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This week we talk about the Double Reduction Policy, gaokao, and Chegg.

We also discuss GPTs, cheating, and disruption.

Recommended Book: Autocracy, Inc by Anne Applebaum

Transcript

In July of 2021, the Chinese government implemented a new education rule called the Double Reduction Policy.

This Policy was meant, among other things, to reduce the stress students in the country felt related to their educational attainment, while also imposing sterner regulations on businesses operating in education and education-adjacent industries.

Chinese students spend a lot of time studying—nearly 10 hours per day for kids ages 12-14—and the average weekly study time for students is tallied at 55 hours, which is substantially higher than in most other countries, and quite a lot higher than the international average of 45 hours per week.

This fixation on education is partly cultural, but it’s also partly the result of China’s education system, which has long served to train children to take very high-stakes tests, those tests then determining what sorts of educational and, ultimately, employment futures they can expect.

These tests are the pathway to a better life, essentially, so the kids face a whole lot of pressure from society and their families to do well, because if they don’t, they’ve sentenced themselves to low-paying jobs and concomitantly low-status lives; it’s a fairly brutal setup, looked at from elsewhere around the world, but it’s something that’s kind of taken for granted in modern China.

On top of all that in-class schoolwork, there’s abundant homework, and that’s led to a thriving private tutoring industry. Families invest heavily in ensuring their kids have a leg-up over everyone else, and that often means paying people to prepare them for those tests, even beyond school hours and well into the weekend.

Because of all this, kids in China suffer abnormally high levels of physical and mental health issues, many of them directly linked to stress, including a chronic lack of sleep, high levels of anxiety, rampant obesity and everything that comes with that, and high levels of suicide, as well; suicide is actually the most common cause of death amongst Chinese teenagers, and the majority of these suicides occur in the lead-up to the gaokao, or National College Entrance Exam, which is the biggest of big important exams that determine how teens will be economically and socially sorted basically for the rest of their lives.

This recent Double Reduction Policy, then, was intended to help temper some of those negative, education-related consequences, reducing the volume of homework kids had to tackle each week, freeing up time for sleep and relaxation, while also putting a cap on the ability of private tutoring companies to influence parents into paying for a bunch of tutoring services; something they’d long done via finger-wagging marketing messages, shaming parents who failed to invest heavily in their child’s educational future, making them feel like they aren’t being good parents because they’re not spending enough on these offerings.

This policy pursued these ends, first, by putting a cap on how much homework could be sent home with students, limiting it to 60 minutes for youngsters, and 90 minutes for middle schoolers.

It also provided resources and rules for non-homework-related after-school services, did away with bad rankings due to poor test performance that might stigmatize students in the future, and killed off some of those fear-inducing, ever-so-important exams altogether.

It also provided some new resources and frameworks for pilot programs that could help their school system evolve in the future, allowing them to try some new things, which could, in theory, then be disseminated to the nation’s larger network of schools if these experiments go well.

And then on the tutoring front, they went nuclear on those private tutoring businesses that were shaming parents into paying large sums of money to train their children beyond school hours.

The government instituted a new system of regulators for this industry, ceased offering new business licenses for tutoring companies, and forced all existing for-profit businesses in this space to become non-profits.

This market was worth about $100 billion when this new policy came into effect, which is a simply staggering sum, but the government basically said you’re not businesses anymore, you can’t operate if you try to make a profit.

This is just one of many industries the current Chinese leadership has clamped-down on over the past handful of years, often on cultural grounds, as was the case with limiting the amount of time children can play video games each day. But like that video game ban, which has apparently shown mixed results, the tutoring ban seems to have led to the creation of a flourishing black market for tutoring services, forcing these sorts of business dealings underground, and thus increasing the fee parents pay for them each month.

In late-October of 2024, the Chinese government, while not formally acknowledging any change to this policy, eased pressure on private tutoring services—the regulators in charge of keeping them operating in accordance with nonprofit structures apparently giving them a nudge and a wink, telling them surreptitiously that they’re allowed to expand again—possibly because China has been suffering a wave of economic issues over the past several years, and the truncation of the tutoring industry led to a lot of mass-firings, tens of thousands of people suddenly without jobs, and a substantial drop in tax revenue, as well, as the country’s stock market lost billions of dollars worth of value basically overnight.

It’s also worth noting here that China’s youth unemployment rate recently hit 18.8%, which is a bogglingly high number, and something that’s not great for stability, in the sense that a lot of young people, even very well educated young people, can’t find a job, which means they have to occupy themselves with other, perhaps less productive things.

But high youth unemployment is also not great for the country’s economic future, as that means these are people who aren’t attaining new skills and experience—and they can’t do that because the companies that might otherwise hire them can’t afford to pay more employees because folks aren’t spending enough on their offerings.

So while it was determined that this industry was hurting children and their families who had to pay these near-compulsory tutoring fees, they also seemed to realize that lacking this industry, their unemployment and broader economic woes would be further inflamed—and allowing for this gray area in the rules seems to be an attempt to have the best of both worlds, though it may leave them burdened with the worst of both worlds, as well.

What I’d like to talk about today is another facet of the global tutoring industry, and how new technologies seem to be flooding into this zone even more rapidly than in other spaces, killing off some of the biggest players and potentially portending the sort of collapse we might also see in other industries in the coming years.

—

Chegg, spelled c-h-e-g-g, is a US-based, education-focused tech company that has provided all sorts of learning-related services to customers since 2006.

It went public on the NYSE in 2013, and in 2021 it was called the “most valuable edtech company in America” by Forbes, due in part to the boom in long-distance education services in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic; like Peloton and Zoom, Chegg was considered to be a great investment for a future in which more stuff is done remotely, as seemed likely to be the case for a good long while, considering all the distancing and shut-downs we were doing at the time.

In early 2020, before that boom, the company was already reporting that it had 2.9 million subscribers to its Chegg Services offering, which gave users access to all sorts of school-related benefits, including help with homework, access to Q&As with experts, and a huge database of solutions for tests and assignments.

The company then released a sort of social-publishing platform called Uversity in mid-2021, giving educators a place to share their own content, and they acquired a language-learning software company called Busuu, which is a bit like Duolingo, that same year for $436 million.

In May of 2023, though, the company’s CEO said, on an earnings call, that ChatGPT—the incredibly popular, basically overnight-popular large-language-model-powered AI chatbot created by OpenAI—might hinder Chegg’s near-future growth.

The day after that call, Chegg’s stock price dropped by about 48%, cutting the company’s market value nearly in half, and though later that same month he announced that Chegg would partner with OpenAI to launch its own AI platform called Cheggmate, which was launched as a beta in June, by early November the following year, 2024, the company had lost about 99% of its market valuation, dropping from a 2021 high of nearly $100 per share, down to less than $2 per share as of early November.

This isn’t a unique story: LLM-based AI tools, those made by OpenAI but also its competitors, including big tech companies like Google and Microsoft, which have really leaned into this seeming transition, have been messing with market valuations left and right, as this collection of tools and technologies have been evolving really fast—a recent five-year plan for Chegg indicated they didn’t believe something like ChatGPT would exist until 2025 at the earliest, for instance, which turned out to be way off—but they’ve also been killing off high-flying company valuations because these sorts of tools are by definition multi-purpose, and a lot of the low-hanging fruit in any industry is basically just providing information that’s already available somewhere in a more intuitive and accessible fashion; which is something a multi-purpose, bot-interfaced software tool is pretty good at doing, as it turns out.

Chegg’s services were optimized to provide school-related stuff to students—including test and homework answers those students could quickly reference if they wanted to study or cheat—and serving up these resources in a simple manner is what allowed them to pay the bills.

ChatGPT and similar AI tools, though, can do the same, and for practically or literally—for the end-user, at least—free. And it can sometimes do so in a manner that’s even more intuitive than the Cheggs of the world, even if these AI offerings are sometimes jumbled along the way; the risk-reward math is still favorable to a lot of people, because of just how valuable this kind of information provided in this way can be.

Other companies and entire industries are finding themselves in the same general circumstances, also all of a sudden, because their unique value proposition has been offering some kind of information intuitively, or in some cases they’ve provided human interfaces that would do various things for customers: they would look up deals on a particular model of car, they would write marketing copy, they would commentate on sporting events.

Some of these entities are trying to get ahead of the game, like Chegg did, by basically plugging their existing services into AI versions of the same, replacing their human commentators with bots that can manage a fair approximation of those now-unemployed humans, but at a fraction of the cost. Others are facing a huge number of new competitors, as smaller businesses or just individuals are realizing they can pay a little money for AI tokens and credits, plug an API into a website, which allows that AI to populate content on their site automatically, and they can then run the same sort of service with little or no effort, and vitally, little or no overhead.

This creates a race-to-the-bottom situation in many such cases, and often the bots are nowhere near as good as the humans they’re replacing, but especially in situations where human jobs have been optimized so that one human can be replaced with another human relatively simply, it has proven to be fairly easy to fire people and then replace them with non-humans that seem human-enough most of the time.

So blog-writing and video-making and inventory-organizing and, yes, school-tutoring and similar services are increasingly being automated in this way, and while, sure, you could pay a premium to stick with Chegg and access these AI tools via their portal for $20 a month, the bet many investors are making is that folks will probably prefer to get what amounts to the same thing cheaper, or even free, directly from the source, or via one of those other lower-end intermediaries with fewer overhead costs.

Chegg has lost about $14.5 billion in market value since early 2021, and the company is now expected to collapse under the weight of its debts sometime in the near-future; the shift in fortunes brought about by the deployment of generally capable, if not perfectly capable, chat-interface accessible AI tools has been that sudden.

None of which means this is a permanent thing, as entities in industries currently being challenged by AI equivalent or near-equivalent tools might push back with their own, difficult to replicate offerings, and there’s a chance that the small but burgeoning wave of vehemently non-AI tools—those that wave their human-made-ness, their non-AI-ness like a flag, or like an organic, cruelty-free label—might carve out their own sustainable, growable niche. That becomes their unique value proposition in place of what these AI-focused companies stole from them.

But this kind of disruption sometimes leads to an extinction-level event for the majority of operators in a formerly flourishing space.

Chegg, for their part, decided to revamp their AI offering, moving away from the Cheggmate name and working with Scale AI instead of OpenAI, to build a few dozen AI systems optimized for different academic focuses; which could prove to be a valuable differentiator for them, but it could also fall flat in the face of OpenAI’s own re-skinned versions of ChatGPT, called GPTs, which allow users to do basically the same thing, coming up with their own field focused experts and personalities, rather than using the vanilla model of the bot.

There’s a chance this will also help Chegg deal with another AI-related issue—specifically, that ChatGPT was providing better answers to some students’ questions than Chegg’s human-derived offerings; they’re trying to out-bot OpenAI, essentially, doing the homework-AI thing better than ChatGPT, and there’s a chance that offering a demonstrably higher quality of answers might also serve as a survival-enabling differentiator; though their ability to consistently provide better answers in this way is anything but certain.

It’s also worth noting that what we’re talking about here, so far, isn’t the sci-fi dream of a perfect digital tutor—something like the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, which is something like an AI-powered storybook that adapts its content to the reader, and which then teaches said reader everything they need to know to flourish in life, day by day. Chegg and ChatGPT serve up tools that help students cheat on tests and homework, while also helping them look up information a lot easier when they decide not to cheat, and to practice various sorts of assignments and exams beforehand.

So this is a far easier space to compete in than something more complex and actually tutor-like. It may be, then, that moving in that direction, toward tools that focus more on replacing teachers and tutors, rather than helping students navigate schoolwork, might be the killer app that allows some of these existing tutoring-ish tools to survive and thrive; though it may be that something else comes along in the meantime which fulfills that promise better—maybe ChatGPT, or maybe some new, more focused version of the same general collection of tools.

It’ll probably be a few years before we see how this and similar bets that’re being made by at-risk companies facing the AI barbarians at the gate turn out, and at that point these tools will likely be even more powerful, offering even more capabilities and thus disrupting, or threatening to disrupt, even more companies in even more industries, as a consequence.

Show Notes

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-chatgpt-brought-down-an-online-education-giant-200b4ff2

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpts/

https://ai.wharton.upenn.edu/focus-areas/human-technology-interaction/2024-ai-adoption-report/

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/07/ai-tutor-china-teaching-gaps/

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

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20965311241265123

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0738059324000117

https://archive.ph/VKkrL

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/07/22/asia-pacific/china-private-tutoring/

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/chinas-youth-unemployment-hits-fresh-high-economic-slowdown-restrictiv-rcna172183

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

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This week we talk about peat, pig iron, and sulphuric acid.

We also discuss the Industrial Revolution, natural gas, and offshore wind turbines.

Recommended Book: Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom

Transcript

This episode is going live on election day here in the US; and this has been quite a remarkable election season for many reasons, among them that there’s been just a boggling amount of money spent on advertisements and events and other efforts to claim attention and mindshare, and in part because the vitriol and tribalism of the past several elections—an evolved, intensified version of those things—has almost completely dominated all those messages.

And as someone who’s based in a swing-state, Wisconsin, I can tell you that it’s been a lot. It’s been a lot everywhere, as US elections also claim more than their fair-share of news reportage in other countries, but in the US, and in the relatively few states that are assumed to be the kingmakers in this election, it’s been just overwhelming for months, for basically a year, actually. So instead of doing anything on the election, or anything overtly political—there’ll no doubt be time for that in the coming weeks, once the dust has settled on all this—let’s talk about coal. And more specifically, British coal.

Coal has been used throughout the British Isles for a long time, with early groups burning unrefined lumps of the substance to heat their homes, though generally only when their local, close-enough-to-the-surface-to-be-gathered source for the stuff was pure enough to beat-out other options, like peat and wood, which was seldom the case in most of these areas.

It was also used to create lime from limestone, the lime used for construction purposes, to make mortar, and it was used for metal-shaping purposes by blacksmiths.

Beyond that, though, it was generally avoided in favor of cleaner-burning options, as coal is often accompanied by sulphur and other such substances, which means when burned in its natural form, it absolutely reeks, and it can make anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the smoke it creates tear-up, because the resulting sulfurous gas would react with their eye-moisture to create sulphuric acid; not pleasant, and even though it was generally better than peat and wood in terms of the energy it contained, it was worse in basically every other way.

Earlier groups of people had figured out the same: there were folks in China as early as 1000 BC, for instance, who used these rocks as fuel for copper smelting, and people in these same early-use areas, where coal veins were exploitable, were really leaning into the stuff by the 13th century AD, when Marco Polo visited and remarked that the locals were burning these weird black stones, which granted them wild luxuries, like being able to take “three hot baths a week.”

Groups in Roman Britain were also surface mining, using, and trading coal at a fairly reasonable level by around 200 AD, though it was still primarily used to process things like grain, which needed to be dried, and to work with iron—as with those Chinese groups, coal has long been appreciated for its smelting capabilities, because of its high energy density compared to other options.

In the British Isles, though, coal was largely imported to major cities by sea, until around the 13th century when the easily accessed deposits were used up, and shaft mining, which granted access to deeper deposits via at times long tunnels that had to be dug and reinforced, was developed and became common, including in areas that hadn’t previously had surface sources that could be exploited.

In the 16th century, this and similar innovations led to a reliable enough supply of coal that folks living in the city of London were able to largely replace their wood- and peat-burning infrastructure with coal-burning versions of the same.

It’s thought that this transition was partly the consequence of widespread deforestation that resulted from a population boom in the city—more lumber was needed to build more buildings, but they also required more burnable wood fuel—though some historians have argued that what actually pushed coal to the forefront, despite its many downsides compared to wood and peat, is the expansion of iron smelting and the increasing necessity of iron for Britain’s many wars during this period, alongside England’s burgeoning glass-making industry.

Both of these manufacturing processes, making iron and glass, required just a silly amount of fuel—making just one ton of the lowest-grade cast iron, so-called pig iron, consumed something like 28 tons of seasoned wood, and glass was similarly wood-hungry.

What’s more, that combination of city expansion and the King’s desire to massively build-out his Navy meant timber resources were continuously being strained anywhere industry popped up and flourished, so those industries would then expand to areas where wood was still cheap, over time making wood it more expensive there, too. Eventually, wood was costly pretty much everywhere, and coal thus became comparably cheap in these regions, and you could use a lot less of it to achieve the same ends.

Even if that subbing-in led to bad smells and burning eyes and clouds of dense, black smoke wherever it was burned, then, the cost differential was substantial enough to make using coal the better option in many such cases and areas.

This boom in coal usage was amplified still further by the rapid clearing of forests due to the expansion of farm- and pastureland.

It was determined, by the late 17th century, that an acre of farm- or pastureland was worth a lot more than woodland used for timber or other purposes—around three-times as valuable—so there was a large-scale deforestation effort to basically claim as much value from these forested lands as possible, dramatically changing the landscape of the British Isles over the course of just a few decades; this transition in part enabled and powered by coal.

Around the year 1700, about five-sixths of all coal that was mined, globally, was mined in Britain, and that helped power the empire’s industrial revolution later that century, beginning in something like 1760, as the majority of clever devices that arose during that period were powered by coal, and the global industrial revolution that eventually created what we might consider technological modernity arose, initially—at least in this manifestation of the concept—from coal-powered Britain.

What I’d like to talk about today is a remarkable coal-related milestone, considering that history, that Britain recently marked, and what it might mean for this and other fuel-types, moving forward.

—

In 1882, the first-ever coal-fired power station opened in London—a thermal power station that uses coal as its fuel, which basically means you refine the stuff, break it into tiny, semi-uniform pieces, and then feed those pieces into a coal-fired boiler. In that boiler the coal is burned to generate heat, and that heat boils water, the resulting steam spinning turbines which turn generators that produce electricity.

Coal-fired power stations are massively inefficient, with modern versions of the model only boasting a 34-ish% efficiency, meaning about 34% of the total energy contained in the fuel source is ultimately converted into electricity—the rest, about 66% of the energy contained in the coal that’s burned, is lost along the way.

That’s not uncommon for power plants, though other fossil fuel-burning plants are somewhat more efficient on average, with oil-powered plants weighing in at about 37% efficiency, and gas-powered versions managing something like 50-60% at their most modern and sophisticated, though simpler variations of the design only achieve about the same as coal.

All fossil fuel-powered power stations emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as a byproduct of their operation, which has been shown to stoke climate change, and they all have pollutant-related byproducts, as well, though there’s a spectrum: gas is relatively clean-burning compared to its kin, while coal is the absolute worst, releasing all sorts of pollutants into the air with at times severe health consequences for anyone in the general vicinity; oil plants are somewhere in between those two extremes, depending on the type of oil used and the nature of the plant.

Those downsides are part of why newer technologies like large-scale wind turbines and solar panel arrays have been replacing fossil fuel-based power plants in many locales, and quite rapidly, though the infrastructure in many areas is optimized for these older-school options, which means there are the plants themselves, which are often quite large and real-estate-spanning, but there’s also all the mines, there’s the shipping facilities, the processing capacity for the coal or oil or whatnot—it’s a nation-spanning network of buildings and machinery and businesses, not to mention all the people who work jobs related to these vital, energy-creating industries.

Coal was already beginning to decline in the UK 100 years after that first plant was built, so by the 1990s, as gas, often called natural gas as a sort of branding effort by gas companies to make it sound cleaner and more desirable, was at that point already beginning to replace coal in many electricity-generating facilities.

Gas has done the same in many countries—especially those with vast natural sources of it, and the US has opened up a lot of new markets for this fuel type in recent decades, and in the past decade in particular, as it mastered the means of compressing gas into a liquid, often called LNG, and shipping it to ports in Europe around the same time Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was fundamentally rewiring the energy mix on the continent.

So gas has played a role in disrupting coal’s hold in many previously coal-happy areas, including the US. But it was renewables that really turned the tide against coal in the UK, with a combination of solar and wind making up about 6% of Britain’s electricity in 2012—compared to 40% for coal, at the time—but just over a decade later, in 2023, renewables were making up a whopping 34% of the UK’s energy mix, mostly due to the widescale deployment and success of offshore wind farms.

This, paired with the emergence of increasingly efficient appliances and lighting, which sip energy compared to previous-generation bulbs and kettles and refrigerators, meant the UK was able to deplete its coal-usage, even as energy demand increased—because that demand was less than anticipated, due to those efficiencies, and enough new renewables and gas facilities were coming online to meet that reduced demand.

At the tail-end of September this year, 2024, the UK witnessed the shut-down of its last remaining coal power plant, which was built 57 years ago.

This was a meaningful moment, as it marked the first time in about 142 years that coal wasn’t contributing to the UK’s electrical grid, and it has global significance, as while 23 European countries have announced that they will phase out coal in the relatively near-future, and while Belgium was the first previously coal-burning European nation to go fully coal-free, back in 2016, the UK is the first G7 nation to do so—the rest of the G7 having committed to accomplishing the same by 2035.

Decommissioning the plant will take about two years, and that will include the task of reallocating the plant’s 170-or-so employees to other positions within the power network, and going through the many steps required to clean up the area after decades of voluminous pollution, while also getting the area ready for other types of development.

In many cases right now, globally, that means swapping in some other piece of energy infrastructure; in some cases coal-fired plants can be replaced with gas-fired plants, which is still not ideal in terms of emissions, but much better than coal, and in some cases it’s a more significant change, like building-out grid-scale battery arrays, which allow nearby wind turbines and solar panels to store the excess energy they generate when the wind is blowing and sun is shining, so that none of that energy goes to waste, and so it can be used when the wind and sun aren’t cooperating.

The British government is also planning to expand its nuclear power capacity, quadrupling its currently five-strong nuclear power plant holdings by 2050, which is a choice that comes with a lot of its own consequences, including, often, very high price tags on building and operating such facilities. But because of the nature of nuclear power plants—specifically, that they produce high levels of consistent, reliable, emissions-free electricity—that additional expense is often okay, because that steady consistency nicely blends with the inconsistent output of solar and wind.

It’s worth noting that coal-heavy nations elsewhere around the world, like Russia, are currently having trouble with the stuff, Russia’s coal industry reportedly experiencing its worst crisis in 30 years due in part to sanctions, in part to a lack of demand from previous customers that’re transitioning away from coal, and in part due to issues within the industry, itself.

Coal production in Russia dropped by 6.7% year on year in July of 2024, marking the lowest output since the height of the covid pandemic, and it’s estimated that they’ve lost around 27% of monthly output compared to recent peaks.

There are different types and grades of coal, so those numbers are averages, and not all coal-exporting nations are having as much trouble as Russia right now. Australia is the world’s foremost exporter of coal, for instance, and while China is going through some economic complications right now—which is an issue for Australia, because they shipped the majority of their coal to China until just recently—India has been stepping in to pick up the majority of that slack.

Australia has still cut its coal export outlook by 6% because of those and other geopolitical ripples, and there’s a chance their sales could continue to drop due to the transition to renewables on one hand, and the move toward gas-powered plants on the other.

But some types of coal remain the cheapest form of energy production in some countries, so there’s a good chance that rising stars like India, and possibly Indonesia and other Southeast Asian booming economies, as well, could step in and grab what they can, despite all the downsides of coal, because they can get it at a discount; which won’t be great for coal companies that are used to higher prices, but it likely will allow them to keep operating at something close to their previous capacity for longer than would otherwise be the case, lacking these rising nations that need cheap fuel, whatever the consequences of using it.

In the UK, though, coal is gone, and the remnants of its use are slowly being wiped away: the land cleaned up and repurposed, more of the grid being optimized for cleaner production types.

We’ll probably see a few other big nations accomplish the same over the next decade, but because of all that aforementioned geopolitical turmoil, there’s also a chance those planned end-dates will be pushed: the cheap, dirty needs of the present overshadowing these nations’ cleaner, healthier next-step ambitions.

Show Notes

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=107&t=3

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/uk-last-coal-plant

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix-uk?stackMode=absolute&facet=none

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/coal-ash-cancer-epa-north-carolina-b39ddf6a

https://beyondfossilfuels.org/europes-coal-exit/

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/30/nx-s1-5133426/uk-quits-coal-climate-change

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/end-of-an-era-as-britains-last-coal-fired-power-plant-shuts-down

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-06/documents/4783_plant_decommissioning_remediation_and_redevelopment_508.pdf

https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/peak-coal/

https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2024/10/07/samii-tyazhelii-krizis-za30-let-vrossii-nachala-rushitsya-dobicha-uglya-a144209

https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/coal-phaseout-UK/index.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y35qz73n8o

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/climate/britain-last-coal-power-plant.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2024/uk-coal-power-exit/

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/the-deep-history-of-british-coal-from-the-romans-to-the-ratcliffe-shutdown

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/uks-last-coal-plant-shutdown-bodes-well-us-lng-exports-maguire-2024-10-01/

https://www.wired.com/story/uk-no-coal-fired-power-plants-first-time-in-142-years/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/371069/employment-in-coal-mining-industry-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/

https://apnews.com/article/high-court-rejects-uk-coal-mine-whitehaven-83b9b7ceedebee1b70927667987b4dd7

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240927-how-coal-fired-power-stations-are-being-turned-into-batteries

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/britain-become-first-g7-country-end-coal-power-last-plant-closes-2024-09-29/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/opinion/england-coal-wind-power.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station

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

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

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

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

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This week we talk about Joe Rogan, Call Her Daddy, and podcast monetization.

We also discuss Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and double-haters.

Recommended Book: You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo

Transcript

In the world of US politics, double-haters are potential voters who really just don’t like the candidate from either major political party, and thus they decide whether and how to vote based on who they dislike least—or in some cases who they would like to hurt, the most.

This isn’t a uniquely American concept, as voters in many global democracies face similar situations, but it seems to be an especially pressing issue in this year’s upcoming US Presidential election—and election day is a week away as of the day this episode goes live—because the race is just so, so close, according to most trusted polls.

In that same context, swing states are states that could swing either way, theoretically at least, in terms of who their votes go to, and because these swing states contain enough electoral college votes to allow even the candidate who doesn’t win the popular vote to win the presidency, that makes them especially vital battlegrounds.

So there’s a scramble going on right now, for both parties, to muster their existing bases, to shore-up some of the demographic groups they’re relying upon in this election, and to get their messaging in front of as many of those double-haters and other undecideds as possible so as to maybe, possibly swing this neck-and-neck race in their direction.

Toward that end, we’ve seen simply staggering sums of money pulled in and spent by both major parties’ campaigns: it’s looking likely that this will be the most expensive election season in US history, with just under $16 billion in spending across federal races, alone—which is up from just over $15 billion in 2020, according to nonpartisan group Open Secrets; that actually means this election will probably end up being just a smidgeon cheaper than 2020’s election, if you adjust for inflation, rather than comparing in absolute dollar terms, but both of these races will have been several times as expensive as previous elections, weighing in at about double 2016’s cost, and triple what these races tended to cost previously, in the early 2000s.

For perspective, too, US elections were already quite a lot more expensive than elections held in other wealthy countries.

According to a rundown by the Wall Street Journal, Canada’s 2021 election only cost something like $69 million in inflated-adjusted dollars, and US elections tend to cost about 40-times more, per person—so this is a population-scaled figure—than elections in the UK and Germany.

The cost of local elections in the US have been increasing, as well, in some cases substantially, and that’s part of why unpaid exposure and promotion is becoming increasingly valuable: it takes a lot of communications oomph to puncture the hubbub of commercial marketing messages in the US, and while pulling in a lot of money to buy ads and fund other promotional efforts is one way to do that, it’s also possible to approach the problem asymmetrically, going to people where they already are, basically, and getting some of that valuable face-time without having to spend a cent on it.

And that’s what I’d like to talk about today—specifically, efforts by candidates to get on popular podcasts, and why this medium in particular seems to be the go-to for campaigns at a moment in which the electoral stakes are historically high.

—

Podcasts, by traditional definition, are audio files delivered using an old-school, open technology called RSS.

In the years since they first emerged, beginning in the early days of the 2000s, the transmission mechanisms for these audio files have become a bit more sophisticated, despite being based on essentially the same technology. They’ve been joined, though, by utilities that allow folks to stream undownloaded audio content, to ping the servers where these audio files are stored more regularly, and to attach all kinds of interesting and useful metadata to these files, which add more context to them, while also providing the fundaments of basic micropayment schemes and the capacity to include video versions of an episode, alongside audio.

That video component has been pushed forward in part by the success of content-makers on YouTube, where for a long while podcasters have promoted their audio shows with visualized snippets, behind-the-scenes videos, and other such add-on content. Over the past handful of years, though, it has also become a hotbed of original video podcast content, some podcasters even using YouTube as their native distribution client—and that, combined with Spotify’s decision to start offering video podcasting content alongside audio podcasting content, in part to compete with YouTube, has pushed video-podders to the forefront of many charts.

Multi-person conversational and interview shows have maybe benefitted most from that shift toward video, as being able to see the people recording these shows, and to watch their body language, all the little microexpressions and other components of conversation and social dynamics that are left out of pure audio shows, has helped them attract more listeners / viewers, while also making these shows an even more potent source of parasocial camaraderie—which was especially valuable during the lockdown-heavy phase of the covid-19 pandemic, but which is also arguably a valuable thing to provide at a period in which a lot of people across all demographics are suffering from intense loneliness and a perceived lack of connection; the sense of familiarity that folks felt listening to a familiar voice in their ear on a regular basis has been emphasized still-further by the ability to see those people on their phones, TVs, and laptops in the same way, and at the same regular cadence.

The business model of podcasting has also contributed to the expansion of this type of show, as while podcasting has never been as big and spendy an industry as comparable broadcast mediums, it has been growing, with most shows leaning on some combination of ads, sponsorships, memberships, patronage models, and subscriptions to keep their operations in the black.

Some shows make use of many or all of these income-generation approaches, and many of them have varied their business models based on the boom and bust phases the industry has seen over the years; so when ad revenue plummets, formerly ad-heavy shows will pivot to memberships, and when the listener membership well grows shallow, they might shift to some kind of featured sponsor model.

As of early 2024, there are more than half a billion regular podcast listeners, globally, and ad spending in this space, globally, reached over $4 billion for the first time this year.

That aforementioned shift toward video has tilted a lot of listening in that direction, with about a third of all podcast listeners in the US also watching at least one podcast, rather than just listening to it.

That watchability component has also nudged YouTube and Spotify into the lead in terms of podcast delivery, alongside Apple, which didn’t invent the podcast, even though the medium is named after their iPod product, but they did bring it to the forefront and make it widely available—Apple’s relative lack of investment in this space, for years, left the doors open for those other competitors, and again, their decision to feature video podcast content alongside pure audio shows has shifted the landscape of this industry substantially, raising questions about what a podcast even is, if any old YouTube show could also theoretically be categorized as such; it’s a blurry distinction at this point, a bit like the debate over whether audiobooks should be considered books, or if only written, visual versions should bear that label.

Also worth noting here is that nearly half, about 47%, of all US citizens ages 12 and up listen to a podcast at least once a month, and 34% listen every week.

11% of that demographic’s daily audio-time is spent listening to podcasts, which is quadruple the figure a decade ago, in 2014, and 23% of weekly podcast listeners in the US spend 10 or more hours with these shows each week, though the average listening time each week is also pretty high, weighing in at 7.4 hours.

Podcasts have diverse audiences and hit a range of economic classes and people of varying education levels—though it leans slightly higher than the average in terms of both educational attainment and income—and interestingly, folks seem to be especially influenced by podcast recommendations, 46% of weekly podcast listeners reporting that they purchased something based on a recommendation or advertisement they heard on a show.

All of which points at why podcasts, and especially interview podcasts, and even more especially video-heavy interview podcasts, have become such highly desired media real estate in this year’s US presidential election; these sorts of shows aren’t always the most desired medium for brands, because tracking return on investment, money earned per dollar spent, is difficult with podcasts compared to, for instance, buying ads on streaming TV shows or social media, but they’re great for raising awareness and general brand-building efforts, which is exactly what these candidates and their parties are aiming for.

So more people are listening to these things, people tend to trust what they hear on podcasts more than on other types of media, and the demographics these shows reach are highly desirable, politically.

This is why, over the past few weeks, candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have appeared on some of the biggest podcasts in existence, right now: Call Her Daddy for the former, and the Joe Rogan Experience for the latter.

Both of these appearances were ostensibly pretty risky, as podcast interviewers tend to color outside the lines compared to hosts on conventional television or radio shows, but the potential upsides were huge for both, as Alex Cooper, the host of Call Her Daddy, which is kind of a comedic advice show, has become a massive force in the world of women’s issues, and she recently became one of the best-paid and most influential podcasters in the world by leaving Spotify for SiriusXM, that change beginning in 2025, for a reported $100 million.

Joe Rogan, in contrast, has consistently been the number one podcast in the world for years, and his audience skews toward the people Trump wants to reach: the listening base is 80% male, more than half of those listeners are ages 18-34, more than a third identify as Independents, politically, and a little over a quarter are Democrats who might be convinced to switch sides for this election, because of Rogan’s somewhat conservative-leaning, independent stance on most things.

Trump recorded a 3-hour podcast interview with Rogan, leaning into the host’s chilled-out, but often heavy and asymmetric-question laden format, and that was blasted out to the show’s 14.5 million Spotify followers and 17.5 million YouTube subscribers.

Call Her Daddy is the second-biggest podcast on most networks after Rogan’s show, and while it has a comparably meager 5 million weekly listeners, the show’s demographics lean heavily toward women, and especially young women, which is seemingly favorable to the messaging Harris wants to megaphone at this point in her campaign; she’s rounded-out that appearance with appearances on other shows, like All The Smoke, which is hosted by a pair of NBA stars, and The Breakfast Club, which is hosted by the popular personality, Charlamagne Tha God.

Trump has appeared on quite a few podcasts of late, as well, though they’ve largely been in the same demographic vein as Joe Rogan—Trump went on YouTuber Logan Paul’s show, Impaulsive, for instance, alongside This Past Weekened with Theo Von and the Lex Fridman Podcast—all shows that lean heavily toward the young, male demographic, and which skew somewhat conservative and/or the libertarian side of independent.

Like many aspects of this election, we don’t really know if these bets will pay off for these candidates and their campaigns. There’s a lot to suggest that folks trust podcasts and podcasters, and that this industry may therefore be an excellent means of blasting a message to the right people, allowing politicians to realize a huge return on the time they invest preparing for their appearances and recording these interviews.

On the other hand, there’s a chance that, like many supposed means of reinforcing brand awareness and identity, that the numbers are kind of fuzzy and don’t necessarily reflect the reality many people think they reflect: it could be that folks tune in, listen, and then don’t do anything with what they learn; a more passive means of engagement that results few, if any, real-world conseqences.

It could also be that one or the other, or both of these parties aimed at the wrong audiences, or at the wrong influencers to help them reach those audiences, which could result in the same outcome, but with their demographic assumptions to blame, rather than the nature of the medium.

We won’t know for sure until after the election, and even then it’ll still be an open question, because it’s difficult to definitely link action to outcome when it comes to this facet of the political world.

That said, it does seem pretty likely, that for the next few elections, at least, podcasters will carry somewhat higher credibility and weight, and consequently attract even more attention, and probably ad-dollars, too, because it’s becoming more and more difficult to reach the right people, the right potential voters, and podcasts are still new and wild westy enough that they could break through the hubbub, even when other content types struggle to do so.

Show Notes

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8nn0913e8o

https://backlinko.com/podcast-stats

https://www.insideradio.com/free/candidates-embrace-podcasts-but-is-it-working-here-s-what-one-survey-shows/article_b8858d76-92a8-11ef-9063-13e0c716cedd.html

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/27/nx-s1-5162304/politics-chat-trump-gives-3-hour-joe-rogan-interview-harris-leans-on-fascist-label

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/23/trump-harris-turn-to-podcasts-and-maybe-joe-rogan-for-us-election-boost

https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/culture/a62526922/kamala-harris-call-her-daddy/

https://www.quillpodcasting.com/blog-posts/podcast-stats-and-facts-2024

https://soundsprofitable.com/research/the-podcast-landscape-2024/

https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-podcast-consumer-2024-by-edison-research/

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alex-cooper-lands-100-million-143000863.html

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

https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-race-to-rogan-who-will-candidates-reach-on-americas-top-podcast/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/10/25/trump-joe-rogan-podcast-interview/

https://time.com/7099104/presidential-podcast-media-tour-donald-trump-kamala-harris/

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/alex-cooper-interview-call-her-daddy-1236023570/

https://apnews.com/article/trump-election-lies-rogan-interview-ballots-voting-c8c06eb608c1b1ae8ca0e93ec1022b02

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/elections-cost-us-highest-spend-b8475961

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/10/21/meet-the-worlds-double-haters-00184634

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/25/wisconsin-swing-state-undecided-voters-trump-harris/

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

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This week we talk about DJT, Polymarket, and Kalshi.

We also discuss sports betting, gambling, and PredictIt.

Recommended Book: Build, Baby, Build by Bryan Caplan

Transcript

Trump Media & Technology Group, which trades under the stock ticker DJT, has seen some wild swings since it became a publicly tradable business entity in late-March of 2024.

The Florida-based holding company for Truth Social, a Twitter-clone that was released in early 2022 following former President Donald Trump’s ousting from Twitter—that ousting the result of his denial of his loss in the 2020 presidential election—is a bit of an odd-bird in the technology and media space, as while it’s ostensibly an umbrella corporation for many possible Trump-themed business entities, Truth Social is the only one that’s gotten off the ground so far, and that platform hasn’t done well in traditional business or even aspirational tech-business terms: a financial disclosure in November of 2023 indicated that the network had tallied a cumulative loss of at least $31.5 million since it was launched, and the holding company’s numbers were even worse: when they filed their regulatory paperwork in March of 2024, they noted that Trump Media & Technology Group had lost $327.6 million, while making a mere $770,000 in revenue.

Those kinds of numbers, the company hemorrhaging money, would be a huge problem if DJT was a typical media business, or business of any kind, really. But for most people who invest in the company’s stock, this entity seems to be less a traditional stock holding, like you might buy shares of NVIDIA or Coca-Cola, hoping to earn dividends or see the value of the stock increase over time based on the performance and assumed future performance of the company in question, but instead it seems to operate as a means of betting on Trump and his political aspirations: many people who have been asked why they’re buying the stock of a clearly fumbling company say that they do it because they like Trump and what he stands for, and some have suggested they assume the stock will do much better if and when he’s back in office.

Other entities, especially those who oppose Trump and his politics, have pointed out that this publicly traded business provides foreign and US entities an easy, and easily deniable means of basically bribing Trump—or getting on his good side, if you want to use less charged language—as they could simply, and legally pick up a large number of shares, raising the price of the stock, which in turn increases the size of Trump’s fortune, which he could then, if he so chooses, cash out of at some point, but in the mean time this allows him to do the more typical rich person thing and just borrow money against the non-money, stock assets he owns.

All of which would be difficult to prove, which is part of why this would, in theory, be an excellent means of funneling money to someone who might hold the reins of power in the near-future, if one were so inclined to do so.

But at the moment that’s all speculation, and with ongoing investigations into other purported bribery schemes on the part of Trump and his campaign, it’s not clear that Trump would need DJT in order to get money into his coffers, as more direct approaches—like simply depositing ten million dollars into his campaign account from Egypt’s state-run bank, seem more straightforward, and just as unlikely to result in any kind of pushback from the US’s oversight panels, based on how they’ve addressed that particular accusation so far, at least.

Of course, some people are simply looking for points of leverage anywhere they can find it, not for political or regulatory manipulation purposes, but to earn money by gambling on assets that change value in dramatic and seemingly predictable ways.

For day traders and other arbitrage-seekers, then, a stock that goes up and down based on the perceived successes and failures of a public figure who’s constantly saying and doing things that can be construed in different ways by different people is an appealing target, even lacking a political motivation for tracking (and perhaps even influencing, to a limited degree) those numbers.

What I’d like to talk about today is another type of political betting, and how a recent court case may make politics in the US a lot more tumultuous, maybe more measurable, and possibly more profitable, for some.

—

In mid-2021, a New York-based online prediction market called Kalshi launched in the US, and this service was meant to serve as a platform through which users could place bets—in the form of trades—on all sorts of things, ranging from when the Fed would next cut interest rates, and by how much, to who would win various global awards, like the Nobel in chemistry.

Bets can only be placed on yes or no questions, which shapes the nature of said questions, and delineates the sorts of questions that can be asked, and in general the platform pays out a dollar for each winning contract—so if you buy one contract saying the Republican party will control the House after November’s election, and they do, you would win a dollar, but if they don’t, you would lose whatever money you spent to buy that contract—and these contracts can be purchased for sums that are based on how likely the event is currently expected to be: so if there’s a low chance, based on all available variables, that the Republicans will take the House, that contract might cost substantially less than a dollar to purchase, whereas if it’s likely they’ll take it, it would cost close to a dollar—so the payout is larger for events considered to be unlikely.

The original idea behind Kalshi, and similar platforms, of which there are many, operating in many different places around the world, was to provide investors with a hedge against events that are otherwise difficult to work into one’s asset portfolio.

It’s relatively simple to have a bunch of bets that will pay out big time if the US economy does well, for instance, and simple enough to buy counter-bets that will pay out decently well if it does badly—many investors buying some of each, so they’re not wiped out, no matter what happens—but there are all sorts of things that can mess with one’s otherwise well-balanced investment strategies, like the emergence of global pandemics and the surprise decision of the UK to leave the European Union.

If you can place bets that will pay out big-time when unlikely things happen, though, that can help re-balance a financial loss that arises from the occurrence of said unlikely events; if you lose a bunch of money from your stock portfolio because the UK voted for Brexit, but you also bought a bunch of contracts on this kind of market that would pay out substantially if Brexit was successful, you’ll reach a kind of equilibrium that isn’t as simple to achieve using other markets, because of how difficult it can be to directly link a stock or bond with that kind of not-directly-financial event.

So Kalshi pitched itself as that kind of alternative asset market, predicated on bets, but while they had a license from the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, to function as a contract market in the States, acquired the year before they launched, their proposal to start a political prediction market, which would allow folks to bet on which party would control the US congress, was denied by the CFTC in September of 2023, the agency claiming that allowing such bets would create bad incentives in the electoral process, and that offering these sorts of contracts would violate US market regulations for derivatives.

A judge ruled in Kalshi’s favor a year later, in September of 2024, saying that the agency had exceeded its authority in banning this type of contract-issuance by Kalshi, and while the CFTC attempted to stall that component of their market’s implementation, on October 2 of this year, a federal appeals court ruled in Kalshi’s favor, and the platform was thus formally allowed to offer contracts that served as a betting market for US politics on which actual money could be lost and earned.

That last point is important, as throughout this process, and even before Kalshi was launched, other betting markets have been common, including those that have allowed bets on US political happenings.

It’s just that the majority of them, and the ones that have persisted and grown in the US in particular, haven’t allowed folks to bet actual money on these things: they’ve allowed, in some cases, the betting of on-platform tokens, which represent credibility, not money, though a few money-trading entities, like PredictIt, have been on the agency’s radar, but in PredictiIt’s case, it was granted what amounts to a “we won’t take action against you, despite what you’re doing being questionable” letter from the CFTC, which until Kalshi’s case turned out in their favor, meant PredictIt was one of the few, large-scale, reputable real-money political prediction markets available in the US.

Not all such markets have been so lucky, but that luck has been highly correlated with their approach to handling money, the structure of the company, and the degree to which they’ve been willing to play ball with the CFTC and other interested agencies.

All that said, we’ve reached an interesting point in which these markets have conceivably become more serious and useful, because rather than relying on not-real tokens that have no actual value to anyone—so you could create an account on one of these sites, bet all your tokens on a silly position that makes no sense, and suffer no consequences for that bet—we now have platforms that allow folks to put their money where their beliefs are, which in turn should theoretically make these markets more reliable in terms of showing what a certain segment of the population actually believes; how likely different candidates are to win, different parties are to hold Congress, and how likely various bills are to be passed into law.

Interestingly, though, that theory may already be destined for the dustbin, as one of the larger betting platforms, Polymarket—which allows folks to place bets on all sorts of things using a crypto asset called USDC, and which isn’t regulated by the CFTC because its operations are not based in the US—is experiencing what looks like market manipulation, possibly meant to sway poll forecasts that take these sorts of markets into account.

What that means in practice is that of the nearly $2 billion in bets that have been placed on the outcome of the upcoming US presidential election on Polymarket, as of the day I’m recording this, about $30 million seems to have been recently bet by just four accounts, all of which have behaved so similarly that a report from the Wall Street Journal posits that they might be the same person, or a collection of people operating alongside each other.

In any case, the net-impact of this investment, which landed in late-October, was to bump Trump’s odds of winning to 60% from where it was previously, at 53.3%.

There’s a chance, of course, that this is just the result of a person or some people with money wanting to earn what they consider to be an easy buck, betting on the candidate they think is most likely to win, and there’s also a chance that they’re plowing that money into this bet in order to show support for their favored candidate.

But there’s also a chance that this is the first example, at this scale at least, of betting market manipulation that’s sizable enough to shift the balance of polls that take betting market numbers into consideration.

Some of the poll predictions you in see in the news work these numbers from these betting markets into their formulae alongside the findings of more conventional polling entities, basically, so if you have tens of millions of dollars to throw into this kind of market, you can bump your favored candidate’s seeming chances significantly higher, which then in turn can make it seem like that candidate has achieved a surge in support more broadly—despite that seeming support actually just having been bought and paid for by one or a few enthused supporters on this kind of market.

So if it does turn out that this is a conscious effort on someone’s part to shift perceptions of the election—maybe big-time Trump fans, maybe someone affiliated with him or one of the PACs trying to get him elected—that could be a big deal, especially considering that Trump and his people have said that they won’t accept the outcome of the election if they don’t win, and if they can show strong expectations, or seeming expectations in the shape of favorable poll numbers that their candidate was meant to win, that could be a point of seeming evidence in favor of their argument that there was voter manipulation by their opponent; this of course wouldn’t be the case, but because of how the news, and even more so social media platforms, sometimes present superficial versions of what’s actually happening, seeing the candidate who had 60% support lose could seem like a valid argument at a highly charged post-election moment, despite all the other evidence to the contrary.

One more important point to make here is that election markets don’t actually represent probabilities—they represent a relatively small population of people’s expectations or hopes about what will happen.

It’s in the interest of these markets to imply that there’s substantial meaning and real-deal data in their numbers, but that’s mostly marketing copy to try to get more people involved; at the end of the day, these markets are often wrong, are populated by outliers who don’t represent the voting public, and in many cases they’re heavily biased in all sorts of directions—some of them more popular with folks on the left, some more popular with folks on the right, and some more popular with folks who just love making big bets that feel like gambling, and in some cases creating chaos or funny outcomes just for laughs.

On that final point, it’s worth mentioning that sports gambling has recently become legal, to some degree at least, across much of the United States, and this has already become a huge industry, representing an expected $14.3 billion in 2024, alone, with an anticipated annual growth of something like 10%, which is astonishing for something that was mostly illegal until just recently—the Supreme Court decision that paved the way for it as a nation-spanning market was only made in 2018.

So there’s a chance that these prediction markets will boom, as there’s clearly an appetite for betting on stuff in the US, as a form of entertainment, as a means to try to get ahead, and potentially as a way to put one’s money where one’s mouth is.

Though all of these incentives and purposes could potentially make these markets less valuable for political researchers hoping to better understand odds, as the incentives may or may not align with those that lead to more accurate predictions, and there’s no way to really know how those post-money-injection numbers will align with actual voting tallies, or fail to do so, until we have more data about this and other near-future elections’ outcomes.

Show Notes

https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/how-investors-are-betting-on-the-election-from-utility-stocks-to-djt-c2b9e838

https://www.yahoo.com/news/hes-sale-trump-djt-stock-001901595.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/03/trump-egypt-democrats-letter.html

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

https://www.axios.com/2024/09/10/prediction-markets-election

https://stanfordreview.org/kalshis-court-victory-a-turning-point-for-prediction-markets-2/

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/04/harris-trump-election-betting-00182432

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

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/prediction-market.asp

https://www.axios.com/2024/09/16/prediction-markets-election

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/prediction-markets-have-an-elections-problem-jeremiah-johnson

https://www.chapman.edu/esi/wp/porter_affectingpolicymanipulatingpredictionmarkets.pdf

https://www.ft.com/content/82199ea0-9707-4d37-b4c4-b65a65d17ecb

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-prediction-markets-arent-popular/

https://www.wsj.com/finance/betting-election-pro-trump-ad74aa71

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/19/election-betting-trump-harris-odds-polymarket-predictit/

https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/how-investors-are-betting-on-the-election-from-utility-stocks-to-djt-c2b9e838

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp500-nasdaq-live-10-03-2024/card/betting-markets-on-the-presidential-race-set-to-go-live-NnRne85QCyVAnc9nZy8z

https://www.wsj.com/finance/regulation/are-you-ready-to-bet-on-u-s-elections-a-judges-ruling-opens-the-door-556abc73

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

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/09/13/kalshis-new-political-prediction-markets-halted-as-cftc-appeals-loss/

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-betting-platform-predictits-legal-struggle-could-hamper-regulators-and-hurt-regulated-firms/

https://www.wsj.com/finance/betting-election-pro-trump-ad74aa71

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

https://www.statista.com/outlook/amo/online-gambling/online-sports-betting/united-states

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

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This week we talk about the HoloLens, the Apple Vision Pro, and the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses.

We also discuss augmented reality, virtual reality, and Orion.

Recommended Book: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

Transcript

Originally released as a development device in 2016—so aimed at folks who make software, primarily, not at the general public—the HoloLens, made by Microsoft, was a fairly innovative device that looked like virtual reality headgear, but which allowed folks to interact with graphical elements overlayed on a transparent surface so that they seemed to be positioned within the real world; so-called augmented reality.

This functionality relied upon some of the tech Microsoft had developed for its earlier Kinect accessory, which allowed Xbox owners to play games using their bodies instead of more conventional controllers—it used a camera to figure out where people, and their arms, legs, and so on, were in space, and that helped this new team figure out how to map a person’s living room, for instance, in order to place graphical elements throughout that room when viewed through the HoloLens’ lenses; so stuff could appear behind your couch, pop out of a wall, or seem to be perched atop a table.

The HoloLens was not the only option in this space, as several other companies, including other tech titans, but also startups like Magic Leap, were making similar devices, but it was arguably the most successful in the sense that it both developed this augmented reality technology fairly rapidly, and in the sense that it was able to negotiate collaborations and business relationships with entities like NASA, the US Military, and Autodesk—in some cases ensuring their hardware and software would play well with the hardware and software most commonly used in offices around the world, and in some cases showcasing the device’s capabilities for potential scientific, defense, and next-step exploratory purposes.

Like many new devices, Microsoft positioned the HoloLens, early on, as a potential hub for entertainment, launching it with a bunch of games and movie-like experiences that took advantage of its ability to adapt those entertainments to the spaces in which the end-user would consumer them: having enemies pop out of a wall in the user’s kitchen, for instance, or projecting a movie screen on their ceiling.

It was also pitched as a training tool, though, giving would-be astronauts the ability to practice working with tools in space, or helping doctors-in-training go through digital surgeries with realistic-looking patients before they ever got their hands dirty in real life. And the company leaned into that market with the second edition of the headset, which was announced and made available for pre-order in early-2019, optimizing it even further for enterprise purposes with a slew of upgrades, and pricing it accordingly, at $3,500.

Among those upgrades was better overall hardware with higher-end specs, but it also did away with controllers and instead reoriented entirely toward eye- and hand-tracking options, combined with voice controls, allowing the user to speak their commands and use hand-gestures to interact with the digital things projected over the real-world spaces they inhabited.

The original model also had basic hand-tracking functionality, but the new model expanded those capabilities substantially, while also expanding upon the first edition’s fairly meager 30 degrees of augmented view: a relatively small portion of the user’s line of sight could be filled with graphics, in other words, and the new version upgraded that to 52 degrees; so still not wall to wall interact-with-able graphics, but a significant upgrade.

Unfortunately for fans of the HoloLens, Microsoft recently confirmed that they have ended production of their second generation device, and that while they will continue to issue security updates and support for their existing customers, like the US Department of Defense, they haven’t announced a replacement for it—which could mean they’re getting out of this space entirely.

Which is interesting in the sense that this is a space, the world of augmented reality, which some newer entrants are rebranding as mixed reality, that seems to be blowing up right now: two of Microsoft’s main competitors are throwing a lot of money and credibility into their own offerings, and pitching this type of hardware as the next-step in personal devices.

Some analysts have posited, though, that Microsoft maybe just got into this now-burgeoning arena just a little too early, investing in some truly compelling innovations, but doing so at a moment in which the cost was too high to justify the eventual output, and now they might be ceding the space to their competition rather than doubling-down on something they don’t think will pay off for them, or they may be approaching it from another angle entirely, going back to the drawing board and focusing on new innovations that will bypass the HoloLens brand entirely.

What I’d like to talk about today are the offerings we’re seeing from those other brands, and what seems to be happening, and may happen in the near-future, in this augmented-reality, mixed-reality segment of the tech world.

—

I did an episode on spacial computing and the Apple Vision Pro back when the device was made available for purchase in the US, in February of 2024.

This device was considered to be a pretty big deal because of who was making it, Apple, which has a fairly solid record of making new devices with unfamiliar interfaces popular and even common, and because the approach they were taking: basically throwing a lot of money at this thing, and charging accordingly, around $3,500, which is the same price the second HoloLens was being sold for, as I noted in the intro.

But because of that high price point, they were able to load this thing up with all sorts of bells and whistles, some of which were fundamental to its functionality—like super-high-density lenses that helped prevent nausea and other sorts of discord in their users—and some that were maybe just interesting experiments, like projecting a live video of the user’s eyes, which are concealed by the headset, on the front of the headset, which to me is a somewhat spooky and silly effect, but which is nonetheless technically impressive, and is something that seems aimed at making these things less anti-social, because you can wear the Vision Pro and still see people, and this projection of their eyes allows them to see you and your facial expression at the same time.

I’ve actually had the chance to use this device since that episode went live, and while there are a lot of weird little limitations and hindrances to this device going mainstream at the moment, the technology works surprisingly well right out of the box, with the eye- and hand-tracking elements working shockingly, almost magically well for relatively early-edition tech; Apple is pretty good at making novel user-interfaces intuitive, and that component of this device, at least, seemed like a slam dunk to me—for casual use-cases, at least.

That said, the company has been criticized for that high price point and their seeming fixation on things like putting the users’ eyes on the outside of the headset, rather than, for instance, investing in more content and figuring out how to make the thing more comfortable for long periods of time—a common complaint with basically every virtual reality or mixed-reality headset ever developed, because of the sheer amount of hardware that has to be crammed into a finite, head-and-face-mounted space, that space also needing to be properly balanced, and it can’t get too hot, for perhaps obvious reasons.

Those criticisms related to price are the result not of comparison to HoloLens, as again, the pricing is basically the same between these two devices, but instead the result of what Meta has done with their mixed-reality offerings, which are based on products and technology they acquired when they bought Oculus Labs; they’ve leaned into providing virtual reality devices for the low- and mid-market consumer, and their newest model, the Meta Quest 3S is a stand-alone device that costs between about $300 and $400, and it has mixed-reality functionality, similar to the Vision Pro and HoloLens.

While Meta’s Quest line doesn’t have anywhere near the specs and polish of the Vision Pro, then, and while it didn’t arrive as early as the HoloLens, only hitting shelves quite recently, it does provide enough functionality and serves enough peoples’ purposes, and at a far lower price point, that it, along with its other Quest-line kin, has managed to gobble up a lot of market share, especially in the consumer mixed-reality arena, because far more people are willing to take a bet on a newer technology with questionable utility that costs $300 compared to one that costs them more than ten-times as much.

Interestingly, though, while Meta’s Reality Labs sub-brand seems to be doing decently well with their Quest line of headsets, a product that they made in collaboration with glasses and sunglasses company EssilorLuxottica, which owns a huge chunk of the total glasses and sunglasses global market, via their many sub-brands, may end up being the more popular and widely used device, at least for the foreseeable future.

The Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses looks almost exactly like traditional, Ray-Ban sunglasses, but with slightly bulkier arms and with camera lenses built into the frames near where the arms connect to them.

If you’re not looking carefully, then, these things can be easily mistaken for just normal old Ray-Bans, but they are smartglasses in that they contain those two cameras on the front, alongside open-air speakers, a microphone, and a touchpad, all of which allow the wearer to interact with and use them in various ways, including listening to music and talking on the phone, but also taking photos of what they’re looking at, recording video of the same, and asking an AI chatbot questions like, what type of flower is this, and getting an audible answer.

These things cost around what you would pay for a Quest headset: something like $300-400, but their functionality is very different: they don’t project graphics to overlay the user’s view, in that regard they function like normal sunglasses or prescription glasses, but if you want to snap a photo, livestream whatever it is you’re seeing, or ask a question, you can do that using a combination of vocal commands and interacting with the built-in touchpad.

And while this isn’t the mixed-reality that many of us might think of when we hear that term, it’s still the same general concept, as it allows the user to engage with technology in real-life, in the real-world, overlaying the real world with digital, easily accessed, internet-derived information and other utilities. And it manages to do so without looking super obtrusive, like earlier versions of the same concept—Google’s Google Glass smartglasses come to mind, which were earlier versions of basically the same idea, but with some limited graphical overlay options, and in a form factor that made the wearer look like an awkward, somewhat creepy cyborg.

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, has a similar offering which originally leaned into the same “these look just like glasses, but have little camera lenses in them” strategy, though with their newest iteration, their Spectacles smartglasses product has reoriented toward a look that’s more akin to a larger, clunkier version of the free 3d glasses you might use at the movie theater—not exactly inconspicuous, though offering much of the same functionality as Meta’s Raybans, alongside some basic graphical overlay functions: a lightweight version of what the Vision Pro and Quest offer, basically, and in a much small package.

These new Spectacles are only available for folks who sign up for the company’s developer program at the moment, however, and are purchased not as a one-off, but for $99/month, with a minimum commitment of 12 months—so the price tag is quite a bit higher than those Quests and Raybans, as well.

Interestingly, Meta’s Reality Labs recently held an event in which they showed off an arguably more advanced version of Snap’s Spectacles, called Orion.

These things are being pitched as the be-all, end-all mixed-reality solution that every company is trying to develop, but which they can’t develop yet, at least not at scale. They look like giant, cartoony glasses—they’re shaped like glasses, but comically oversized ones—and they provide many of the same benefits as today’s Quest headset, but without the large, heavy headset component; so these could theoretically be used in the real-world, not just in one’s living room or office.

The company announced this product along with the caveat that they cannot make it on scale, yet, because cramming that much functionality into such a small device is really stressing the capacity of current manufacturing technologies, and while they can build one of these glasses, with its accompanying wristband and a little controller, both of which help the glasses do what they do, in terms of compute and the user interface, for about $10,000 per unit, they could not, today, build enough of them to make it a real, sellable product, much less do so at a profit.

So this was a look at what they hope to be doing within the next decade, and basically gives them credibility as the company that’s already building what’s next—now it’s just a matter of bringing down costs, scaling up production, and making all the components smaller and more energy efficient; which is a lot of work that will take years, but is also something they should theoretically at least be able to do.

To be clear, most other big tech companies should be capable of build really snazzy, futuristic one-offs like the Orion, as well, especially if they, like Meta, offload some of the device’s functionality into accessory hardware—the Vision Pro has offloaded its battery into a somewhat clunky, pocketable appendage, for instance, and most of these devices make use of some kind of external controller, to make the user interface snappier and more accurate.

But Meta is attempting to show that this is the direction they see wearable technology going, and maybe our engagement with the digital world more holistically, as well. It’s easy to imagine a world in which we all have these sorts of capabilities built into our glasses and wristbands and other wearables, rather than having to work with flat, not-mixed-reality screens all the time, especially once you see the tech in action, even if only as a not-for-sale example.

One aspect of this potential future that Meta is forecasting is already leading to some soul-searching, though.

Some students at Harvard modified a pair of Meta Ray-Bans to use facial recognition and reverse-image search technology so they could basically look at a stranger, then learn a bunch of stuff about them really quickly, to the point that these students were able to do this, then pretend to know the that stranger, talk about their work, find their spouse’s phone number—a bunch of details that made it seem like they knew this person they’d only just met.

All of which is pretty wild and interesting, but also potentially frightening, considering that this is basically doxing someone on demand, in public, and it could be used—like many other tech innovations, granted—to enable and augment stalking or kidnapping or other such crimes.

None of which is destiny, of course. Nor is the success of this product type.

But there does seem to be a lot of interest in what these gadgets seem like they might offer, especially as the prices drop, and as more entrants carve out space in that relatively lower-cost space—which is a space Apple is reportedly planning to enter soon, too, with a new edition of their Vision Pro that would cost maybe something like half as much as the first one, and possibly smart glasses and maybe even Airpods with cameras meant for release over the next couple of years.

So it may be that the early divulgence of these next-step devices, showing us where these things might go with these higher-priced, smaller audience initial editions, could allow us to predict and prepare for some of their negative externalities before they go completely mainstream, so that when they finally arrive in their finished form, we’re a bit more prepared to enjoy the benefits while suffering fewer (though almost certainly not zero) of their potential downsides.

Show Notes

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Quest_3S

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

https://www.reddit.com/r/RayBanStories/comments/1e3frhc/my_honest_review_of_the_rayban_metas_as_everyday/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray-Ban_Meta

https://www.spectacles.com/spectacles-24?lang=en-US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectacles_(product)

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/students-add-facial-recognition-to-meta-smart-glasses-to-identify-strangers-in-real-time.2438942/

https://archive.ph/6TqgF

https://www.theverge.com/24253908/meta-orion-ar-glasses-demo-mark-zuckerberg-interview

https://about.fb.com/news/2024/09/introducing-orion-our-first-true-augmented-reality-glasses/

https://www.reddit.com/r/augmentedreality/comments/1frdjt2/meta_orion_ar_glasses_the_first_deep_dive_into/

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/10/13/cheaper-apple-vision-headset-rumored-to-cost-2000-arriving-in-2026

https://www.uploadvr.com/microsoft-discontinuing-hololens-2/

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support

https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/7/23159049/microsoft-hololens-boss-alex-kipman-leaves-resigns-misconduct-allegations

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

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This week we talk about the AfD, the Freedom Party, and the Identitarian Movement.

We also discuss Martin Sellner, Herbert Kickl, and racialism.

Recommended Book: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Transcript

Racialism, sometimes called scientific racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that groups of human beings are inherently, biologically different from each other based on different evolutionary paths that have carved up the species into different races that are distinct enough from each other to make interbreeding undesirable, and cultural exchange a dangerous hazard.

Said another way, racialism posits, using all sorts of outdated and misinterpreted scientific understandings—like determining intelligence based on the shape of a person’s skull—that black people and white Europeans and folks from Asia are different enough (which is an idea also called polygenesis) that they should stay in their own parts of the world, and that by separating everyone out according to presumed racial background, we would all be able to do as we like, based on our own alleged cultural guide rails, and in accordance with our own, alleged biological destinies; which in some cases would mean invading and killing and maybe enslaving the other, inferior, in our minds at least, races, but in the polite, political telling, usually means something like putting up walls to keep out the racially inferior riffraff, so they don’t pollute our good and pure and obvious superior bloodlines.

Important to note is that different people with genetic lineages in different parts of the world do tend to have distinct collections of biological traits, ranging from skin tone to height to propensities to, or defenses against various sorts of disease.

There’s actual no clean line between groups of people the way this theory says, though: race, the way the word is used today, references a collection of qualities that tend to be found within different groups of people, but every person is a unique collection of genetic mutations and variations, and the old-school concept of biological race has not held up to modern scientific scrutiny—it’s mostly a cultural concept at this point, and even then it’s a fairly fuzzy one.

That said, a lot of very smart people used to believe in the racialism concept back in the Enlightment era, from around the mid-1600s to the late-1700s, as science back then was helping us delineate between all sorts of species, and giving us a hint of the more complete evolutionary understandings that would arrive the following century; but as with many fields of inquiry, this initial glimpse granted us as much new confusion, masquerading as insight, as it did actual, novel understandings.

Today, this concept is almost exclusively cleaved to by folks belonging to various racial supremacist groups, including but not limited to those who are part of the so-called Identitarian Movement, which is a far-right, European nationalist ideology that spans many countries and political organizations, and which aims, among other things, to significantly truncate or end globalization, to do away with multiculturalism in all its forms, to combat what this group sees as the spread and influence of Islam across Europe, and to significantly limit or even completely end immigration of people from outside Europe into European nations.

Folks and parties that subscribe to this ideology are often considered to be ultra-conservative, but also xenophobic and racist—racism being distinct from racialism, as racialism posits there are different, hard-coded biological racial realities that cleanly delineate one group of humans from another, while racism tends to be the belief that one group of people is superior to another, with folks who are racist at times acting on that belief in various ways.

The Identitarian Movement is officially categorized as a right-ring extremist group by the German intelligence agency, and the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a slew of groups that align with this movement to be hate groups.

Though based on the writings and principles of earlier thinkers and politicians, this group is actually fairly modern, only coming into being in its current form in the early 2000s—though the collection of ideas and efforts that informed this movement arose in France in the 1960s as part of a neo-fascist effort to inject out-of-vogue, extremist ideas into respectable, post-WWII political debate.

This was essentially an effort to rebrand Nazi ideology so as to make it seem smart and with-it in the still-stunned, but rebuilding European idea marketplace, and its primary innovation was taking some of those fascist concepts and hiding them under the more palatable label of nationalism—which was experiencing a resurgence following the wave of multiculturalism that began to flourish after the war, though not without imperfections and conflict.

One of the most popular elements of this ideology, though, was introduced a fair bit later, in the early 2000s and 2010s.

Remigration refers to the idea that liberals, people on the left of the political spectrum, want to replace good, hard-working, morally correct, white French people—and later this idea was expanded to encompass all white Europeans—with folks from other countries, especially Muslim-majority countries, but also other places where folks don’t tend to be white.

These lefties are keen to do this for a variety of reasons, apparently, but one of the most popular claims is that they want to give handouts to these new arrivals, and thus get their votes, capturing the government forever by slowly reducing the overall population of the good, wholesome white locals, in order to out-populate them with new arrivals, whose votes will forever be captured by the politicians who gave them all these handouts.

Sometimes called The Great Replacement Theory, this idea serves as justification for the aforementioned, increasingly popular concept of remigration, which basically means rounding up everyone who’s living in Europe, but not originally from Europe, and shipping them elsewhere—even if they are citizens, and even if they aren’t citizens of the countries they’re being shipped to.

Some versions of this idea also say that the descendants of immigrants, folks who were born in their European homes, not elsewhere, should nonetheless be shipped back to where their grandparents came from, due to a lack of sufficient assimilation—which means taking up the culture of the place you’ve moved to, but in this case usually serves as a stand in for “has a different faith, likes different food, adheres to different norms,” and other multiculturalism-linked, distinctions.

This rounding up and shipping would be based on the person’s supposed racial identity, not on their national identity—so in a way, this concept is a means of smuggling racialism into politics, by making it seems as if the modern way of organizing the world and its people—that of nation states, and those nation states granting an identity, a national origin—is not inherent or ideal, and that we should instead force people to stay where we believe other people like them, according to our beliefs about such things, originally came from, and thus, belong.

That underlying concept isn’t one that’s taken seriously by most scientists, philosophers, demographers, or anyone else who’s profession is linked to this collection of ideas, but it’s proven to be a useful narrative and justification for folks who feel as if they’re becoming strangers in what they consider to be their homeland, their culture, their city, and so on. And that’s made it a useful point of leverage for traditionalist and conservative political parties across Europe; and increasingly, in recent years especially, elsewhere around the world, as well.

What I’d like to talk about today is a party in Austria that has leaned heavily into this collection of ideas, and which claimed the most votes in the country’s recent election, as a consequence.

—

The Freedom Party, or FPO, is an Austrian political party that’s a founding member of the European-scale Identity and Democracy Party, which recently merged with other, fellow traveler parties from the Czech Republic and Hungary, to become the Patriots for Europe group; though all of these entities share roughly the same ideological platforms and practical, political ambitions.

And among those ambitions is the desire to tackle the issue of immigration across the EU, reducing especially the number of people coming into the bloc from Muslim-majority nations, which large numbers of people in many European countries have complained about, usually because they feel the cultures of their hometowns and home countries are changing rapidly, and they consequently feel like they’re being elbowed out and replaced by these newcomers.

This is not a new complaint, and this isn’t only a European thing; across history, even very modern history, when a wave of immigrants arrive in a new home, that can make the people who were there before them feel like they’re under assault—and if those new arrivals have a different religion than the majority of the people in the place they’ve immigrated to, that can increase the perceived differences and threats, as can a difference in skin color, the clothing they wear, cultural customs, foods, fragrances, language, and just about anything else.

This angle of politicking has become increasingly popular with mostly but not exclusively conservative parties around the world in recent years, though, as some of those parties have gotten pretty good at spreading this message to disaffected people, including disaffected youths, in some of the most immigrated-to places in the world.

So young men in the United States have, according to recent polls, been hearing a lot about this and seem to be open to the idea that some of the, on average, at least, issues they seem to be facing in terms of educational attainment and employment options, among other things, are the fault of those new arrivals, and that’s possibly a component of the gender-skewed shift we’re seeing in the lead-up to November’s election, with young people in general leaning liberal, but more young men leaning conservative than young women.

That’s almost certainly not the only issue at play here, of course, but it’s something conservative politicians in the US seem to be leveraging, even to the point that former president and current Republican candidate Donald Trump recently mentioned the term “remigration” in a social media post: something that’s being seen by political analysts as a trial balloon to see if the concept might be picked up by folks in his political orbit, and might in turn garner him more support amongst people who feel like too many immigrants are entering the US, and that all that immigration is bad for one of several possible, and well-promoted, reasons; maybe, this trial balloon implies, we should just ship them all back from where they came from, and that may then free up housing and jobs and maybe set things back to normal, how things used to be.

It’s worth noting that the word remigration was initially used to refer to the return of European Jews to their homes after WWII, but it was adopted by French white nationalists in the mid-2010s to allude to deporting immigrants and the children of immigrants, en masse.

The term became more widely known after an investigation found that, in late-2023, members of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD party had a secret meeting with neo-nazis, at which there was a presentation by a thirty-something far-right Austrian political activist named Martin Sellner, who among other things is the leader of the Identitarian movement I mentioned in the intro, and in that talk he supported the idea of a program that would involve identifying and removing minorities of various kinds from Germany by force—remigration, basically, a topic he’s also written a book about.

Sellner later said that his words were twisted by the media and that remigration is really just a collection of policies that would slow or stop some types of immigration in the future, but he was banned from Germany because of that talk, until a German court revoked that ban last May, and he was denied entry into the UK in 2018, and into the US in 2019 because of a large donation he received from the mass-shooter who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, killing 51 people and injuring 89.

Sellner himself has said that until 2011 he was a neo-nazi, and his wife, an American pro-Trump online influencer—who was a big proponent of the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory among other notable, and demonstrably untrue narratives that became popular in the lead up to previous elections—she spreads a lot of the same content, but with a US bent, rather than a European one.

Both Sellners, and other members of the Identitarian movement, have been accused of parroting Nazi talking points, promoting things like Holocaust denial, and calling for minorities to be mass-executed, but they generally contend that they’re simply proud nationalists who love their countries and don’t want to see them changed or ruined by a bunch of people from other places with different ideas, beliefs, and priorities coming in and taking all the jobs, and tweaking everything to suit their wants and needs, against the desires of those who were there first.

The concept of remigration has attained popularity at a more rapid rate in some places than others, and it seems to have done especially well in Austria—the country’s Freedom Party won 29% of the vote in the country’s last election in late-September of this year, and that was the highest tally of all the parties that participated; which is notable in part because of what the Freedom Party believes now, in remigration and adjacent policies, but also because this is a party that was founded in the 1950s by a former SS officer and Nazi politician.

It’s expected that the Freedom Party won’t be able to form a government, because every other party has said they won’t form a coalition with them—the currently governing conservative People’s Party has said they might be open to it, but not with Herbert Kickl, the group’s current leader, involved in the resultant government.

Kickl is an ardent ally of Russian president Putin and has been accused of attempting to meld right-wing populism with nazi-valenced, fascist extremism—a common accusation against folks in this corner of the political spectrum, though in some cases an accusation that is also seemingly true.

Like Sellner and other folks with this ideological orientation, Kickl promotes the idea of Remigration, which in the context of Austrian politics, in his mind at least, would help reinforce the strength of a Fortress Austria with completely closed borders and which is run by an all-powerful security state apparatus, that is capable of managing those borders, and keeping the peace inside the nation’s impermeable walls.

Kickl has said, in the wake of the election in which his party was victorious, that Austrian politicians are making a decision, by excluding his party, and him specifically from government, that is a slap in the face to the electorate—though he’s continued to make overtures to other conservative parties in the hope that they might be willing to work with the Freedom Party to form a functioning government; this seems unlikely, at this point, though it’s not impossible.

Even without a functioning coalition, though, Kickl and his party’s win at the polls, bringing in the most support of any party, speaks volumes about the popularity of this general collection of concepts and ideas; and the same seems to be true in many other countries where these ideas are being spread: despite a few let-downs for European far-right parties in recent years, this collection of political entities and personalities have done pretty well over the past decade, making substantial gains in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, in particular.

That these parties often align themselves with fascist governments and subscribe to easily disproven conspiracy theories doesn’t necessarily outweigh their support of increasingly popular anti-immigration policies, it would seem, and that popularity seems to be the result of their success in tying immigration to all manners of social and economic ills.

Much of Europe is still experiencing economic downswings, high levels of inflation, and overall underperformance compared to their peers, post-pandemic peak, so this sort of messaging may be decently well-received even by folks who wouldn’t typically agree with much of the rest of their platform or narrative, but who are currently looking for anything that defies the current status quo, and anyone who provides something that seems like it might be an explanation for those many and varied downswings and other perceived ills.

Show Notes

https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/56618/italyalbania-asylumseeker-deal-to-cost-%E2%82%AC653-million-report-finds

https://archive.ph/PFWhk

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/29/world/europe/austria-election-freedom-party-kickl.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/austrian-far-right-head-urges-rivals-let-him-govern-after-election-win-2024-10-05/

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/austria-holds-tight-election-with-far-right-bidding-historic-win-2024-09-28/

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week we talk about the Fed, interest rates, and inflation.

We also discuss cooling economies, the Federal Funds Rate, and the CPI.

Recommended Book: Dirty Laundryby Richard Pink and Roxanne Emery

Transcript

I’ve done a few episodes on this general topic over the past several years, so I won’t get super in-depth about many of the specifics, but the US Federal Reserve has a dual-mandate to keep prices stable and to maximize employment in the country—though that core responsibility has been expanded in recent years to also include regulatory control over banks, providing a variety of services to banks and other savings associations, and doing what it can to moderate long-term inflation rates.

A lot of these responsibilities are intertwined, in the sense that, for instance, if you increase interest rates, that can lead to less spending by corporations that might otherwise borrow and spend liberally, creating more jobs; so adjusting one lever often tweaks seemingly disconnected outcomes—which is part of why this agency’s activities often fly below the radar of non-regulation, non-monetary-world people and publications; they’re super-careful with their powers, because one wrong move can cause ripples of discomfort throughout the US and global economy.

When one of those metrics they’re meant to moderate goes haywire, on the other hand, they’re all over the news; their every action, even the seemingly unimportant ones, tracked in great details, and breathlessly reported-upon.

For a variety of reasons, including the large-scale shut-down of various aspects of society and the global economy, and the consequent disruption of global supply chains, inflation—as measured by CPI, or the Consumer Price Index—shot through the roof, pretty much everywhere on the planet, beginning in 2020.

Leading up to that moment, many wealthy countries had been doing pretty well in terms of moderated inflation levels, and the US was no different: year-over-year inflation growth was down to sub-1% levels in 2014 and 2015, and it was close to the Fed’s 2% target level from 2010, when the worst of the 2007-2008 economic crisis had receded, until 2020, when it was down to 1.4%.

That year, the Federal Funds Rate, which is the lever the Fed uses to adjust interest rate levels throughout the US government and economy, setting the interest rate banks charge to lend each other money short-term, basically, that number eventually influencing everything from savings account interest payments to mortgage rates to what you can expect to pay for a car loan—that Federal Funds Rate was down to .25% in 2020 and 2021, which is very low, which meant that debt was very cheap and easy to acquire, corporations happily borrowing as much money as they wanted, as it would cost them very little to do so, and that meant expansion across the economy, that expansion further aided by low interest paid on savings accounts and similar, safe-havens for money, which made investing in startups, stocks, and similar, risky investment vehicles more appealing—because the safe stuff didn’t pay much of anything.

All of which meant a spending bonanza—right up to the point that COVID-19 started rippling outward from China, and the world’s governments responded with lockdowns and similar, economy-stifling measures.

By the end of 2021, year-over-year inflation in the US was up to 7%, from 1.4% the previous year, and it was 6.5% the following year.

In 2022, the Fed bumped the Federal Funds Rate from that incredible low of .25% up to 4.5%—a huge jump, and a staggering blow for an economy that was experiencing a dramatic surge in prices; the goal being to slow things down, and consequently, hopefully, also slow that inflation rate.

Other factors likewise influenced inflation around the world during this period, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which massively complicated the global energy market, alongside other disruptions, and the weirdening of politics, which have become increasingly tribal and extreme over the past decade or so in many governments around the world, have made it trickier to legislate, and have carried a wave of unserious and obstructive lawmakers into office.

That hiking of the Federal Funds Rate ended what’s been called the US’s ZIRP era: a period in which zero interest-rate policy, or so close to zero that it’s essentially zero interest rate policy, defined the shape of the economy, what professions everyone chose to pursue, which players became dominant in their industries, and what sorts of bets made financial and reputational sense.

The US, and much of the world, especially the wealthy world, was thus suddenly plunged into a very different financial and regulatory environment, changing its posture and the politics of money and spending, while also queueing things up for a potential future in which inflation might be tackled and the Fed might start adjusting the dial downward once more, tipping the economy back into something more spendy and risk-taking, after a handful of years in which the name of the game has been cutting costs, laying off as many people as possible, and recalibrating toward today’s profits over investing in tomorrow’s potential gamechanging outcomes.

What I’d like to talk about today is the Fed’s recent decision to do exactly that, adjust their interest rate dial, and how the way they did it is being received by those who are the most affected by this choice.

—

The mechanism of the Federal Funds Rate is fairly straightforward: make it more expensive to borrow money and you tend to cool the economy.

Do this at the wrong time—when the economy is already cool—and you hurt the businesses that make up the production side of things, but also consumers, as there likely won’t be enough jobs, and enough jobs paying enough for folks to earn a living, buy things, and keep those businesses operating at nominal capacity.

Don’t do it when you need to, though, and the economy can get out of hand, running too hot, expanding wildly, and possibly also pumping up inflation at a rate that makes everything pricier, which can lead to similar consequences: folks not able to afford as much because the price of things is going up, despite their pay being decent and the job market being on fire.

This rate has to be used like a scalpel, not a chainsaw, then, lest you tip things one way or the other, in either case resulting in some type of economic truncation and various types of suffering for the citizenry of the country in question.

In this context, a “soft landing” is a semi-mythical accomplishment involving the just-right application of the Federal Funds Rate so that you increase interest rates, maybe dramatically, to stifle high inflation, but then pull those interest rates back at just the right moment so that the economy is cooled, but not damaged, and you’re thus able to put things back on a nice growth trajectory, but with something like a 2% inflation rate, rather than something much higher, or just as bad in some ways, much lower than that.

It’s been speculated that a soft landing might be attainable by this Fed’s current leadership because they seemed to be acting prudently and objectively, despite the politics surrounding their efforts, and they also seemed willing to hold off on lowering the rate even when much of the business world and parts of the government were losing its mind over worry that they would keep it high for too long.

In late September 2024, the Fed announced that they’d decided to finally cut this rate, from a target range of 5.25-5.5%, down to a target range of 4.75-5%.

That’s a drop of .5%, which is unusual except in emergency circumstances, and while it wasn’t totally out of the blue—many analysts and betting markets had given a high probability to this potentiality, as opposed to the usual .25% cut—it was still quite a big event, as it makes pretty clear that the Fed sees their job as being mostly done, at least in the sense that they need to cut inflation quickly and dramatically.

That decision was made on the basis that US inflation rates, using the Fed’s preferred index, had dropped for the fifth consecutive month in August of this year, down to 2.2%, which marked the lowest level since February of 2021; that’s down from 2.9% in July, and is tantalizingly close to their target rate of 2%.

The implications of this double-the-usual drop in the Federal Funds Rate are many, and the specifics and claims vary depending on who you ask.

One perspective of why this did this how they did it is that the Fed sees that it’s work is done on this matter, and they’re keen to get interest rate levels back to something more moderated as quickly as possible so that the economy can keep its solid momentum going apace. They also recognize that there’s a delay on these sorts of decisions and their impact, so getting close to 2% and then pulling back is more likely to ultimately land them somewhere close to 2%, while waiting for reports that show 2% before pulling back would be likely to lead to an overshoot, which could be really bad for economic outcomes.

Another view is that the Fed accidentally held on a little too long and maybe should have cut rates by .25% at their previous meeting, and now, to make up for that, they doubled the cut; but because of that accidental delay, the economy could suffer a bit, the Fed overshooting after all, which again, wouldn’t be ideal, but is a possibility because of that aforementioned delay in cause and effect.

Some prognosticators in this space, however, are seeing this as a panicky indication that we’re actually careening toward a recession, as some of the economic indicators folks watch to predict such things are flashing red, and while a successful soft landing could theoretically help the US avoid such a path, the current wave of relief and optimistic anticipation could also be an illusion that’s concealing structural weaknesses in the US economy that are about to rupture.

The most popular version of that more pessimistic prediction is that the US will experience a recession in 2025, maybe 2026 at the latest, and it will have to make it through that trough before it can start climbing up the peak, again—which would be bad news for investors and businesses, and would mean basically resetting to a standing start, in terms of growth, as opposed to perpetuating the momentum of the economy as it exists, today, which is doing pretty well by most metrics.

That could also be quite bad for burgeoning industries like those connected to AI systems, renewable energy, and microchips, as these are all investment-intensive corners of the economy, and a recession would almost certainly significantly truncate the amount of money sloshing around in investors’ bank accounts, waiting to be injected into businesses operating in such spaces.

All that said, at the individual level, while inflation has been moderated by many measures, prices dropping substantially from where they were even a few months ago, what’s been called the “vibecession” seems to still be hampering the everyday person’s sense of how things are going economically in the US—the numbers look pretty good, but the average person reports that they think things are going catastrophically.

It’s thought that this is at least partly the consequence of economic ignorance—folks only remembering the many negative headlines they see, and not realizing how historically low unemployment is, and how historically high the stock market has climbed, alongside other positive measures.

But the more potent ingredient, almost certainly, is that while inflation has moderated for many common goods and expenses, others, like food, are still quite high, and that’s an expense that we don’t just see periodically, like when we buy new shoes or a new car, but every week or even every day, which is a far more regular punch to the gut that hits not just our pocketbooks, but also our perception of how far our money goes, and how well off we feel as a consequence.

There’s already a great deal of speculation as to what the Fed will do at its next meeting in November, and bets on popular futures markets indicate there’s a 54% chance of another half-point cut, as opposed to a 46% chance of a quarter-point cut.

That latter potentiality would arguably support the assertion that the Fed is scrambling to make up for lost time, hoping to avoid an inflation reduction overshoot—or from a more positive perspective, maybe just wanting to get back to a more neutral interest rate stance sooner rather than later, to help keep the economy chugging along, without any periods of sluggishness, while the former potentiality, a quarter-point cut in November, would ostensibly seem to be a more confident stance from the Fed, but could also worry investors, as it might mean it’ll take a bit longer to fully return to that neutral stance.

Whatever speed the Fed ends up opting for in dropping interest rates, though, most analysts see the rate falling to something like the 3-3.25% range by the middle of 2025, which is at the top end of what’s generally see as a neutral rate for such things—a rate that won’t add fuel to a hot economy, but also won’t cool things artificially.

By that point, we’ll probably also know if the Fed has managed to nail a soft landing; it seems like they might have, but at this point there is still reason to suspect they didn’t, and that this is just the silence before the storm.

Show Notes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/john-lanchester-consumer-price-index-who-is-government/

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misery_index_(economics)

https://apnews.com/article/federal-reserve-barkin-interest-rates-inflation-bba49b528649cf866e391a783033c067

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/23/economy/rate-cut-what-next/index.html

https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/fed-interest-rate-cut-small-business-spending-abfed941

https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2024/09/26/the-feds-rate-cut--a-soft-landing--or-fake-news/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/fed-is-aligned-rate-cuts-upcoming-data-will-shape-pace-2024-09-27/

https://apnews.com/article/interest-rates-inflation-prices-federal-reserve-economy-0283bc6f92e9f9920094b78d821df227

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/federal-reserve-rate-cut-credit-cards-mortgages-already-lowering-rates/

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20240918a.htm

https://www.investopedia.com/will-fed-rate-cuts-save-commercial-real-estate-cre-loans-banks-8719181

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/new-pce-reading-supports-case-for-smaller-fed-rate-cut-in-november-143349577.html?guccounter=1

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-28/powell-speech-and-jobs-data-to-help-clarify-fed-rate-path?embedded-checkout=true

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/traders-bet-second-straight-50-bps-fed-rate-cut-november-2024-09-27/

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/softlanding.asp

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/federal-reserve-rate-cut-credit-cards-mortgages-already-lowering-rates/

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/27/stock-markets-hit-record-highs-after-news-of-a-fall-in-us-inflation

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This week we talk about interdiction, the NSA, and Mossad.

We also discuss exploding pagers, targeted strikes, and paramilitary organizations.

Recommended Book: Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan

Transcript

In the world of technology, and especially computers—or anything with microchips and thus, some computing capabilities—a “backdoor” is a bit of code or piece of hardware that allows someone (or a group of someones) to get inside that computer or compute-capable device after it’s been delivered and put into use.

At times the installation of backdoors is done beneficently, allowing tech support to tap into a computer after it’s been sold so they can help the end-user with problems they encounter.

But in most cases, this term is applied to the surreptitious installation of this kind of hardware or software, and generally it’s meant to allow those doing the installing to surveil the activities of whomever is using the product in question, or maybe even to lock them out and/or hijack its use at some point in the future, should they so desire.

There are potential downsides to the use of backdoors even when they’re installed with the best of intentions, as they can allow malicious actors, like hackers, working independently or for agencies or nation states, to tap into these devices or networks or whatever else with less effort than would have otherwise been required; in theory such a backdoor would give them one target to work on, rather than a bunch of them, which would mean attempting to access each and every device individually; a backdoor in an operating system would allow hackers who hacked that backdoor system access to every device that uses said OS, for instance.

Backdoor efforts undertaken by the US National Security Agency, the NSA, were famously divulged by whistleblower Edward Snowden, revealing all sorts of—to many people outside the intelligence world, at least—unsavory activities being conducted by this agency, among them efforts to install backdoors in software like Linux, but also hardware like routers and servers, at times opening these devices up and installing what’s called a Cottonmouth, which allows the NSA to gain remote access to anything plugged into that device.

This sort of interdiction, which is basically the interception of something before it reaches its intended destination—so intercepting a modem that’s been ordered by a big company, opening it up, installing a backdoor, then repackaging it and sending it on its way to the company that ordered it as if nothing has happened—is not uncommon in the intelligence world, but the scope of the NSA’s activities in this regard were alarming to pretty much everyone when they were divulged, with leaks and reporting showing, basically, that the NSA had figured out ways to put hardware and software backdoors in just about everything, in some cases resulting in the mass collection of data from American citizens, which goes beyond their legal remit, but also the surveillance of American allies, like the chancellor of Germany.

What I’d like to talk about today is another, recent high-visibility example of an intelligence agency messing with devices ordered by a surveillance target, and what consequences we might expect to see now that this manipulation has come to light.

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In the world of covert operations—spy stuff, basically—a “hand of God” operation is one that is almost immaculately targeted to the point where it might almost seem as if those who are struck did something to piss off a deity; those who the targeters want to hit are hit, and everyone else is safe or relatively safe.

In 2020, a hand of God operation was launched against an Iranian general named Qassem Solaimani while he was near the Baghdad airport, an American Reaper drone hitting Solaimani and his escorts’ cars with several missiles, killing the general and nine other people who were with him, but leaving everyone else in the area largely unscathed—not an easy thing to do.

Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in July of 2024 by Israel, which blew up his bedroom in a military-run guesthouse in Iran’s capital city, Tehran, either using a well-targeted missile or a bomb that they somehow managed to hide in that room ahead of time—either way, it was a very precise attack that made use of a lot of intelligence data and assets in order to hit the target and just the target, avoiding other casualties as much as possible—which again, can make this sort of strike, though still massively destructive, seem like an act of god because of how highly specific it is.

On September 17 of 2024, at around 3:30 in the afternoon, local time, thousands of pagers, which were purchased and used by the militant group Hezbollah, which governs the southern part of Lebanon, and which is locked in a seemingly perpetual tit-for-tat with Israel, mostly using rockets and drones across their shared border, these pagers began to buzz, indicating there was a new message from Hezbollah leadership, and then seconds later they exploded—some in their owners’ pockets or on their hips, some in their hands, if they lifted them to their faces to see what the message contained.

These sorts of devices were subbed-in for smartphones by the organization’s leadership in recent years, especially following the early October attacks on Israel by Hamas in 2023, due to fears that Israel’s notorious intelligence agency, Mossad, would be able to tap their communications if they used more sophisticated tools.

The pagers in question were a bit more modern than those that were common a few decades ago, allowing users to basically text each other, and it was thought that they were simple enough that they would reduce the number of software backdoors that Mossad could use to intercept their messages, while still allowing those in the higher-levels of the organization to communicate with each other quickly and efficiently.

Instead, it looks like Hezbollah acquired these pagers from an Israeli shell company—maybe several shell companies—operating out of Hungary which licensed the device schematics and branding of a Taiwanese company in order to make it seem legit.

This company or companies were set up in mid-2022, and the tangled web of activities surrounding them is still being unspooled by journalists and intelligence agencies, but pretty much everyone, from the pager brand’s parent company to the Hungarian government deny any connection to any of this, the US and Israel’s other allies deny having any foreknowledge of the operation, and Israel’s Mossad is of course not divulging their secrets, so it could be a little while before we know all the details, if we ever do, but it seems like this larger operation, the infrastructure for it, anyway, may have been in the works for a decade or more.

The way it played out, though, is that those thousands of pagers seem to have been filled with a few ounces of explosives and rigged with software that would detonate said explosives when a specific message was received by them. These pagers, then, were delivered to Hezbollah, distributed to their higher-ups, their inner-circle, basically, and then on September 17 thousands of them received the detonate message, blew up, and killed at least 12 people and injured nearly 3,000.

Lebanon’s hospitals were filled with the dead and grievously injured, shutting down a significant chunk of their overall medical capacity, and the following day a wave of radios—the kind used to communicate, not the kind used to listen to music, so basically walkie-talkies—alongside a few mobile phones, laptops, and some solar power cells, all owned and used by Hezbollah officials and operatives, blew up, killing at least 25 people and injuring about 450.

Then, a few days later, Israel launched an airstrike on a suburb in Beirut—the capital city of Lebanon—killing two senior Hezbollah officials and something like 36 other people with the 140 or so rockets it launched during the operation.

Anonymous officials from the US and Israel have told reporters that the explosives hidden in those pagers and other devices, were originally meant to be used as an opening salvo of an all-out attack against Hezbollah, which by definition would probably mean an invasion of Lebanon, since Hezbollah controls a fair portion of the country, but they were growing concerned that Hezbollah might have been on to them and their explosives-hiding efforts, so they decided to move sooner than planned and detonate these devices without having that immediate full-bore followup ready to go.

This might be part of why the attack is generally being seen, in analytical and intelligence circles, at least, as a tactical success but a strategic question mark, as the end-goal isn’t really clear, especially since Israel is still partly tied-up in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank, as well, and thus not super well-prepared for a potential real-deal war with Lebanon, to its north. This operation’s culmination would have made a lot more sense several months in the future, when they would theoretically have been in a better spot to detonate these devices, launch a bunch of missiles, and then move in with soldiers on the ground to capture or kill the rest of Hezbollah’s leadership.

It has been posited that this effort still serves a few important purposes for Israel’s military and intelligence agencies, though. For the latter, it serves as a reinvigoration of the “don’t mess with us” reputation they held up until the successful sneak-attack by Hamas last October; Mossad has been heavily criticized for ignoring the signals they were receiving about that attack, and this could have been partly meant to show their government and the world that they still have plenty of gas in the tank; it was a highly sophisticated operation, and it’s fairly terrifying to think that the devices we all carry in our pockets might be weaponized in this way; Iran’s military is reportedly disallowing the use of such devices for the time being, and local airlines are not allowing folks to bring these sorts of things aboard, either, so the scare-factor has definitely worked, and it will likely make it a lot more difficult for Hezbollah and similar organizations in the area to function, since they won’t know for certain which of their communication channels have been compromised and potentially weaponized against them.

The Israeli military, too, would seem to benefit from what amounts to a decapitation attack on an organization that has declared its intention to wipe Israel off the face of the map.

Hezbollah and similar organizations are more fluid than typical government organizations by necessity, but Hezbollah is a lot more established and entrenched than other Iran-backed entities, like Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen, which means they have more infrastructure, a larger military force, and a more concrete leadership structure—the latter of which was hit hard by these strikes and hand of God operations, and the former of which has been hit hard over the past year or so, airstrikes targeting Hezbollah’s rocket, drone, and missile capabilities in particular having become more common since Hamas attacked Israel.

There are several interesting, and in a few cases alarming, possible implications of this operation and its accompanying airstrikes.

First is that it could represent a time-delayed unofficial declaration of war by Israel against the Hezbollah-controlled portion of Lebanon.

There have been very clear red-lines honored by both militaries for the past several years, both of them generally sticking to hitting targets within a few miles of their shared border, and both sides generally avoiding hitting major cities or higher-ups from the opposing side with their strikes; a lot of rockets and missiles and drones flying, but few of them hitting anything meaningful, other than the sites from which those projectiles were launched.

Israel seems to be indicating that the rules have changed, though, and while Hezbollah has made similar gestures in recent days, aiming at and hitting a few Israeli targets beyond the typical projectile launch-sites and military installations close to the border, including towns dozens of miles from that border, they’re still proving to be less brazen than Israel in this regard, so far at least.

So it could be that Israel is leaving Hezbollah some space to back off, giving them a taste of what’s to come if they don’t accept that ultimatum, and it could be that Hezbollah is gesturing at hitting back, but avoiding doing anything they can’t step back from in order to give themselves time to either tone things down on what feels like their own terms, or to prepare for a more formal conflict; this could change at any moment, of course, but that seems like the most likely resting stance for Hezbollah at the moment—though in recent days both sides have indicated they’re not just prepared, but actually keen for a more formal conflict, including an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which would allow the Israelis to do more capturing and disassembling of Hezbollah’s infrastructure, but could also bog them down in street combat, which would make them less effective in Gaza, while also probably requiring the summoning of thousands of new soldiers, or already active, but exhausted soldiers—which wouldn’t be a popular move on the Israeli homefront.

This also raises all sorts of questions about the safety, or lack thereof, of international supply chains.

Some of these supply chains have already suffered as a consequence of their tangling and breaking during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but others are beginning to shrink or even wither as a result of concerns about, for instance, China integrating itself in global communications systems via its 5G technology and mobile devices, which has led to all sorts of sanctions and import bans by countries like the US and their allies.

Could iPhones built in China be messed with before they’re shipped to their end-users in other countries? It’s not impossible, and the same is true of just about anything that’s made in one place and exported to another. That doesn’t mean it will happen, but the knowledge that it could—and the line that’s been crossed by Israel in blowing up seemingly safe personal devices in this way—could lead to more such bans, or at least concerns and posturing by political figures about these fears. That, in turn, could expedite the truncating and culling of some of these supply chains, further curtailing the expansiveness, range, and openness of global trade.

And finally, this raises more concerns about the possibility of Israel’s invasion and occupation of Gaza sparking a larger, regional conflict, as Hezbollah is backed by Iran, which also backs an array of other non-government interests in the region, including several paramilitary groups. And the Israeli government seems keen to take down as many of the threats it’s surrounded by as possible before any peace treaties are signed; which perhaps understandable when you’re running a country that’s been invaded by all of its neighbors simultaneously as many times as Israel has in its relatively short history as a sovereign nation, but it’s also pretty alarming as Israel is a hugely potent military force in the region, and it’s backed by many of the world’s most globally potent military forces, which means it could wreak a whole lot of havoc if it wants to, and if such an effort increases in scope, that could pull other regional powers, like Iran, more formally and overtly into the conflict.

There are other forces at play, here, too, like the political machinations of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who’s walking a fine line attempting to stay in office in the midst of large and seemingly endless protests by Israelis who oppose his seeming kowtowing to the country’s far-right political establishment, and who’s scrambling to stay in office, in part to avoid facing ongoing corruption charges against him.

There are also external factors that could influence the region’s next steps, like Russia, which would love to see this conflict expand because that would take resources and attention away from its invasion of Ukraine, while other nations, like Saudi Arabia, would likely prefer to continue along a previous course of regional stabilization and normalization—of more trade enabled by more peace, basically—though it now seems inclined to put those efforts on pause because of the unpopularity of dealing directly with Israel until and unless it recognizes a Palestinian state, which doesn’t seem likely in the immediate future, given everything that’s happened in the past year.

Lots going on, then, and this most recent wave of attacks would seem to stir the pot more than it settles much of anything for everyone involved; which means, most immediately, and this is true whether or not Israel and Lebanon more formally go to war with each other, the ongoing peace talks that many of Israel’s neighbors and allies have been hoping for have been essentially back-burnered for the time being.

Show Notes

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

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

https://archive.ph/OqfPt

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-strikes-lebanon-hezbollah-revenge-device-blasts-nasrallah-rcna171946

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/hezbollah-commanders-killed-israel-strike-beirut-device-blasts-rcna172085

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/21/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-exploding-pagers/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz04m913m49o

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/business/dealbook/exploding-pagers-deliver-supply-chain-warning.html

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hezbollah-exploding-pagers-israel-supply-chain-a4937b48

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israels-ultimatum-to-hezbollah-back-off-or-go-to-war-f1b99924

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/09/21/israel-lebanon-pager-explosions-hezbollah-warfare/

https://www.axios.com/2024/09/21/hezbollah-launches-medium-range-rockets-israel

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/22/world/gaza-israel-hamas-hezbollah

https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-755733f50ad52c5af05a2ea7ef082e26

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-lebanon.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/20/world/middleeast/gaza-cease-fire-talks-hezbollah-lebanon.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/israel-s-hand-of-god-operation/ar-AA1qMval

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-pagers-explosives.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/hezbollah-pager-explosions-lebanon.html

https://www.axios.com/2024/09/18/hezbollah-pager-explosions-supply-chain-terror

https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-pager-explosion-e9493409a0648b846fdcadffdb02d71e

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/22/world/middleeast/mideast-diplomacy-hezbollah-israel.html

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/22/world/gaza-israel-hamas-hezbollah

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-escalating.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/irans-guards-ban-communications-devices-after-strike-hezbollah-security-2024-09-23/

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/spy-agency-ducks-questions-about-back-doors-in-tech-products-idUSKBN27D1DO/

https://www.extremetech.com/defense/173721-the-nsa-regularly-intercepts-laptop-shipments-to-implant-malware-report-says

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

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

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This week we talk about EREVs, Ford’s CEO, and Hertz.

We also discuss the used EV market, plug-in hybrids, and the Tesla Model 3.

Recommended Book: Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie

Transcript

In late-2021, car rental giant Hertz announced that it would purchase 100,000 Tesla Model 3 sedans for its fleet, giving customers the opportunity to drive what had recently, in 2019, become the best-selling plug-in electric car in US history, beating out the Chevy Volt, and then in 2020 become the bestselling plug-in in the world, bypassing the Nissan Leaf.

This was announced about six months after the company went through a massive restructuring, triggered by a bankruptcy filing in May of 2020, which landed Hertz in the hands of a pair of investment firms that purchased a majority stake in the company for about $4.2 billion.

Part of the goal in making such a huge electric vehicle purchase was that it would ostensibly set Hertz up with some of the snazziest, most future-facing vehicles on the road, and it should—if everything went according to plan—also provide them with some advantages, as full-bore EVs have far fewer parts than traditional internal-combustion vehicles, which means a lot less that can go wrong, and fewer moving pieces that need maintenance; which is pretty vital for vehicles that will be driven pretty much continuously.

So the single largest purchase of electric vehicles in history would represent a massive up-front investment, but the hope was that it would both pay off in dollars and cents, maintenance-wise, and help differentiate a brand that had recently been through some very rough patches, business and competition-wise.

Unfortunately for Hertz, that’s not what happened.

Initially, this announcement bumped the company’s stock up by about 40% over the course of just two weeks, but the Model 3s they purchased weren’t as popular as they thought they would be, and though EVs should in theory be easier to maintain than their ICE peers, the relatively low number of specialized repair shops and high cost of relatively scarce spare parts meant that the cars were actually more expensive to maintain than more common and less flashy alternatives.

The company was also dinged by Tesla’s decision to raise its prices around the same time Hertz was making the majority of its purchases, and Hertz decided to start offloading some of the Model 3s it had bought—which only ended up being about 30,000, rather than the originally announced 100,000—selling the cars at a fire-sale discount, in some cases as low as $25,000, which could drop to about $21,000 in areas where EV tax credits applied to used vehicles.

Unfortunately for those who bought them, many of these used Teslas were hobbled by the same issues Hertz was scrambling to address, but couldn’t make work for their business model.

Many initially happy used-Tesla purchasers found that their car’s battery pack was fundamentally damaged in some way, in some cases costing half, or nearly the same as the price they paid for the car, to repair or replace.

This fire sale arrived at around the same time as an overall drop in used EV prices across the market, too, which meant that Hertz’s prices—though at times falling to about half of what a new Model 3 would cost—weren’t as great as they could have been, especially for cars with so many potentially costly problems.

In other words, at this moment the whole of the EV industry was experiencing a bit of a price shock, as most automobile companies selling in the US were introducing new EV models, and they were finding that supply had surged beyond demand, leaving some of them with lots full of cars—especially in parts of the country where EV charging infrastructure still hasn’t been fleshed out, dramatically diminishing the appeal of EVs in those regions.

In early 2024, Hertz’s CEO resigned, mostly because his bet on Teslas and other EVs, hoping to making about a fifth of the company’s fleet electric, didn’t go as planned, and that’s left the company’s stock trading at around 11% of its 2021 high price point as of early September 2024.

To replace him, the company brought in a former executive from Cruise, which is an autonomous car technology company that’s owned by General Motors; another company that’s been trying to figure out the proper balance between investing in where the automobile market in the US is, today, and where it will be in the coming years.

What I’d like to talk about today is another facet of the automobile industry that’s changing pretty rapidly, and a new take on a third option, straddling the internal combustion engine and EV worlds, that seems to be evolving in a compelling—to those running these companies, at least—manner.

—

In January of 2023, the CEO of Toyota, who was the 66-year-old grandson of the company’s founder and who had been running the company since the early 2000s, stepped down from his position following a wave of criticism about his outspoken focus on hybrids over electric vehicles.

This company, which in some ways has been defined in recent years by its gamble to release the very well-received Prius, an early hybrid that really leaned into the concept of using a battery to support the activities of the car’s conventional fuel-burning engine, which resulted in a bunch of energy-efficiency benefits, the company had lagged behind its competitors in developing, announcing, and releasing new electric vehicle models to compete with the likes of Tesla—a company that was eating everyone else’s lunch in the EV department, and which was seeing sky-high valuations as a consequence.

Toyota was also being criticized by environmentalist groups for failing to move toward fully electric, zero-emissions vehicles, as while it did have a few EV models on the market, they were seemingly afterthoughts, accounting for less than 1% of the company’s US sales, and the main model, the cumbersomely named bZ4X, experienced a significant safety recall that upended its rollout plans.

Toyota’s new CEO leaned a bit more into EVs, announcing 10 new models in 2023, alongside plans to sell 1.5 million of them per year by 2026. But the company was still selling more cars than any other automaker on the planet, and the vast, vast majority of them were some kind of fuel-burning vehicle.

Despite the change in leadership, then, and the slight tack toward EVs the new CEO made soon after ascending to his new position, the company was still being criticized by environmentalist groups for not doing enough or moving fast enough, and the market seemed to think Toyota was setting itself up for a pretty grim next decade, since it was falling so far behind its competition in terms of supply chains and manufacturing know-how, related to EVs.

This general storyline, though, seems to have changed over the past year.

Yes, it’s still generally assumed that EVs are the future, that the electrification of everything is where we’re headed as a globe-spanning civilization, not just our transportation, but everything moving toward renewables—and that’s for climate-related reasons, but also the economics of renewables, which, once installed and connected, tend to be a lot more favorable, economically, than fossil fuel-based alternatives, almost always.

That said, the aforementioned disconnect between EV availability and investment, and EV demand in the United States has increased over the past year. EV sales are continuing to increase overall, but the huge spike in sales we saw over the past handful of years has tempered into a slower ascension, and many automakers have found themselves with car lots filled with models that aren’t the ones people want—at least not in the requisite numbers to keep lot turnover happening at the rate they like, and in some ways need, to see.

This is not the case in many other countries, I should note.

In China, EVs already made up something like 37% of the country’s total automobile marketshare, the share of new cars sold, in 2023, and across Europe, about 24% of all new cars sold were plug-in electric vehicles that same year.

In the US, the number is still in the single-digits, something like 8% as of Q2 2024, which is a lot bigger than the 5% or so in early 2022, but again, not the kind of rampant growth carmakers were planning for.

Another component of the automobile industry in the US has continued to grow a fair bit faster, though, up more than 30% year-over-year, accounting for up to 9.6% of the country’s total light-duty car marketshare in the second quarter of 2024.

And that slice of the market is the world of hybrids—the component of the car industry that Toyota has bet heavily on, despite antagonism from all sides, over the past several years, and which other automakers like Ford, are pivoting toward, as well; Ford recently announced that it would no longer be releasing a full electric, large SUV in the near-future, and will instead be releasing hybrid models, possibly including plug-in hybrid models.

Plug-in hybrids are like traditional hybrid vehicles, except they have a larger on-board battery pack that can be plugged into an electrical outlet, which allows them to be even more efficient than their traditional hybrid kin; so they're like a traditional ICE vehicle, but with a big, plug-innable battery that helps that engine be more efficient, giving it much better gas mileage.

Another recent development in this space, though—one that’s already pretty well-known in China, but still foreign enough in the US that the CEO of Ford said, after being exposed to the idea for the first time earlier this year, that he thinks it might be the right variation of existing approaches to help the US make the transition to electric vehicles—is called an extended-range electric vehicle, or EREV, and rather than being a hybrid with a suped-up battery, it’s an EV with a built-in, smaller internal combustion engine that serves as an onboard generator, allowing the car to burn fuel to generate electricity, which then charges the car’s giant battery, giving it more range when it’s needed.

The CEO of Ford thought this lined up well with how the American market works, and could help temper the range-anxiety many Americans feels, worrying that the battery packs in their EVs won’t allow them to take road trips, or might run out of juice when they’re partway through their homeward-bound commute at the end of the day; recharging an EVs battery still takes a fair bit longer than filling up a tank of gas, and there are way more gas stations than EVs plug in points around the country, as of 2024.

So if there were a little engine inside their EV capable of giving it a backup charge when necessary, and if that little generator could be fueled using gas that’s widely and relatively inexpensively available across the US, that could in theory help people transition to driving with electricity—which can be generated cleanly, using renewables—most of the time, while having that backup system in place, for when it’s needed, which might be rarely or never.

In late-2023, car-maker Stellantis unveiled their Ram 1500 Ramcharger, which is an EREV that can drive up to 690 miles on its battery pack, but it also includes a 3.6-liter V6 engine that activates when the main 92kW battery is running low on juice; a little generator that burns fuel to recharge the main battery.

One of the big, market-defining questions related to that new Ram and similar models, though, is whether US government regulators will categorize EREVs as zero-emissions vehicles, because, in theory at least, they will at times not be zero-emissions, even though for many people they would probably run on just their batteries most of the time.

This judgement call could impact sales substantially, though, as such determinations help define what would-be customers pay up front, what sorts of tax benefits, if any, they can expect on their purchases, and what sorts of taxes and other fees they’ll pay along the way, for the life of the vehicle.

Whether this topsy-turvy version of the hybrid—the traditional version having a conventional engine with battery backup, and this new riff on the theme defined by a massive main battery with a conventional engine backup—whether it will do well on the market anywhere outside of China has yet to be seen, and there’s still the question of whether other automakers will be able to spin up their own versions of the concept before the market moves again, trends realigning, and more plug-in electricity infrastructure maybe making vanilla EVs more desirable and useable in more parts of the country.

In the meantime, though, we seem to be seeing—rather than the clean transition from ICE vehicles to EVs that some people had hoped for and expected—something more akin to a Cambrian Explosion, where new pressures and innovations are sparking all kinds of interesting offshoot evolutions, and rather than just two options, one supposedly the future and the other supposedly on its way out, we have a half-dozen core themes around which most new vehicles are being built, some of them interchangeable, some not so much, and that suggests we could see more large recalibrations and broad market shifts, alongside a slew of new combinations and innovations, before the previous paradigm fully gives way to whatever ultimately replaces it.

Show Notes

https://electrek.co/2023/01/26/toyota-ceo-steps-down-amid-electric-vehicle-movement/

https://caredge.com/guides/electric-vehicle-market-share-and-sales

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

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/08/28/u-s-share-of-electric-hybrid-vehicle-sales-increased-in-2nd-quarter-of-2024/

https://electrek.co/2023/04/07/toyotas-new-ceo-adjusts-ev-plans-but-sticks-to-a-hybrid-approach/

https://www.thestreet.com/electric-vehicles/ford-ceo-says-this-type-of-vehicle-can-be-the-bridge-for-electrification

https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/the-plug-in-hybrid-car-starts-to-win-over-buyers-2155e054

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_hybrid

https://fortune.com/2024/06/07/buy-used-tesla-hertz-fire-sale/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_3

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a60232041/hertz-ceo-resigns-after-big-bet-on-evs-fails-to-pay-off/

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a35698039/hertz-potentially-saved-from-bankruptcy/

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a38053117/hertz-buying-100000-teslas/

https://qz.com/tesla-hertz-used-electric-cars-evs-damage-glitches-1851482632

https://archive.ph/364dj

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/26/hertz-pulls-back-on-ev-plans-citing-tesla-price-cuts-repair-costs.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_(autonomous_vehicle)

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This week we talk about Wegovy, Eli Lilly, and HIMS.

We also discuss pig pancreases, beneficial side-effects, and shortages.

Recommended Book: The Death Café Movement by Jack Fong

Transcript

In the 1970s, a pair of researchers looking into possible ways to address duodenal ulcer disease were studying the way we secrete different hormones while eating, and that led to an experiment in which they pumped a hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1, or GLP-1, extracted from pigs, into pig pancreases to see what effect that would have.

As it turned out, this hormone stimulated the secretion of insulin while inhibiting the secretion of glucagon, and that was notable to these researchers because folks with diabetes have too much glucagon in their bodies, which is what causes high blood sugar.

The idea, then, was that by stoking the production of more insulin and limiting the amount of glucagon being produced, you might be able to help folks with type 2 diabetes control their symptoms.

These researchers shopped around the idea of building a treatment based on this hormone a little bit in subsequent years, but didn’t get much interest from the major drug companies. In 1993, though, they were able to do a study that showed that infusing folks who have type 2 diabetes with GLP-1, they could reset their blood glucose levels back to normal within just four hours, which was a pretty big deal—a lot better than most other options at the time.

A drug based on this hormone was approved by the FDA for medical use in the US in 2017 under the name Semaglutide, and by 2021 it had become one of the top 100 most-prescribed drugs in the country—which is saying something, as the US is awash in pharmaceutical options, these days.

Even before that approval, though, there were signs that GLP-1 receptor agonists, which is what Semaglutide and other drugs based on this concept are called, might have also had some other uses.

In some of the clinical trials in which they were trying to gauge how well folks with type 2 diabetes faired while using the drug, for instance, they found that many of their subjects had trouble finishing the meals they were supposed to eat, which was a problem, as having that meal was part of the process, and after they ate it, ideally the whole thing, researchers would measure their blood insulin—so keeping that controlled was kind of important for their results, but the subjects consistently just weren’t as hungry as they typically would have been.

Interestingly, this realization led to a proposal by one of those original researchers to the drug company Novo Nordisk, the company that brought Semaglutide to market, for another drug that would help people control their appetite and consequently limit food intake, perhaps serving as a means of remediating obesity, which at the time, in 1998, was already becoming a big health issue of significant global concern and widespread impact.

The company didn’t end up doing anything with the patent they went in on with that researcher, but they did pursue something along those lines a little bit later, which approached the issue with a similar underlying substance, but via a different route.

And in March of 2021, the company started clinical trials for that drug, which eventually became Wegovy, using basically the same substance as Semaglutide, but in a different volume, and the adult subjects in that trial lost a significant amount of weight.

A few months later, in June of 2021, Wegovy was approved for use in the US to treat adults with obesity, and then in December the following year it was approved for use by obese teens, as well.

Now, Wegovy and its effects were in some ways forecasted in those trials for Semaglutide when test subjects were eating less than usual while on the drug, and something similar happened here, as subjects who were being given Wegovy for weight loss purposes were showing other, unanticipated positive effects, as well.

Among those effects were positive cardiovascular outcomes, which Novo Nordisk then tested for specifically, noting that the drug reduces the risk of major adverse cardiovascular events like heart attacks and stroke by about 20% in obese adults. The FDA approved the drug for this purpose in March of 2024, and another study that looked into Semaglutide’s effect on folks with liver disease resulting from HIV found that it meaningfully reduces the severity of that disease—another unexpected win.

Several earlier studies that showed positive results, and which are now being looked into on larger scales and with human subjects, include those looking into its impact on depression and suicidal ideation, its potential to reduce alcohol consumption, and the possibility that it might also help with gambling addiction and other non-substance-related addictions, alongside substance-based ones like nicotine.

Semaglutide seems to help with eating disorders and may help with infertility issues. It may also help with persistent inflammation, enhance autophagic activity, meaning it could help the body break down the cells that don’t work anymore so new ones can grow, and it might help prevent the buildup of what’s called alpha-synuclein in our brains, which is thought to maybe be a cause of or contributor to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

There’s even early evidence that GLP-1-based drugs might reduce our risk of developing some types of cancer, and maybe the worst, long-term sorts of COVID outcomes, as well.

It’s a very interesting time in this space, in other words, as the more we test these things, and the more people who take them, the more we learn about their effects and potential other use-cases.

And a lot of people are using this class of drug right now: up to 12% of the US adult population has used a GLP-1 drug at some point, as of early 2024, according to research from KFF, and Novo Nordisk has been struggling to make enough of the stuff in its different manifestations, branded for different purposes, as have its competitors who have launched their own copy-cat products, and in some cases products that up the ante with even more impressive clinical results than what the first wave of GLP-1 drugs can boast.

Novo Nordisk has become Europe’s most valuable company on the strength of this drug class, growing by about 230% since 2021 when it first launched Wegovy; it’s now hovering at something like $500 billion in market cap.

But the company has suffered a few recent stock value hits due to the one-two punch of patients not being able to afford the drug, which can cost more than $1000 per month, and a dearth of production capacity, which means they’ve been unable to meet this drug class’s perhaps understandably significant demand.

What I’d like to talk about today is an aspect of the pharmaceutical industry in the US that has generally operated under-the-radar, but which has recently stepped into the limelight because of this rush to get GLP-1 drugs to market and in the hands of those who want them.

—

In the world of pharmaceuticals, especially in the US, but also in a few other countries, “compounding” refers to the practice of creating a drug on-demand for a patient, usually because they need a dosage or specific composition that isn’t manufactured in bulk, or which isn’t readily available in its mass-manufactured form.

So while the majority of drugs in the US and similar wealthy countries are produced on scale, these days, and in a variety of common portions or doses, in some cases you might need an exact dosage that’s somewhere between two doses that are manufactured on scale by the company that makes the drug, and a pharmacist will make that specific you-sized dose for you, maybe by measuring out the right amount of drug powder into a gel-cal pill, maybe by blending two substances into a single liquid that you can take all at once.

These days, the most common compounding tasks revolve around removing non-active ingredients from a drug—something in the gel-capsule, for instance, or a binding agent that allows a drug to be delivered in liquid form—for folks who need that drug, but who are allergic or otherwise sensitive to something in the final, mass-produced form; a color additive, a suspension, a flavoring, something like that.

This is often referred to as “traditional compounding,” and it can only be done by a licensed pharmacist; and while all licensed pharmacists will have at least a rudimentary understanding of how to compound custom medications, much of this kind of work is done in facilities that have compounding-specific equipment on hand; some that can do sterile work, and some that can only be used for non-sterile final products.

Many pharmacies have some basic tools that allow them to do things like mix flavorings into a gross substance to make it more palatable to kids or pets, or to weigh and mix and divvy-up medicinal powders into properly sized capsules, but some pharmacies are a lot more specialized and have far fancier tools that allow them to output more elaborate concoctions for their customers.

Another role these compounding pharmacies can play, though—and in this case I’m referring to that latter type, the ones with specialized tools and machines that allow them to compound on a larger and more specialized scale, if they need to do so—is that the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration which regulates the US drug market, can allow them to make drugs that are experiencing a shortage on the market; when those who have the patent for a drug are unable to scale-up fast enough and meet market demand, in other words, these compounding pharmacies can be given the legal go-ahead by the FDA to make and sell that drug.

To be clear, these pharmacies aren’t allowed to make the exact drug: they can make a drug with the same active ingredients, and sometimes they’ll be quite similar and sometimes they’ll be in a different form (an injectable rather than a powder, a capsule rather than a tablet, etc). These things are also not FDA approved, so while the FDA says it’s okay for them to make and sell them in those limited circumstances, it’s not meant to be equivalent to the real-deal, market-approved product; it’s a temporary, emergency measure meant to help people who would be in a lot of pain or discomfort or even danger if they don’t get a drug they need on a regular basis because of a shortage.

And that brings us to what’s happening now: Novo Nordisk is experiencing a shortage of its GLP-1 inhibitor-based drugs, and the FDA gave these compounding pharmacies legal permission to make GLP-1 inhibitor based drugs, with the same active ingredients, usually in the same dosage, while this shortage persists.

Consequently, there are a bunch of drugs made by compounding pharmacies being marketed all over the place, produced by existing companies like HIMS and 23andMe, alongside brands like Mochi and Eden and HenryMeds—most of them selling doses equivalent to those that are sold by Novo Nordisk for something like $1,000 to $1,300 a month, but those sold by the compounding pharmacies are usually going for closer to $250-300 per month.

It’s been estimated, by the way, that it probably costs only about $5 to produce each of those doses—so even the compounding pharmacies selling at that dramatic cut to the sticker price are likely making money hand over fist on each of these doses, which is probably why ads for these alternative branded versions of the drug are plastered all over the internet, TV, billboards, and magazines, at the moment.

The FDA does keep tabs on these compounded pharmacies, and they can shut down them down if they sell unsafe products, and they can threaten to do so if they don’t toe various lines—which is something the FDA has already done, as a version of the drug that was being delivered attached to salt, which would be dissolved in water before injecting, wasn’t considered to be as safe as the free base version of the drug, so the FDA put out a warning and all the folks who were making the salt version converted over to the free base version, lest they lose their legal ability to sell this product type.

Even with that regulatory pseudo-oversight, there have been reports of people ordering these cheaper versions and getting shoddy products.

One study found that those reports are probably of a kind with reports about side effects experienced by people who take the Novo Nordisk version, as folks taking any version of this drug can experience some pretty uncomfortable side effects, but it’s hard to say right about that right now, as the drug is still relatively new and this aspect of the pharmaceutical industry is, again, approved but not as well-regulated.

So it’s a buy with caution and at your own risk sort of situation, though the cost savings very well might be worth it for many people, regardless of the potential risks.

All of which is interesting, in part because this category of drug-maker is becoming more brazen with its flogging of products, probably at least in part because this particular drug is such a cash-cow and very popular right now, and in part because it will be a little while before the patent-holding drug-makers like Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly can scale-up their manufacturing capacity appropriately. So investments they make in marketing will pay off longer than they might have, had this shortage been a brief one.

But it’s also interesting because of what this implies about the market, as, conceivably at least, a lot of potential customers for this drug will become accustomed to paying just a few hundred dollars per month for it, rather than more than $1,000, and while that lower price is doable for the compound pharmacies, there’s a chance the Novo Nordisk’s of the world won’t consider that reduced profit margin to be worth their time and up-front investment in developing this drug, which could lead to some weird market effects and a potential whipcrack in the other direction, especially if national insurance plans don’t get on board with adding this type of drug to their acceptable list; a higher sticker price paired with a lack of support from insurance companies would mean this drug remains out of reach for the majority of people who might otherwise benefit from it, and that, in turn, could mean a rough couple of years for Novo, until they can recalibrate their expectations and/or their product catalog, accordingly.

That said, Novo Nordisk competitor Eli Lilly recently announced that they will be selling a version of their Wegovy competitor, Zepbound, which will be sold in vials instead of in auto-injector pens, reducing their packaging costs and requiring that customers load the syringes themselves, that will have a shelf price as low as $399 per month.

That’s a staggering undercut of Novo’s offerings. And while this is partially an attempt to address the shortage of this drug, as this lower priced version will also be available in smaller doses, it will almost certainly also help them compete with Novo and the many compounded pharmacy offerings that are still cheaper, but not as dramatically cheaper as this name-brand offering, as before.

There’s a good chance this move by Eli Lilly is just the first of many reworks to a drug type that will permanently shift the average price, allowing the fully FDA-backed versions to compete with the compound versions, remaining a little pricier, but not much, which should help them maintain market share until they can get their new manufacturing capacity online, knocking those compounding competitors out of the game entirely.

Of course, there’s a chance that within months or just a few years, this whole industry could shift once more, as what’s generally considered to be the “holy grail” in this space—a pill-delivered drug that accomplishes the same or better outcomes as the injectables—is in development by pretty much everyone, and some of them already have pills in phase 2 trials.

For the moment, though, the name of the game seems to be discovering new benefits of this drug type, opening it up for more use-cases and, thus, customers, and repackaging it in different ways so that the price can go lower without fully depleting the massive profits those who are producing it—big pharma and compounding pharmacies, alike—are enjoying.

Show Notes

https://qz.com/ozempic-shortage-ema-novo-nordisk-1851638383

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/compounding_pharmacy

https://www.pharmacist.com/Practice/Patient-Care-Services/Compounding/Compounding-FAQs

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2816824

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

https://www.goodrx.com/classes/glp-1-agonists/compounded-semaglutide

https://www.fda.gov/drugs/human-drug-compounding/drug-compounding-and-drug-shortages

https://archive.ph/Czn0t

https://qz.com/viking-therapeutics-weight-loss-drugs-amazing-1851631337

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11227080/

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

https://www.wired.com/story/obesity-drugs-researcher-interview-ozempic-wegovy/

https://www.drugs.com/history/wegovy.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11011817/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9417299/

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/30/health/liraglutide-alzheimers-trial/index.html

https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16529340/

https://www.jci.org/articles/view/72434

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7606641/

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.31.564990v1.full.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5711387/

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/14/6/617

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3700649/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24133407/

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn4128

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/most-patients-stop-using-wegovy-ozempic-weight-loss-within-two-years-analysis-2024-07-10/

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2819949

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/obesity-drugmaker-novo-nordisk-misses-q2-profit-forecast-2024-08-07/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/health/wegovy-covid-deaths.html

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Friends!

It looks like Covid got me (my girlfriend is just getting over her own Covid-y week, and we live together—so despite our best efforts this was maybe unavoidable).

In accordance with my policy of aggressively resting when I get sick, I’ll be taking the week off to sleep, feel generally sore and uncomfortable, and consume alarming quantities of ibuprofen.

Sorry about the gap in programming, but unless something unexpected and worrying happens I’ll be back to my usual publishing schedule beginning next week, on the 10th.

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This week we talk about the Falcon 9, the Saturn V, and NASA’s bureaucracy.

We also discuss Boeing’s mishaps, the Scout system, and the Zenit 2.

Recommended Book: What’s Our Problem? by Tim Urban

Transcript

In 1961, the cost to launch a kilogram of something into low Earth orbit—and a kilogram is about 2.2 pounds, and this figure is adjusted for inflation—was about $118,500, using the Scout, or Solid Controlled Orbital Utility Test system of rockets, which were developed by the US government in collaboration with LTV Aerospace.

This price tag dropped substantially just a handful of years later in 1967 with the launch of the Saturn V, which was a staggeringly large launch vehicle, for the time but also to this day, with a carrying capacity of more than 300,000 pounds, which is more than 136,000 kg, and a height of 363 feet, which is around 111 meters and is about as tall as a 36-story building and 60 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Because of that size, the Saturn V was able to get stuff, and people, into orbit and beyond—this was the vehicle that got humans to the Moon—at a dramatically reduced cost, compared to other options at the time, typically weighing in at something like $5,400 per kg; and again, that’s compared to $118,500 per kg just 6 years earlier, with the Scout platform.

So one of the key approaches to reducing the cost of lifting stuff out of Earth’s gravity well so it could be shuffled around in space, in some rare cases beyond Earth orbit, but usually to somewhere within that orbit, as is the case with satellites and space stations, has been to just lift more stuff all at once. And in this context, using the currently available and time-tested methods for chucking things into space, at least, that means using larger rockets, or big rocket arrays composed of many smaller rockets, which then boost a huge vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well, usually by utilizing several stages which can burn up some volume of fuel before breaking off the spacecraft, which reduces the amount of weight it’s carrying and allows secondary and in some cases tertiary boosters to then kick in and burn their own fuel.

The Soviet Union briefly managed to usurp the Saturn V’s record for being the cheapest rocket platform in the mid-1980s with its Zenit 2 medium-sized rocket, but the Zenit 2 was notoriously fault-ridden and it suffered a large number of errors and explosions, which made it less than ideal for most use-cases.

The Long March 3B, built by the Chinese in the mid-1990s got close to the Saturn V’s cost-efficiency record, managing about $6,200 per kg, but it wasn’t until 2010 that a true usurper to that cost-efficiency crown arrived on the scene in the shape of the Falcon 9, built by US-based private space company SpaceX.

The Falcon 9 was also notable, in part, because it was partially reusable from the beginning: it had a somewhat rocky start, and if the US government hadn’t been there to keep giving SpaceX contracts as it worked through its early glitches, the Falcon 9 may not have survived to become the industry-changing product that it eventually became, but once it got its legs under it and stopped blowing up all the time, the Falcon 9 showed itself capable of carrying payloads of around 15,000 pounds, which is just over 7000 kgs into orbit using a two-stage setup, and remarkably, and this also took a little while to master, but SpaceX did eventually make it common enough to be an everyday thing, the Falcon 9’s booster, which decouples from the rocket after the first stage of the launch, can land, vertically, intact and ready for refurbishment.

That means these components, which are incredibly expensive, could be reused rather than discarded, as had been the case with every other rocket throughout history. And again, while it took SpaceX some time to figure out how to make that work, they’ve reached a point, today, where at least one booster has been used 22 times, which represents an astonishing savings for the company, which it’s then able to pass on to its customers, which in turn allows it to outcompete pretty much everyone else operating in the private space industry, as of the second-half of 2024.

The cost to lift stuff into orbit using a Falcon 9 is consequently something like $2,700 per kg, about half of what the Saturn V could claim for the same.

SpaceX is not the only company using reusable spacecraft, though.

Probably the most well-known reusable spacecraft was NASA’s Space Shuttle, which was built by Rockwell International and flown from the early 1980s until 2011, when the last shuttle was retired.

These craft were just orbiters, not really capable of sending anyone or anything beyond low Earth orbit, and many space industry experts and researchers consider them to be a failure, the consequence of bureaucratic expediency and NASA budget cuts, rather than solid engineering or made-for-purpose utility—but they did come to symbolize the post-Space Race era in many ways, as while the Soviet, and then the successor Russian space program continued to launch rockets in a more conventional fashion, we didn’t really see much innovation in this industry until SpaceX came along and started making their reusable components, dramatically cutting costs and demonstrating that rockets capable of carrying a lot of stuff and people could be made and flown at a relatively low cost, and we thus might be standing at the precipice of a new space race sparked by private companies and cash-strapped government agencies that can, despite that relatively lack of resources, compared to the first space race, at least, can still get quite a bit done because of those plummeting expenses.

What I’d like to talk about today is a reusable spacecraft being made by another well-known aerospace company, but one that has had a really bad decade or so, and which is now suffering the consequences of what seems to have been a generation of bad decisions.

—

Boeing is a storied, sprawling corporation that builds everything from passenger jets to missiles and satellites.

It’s one of the US government’s primary defense contractors, and it makes about half of all the commercial airliners on the planet.

Boeing has also, in recent years, been at the center of a series of scandals, most of them tied to products that don’t work as anticipated, and in some cases which have failed to work in truly alarming, dangerous, and even deadly ways.

I did a bonus episode on Boeing back in January of this year, so I won’t go too deep into the company’s history or wave of recent problems, but the short version is that although Boeing has worked cheek-to-jowl with the US and its allies’ militaries since around WWII, and was already dominating aspects of the burgeoning airline industry several decades before that, it merged with a defense contractor called McDonnell Douglas in the late-1990s, and in the early 2000s it began to reorganize its corporate setup in such a way that financial incentives began to influence its decision-making more than engineering necessities.

In other words, the folks in charge of Boeing made a lot of money for themselves and for many of their shareholders, but those same decisions led to a lot of inefficiencies and a drop in effectiveness and reliability throughout their project portfolio, optimizing for the size of their bank account and market cap, rather than the quality of their products, basically.

Consequently, their renowned jetliners, weapons offerings, and space products began to experience small and irregular, but then more sizable and damaging flaws and disruptions, probably the most public of which was the collection of issues built into their 737 MAX line of jets, two of which crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people and resulting in the grounding of 387 of their aircraft.

A slew of defects were identified across the MAX line by 2020, and an investigation by the US House found that employee concerns, reported to upper-management, went ignored or unaddressed, reinforcing the sense that the corporate higher-ups were disconnected from the engineering component of the company, and that they were fixated almost entirely on profits and their own compensation, rather than the quality of what they were making.

All of which helps explain what’s happening with one of Boeing’s key new offerings, a partially reusable spacecraft platform called the Starliner.

The Starliner went into early development in 2010, when NASA asked companies like Boeing to submit proposals for a Commercial Crew Program that would allow the agency to offload some of its human spaceflight responsibilities to private companies in the coming decades.

One of the contract winners was SpaceX’s Crew Dragon platform, but Boeing also won a contract with its Starliner offering in 2014, which it planned to start testing in 2017, though that plan was delayed, the first unmanned Orbital Flight Test arriving nearly 3 years later, at the tail-end of 2019, and even then, the craft experienced all sorts of technical issues along the way, including weak parachute systems, flammable tape, and valves that kept getting stuck.

It was two more years before the company launched the second test flight, and there were more delays leading up to the Starliner’s first Crew Flight Test, during which it would carry actual humans for the first time.

That human-carrying flight launched on June 5 of 2024, and it carried two astronauts to the International Space Station—though it experienced thruster malfunctions on the way up, as it approached the ISS, and after several months of investigation, the Starliner capsule still attached to the Station all that time, it was determined that it was too risky for those two astronauts to return to Earth in the Starliner.

That brings us to where we are now, a situation in which there are two astronauts aboard the ISS, in low Earth orbit, who were meant to stay for just over a week, but who will now remain there, stranded in space, for a total of around eight months, as NASA decided that it wasn’t worth the risk putting them on the Starliner again until they could figure out what went wrong, so they’ll be bringing Starliner back to earth, remotely, unmanned, and the stranded astronauts will return to Earth on a SpaceX Crew Dragon craft that is scheduled to arrived in September of this year, and which will return to Earth six months in the future; that craft was originally intended to have four astronauts aboard when it docks with the ISS, but two of those astronauts will be bumped so there will be room for the two who are stranded when it returns, next year.

All of which is incredibly embarrassing for Boeing, which again, has already had a truly horrible double-handful of years, reputationally, and which now has stranded astronauts in space because of flaws in its multi-billion-dollar spacecraft, and those astronauts will now need to be rescued, by a proven and reliable craft built by its main in-space competitor, SpaceX.

One of the key criticisms of NASA and the way it’s operated over the past several decades, from the shuttle era onward, essentially, is that it’s really great at creating jobs and honorable-sounding positions for bureaucrats, and for getting government money into parts of the country that otherwise wouldn’t have such money, because that spending can be funneled to manufacturing hubs that otherwise don’t have much to manufacture, but it’s not great at doing space stuff, and hasn’t been for a while; that’s the general sense amongst many in this industry and connected industries, at least.

This general state of affairs allowed SpaceX to become a huge player in the global launch industry—the dominant player, arguably, by many metrics—because it invested a bunch of money to make reusable spacecraft components, and has used that advantage to claim a bunch of customers from less-reliable and more expensive competitors, and then it used that money to fund increasingly efficient and effective products, and side-projects like the satellite-based internet platform, Starlink.

This has been enabled, in part, by government contracts, but while Boeing and its fellow defense contractors, which have long been tight-knit with the US and other governments, have used such money to keep their stock prices high and to invest in lobbyists and similar relationship-reinforcing assets, SpaceX and a few similar companies have been stepping in, doing pretty much everything better, and have thus gobbled up not just the client base of these older entities, but also significantly degraded their reputations by showing how things could be done if they were to invest differently and focus on engineering quality over financial machinations; Boeing arguably should have been the one to develop the Falcon 9 system, but instead an outsider had to step in and make that happen, because of how the incentives in the space launch world work.

One of the big concerns, now, is that Boeing will retreat from its contract with NASA, leaving the agency with fewer options in terms of ISS resupply and astronaut trips, but also in terms of longer-term plans like returning to the Moon and exploring the rest of the solar system.

Lacking industry competition, NASA could become more and more reliant on just one player, or just a few, and that’s arguably what led to the current situation with Boeing—its higher-ups knew they would get billions from the government on a regular basis whatever they did, no matter how flawed their products and delayed their timelines, and that led to a slow accretion of bad habits and perverse incentives.

There’s a chance the same could happen to SpaceX and other such entities, over time, if they’re able to kill off enough of their competition so that they become the de facto, go to option, rather than the best among many choices, which they arguably are for most such purposes at the moment.

And because Boeing seems unlikely to be able to fulfill its contract with NASA, which will necessitate flying six more Starliner missions to the ISS, before the International Space Station is retired in 2030, this raises the question of whether the company will move forward with the reportedly expensive investments that will be necessary to get its Starliner program up to snuff.

It’s already on the hook for about $1.6 billion just to pay for various delays and cost overruns the project has accrued up till this point, and that doesn’t include all the other investments that might need to be made to fulfill that contract, so they could look at the short-term money side of this and say, basically, we’re ceding this aspect of the aerospace world to younger, hungrier companies, and we’ll just keep on collecting the reliable dollars we know we’ll get from the US military each year, no questions asked.

We could then see Boeing leave the race for what looks to be the next space-related government contract bonanza, which will probably be related to NASA’s smaller, more modular space station ambitions; the ISS may get a second-wind and be maintained past 2030, but either way NASA is keen to hire private companies to launch larger craft into low Earth orbit for long-term habitation, supplies and crew for these mini space-stations shuttled back and forth by companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, the latter of which is a direct competitor to SpaceX owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Boeing has been tapped by Blue Origin to help keep their in-orbit assets supplied under that new paradigm, but it could be that they show themselves incapable of safely and reliably doing so, and that could open up more opportunities for other, smaller entities in this space, if they can figure out how to compete with the increasingly dominant SpaceX, but it could, again, also result in a new monopoly or monopsony controlled by just a few companies, which then over time will have to fight the urge to succumb to the save perverse incentives that seem to be weighing on Boeing.

Show Notes

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/20/1239132703/boeing-timeline-737-max-9-controversy-door-plug

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

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

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/after-latest-starliner-setback-will-boeing-ever-deliver-on-its-crew-contract/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/24/science/nasa-boeing-starliner-astronauts.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scout_(rocket_family)

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenit-2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_3B

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-earth-orbit

https://www.cradleofaviation.org/history/history/saturn-v-rocket.html

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9

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This week we talk about Kursk, asymmetric warfare, and Russian politics.

We also discuss HIMARS, supply lines, and Kyiv.

Recommended Book: The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han

Transcript

About two and a half years ago, on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine.

This invasion had been forecasted for a while, as Russian forces had at times surreptitiously, at times more overtly supported separatist factions in the eastern and southeastern portion of Ukraine for about a decade, eventually invading and them annexing the Crimean Peninsula back in March of 2014 using what became known as the "little green men" strategy because the invading soldiers had their flags, patches, and other insignia removed, which gave the Russian government deniability, saying basically some patriotic members of their military might be inclined to help their fellow travelers in parts of Ukraine that are being repressed for their Russian heritage, and who crave freedom from an oppressive central government; how these patriotic soldiers acting on their own behalf, without support from the Russian government, supposedly, were able to bring so much heavy artillery and tanks with them was never formally addressed.

So Russia had been chipping away at Ukraine for a long while leading up to this more conventional attack in 2022, grabbing an important port when they took Crimea and leaving the Ukrainian government, which had been tilting toward Europe and away from Russia's sphere of influence—which is part of what triggered that pseudo-invasion of Crimea—and all of this left Ukraine fighting those separatist groups on their eastern flank pretty much continuously for the decade leading up to that bigger invasion a few years ago.

When that invasion was launched, Russia was expected by pretty much everyone to basically waltz right into Kyiv with little opposition, as it was this huge, powerful country with nukes and a massive conventional military apparatus, so it stood to reason it should easily defeat its weaker, former supplicant neighbor.

But that's not how things played out.

Ukraine managed to hold off an initial, ill-planned but large invasion force, and for the past two and a half years they've continued to hold those lines, despite huge drafts of soldiers and new investments in wartime materials, including drones and missiles that have been near-continuously lobbed at Ukrainian cities and towns, by the Russian government.

For the past year or so, following some back-and-forth pushes by Russian and Ukrainian forces in mostly the eastern part of Ukraine, at least following that initial unsuccessful incursion toward the capitol, Ukraine's efforts to reclaim its captured territory have been fraught.

It launched a successful counterattack a little while back, retaking some earlier captured territory, but after plowing through Russian forces and arriving in the eastern portion of the country, it's next-stage offensives basically collapsed as soon as they were launched.

The Ukrainian government is still making fresh attempts in this regard, as any stagnation and seeming lack of progress could serve as justification by its allies to stop sending money and weapons to bolster their war effort, but these have been relatively small and haven't accomplished much—not for the last year, at least.

The same was generally true for Russia up until recently, it's troops on the ground exhausted and undersupplied, their pushes deeper into Ukrainian met with stern-enough resistance that they've had to pull back, or they've persisted in shouldering their way through a meat-grinder defense, capturing little tiny bits of territory, but with huge costs in terms of lives and military hardware.

This past year they've seen some decent gains, though, as freshly drafted and trained troops have subbed-in for exhausted and wounded ones, and as Ukraine's forces have suffered the consequences of delayed support from the US in particular, and as their own forces have been unable to tap-out, rest, and recover, because of the difference in the size of the two countries' populations, but also because of the nature of the conflict, Ukraine being invaded, while Russia has remained a safe-haven for the most part.

As of the day I'm recording this in late-August 2024, Russia's military controls about 20% of Ukraine's total territory—and that includes Crimea and other chunks that were taken in 2014—around 8.2 million of Ukraine's 41 million population before the invasion had already fled the country by mid-2023, some having returned in the year or so since, but millions of people are still scattered throughout Europe and the rest of the world, making this the continent's largest refugee crisis since WWII.

About 8 million Ukrainians are now considered to be internally displaced, which means they're homeless within their own country, often because their cities or towns have been captured or destroyed.

Estimates on casualties and fatalities in this conflict vary widely, as official numbers are often incomplete and filtered for public consumption and propaganda purposes, but some fairly strict and consequently probably low estimates from outside groups suggest a few hundred thousand people may have died in this conflict, so far, with hundreds of thousands more having been wounded, in some cases grievously, with some more biased figures—like those provided by Ukraine's Ministry of Defense—suggesting that well over half a million people may have been wounded on Russia's side, alone, since the 2022 invasion began.

Again, this war has been uneven but surprising from the get go, Russia taking a lot of territory, but Ukraine holding its own and performing well beyond most expectations.

But over the last year, since battle lines in the east were more firmly drawn and both sides had the opportunity to carve out defenses, lay mines, things like that, this has been a story of slow attritional conflict, which has tended to mean an advantage for Russia: they've ever-so-slowly been claimed more of Ukraine—grabbing just over 400 square miles of territory over the course of the past twelve months, including a few dozens cities and towns along those well-entrenched emplacements.

What I'd like to talk about today is a recent move by Ukraine that has seemingly surprised just about everyone, and which, depending on who you ask, is the desperate act of a flailing military, or an inspired bit of asymmetrical warfare that could help turn the tides in their favor.

—

Part of why many well-informed analysts assumed Russia's invasion of Ukraine would be a quick thing, several days-long, maybe a week or two at most, is that Russia's military is big and backed by the largest arsenal of nukes in the world. Russia's economy is also decently large, even if it is significantly dependent on fossil fuel and mineral wealth.

So Russia's military should be capable of stomping in to a smaller country's territory, especially a neighboring country, and then killing and threatening everyone into submission, and menacing them with nukes if they do anything threatening in return.

That's the ostensible promise of a nuclear arsenal: you have the whammy on everyone else if they do anything that really scares you or threatens you, no matter what you do to them, first.

That expectation didn't pan out, but the threat of nukes has hovered over this conflict from day one, and Russia's government has happily reinforced the sense that if Ukraine does anything to threaten them in return, even as they invade and gobble up Ukraine's territory, killing and kidnapping their people, Russia might use nukes, because why wouldn't they?

And they've often signaled this by saying, basically, that if the Fatherland is threatened, if anyone menaces Russia in return, that could serve as a spark that turns this invasion into a nuclear conflict.

This threat has ensured Russia's invasion of Ukraine, thus far, has been a fairly one-sided undertaking in which Russia can do basically anything they want, stomping all around Ukraine and launching endless drones and missiles at their densely populated cities, but Ukraine is not allowed to do anything like that to Russia in return.

And this nuclear threat has been taken seriously enough by Ukraine's allies that they've said, from the get-go, we'll give you money and weapons, but you have to promise not to use them on targets within Russia, because we don't want to kick off a nuclear war, or even a broader conflict between nuclear-armed nations, if Russia were to consider attacks by Ukrainians wielding American weapons against Russian civilian targets to be an attack by the US—which was always a theoretical possibility that, again, Russia was happy to reinforce.

As a result, some of the weapons provided to Ukraine by its allies were artificially limited, including the 20 HIMARS long-range rocket systems the US supplied back in late-2022, which were altered before being sent so they couldn't be used against targets within Russia territory.

The US and other allies have also been incredibly hesitant to provide Ukraine weapons with greater range, like ATMS, Army Tactical Missile System rockets, that can strike targets up to 186 miles away, and fighter jets that could be used to take out targets deep within Russian territory, if used correctly.

From the beginning, though, Ukrainian forces figured out ways to hit targets within Russia, generally using asymmetrical methods, like covert infiltrations and loose alliances with anti-government entities operating within Russia, rather than launching aerial or artillery strikes from within their own borders.

In 2022, they struck dozens of air bases, fuel depots, and similar targets across the border, though they almost always denied involvement, officially, due to fears that overtly launching such attacks could lead to significant reprisals, and could cause their allies to step back from supporting Ukraine over fears of an expanding conflict.

Several bits of manufacturing and shipping infrastructure in Russia were damaged or destroyed by Ukrainian missiles and drones in 2023, which were again, often denied, though a bit more overt than their earlier efforts, and military and civilian buildings in Russian towns along their shared borders were damaged by drones and saboteurs from the beginning of the invasion.

Artillery shelling has also incidentally or accidentally hit civilian targets across these borders, though almost all of these attacks, up until 2024, caused little damage and few deaths and injuries; they were more symbolically than practically important.

Beginning in early 2024, though, mostly drone attacks on Russia energy infrastructure seemed to impact Russia's economy, several important oil and gas terminals damaged to the point that they required a lot of time and investment to get them operational again, not to mention the further investment that would be required to protect these small, numerous, and important weak-points that Ukraine had shown a willingness to attack.

There were also a few drone attacks on major cities, like St. Petersburg, but these seemed to be mostly symbolic strikes, and were generally not claimed by Ukraine—they could have been false flag attacks, or launched by Ukraine's anti-Russian-government allies operating within Russia's borders, or attacks by ISIS or similar terrorist organizations—but whoever launched them, they seem to have caused more fear and consternation than actual, physical damage.

Causing fear, though, is still important in this conflict, because, as far as many Russian civilians have understood for years now, the war has been going fine, or fine enough, and they haven't felt they've had much to worry about, because although a lot of their people have been drafted and sent to the frontlines, the conflict itself hasn't really impacted them beyond some brands having disappeared from shelves due to international sanctions, and a general sense that the government has clamped down on several freedoms they previously enjoyed, using the invasion—which has been pitched internally as an effort to liberate Ukrainians from a tyrannical, Nazi government—as justification.

That's part of what makes a recent move by Ukraine's military so interesting.

On August 6, 2024, the Ukrainian military launched an attack across their border with Russia into the Kursk oblast, which is an administrative district of about a million people located in western Russia.

This assault included at least 1,000 troops, alongside armored personnel carriers and tanks, and they plowed more than 6 miles into Russian territory within two days, apparently wiping out local defensive positions without too much trouble.

They reportedly drove right past many defensive emplacements and came at the relatively few defenders from unexpected angles, behind rather than in front of them, and that allowed them to rapidly capture territory and prisoners.

As a result of this blitz into Kursk, more than 100,000 Russian citizens, closer to 200,000 by some estimates, have had to flee their homes, a state of emergency has been triggered in this and surrounding regions, and the Ukrainian military has captured just under 400 square miles, or around 1,000 square km of Russian territory—which is about what Russian forces have managed to capture of Ukraine over the whole of the past year. Within that held territory, they also hold 82 towns and villages, and they've captured an estimated 2,000 or so prisoners.

This rapid assault into Russian territory was unexpected, catching even Ukraine's allies by surprise, reportedly, and it struck an area that was apparently under-defended, which is part of why they were able to break through so easily, hundreds of Russian soldiers surrendering almost immediately, none of them having expected anything like this so far from what has become the front lines of the conflict all the way on the other side of the country.

In the weeks since this assault was launched, Ukrainian forces have taken out a couple of important bridges, which serves the double-purpose of making a counterattack by Russian forces more difficult, while also hobbling some of their supply lines that are fueling the Russian invasion of Ukraine further south and east.

The Ukrainian force that invaded Russia is relatively small, but because of the nature of this sort of thing, it's estimated that Russia will need something like 3 to 5-times as many soldiers as Ukraine has if they want to successfully dislodge them, which will likely mean having to pull troops and military hardware from the frontlines, or other spots along their border, which would leave those other spots less defended, in order to muster that kind of counterattack.

This spot is also reportedly somewhat protected from existing Russian artillery installations, and any attacks they launch against the occupying Ukrainian forces will be attacks against their own cities and towns—something that is arguably inevitable when you're invaded and trying to boot the invaders, but also not something that's super politically popular, because, again, as many as a few hundred thousand people have fled their homes, and if their own government bombs their homes and other infrastructure into smithereens in order to recapture it, that probably won't make all those people too happy, in addition to making them an additional burden in a way, suddenly needing more government support just to keep them fed, housed, and so on.

This is also tricky for Russia because, as I just mentioned, pulling troops from elsewhere will require weakening either some other border area, or their front lines in eastern Ukraine, meaning they either open themselves up to another incursion, or they slow the progress they're making with their own invasion, and that component of the conflict is currently going pretty well for them, so it's a tough sell, the idea of slowing that momentum in order to take back territory they didn't think was under any real threat, up till just now.

Of course, this assault also makes clear that other parts of Russia's extensive shared border with Ukraine might be under threat if they leave any gaps or weak spots, which will likely mean having to shuffle things around a bit, either way. Attacking and capturing this part of Kursk, then, would seem to be a means of forcing Russia into a two-front conflict, while also demonstrating parts of their territory they thought were well-fortified-enough possibly aren't, which could further distract their leaders and spread their forces out over a wider area.

The political aspect of this might prove to be important, too, as while Russia's economy has been doing pretty well, considering all the sanctions, because the government has been flooding the economy with war-time investment and dropping all kinds of regulations to keep businesses afloat and flourishing, authoritarian regimes are often bulwarked by certainty and the projection of strength, and anything that seems to weaken that supposed inevitability and invulnerability can lead to cracks in the facade that ultimately lead to the people up top no longer being up top.

That doesn't seem to be a major threat here at the moment, but if we're looking at the long-term, this could be one more dent in what's meant to be an impervious, pristine visage of power, which could over time lead to something more substantial, in terms of who's in charge in Russia.

All that said, most analysts seem to think this invasion of Kursk won't be terribly maintainable because it stretches Ukraine's supply lines in such a way that those who did the invading can be relatively easily cut off from the rest of their military, and because it forces Ukraine into a two-front conflict, as well, and while Russia can muddle through something like that, even if it would prefer not to, Ukraine will struggle to do the same because of the nature of their population and infrastructure at the moment.

Ukrainian forces are also already struggling on their eastern front, losing territory in small bits, but continuously, to Russian forces, and the grinding nature of the invasion has really taken a toll on those who have been fighting without a break for in some cases years at this point.

This successful and surprising move does seem to have served as a morale boost for Ukrainian troops, though, as this is the first time a rival military has taken and held Russian territory since WWII, marking a huge symbolic victory, and one that may keep Ukraine's allies optimistic as well, which is important, as many politicians in those allied countries have shown themselves to be more than willing to stop the ready flow of money and weapons into Ukraine any time it seems like the conflict might not be going their way, even momentarily.

Some reports have suggested that this assault might be part of a larger effort by Ukraine's leadership to prepare itself for what seems to be, to some at least, inevitable near-future peace talks, as holding this chunk of Russian land and all these prisoners would give Ukraine more leverage to get some of their land and prisoners back in such negotiations.

Others have suggested that the key purpose might have been to humiliate Russian President Putin, while also making everyday Russians feel the war the way everyday Ukrainians have, as that can help tip public opinion enough to, eventually, sway governmental action, even within authoritarian states like Russia.

If that's the case, Ukraine may well achieve the opposite, as while Putin has seemingly been slow to respond, focusing his public statements on the Russian military's continuing success in eastern Ukraine, he's reportedly, behind the scenes, plotting revenge, and telling his people to step back from back-room negotiations that have been focused on agreements related to not targeting energy infrastructure on either side; this is pretty speculative and there are a lot of anonymous sources on this narrative, so take it with a grain of salt, but there's a chance that Putin is playing down how bad this is for him and his forces in public, but is planning some kind of significant and devastating counterattack for sometime in the near-future, to deter future attacks on Russian soil.

Russian officials have described this attack as an escalation, which is exactly the language you would use if you were preparing your own escalation, so we maybe have that to watch out for in the coming weeks.

Simultaneous to all this, though, Russia is on the brink of capturing all of Donesk in eastern Ukraine, which it illegally annexed a little while back, but which Ukraine has partially held all this time—so we may see some kind of change to the conflict once that capture is completed, as it could prove to be a suitable moment, strategically, for Russia to walk back to the peace talks table, happy to take the land it says it owns, before stepping back from active conflict and arming itself for some later, potentially less-direct effort to claim the rest; another little green men attack, perhaps.

There's a chance that this attack will force Putin to make politically expedient, but militarily non-ideal decisions over the next few months, though.

It would arguably be smartest for the Russian military to keep at it in the east, claim what they need to claim and reinforce their holdings, there, before then going and addressing the Ukrainians in Kursk, but he may feel pressured to send forces to Kursk sooner rather than later, because of embarrassment if nothing else, but also possibly pressure from other Russian leaders, which would spread out his forces and the military's attention, while also slowing their advances in the east, which could in turn give Ukraine a chance to shore up some of their positions, and possibly even launch more small attacks into Russian territory, further complexifying the state of play and the number of emergencies the Russian military needs to address simultaneously.

Each of these attacks could be small and strategic, causing outsized damage and requiring an outsized response force: a bit like how irregular militaries, like Hamas and Hezbollah, use cheap rockets that they know will almost always be knocked out of the sky with countermeasures, but those rockets cost maybe ten thousands dollars, while the countermeasures cost ten or twenty times that.

Over time, you can deplete the enemy's reserves of money, hardware, and people by forcing them to commit a lot more than you do to a given area or attack; in this way, the outgunned and out-populated Ukrainian military could tie-up a lot of Russia's forces by making them worry about maintaining the bare-bones status quo back home.

There's also a chance, though, that Russia will play the long game, ignore opinion polls and protests by people who are forced to flee their homes, and wait to address these asymmetric incursions until later, at which point they'd be in a much stronger position within Ukraine, and that leaves them in a good spot to keep pushing forward, militarily, or to have peace talks that heavily favor them, even more than such talks would, today.

Show Notes

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3762042-us-secretly-modified-himars-for-ukraine-to-prevent-kyiv-from-shooting-long-range-missiles-into-russia/

https://www.wsj.com/world/behind-ukraines-russia-invasion-secrecy-speed-and-electronic-jamming-188fcc22

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/how-russia-looked-wrong-way-ukraine-invaded-2024-08-17/

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/belarus-lukashenko-says-nearly-third-army-sent-ukraine-border-belta-reports-2024-08-18/

https://www.news24.com/news24/world/news/most-likely-used-north-korean-ballistic-missiles-russia-strikes-with-for-the-third-time-ukraine-20240818

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/now-even-north-korea-weighed-103312164.html

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-kursk-incursion-bridge-invasion-43d6579c82c24ffc5cfabd99d07c66db

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/world/europe/ukraine-russia-bridge.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/world/europe/ukraines-incursion-russian-conscripts.html

https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraines-raid-kursk-russia-shift-tactical-narrative/

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4829506-how-ukraines-surprise-offensive-into-russia-has-changed-the-war/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_2024_Kursk_Oblast_incursion

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/world/europe/ukraine-russia-zelensky-putin-ceasefire.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/safety-at-ukraines-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-deteriorating-iaea-warns

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/18/vladimir-putin-kursk-crisis-reponse/

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-17/ukraine-military-incursion-into-russia-maps-satellite-images/104233912

https://www.barrons.com/news/russia-says-captured-another-village-near-ukraine-s-pokrovsk-6dc20994

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/18/world/europe/kursk-russia-ukraine-incursion.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/16/world/europe/russia-ukraine-pokrovsk-kursk.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_2024_Kursk_Oblast_incursion

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0ngzg9754o

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/10/ukraine-braces-for-reprisals-as-russia-to-send-more-troops-to-kursk

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

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

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-16-2024

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-incursion-kursk-afa42b9613323901bef07800ac2cae9e

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

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This week we talk about Taylor Swift, knife attacks, and immigration politics.

We also discuss immigration rationales, riffraff, and terrorist plots.

Recommended Book: AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan

Transcript

American musician, singer, and songwriter Taylor Swift, at age 34, recently became the world's first music industry billionaire who's primary source of income is their music—as opposed to side-businesses, work, and royalties in adjacent or completely disconnected industries.

A lot of that wealth has stemmed from her incredibly successful, and ongoing—as of the day I'm recording this at least—Eras tour, which began in March of 2023 and which is her sixth tour, and by far the biggest in scope, scale, and success.

The Eras Tour, by itself, has surpassed a billion dollars in revenue—the first tour to ever hit that milestone—and it's had all sorts of interesting direct ramifications and repercussions, like bolstering Swift's music sales and streams, but also indirect ones, like creating a sort of economic weather system wherever these tour stops are planned: it's been estimated, for instance, that the Eras Tour contributed something like $4.3 billion to the GDP of the United States, and the WSJ dubbed these economic impacts "Taylornomics," as the combination of travel, food, entertainment, and other spending surrounding her tour dates, folks coming from all the around the world to visit the relevant cities, attend the concert, and spend on those sorts of things while in town, has all had a meaningful impact legible in even the huge-scale numbers of national income figures.

Swift, then, has been having quite the moment, following the several decades of work in this industry leading up to this tour.

And the swirl of activity—economic and cultural, especially—around her Eras Tour stops have made these events central to the collective consciousness, grabbing lots of airtime and watercooler talk wherever she shows up, because of how much of an event each of these stops are; and notably, they have been very well reviewed, in terms of the performance, the sets, the planning, everything—so it would seem that the attention being focused on these shows isn't superficial and reflexive, it's the result of having put together something pretty special for people who are willing to spend to attend that kind of event.

It maybe shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that there may be people out there looking to garner attention for themselves and their causes who see these events as an opportunity to do exactly that.

Three sold-out shows in Vienna, Austria were cancelled in early August due to a plot by what seems to have been several teenagers looking to kill as many people as possible outside the tour's local concert venue.

An investigation into this plot is ongoing, so there's still a fair bit we don't know, but what's been divulged so far is that three people have been connected to the plot and detained, the main suspect is a 19-year-old who planned to use knives and/or explosives to kill as many of the 30,000 or so onlookers who gather outside the show venues each night as possible—and another 65,000 people would have been inside the venue, so that's a lot of people, and a lot of potential for stampede-related injuries and deaths, alongside those that could be caused with knives and bombs—and that he, alongside two other suspects, a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, was inspired by the Islamic State group and al-Qaida—the 18-year-old, who is an Iraqi citizen, apparently having pledged himself to the Islamic State.

Propaganda materials from both terrorist organizations were found at the 17-year-old's home, alongside bomb-making materials, and he was hired just a few days before being caught by a company that provides some type of service to the concert venue; specifics about what said company provides haven't been officially divulged yet, but the theory is that this job was meant to give him and his accomplices some kind of access, allowing them to do what they intended to do more effectively.

There were a lot of disappointed Swift fans in Vienna who in some cases spent thousands of dollars just getting and staying there for the concert, only to be told that it was cancelled; most of the response from those affected in this way seems to be relatively upbeat, though, considering the circumstances, pretty much everyone breathing a sigh of relief that this plot wasn't pulled off successfully, which could have resulted in something like what happened at Manchester Arena in 2017, when an Ariana Grande concert was attacked by an Islamic extremist with a bomb who killed 22 people and injured more than 1,000.

Swift's representatives have said that her next concert, scheduled for between August 15 and the 20th, are still on the books and ready to go, at London's Wembley Stadium, which will close-out the European leg of this record-setting tour.

London's mayor has said that local authorities are prepared for whatever might happen, having learned a lot from that aforementioned Ariana Grande concert in 2017.

What I'd like to talk about today is a bout of violent rioting that broke out in the UK recently, which is loosely connected to Swift and her music, though only adjacently, and is primarily focused on the roiling topic of immigration and its British discontents.

—

At the tail-end of July, 2024, there was a knife attack in Southport, a town in northwestern England, in which three young girls were killed and ten other people, eight of whom were also children, were injured—some very badly injured.

This attack targeted a Taylor Swift-themed yoga and dance workshop that catered to children ages 6 to 11, twenty-five of whom were in attendance—hence that large number of young victims. And the adults who tried to stop the attacker were all themselves injured, in some cases critically, and the assailant was only ultimately halted when a pair of police officers managed to subdue him.

The person behind this attack, and those murders, is a 17-year-old British citizen who was arrested at the scene, and whose identity was initially concealed from the public because of how privacy laws work in the UK, related to minors; they tend not to divulge identifying details when crimes are committed by people who are legally children, though in this case they ultimately decided to do so, for reasons I'll get into in a moment.

Thus far, there isn't a clear motive behind this attack—the attacker has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and was apparently deep in the midst of some kind of self-imposed isolation leading up to his apparent decision to take a taxi to this workshop and kill a bunch of children.

He's been charged with possession of a bladed article, ten counts of attempted murder, and three counts of murder, and his trial date is currently set for the end of January in 2025.

This attack is currently not being treated as a terrorist incident, though again, no clear motive has been established, and there's a lot that's not known, and likely quite a bit that hasn't been publicly divulged yet.

This knife attack, unto itself, led to a lot of headlines and attention because of how just brutal and horrible it was.

But in the aftermath of the attack, possibly because the attacker wasn't named, again, because he was a minor, rumors and then outright misinformation began to spread around less-than-legitimate news entities in the UK, and across social media platforms and messaging apps like Telegram, many of them suggesting or directly alleging that the attacker was someone he was not—a false name was given to him by some of those spreading these rumors—and even in cases when a name wasn't misattributed or fabricated, he was alleged to be an immigrant seeking asylum—which is also incorrect; his parents are from Rwanda, but he was born in Cardiff, and is thus a British citizen.

Within days these rumors and this mis- and dis-information, this accidental and purposeful spreading of mistruths, began to reach a fever-pitch, the zone flooded with patently untrue claims and narratives, which is why the police decided to release the attacker's name publicly on August 1; it was going to happen within a week or so, anyway, because he was turning 18 on the 7th, so the idea was to get ahead of that impending forced divulgence, and to try to temper some of that false information spread within facets of British society in the meantime.

Most of the false stories, though, hung on, even after officials made this information public, and to understand why, it's important to understand what a political force anti-immigration sentiment has become in Britain over the past few decades.

The British aren't alone in this, of course: especially in wealthier countries, mostly but not exclusively conservative politicians and parties have been making hay with claims about folks from other countries coming into their territory, taking their jobs, gobbling up their social services, and changing their culture into something those who came before feel they no longer recognize.

Part of this is just the consequence of societies changing being reframed into something devilish and wrong, part of it is the reframing of stagnating economic conditions as something that's being done to their societies by outside forces, not by uncontrollable macro variables like pandemics, and controllable variables that are being mismanaged by those in power.

Part of it, though, is related to real-deal demographic shifts, as folks flee from repression, violence, economic deterioration, and dangerous climactic happenings in less-wealthy parts of the world to those that are currently not suffering from these things, or not to the same degree.

Thus, we see waves of people show up to the US's southern border, all hoping to get into the country, legally or otherwise, and the same is true of European nations with Mediterranean coasts, and, as is the case here, people arriving legally, by ship and plane and train into England, but also illegally, often in makeshift boats crossing the channel, the people who arrive in this way arrested and filtered into a system that often moves sluggishly and puts these new arrivals up in hotels or other housings for the duration of their processing at government expense.

From the perspective of someone in a smaller British town, then, where the economic conditions are not much better than those in a similarly sized town in a much poorer country—since London is the only city in Britain doing really well in that regard, right now—this looks like a bunch of people from elsewhere, who don't belong, taking resources that should go to them, should be spend on their housing and healthcare, should be making jobs for them, and the ones that are allowed to stay continue to take those resources, leaving a lot less to go around, again, in circumstances in which it already feels like there's not anywhere near enough—no chance for growth, few opportunities, and diminishing value in the social services they've been promised.

These are potent political topics, then, because in some cases these are real-deal issues already, and in others it can be useful and effective to stoke fears that this could happen in the future, if we allow these foreigners to keep flooding across our borders, legally or illegally.

In the UK, the Conservatives, the Tories, have used this issue as a very effective lever, and at the height of fervor about this topic, they seemingly accidentally led the country to a successful Brexit referendum in 2016, leading to the UK leaving the European Union, in large part because this would allow them to set their own immigration policies separate from those of the EU, which are much more open in terms of movement between member nations.

All of which, I think, helps explain what happened next, following that knife attack, and the torrent of false information that flooded the zone following the attack, which included all sorts of claims that the attacker was an illegal immigrant, that he was a Muslim, and that if nothing else, he was a black teenager who had brutally murdered several young, British girls.

On July 30, a crowd in Southport gathered outside a local mosque and started causing trouble and making threats. The police showed up to keep the peace, and the protestors attacked them, set fire to a police van, and damaged the mosque—in the process injuring more than 50 police officers and three police dogs.

This initial group of protestors was formed around a nucleus of people belonging to the English Defense League, which is a far-right, anti-Muslim organization, and members of Patriotic Alternative, which is a neo-Nazi group.

Similar protests that became riots popped up in cities across the country in subsequent days, and amidst all the resulting tumult, a police station was set on fire in Sunderland, and more mosques, alongside businesses and homes owned by people who were purported to be, often incorrectly, immigrants, were also damaged or destroyed.

Hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked, and something like 750 of these anti-immigration rioters have been arrested, thus far.

The nature of these riots changed on August 7, when a protest, populated by the same sorts of people as were seen at the other ones, mostly anti-immigrant, neo-Nazi, and far-right folks, was met by a group of anti-racist counter-protestors that dramatically outnumbered them. The police helped support the peaceful anti-racist protestors, and since that day, most of these would-be riots have been quelled by oversized groups of counter-protestors augmented by a police presence.

Before that tactic arose, though, several cities saw a handful of nights in a row of rioting by those far-right groups, many of them pillaging and burning shops, and attacking strangers and the police, and the government has gone out of its way to really throw the book at folks they've arrested, handing down significant punishments to some of the instigators of these riots, in particular, while also publishing their names and faces, in an attempt to embarrass and make examples of them.

As of the second week of August, we're still seeing periodic attacks on mosques and attempted protests and riots by far-right activists pop up here and there, though they're happening a lot less frequently than in previous weeks, and peaceful anti-fascist, anti-racist protests have become a lot more common, in response to attempted riots, but also unto themselves.

There are several ways of looking at what has happened here, in response to that attack, and in response to the riots that followed.

One narrative of all this is that far-right politicians and ideologues int the country have attempted to convert a truly horrible event into something it wasn't for the purpose of regaining some of the power they lost with the last round of parliamentary elections.

It's been alleged by the new British Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, that these riots were instigated by far-right troublemakers like Nigel Farage, who was one of the key proponents of Brexit, and who has recently reemerged in British politics as the leader of a vehemently anti-immigrant, further-right than the Conservatives party in the country.

Farage and similar anti-immigrant leaders flooded the informational zone with disinformation and nudge-nudge-wink-wink innuendo that implied this was one of the consequences of allowing immigrants into the UK, and that, according to Starmer and other government leaders, led to some of this violence and destruction—they've even hinted that it might be prudent to clamp down on those sorts of posts and false claims, because of the real-world consequences that can follow; though that hint has been met with skepticism and worry from free-speech advocates.

It's also been alleged that foreign agencies, like those in Russia, have been helping amplify these false claims, as part of their larger effort to sow discord and to augment the potency of reactionary groups in countries they want to influence, and folks who have aligned themselves with global conservative movements, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have been accused of doing the same, Musk himself sharing a lot of misinformation related to this attack and the riots that followed on the social network he bought, formerly Twitter, now X, clashing with the new Labour government on the network while saying that he believes a civil war is inevitable in the UK.

So we could look at all this through the political-leverage lens, as there's a lot of power to be gained by successfully attaching reins to this sort of movement, and amplifying trouble for those in power, if those in power are your political rivals.

We might also look at this through the lens of actual on-the-ground issues, though.

There was a piece in the Financial Times, recently, in which it was posited that how we perceive these riots, and the people sparking and perpetuating them, will tend to depend on whether we subscribe to the "rational actor" or "riffraff" models of riot interpretation.

The rational actor model says people who riot are doing what they do because of real-deal grievances that they can't seem to get addressed in any other way, while the riffraff model says rioters are basically low-lifes who have nothing better to do, and/or who like to mindlessly give in to the animalistic urge to belittle, attack, and maybe even kill those who seem different from them and theirs, and all they're looking for is an excuse to do so.

Most social scientists, today, support the rational actor model, suggesting that even people who lean toward violence will keep those behaviors tamped-down most of the time, and only allow them out at moments in which they feel like there's no other way to get themselves and their grievances heard and addressed; and that's true whether we're talking about people of color rioting because they feel like they're being unfairly and violently targeted by police, or when it's mostly white, British Christians who feel like they're being elbowed out of society by Muslim immigrants and various other people of color.

That folks like Farage might step in and try to ride this kind of wave, then, might ultimately be less important than identifying a pressure-valve that'll allow these sorts of grievances to be worked out and addressed in socially positive, legal ways.

Government healthcare infrastructure in many of these areas is stretched to the breaking point, social safety nets are unraveling, and years of Conservative-instigated austerity measures have left these and other social baselines way below where they were in recent memory—and the messaging from the Conservative Party has been that immigrants are to blame, not their good and logical and responsible monetary policies.

Starmer, as the head of the new Labour government, which won the last election in a landslide, booting the Conservatives from their perch for the first time in a long time, has the opportunity to address these issues, then, but it's likely he'll have to do so in such a way that the actual problems are addressed—providing better funding for these services, helping stimulate more economic activity so there are enough, and high-quality enough jobs for everyone, and ensuring there's enough immigration so that systems that rely on folks coming in from elsewhere (which is especially true of the nation's healthcare system and its construction industries) can function properly—while also addressing some of the seeming issues, like cracking down on illegal immigration; which probably isn't the core problem it's been promoted as by the Conservatives and those to their political right, but is an issue, and is something Starmer has said he will crack down on.

It currently seems like he might aim to grease the wheels of the immigration system, so that folks applying for citizenship are processed faster, which will mean fewer resources expended putting them up in the country while they're waiting to see if they can stay—which would possibly help free up government resources, while also representing a kinder model for those who are otherwise left in limbo for long periods of time.

Whether this can be framed and communicated correctly by the Labour government so that it appeals to those who are worried about immigration is an open question, though, as it's possible that anything other than a hardcore lockdown of the borders and a denial of new immigration requests—which would cause even more chaos in the country's healthcare and other immigration-related systems—might seem like non-solutions, even if they technically solve some of the underlying problems the rioters have been complaining about.

Show Notes

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

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/30/uk/taylor-swift-southport-stabbing-reaction-gbr-intl/index.html

https://www.thetimes.com/article/e87b09fb-b8fe-408d-a961-c89e6ae0f098?shareToken=620a021a38d86ed3af11587c36a52afd

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y38gjp4ygo

https://apnews.com/article/britain-unrest-riot-southport-police-response-ec348340c7d223f0117ae8c62638dd6f

https://newrepublic.com/article/184691/day-riots-stopped-uk

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-examines-foreign-states-role-sowing-discord-leading-riots-2024-08-05/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp35w0kj2y4o

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/8/why-is-elon-musk-clashing-with-the-uk-government-over-far-right-riots

https://archive.ph/vKdeu

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyg7dzr8wko

https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/08/is-cocaine-driving-the-british-riots

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/august/this-time-it-s-worse

https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/amid-chaos-far-right-protests-9459421

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/29/uk/northern-england-stabbing-intl/index.html

https://apnews.com/article/uk-southport-children-stabbed-dance-class-8a9c7d7ed01441ce96332cd3d1250e43

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

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

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

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/southport-far-right-disinformation-russia-b2589041.html

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/30/misinformation-southport-attack-suspect-social-media-conspiracy-theories

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

https://www.ft.com/content/a0a4fb08-40cc-4627-a58f-b3a8d2d0e009?accessToken=zwAGH1UwRNrgkdOgpPsIQMxGJ9Olj7Oo0tDgCQ.MEYCIQChxhfA2SBamOb_Y_c0vQwPJmzXo0fHfucpW2v_dBGr2gIhANMcXEtBzZqY7R0Z9RkAZMkEoGMSy5P49MRnprFYWvAH&sharetype=gift&token=75895b79-b6c8-4e1f-a3ab-dc4d87161131

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/taylor-swift-concert-terror-plot-austria-foiled-2-men-arrested-shows-w-rcna165591

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

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

https://www.investopedia.com/swiftonomics-definition-8601178

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

https://apnews.com/article/austria-taylor-swift-concerts-canceled-extremism-arrests-17b494f1a164b205128d7faeb607e731

https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/taylor-swift-vienna-terror-plot-third-person-detained-1235750067/

https://apnews.com/article/austria-taylor-swift-concerts-canceled-extremism-arrests-feff9108d0a14d9941c4bc416c0eb05f

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This week we talk about Chávez, Maduro, and Bolivarianism.

We also discuss authoritarianism, Potemkin elections, and the Venezuelan refugee crisis.

Recommended Book: Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen

Transcript

Venezuela, a country with a population of about 30.5 million people, has lost something like 7 to 9 million people, depending on which numbers you use, to a refugee crisis that began about a decade ago, in 2014, and which has since become the largest ever in the Americas, and one of the top ten all-time biggest outflows of people from a region in recorded history—just under the outpouring of people from Bangladesh into mostly India, which I mentioned in last week's episode, during the country's war of independence from Pakistan, and just above the number of people who have fled Syria over the course of its now 13-year-long civil war.

That means Venezuela has lost around a quarter of its total population in the span of just ten years.

The spark that lit the fire of Venezuela's refugee crisis wasn't a civil war, but a political movement called the Bolivarian Revolution, which is named after Simón Bolívar, who is renowned and respected throughout the region for leading the area's independence movement against Spain.

This revolution was kicked-off by a soldier-turned-polician named Hugo Chávez who has long worked to implement what he calls Bolivarianism across the Americas, which calls for a nationalistic, socialistic state of affairs in which hispanic governments would work together, these governments would own most vital aspects of industry and the economy, according to a social model, it calls for self-sufficiency driven by that state-owned nature—the government reining in the purported excesses of capitalism-oriented competition, basically, and it calls for the elimination of corruption and the expulsion and exclusion of what it calls colonialist forces, alongside the equitable distribution of resources to the people.

It's a riff on other socialist and communist models that have been tried, basically, with a South American twist, but it has many of the same implications for day-to-day realities, including the supposition that everything is owned and run by The People, though generally what that means in practice is a pseudo- or full-on police state, meant to keep those outside, enemy forces—which are blamed for anything that goes wrong—from meddling in local affairs, and it also tends to mean a lot of self-enrichment at the top, those in charge of the police state apparatus, and all the state-owned businesses giving a lot of handouts to their friends and family, and generally becoming quite wealthy while the rest of the population becomes increasingly disempowered and impoverished.

This isn't the way these sorts of models necessarily have to go, of course, and it's not the way they're meant to go according to their own ideals and tenets, but historically this combination of claimed goals seems to lead in that direction, and in Venezuela's case we've seen that same trend play out once more, the Bolivarian Revolution putting Chávez at the top of a system predicated largely on oil wealth, which allowed Chávez to reinforce his hold on power, the reinforcement including the jailing, threatening, and harassing of political opponents, and keeping the main opposition party mostly out of power, despite their widespread popularity.

In 2013, Chávez's Vice President, Nicolás Maduro, stepped into the role of acting president when Chávez had to step aside due to cancer complications. He then won an election that was triggered by Chávez's death by less than 1.5% of the vote, though his opponent claims there were irregularities. The National Election Council carried out an investigation and said that the vote was legit, and Maduro became president later that year.

The seeming illegitimacy of that election, though, remains a huge point of contention between the political forces in Venezuela, and in the years since, the government has engaged in what's often euphemistically called "democratic backsliding," which means those in charge are implementing increasingly authoritarian policies in order to maintain control and keep themselves at the top, at the expense of democratic norms and values, like fair and free elections.

All of which has been bad for morale and for locals' sense of power within their own governmental system, but this has all been maintainable to a certain degree because Venezuela is sitting on the world's largest known oil reserves, and has thus able to just keep pumping oil, and expanding their own pumping capabilities, and that has allowed them to fail across a lot of other metrics of success, but still keep things afloat, the average person doing just well enough that they had something to lose if they stepped too far out of line—challenging the government in some way, for instance.

This increasing mono-focus on oil and similar raw materials, like gold, though, became a huge issue when a series of what are generally considered to be hamfisted policy decisions—including abundant and generous fuel subsidies for citizens and local businesses—that left them with wild levels of inflation that led to an intentional devaluation of the country's currency, as part of an effort to address that inflation, but which ultimately just ended up making things worse.

The government also took out a bunch of debt to help increase their oil-pumping capacity, and that combination of debt, a weak currency, and a local economy that had done away with basically everything else except oil left them without everyday fundamentals, including food, alongside issues like burgeoning disease rates, child mortality rates, high levels of crime and corruption, and a whole lot of violence, politically motivated and otherwise.

As of mid-2024, nearly 82% of Venezuela's population lives in poverty, and 53% of the population lives in extreme poverty, unable to afford enough food, and slowly starving to death.

Maduro seems to have won another election in 2018, though that vote is even more widely considered to be a farce than the one in 2013, and though outside governments like the US supported the ascension of opposition candidate Juan Guaidó, who seems to have actually won, that support didn't lead to any real change within Venezuela—though it did lead to more sanctions by the US and its allies against the Venezuelan government and many higher-ups within that government, of which there were already quite a few, and the weight of these sanctions on their oil industry in particular have made it very difficult to Venezuela to openly sell their oil on the international market at full price, which has further deteriorated their economic situation.

There was some hubbub within the Trump administration in 2020 that a military option, like a full-on naval blockade, to keep under-the-table oil deals that dodge US sanctions from occurring, might be on the table, as Maduro was proving resilient to other, less forceful attempts to dethrone him, like the aforementioned sanctions.

But nothing came of that, and a few years later the Biden administration offered to ease sanctions on Maduro's government, and to begin the process of normalizing relations between the two countries, if Maduro agreed to have a fair and free election, letting Venezuelans decide whether to keep him or not, but in an actual election, not rigged election, this time.

What I'd like to talk about today is how that election played out, and the local and international response to its results.

—

Some of that promised loosening of sanctions began well before the election, which took place at the tail-end of July 2024—and that allowed Venezuela to reap some profits from selling oil, gas, and gold that would have otherwise been tricky to get onto the global market.

But while Maduro made a few gestures at allowing things to be free and fair, and released some political prisoners, as demanded, he figured out a way to justify keeping his main opposition, a woman named María Corina Machado, who has been incredibly popular with Venezuelans, from being on the ballot. So she picked someone to basically serve as a stand-in for her and her party, a man named Edmundo González.

Official numbers released by the government indicate that Maduro won about 52% of the vote, and will thus remain in office.

According to data and analysis from outside watchdog groups, however, the voter numbers released by the government are highly suspect, the numbers giving every indication that they were falsified.

Evidence, including two-thirds of the tally sheets that the electronic voting machines printed out after polls closed on Election Day, provided by González's opposition alliance to some of those watchdog groups and to journalistic entities like the New York Times and Associated Press, suggest that Maduro probably only got something like 31% of the vote, while González, and through him, Machado and her party, received around 66%—a landslide victory, if those numbers are even close to accurate, and there's additional evidence that they are, as that's very similar to the results tallied by an independent exit poll on Election Day.

Despite that evidence, the Venezuelan election authority has confirmed Maduro's reelection, saying that González only garnered 43% of the vote, and the governments of Venezuela's allies, like Russia, China, and Iran, have also recognized the results as valid—though to be clear, China, Russia, and Iran are all renowned for their Potempkin elections that have all the trappings of a democratic act, but which are largely ceremonial and always predetermined to some degree, even if they claim to take the will of the people into account. So this is a group of governments that regularly run invalid elections who are vouching for the legitimacy, the apparent validity, of an election that keeps their preferred, authoritarian ally, in power. Do with that information what you will.

On the other side, we have a slew of mostly Western nations that have come out against the results, saying, with varying degrees of certitude, that there's abundant evidence these election results were faked, and that González is the actual winner.

The US government is included on that list, and many of Venezuela's neighbors—some of whom have recently publicly spoken about their concerns related to Maduro's belligerence in the region, and seeming intention of rigging the vote in his favor—like Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, they've said they want the Venezuelan government to release the full details of the vote, so everyone can see and analyze the totality of data the government is supposedly working from.

Some of Maduro's allies and former allies, and some hardcore supporters of his predecessor, Chávez, have likewise told Maduro he needs to release the baseline voter data, to clear things up.

Maduro has said, instead, he'll have the country's Supreme Court audit the results, but this is being seen as a sidestep move by Maduro, as the court was recently packed with Maduro loyalists, and is therefore not capable of undertaking an independent review of the data—like other aspects of the country's government, the high court is basically in Maduro's pocket.

Maduro is also saying that the US and other long-time enemies of his government are trying to rig the election against him, and that he can't release detailed vote counts because the National Electoral Council is under attack, including cyberattacks, and they're not able to provide those numbers right now because of that aggression—though he's provided no evidence to support this supposed reason he can't make any of this information public.

So while it's still not 100% certain what has happened here, it's looking a lot like what happened in the last election, Maduro pulling out all the stops to muddle what information is being released, looking like he's playing ball whenever possible, but within a context in which he can make it look that way without facing any real risk of being challenged, and it would seem that he's leveraged the powers of state, once more, to lock in his position at the top for another six years, minimum.

In addition to those international governments and groups calling foul on his actions, we're seeing widespread protests against the government and these alleged results, and in a few cases these protests have become violent—the government supports groups of loyalists called colectivos, giving them weapons and telling them to go attack peaceful protestors, which can spark such violence, though formal police and military forces have also seemingly triggered pushback in some cases.

The government is accusing foreign nations like the US, and immigrant groups of causing this violence, saying these are special covert ops to make the government look bad and attack good loyal citizens basically—which is a common authoritarian move in such circumstances—and police and military forces have been rounding up protestors, and hunting them down afterward, arresting thousands of people for what they're calling anti-government or terrorist activities.

This has led to a situation in which there are still protests, and the opposition is still pushing hard against these supposed results, but many people involved have been pulling down their social media profiles and not posting photos or videos, because they're worried the government will send people to their homes to black-bag them and take them away, which is apparently happening around the country right now, to folks from the opposition party, but also everyday people who went to a rally or protest.

The question, now, is whether the outcome this time around will be any different than it was in 2013, and then again in 2018, when Maduro first stepped into power and when he retook power.

Something the opposition has this time, but which it didn't have in those previous elections is Maria Corina Machado—the candidate who was booted from the ballot and who had to select González to run in her stead.

Machado has become a public figure of almost religious significance in the country, and her star has arguably only gotten brighter the more Maduro has pushed back against her ability to participate in the formal processes of state.

She won 90% of the vote to become the head of the opposition coalition last October, and she's been in politics since 2004, when she promoted a referendum to recall then-President Chávez, and that effort earned her a conspiracy charge.

In later years, as she continued to hold various political roles, she was accused of corruption, disqualified from holding public office, accused of being involved in a plot to assassinate Maduro—all of these accusations seemingly false, and only applied to keep her from causing trouble, by the way—and then, after nearly a decade staying out of the spotlight, she became a candidate in that party primary that she won so handedly, which in turn led to her being banned from running for office for 15 years—all of which just seems to have further empowered her with everyday Venezuelans.

She seems to be a lot more popular and to hold a lot more sway than Guaidó, the candidate who was held up as the actual victor of the 2018 election, and treated as such by several other governments in subsequent years.

Die-hard fans of Machado also seem to have a bit more zeal than Guaidó's followers did, which could mean if the government acts against her or González, as they've threatened to do, and which both candidates seem to be daring the government to do, having shown up in public a few times despite those threats to lock them up or worse, since the election—if something like that happens, that could result in even bigger and potentially more destructive and violent protests, despite her calls for nonviolent opposition against what seems to have been a grave injustice.

The world has also changed quite a lot since 2018, and many of Venezuela's neighbors, even those that would have previously stayed carefully neutral in this election, have outright recognized González as the winner, including Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru, among others.

This changed world could also bring more support for Maduro, though, as their global allies, the Russias, Chinas, and Irans of the world, in particular, are busily building a collection of relationships with governments that oppose the de facto hegemony of the US and Europe, and that's manifesting in all sorts of ways, including providing resources, trade, and misinformation and military support to other fellow travelers who are holding the authoritarian line against pushback from their democratic and close-enough-to-democratic peer states.

There's a good chance there will be more tumult in neighboring nations as a result of all this—most immediately Colombia, as that's where the majority of Venezuelans who have left the country as part of that larger, decade-long exodus, have been going, and there's abundant indication that many people who held out, hoping this election would change something in the country and sticking around on that possibility, are planning to leave, now that Maduro has apparently managed to cling to power.

There's a chance this could trickle into other nations' politics, too, as many of those Venezuelan migrants who don't stay in Colombia end up heading north to US borders, and those borders have been at the center of the past several elections, and the new Democratic nominee for president this November, Kamala Harris, was tasked with handling border issues in the country at a truly tumultuous moment for the border. So a surge in new migrants could lead to more criticism of her on that front, as her performance in that role is generally considered to have been not great.

The Venezuelan military seems to be standing with Maduro, so far, which means it's unlikely the citizenry will have much of a chance of forcing the government to take them seriously and do anything about this seemingly rigged election, beyond protesting at such a scale and regularity that it messes with their ability to get anything else done, which could, at some point, nudge those in positions of power within the military to take the citizenry's side.

This is considered to be unlikely at this point, as Maduro has made sure to tie those leaders to him, giving them all sorts of monetary and business benefits, and arranging the country's military and intelligence apparatuses so that all the agencies and people running them are tasked with watching each other, as much as the other elements they're meant to defend against—again, a common authoritarian tactic, as this can help stave off the potential for coups, no one willing to risk losing their own power to oust the person up top.

The most likely outcome, based on how things have gone previously, at least, and how this has played out so far, is probably that this will remain a talking point internationally for a while, protests will continue to bubble up and be tamped-down, periodically becoming violent enough to warrant international news, but then in a handful of months, Maduro will have reinforced his position in power, still further, neighboring governments will be forced to reckon with his staying power and will figure out ways to deal with him, even if not happily, and the exodus of citizens from the country will continue as the economy continues to get worse in most ways, though perhaps bolstered a bit by support from the Russia/China/Iran alliance.

All of which will reshape the population and demographics of the region, while causing all sorts of economic ripples globally, as well.

Show Notes

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/28/world/americas/venezuela-election-results.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/world/americas/venezuela-election-takeaways.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/venezuela-maduro-election-results.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd1d10453zno

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-can-prove-maduro-got-trounced-venezuela-election-stolen-772d66a0

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/07/31/suspicious-data-pattern-in-recent-venezuelan-election/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-administration-announces-sanctions-targeting-venezuelas-oil-industry/2019/01/28/4f4470c2-233a-11e9-90cd-dedb0c92dc17_story.html

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/30/venezuela-election-biden-trump-response

https://theintercept.com/2024/08/02/venezuela-election-maduro-us-sanctions-democracy/

https://www.barrons.com/news/venezuela-election-body-ratifies-maduro-s-poll-win-official-39010070

https://archive.ph/izdLU

https://apnews.com/article/colombia-president-maduro-vote-count-venezuela-election-00d399b74300b6d1ed010bed9539a166

https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-08-05/venezuelas-political-crisis-enters-uncharted-territory.html

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10715

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim%C3%B3n_Bol%C3%ADvar

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Venezuelan_presidential_election

https://dialogue.earth/en/business/8768-fuel-subsidies-have-contributed-to-venezuela-s-economic-crisis/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/venezuela-election-preview-1.7274864

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

https://archive.ph/20240726145913/https://www.r4v.info/en/refugeeandmigrants

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

https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-maduro-machado-biden-gonzalez-elections-protests-d6e70bd88ee9511298a4850c224a12e2

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This week we talk about student protests, curfews, and East Pakistan.

We also discuss Sheikh Hasina, Myanmar, and authoritarians.

Recommended Book: The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk

Transcript

Bangladesh is a country of about 170 million people, those people living in an area a little smaller than the US state of Illinois, a hair over 57,000 square miles.

It shares a smallish southeastern border with Myanmar, and its entire southern border runs up against the Bay of Bengal, which is part of the Indian Ocean, but it's surrounded to the west, north, and most of its eastern border by India, which nearly entirely encompasses Bangladesh due to the nature of its historical formation.

Back in 1905, a previously somewhat sprawling administrative region called Bengal, which has a lot history of human occupation and development, and which for the past several hundred years leading up to that point had been colonized by various Europeans, was carved-out by the British as a separate province, newly designated Eastern Bengal and Assam, at the urging of local Muslim aristocrats who were playing ball with then-governing British leaders, the lot of them having worked together to make the region one of the most profitable in British India, boasting the highest gross domestic product, and the highest per-capita income on the subcontinent, at the time.

This division separated Bengal from its Hindu-dominated neighboring provinces, including nearby, and booming Calcutta, which was pissed at this development because it allowed the British to invest more directly and lavishly in an area that was already doing pretty well for itself, without risking some of that money overflowing into nearby, Hindu areas, like, for instance, Calcutta.

This division also allowed local Muslim leaders to attain more political power, in part because of all that investment, but also because it freed them up to form an array of political interest groups that, because of the nature of this provincial division, allowed them to focus on the needs of Muslim citizens, and to counter the influence of remaining local Hindu landowners, and other such folks who have previously wielded an outsized portion of that power; these leaders were redistributing power in the region to Muslims over Hindus, basically, in contrast to how things worked, previously.

In 1935, the British government promised to grant the Bengalese government limited provincial autonomy as part of a larger effort to set the subcontinent out on its own path, leading up to the grand decolonization effort that European nations would undergo following WWII, and though there was a significant effort to make Bengal its own country in 1946, post-war and just before the partition of British India, that effort proved futile, and those in charge of doing the carving-up instead divided the country into areas that are basically aligned with modern day India and modern day Pakistan, but two-thirds of Bengal were given to Pakistan, while one-third was given to India.

This meant that a portion of Pakistan, the most populous portion, though with a smaller land area, was separated from the remainder of the country by Indian territory, and the logic of dividing things in this way was that the British wanted to basically delineate Hindu areas from Muslim areas, and while large, spread-out groups of Muslims lived roughly within the borders of modern day Pakistan, a large, more densely crowded group of Muslims lived in Bengal, hence the otherwise nonsensical-seeming decision to break a country up into two pieces in this way.

Frictions developed between mainland Pakistan and the portion of Pakistan, formally Bengal, that was initially called East Bengal, and then renamed East Pakistan in 1955, almost immediately.

There was a movement to get the Bengali language officially recognized as a state language, alongside Urdu, which was promoted as the exclusive federal language of Pakistan, early on, and a list of six demands were presented to the Pakistani government by East Pakistan-based politicians, all of which aimed to get the region equal representation in what they felt was a West Pakistan-biased system, despite the fact that, again, East Pakistan, formally Bengal, was the most populous part of the country, and they had the most thriving economy, as well, bringing in most of the country's income.

These demands led to what's become known as the Six Points Movement, which in turn, just a few years later, kicked off the Bangladesh War of Independence, which was exactly what it sounds like: an effort by folks in East Pakistan to achieve independence from the larger government of Pakistan, which had in recent years been taken over by a military junta which, like the previous government, didn't give as much political power to Easy Pakistanis.

That junta, in late March of 1971, launched a military operation called Operation Searchlight that was meant to take out separatists in East Pakistan—but in practice this meant they swooped in and started targeting academics, members of the local intelligentsia, and people of Hindu faith, alongside members of the rabble-rousing groups that were petitioning for more power in this smaller-by-landmass, but larger by population and income, segment of the country.

Operation Searchlight sparked the aforementioned Bangladesh War of Independence, and nine months later, the military government's efforts during this conflict were deemed to be genocidal because of how they targeted ethnic Bengalis, killing somewhere between 300,000 and 3 million of them, while also intentionally and systematically raping hundreds of thousands of Bengali women, the soldiers who committed these acts doing so with the formal go-ahead from their government—they were told to do so, basically.

These atrocities eventually pulled India into the conflict, in part because millions of Bengalis were fleeing across their border to escape the genocide, and in part because the genocide was occurring, to begin with, and that sparked the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, which eventually led to an end to that genocide when Pakistan's government surrendered at the tail-end of 1971.

That victory led to, formerly Bengal, then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan. It also concretized India's military dominance in the region, and Pakistan, what remained of it, lost more than half its population, much of its economic base, and suffered a long period of embarrassment that left it questioning the basis of its militant, braggadocios approach to both nationalism and foreign policy; it was previously a well-respected and feared military force, but it became a somewhat eyes-downcast entity in the region for a while, lots of reforms eventually helping it shore-up its economy, but remnants of this period still percolate in its internal politics and government operation, to this day, including its antagonism toward India, and its support of local jihadist groups, which the government uses as a counterbalance against India and other local power structures, which it can no longer face head-on.

What I'd like to talk about today is a swirl of new tumult in modern day Bangladesh, and what this moderate uproar might mean for the country's future.

—

Modern Bangladesh is surrounded by conflict.

Myanmar's military government is in the midst of a civil war, following the recent overthrow of its democratically elected civilian government, and the subsequent rise and loose collaboration between rebel groups in various parts of the country.

India is booming, and is broadly considered to be the next big power player on the world stage, though it's already a regional titan. It also continues to scuffle with Pakistan to its northwest, and with China along its shared borders, which are located just a short distance north of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh's coast, along the Bay of Bengal, has long underperformed economically, despite being surrounded by some of the most impactful producers of goods in the world, and this coastline, including the one occupied by Bangladesh, has become incredibly unpredictable in recent years: regularly flooding, entire villages being swept out to sea, and freshwater sources increasingly tainted by those incursions of salt water.

This area already has a lot going on, in other words, and many of those goings on seem primed for amplification in the coming years, as global power structures and economic tangles continue to flex and break and rearrange, and as the climate continues to behave in increasingly distressing ways; there's a political and military realignment happening in this part of the world, but geopolitics and global economics are also swirling and rearranging in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

All of which serves as context for a recent series of protests that arose around Bangladesh beginning in July of 2024.

These protests were held by mostly students who were not fans of a quota scheme that was originally implemented by the government in the wake of that 1971 war with Pakistan, this system abolished in 2018, but which was reimplemented by the country's High Court shortly before the protests began.

And this system basically promised that 30% of all government jobs would go to the descendants of people who fought in that war against Pakistan, for independence, alongside some jobs for minority groups, folks from traditionally underrepresented districts, and people who are disabled—though mostly it was meant to honor the descendants of those veterans.

The protesting students were pissed about this reimplementation because the country's economy isn't great at the moment, and unemployment is rife; the jobs that are available are not paying much, and are not terribly secure. About 18 million young people are currently unemployed in Bangladesh.

Government jobs, in contrast, tend to provide some level of consistency and predictability, pay relatively well, and tend to stick around—folks in such jobs aren't worried about being fired or their jobs disappearing, because of their very nature. So the best jobs, by that standard, are government jobs, and nearly a third of those jobs have been promised to people who, in many cases, just happened to be born to the right parents or grandparents; and notably, the majority of folks with families who fought in that conflict, are also supporters of the current, authoritarian Bangladeshi government—so part of the criticism here is that these quotas offer a means of giving cushy, reliable jobs to supporters of the current regime, without seeming like that's what they're doing.

These peaceful student protests were met with heavy resistance and violence by the government, which deployed police and soldiers who shot at protestors and shut down universities and the internet in the country, and that led to more protests, including by non-students, who were also met with at times deadly force.

About 150 people have been confirmed killed, so far, though that's the government's figure, and other, independent counts have tallied more than 200 dead. Hundreds of protestors were also arrested and curfews were implemented.

The Supreme Court responded to the initial protests by reducing the quota in late July, to the point that about 5% of government jobs would go to descendants of those veterans, which in practice meant about 93% of all government jobs would be divvied-out in a normal way, hiring people based on who's the best candidate.

Protests largely ceased after that announcement, and the government restored internet services 11 days after shutting it down across the country. Social media platforms like WhatsApp and TikTok remain restricted, however, as these services were used to promote and organize protests.

Curfews have also been relaxed somewhat, though police are reportedly sweeping through schools and cities, grabbing people who were recorded at protests, arresting thousands of them, including at least half a dozen students who led the initial protests that kicked everything off.

Protest leaders are now demanding that the remaining curfews be lifted, that those who were arrested are released, charges against them dropped, and that the leaders responsible for the heavy-handed response should resign.

Some protestors have also called for the country's Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, to step down, as she initially called the students traitors, though she later backtracked and said she didn't want them to be harmed.

Hasina is the longest-serving Prime Minister in Bangladeshi history, having initially stepped into the position in 1996, then stepping back into the role in 2009—she's held the office ever since.

She's generally considered to be an authoritarian, and has been accused of fixing elections, extrajudicial killings, and the imprisonment, or worse, of politicians and journalists who challenge her in any way.

She is, given all that, then, perhaps not surprisingly blaming these protests not on the students—not any longer, at least—but instead on opposition political parties who she says are attempting to challenge her rule, and thus, the wellbeing of the country as a whole.

Given that this is a relatively well-established authoritarian regime, there's a nonzero chance those who are in charge of these protests will take the win with the quota system, even though it wasn't fully removed, and step back from these other, more substantial demands that are unlikely to be met, short of perhaps a token resignation here and there by lower-run government officials who take the bullet for those higher up.

Outside demands for impartial investigations into who caused what are likewise unlikely to move forward, and the government has made it pretty clear it intends to double-down on the "it's the political opposition doing this to us, and you" narrative, which could help them justify further clamping-down on these groups, even to the point of more imprisonments and killings, but bare-minimum, in such a way that it makes dislodging the current ruling party even more difficult in the future.

It's possible that tumult elsewhere around the world, including in Bangladesh's own backyard, might encourage overreaction, not under reaction, from those in charge, as Myanmar's military government is having a lot of trouble with rebels, these days, and while it's not impossible that the prime minister will give in to more moderate demands, publicly apologizing for the violent response and firing some of her higher-level ministers, her government's history hints that things are more likely to tilt in the other direction, at least for the foreseeable future, and at least if the protestors fail to scale-up their operations to incorporate more of the country's population than they have, thus far.

At the moment, then, things have calmed a bit in terms of protests and government responses to those protests in Bangladesh. But there are elements to this story that have made things even more volatile than they already were, and because of how uncertain so many variables in the region are right now, there's a chance we'll see this, or connected movements and storylines, bubble back up at some point in the near-future.

Show Notes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2024/bay-of-bengal-climate-change/

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

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/bangladesh-protests-quelled-anger-discontent-remain-2024-07-26/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/26/bangladesh-student-protests-mass-movement-against-dictator

https://apnews.com/article/bangladesh-campus-violence-hasina-bc513b6d68cf5b94cfd898f3c7f153d2

https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/bangladesh-student-group-vows-to-resume-protests-if-demands-not-met/article68456310.ece

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/25/bangladesh-minister-defends-govt-response-to-protests-amid-calls-for-probe

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/7/24/bangladeshs-deadly-protests-explained

https://www.britannica.com/topic/largest-U-S-state-by-area

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_war_of_1971

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This week we talk about assassination attempts, presidential drop-outs, and October Surprises.

We also discuss election narratives, the frictions of age, and brief attempts at unity messaging.

Recommended Book: The Day the World Stops Shopping by JB MacKinnon

Transcript

On October 7 of 2016, The Washington Post released a video from 2005 in which Presidential Candidate Donald Trump bragged about how you can get away with sexually assaulting women if you're famous.

That same day, Wikileaks released transcripts of three paid speeches given by Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton to banking giant Goldman Sachs as part of a larger bundle of divulgences from the hacked personal Gmail account of her campaign chairman, John Podesta—these speeches were pretty controversial as they were very well paid—she earned $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman for the appearances, and fellow Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders lambasted her for the apparent conflict of interest this payout implied.

Also on October 7, 2016, mere hours before that tape was released and those talks were leaked, Trump publicly claimed that the Central Park Five—a group of black men who were wrongly convicted of assault and rape in 1989, and who were later exonerated by DNA evidence and a confession from the actual perpetrator—Trump claimed they were guilty, which was a silly and to some, quite offensive thing to say, but it also seemed to gesture at the candidate's ignorance, at minimum, and according to some responses to this statement, at least, his possible racism, as well.

So October 7 of 2016 was a pretty big day in terms of political divulgences, and it's considered to be one of the most prominent modern aggregations of what are, in US politics, often called October Surprises.

The term October Surprise was coined by former President Ronald Reagan's campaign manager during the run-up to the 1980 presidential election in reference to fears that a last-minute deal negotiated by incumbent president, and Reagan's competitor in the race, Jimmy Carter, to get American hostages in Iran freed could net Carter enough votes to win re-election, despite many other variables operating against him.

News reports were abuzz over these negotiations, so the narrative leaning in the President's favor could tilt things against Reagan, and his campaign manager was thus concerned that this bit of news, which was outside of his control, part of a spiral of larger events, would drop like a bomb on his campaign maneuverings, upending everything and completely changing the nature of the race, if it were to happen.

That ended up not being the case, as Iran's leaders eventually notified their counterparts in the US that they wouldn't be releasing anyone until after the election, but this sort of last-minute narrative change-up had occurred in US elections before, including then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger saying, at a press conference, that he believed the Vietnam War would end soon, just twelve days before the 1972 election, which is thought to have helped Nixon win another term in office, and—also on October 7, but in 1964—one of then-President Johnson's top aides was arrested for engaging in homosexual acts with another man at a DC YMCA, which seemed likely to tip the scales against his campaign, as that was a big no-no at the time, but then, just a week later, hardliners in the Soviet Union booted Nikita Khrushchev from power, the Labour Party narrowly took over the UK government, and China conducted its first nuclear weapons test; all of which pushed that YMCA incident from the news and rebalanced the election in various ways.

These sorts of last-minute surprises—last-minute because US presidential elections occur in early November, and these things seem to land like clockwork sometime in October, give or take a week—abound throughout US history, and though they usually only have a small or moderate impact on the final vote, in some cases they've been so dramatic, surprising, or paradigm-shifting they've completely upended expectations and seemingly changed the course of history.

What I'd like to talk about today are two recent narrative change-ups in the ongoing US election, which will culminate with a vote this November, both of which have the potential to dramatically influence the outcome of the election, and who ultimately occupies the White House early next year.

—

It feels like I've been doing a lot of US-centric news lately, and though that's not intentional, and a trend I intend to defy in the coming weeks, there have been two potentially historic storylines playing out in US politics in recent weeks that I believe justify explanation and analysis; in part because they are so historic and unusual, and in part because they seem likely to define the narrative of the presidential race over the next 100 days or so between now and the November 5 vote.

Of course, I say that knowing full well I could end up eating crow, acting, today, as if these are defining moments, when in reality either more dramatic and seemingly historic stuff could happen in the next three months-ish, or they moments could be set aside and largely forgotten in mere weeks, voter attention refocused on other things, like the actual policies being proposed by the two major parties in this race.

There are good arguments for both eventualities, as the communication environment in which this election is playing out is novel in many ways, and the people involved and the things they stand for, and the larger global context in which they're operating, are also quite bizarre by historical standards.

So these two stories are, I think, important to understand, as they could shape the path the rest of the race takes, and the moves both Republicans and Democrats, up and down the ballot, make in the coming months, which in turn will influence happenings globally in all sorts of important ways.

But it could also be that life takes over, other stuff takes precedent, and folks mostly just vote along party lines as has tended to be increasingly the case these past handful of elections—we'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, though, let's talk about the apparent attempted assassination of former President and current Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, and the seeming deterioration of current President Joe Biden's mental and physical health, the resultant calls from within his own party for him to step aside and let someone else run in his stead, and the decision he announced just a few days ago to step aside and let his party select a new candidate.

On July 13 of this year, 2024, Trump was at a campaign tour stop in Butler, Pennsylvania, up on stage, presenting his speech, when a 20-year-old man named Thomas Crooks shot at him, firing eight rounds from an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle from a rooftop about 400 feet, which is about 120 meters, away from the stage.

One of the bullets seemed to clip Trump's ear, and others hit members of the audience, one of whom was killed, and two others were critically wounded.

A Secret Service sniper killed Crooks right after he took those shots, and Trump was surrounded by Secret Service agents moments after he was hit, briefly emerging from their huddle to raise his fist and shout "fight, fight, fight," before being hustled away from the stage.

Some of the photos of the shooting and the aftermath quickly became famous, and a few of them are already considered to be historic, including several that show Trump, still bloody, pumping his fist, seemingly defiant and even victorious, from within the protective embrace of his Secret Service team, an American flag waving in the background—even commentators who don't like Trump have publicly said he looks pretty badass in these photos.

And that general sense of badassery has been played up by the Trump campaign since the shooting. The Republican National Convention was just days after that campaign stop, and several attendees wore fake ear bandages, mimicking the one worn by the former-President, and many political analysts went ahead and called the election for Trump, citing the significance of surviving an assassination attempt, especially during a race between two elderly men, both of whom have been struggling to demonstrate their youthful vigor and favorably contrast themselves to their opponent.

In the wake of the shooting, several big name donors committed money to Trump's campaign, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and an array of Silicon Valley bigwigs, like the founders of Andreessen Horowitz, which is the most prominent venture capital firm in California.

This wave of new support, from big donors and small, allowed Trump to out-raise Biden for the month for the first time in this election cycle.

The campaign also signaled it may lean into a unity message, rather than what's become Trump's more combative, aggressive tact, which seemed likely to help him scoop up some on-the-fence voters, and possibly even some centrist Democrats who were increasingly concerned about Biden as the face of their party—though at the RNC event, Trump named further-right Ohio Senator, and author of bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance as his VP, which is being seen as a doubling-down on aggression, not a balancing, moderating move, on Trump's part, and the scripted unity speech he gave, which used a lot of religious, "Jesus rising from the dead" language, alongside some gestures at the country coming together in the wake of violence, pretty quickly derailed into a somewhat rambling series of attacks against Trump's perceived enemies—so that approach, at least for the moment, is not being seen as a serious path for Trump and his team.

On the other side of the political fence, current President Biden has long faced calls to step down, mostly because of his advanced age and what that age portends: he's already 81 years old, and he'll be 82 in late November, shortly after the upcoming election.

People are living longer these days, and enjoying more of those years healthfully and productively, but Biden has had a speech impediment his entire life, which, as an older man, has at times made it seem like he's not as with-it as his fellow candidates—fairly or unfairly—and the frictions and scars of simply having lived a long, long time seem to be catching up with him, as well, and some fairly high-profile stumbles and mis-speakings, alongside caught-on-camera missteps and other signs of age and possible not-wellness, have amplified calls for him to step aside and allow someone younger to lead the Democrat's ticket in November.

These calls were a not insignificant component of his opponents' campaign in the 2020 election, but they ticked up several notches following what's generally considered to be a disastrous debate, for Biden, in late-June of this year.

The debate rules were in some ways stacked in Biden's favor, as there wouldn't be a studio audience for Trump to play off of, which is considered to be a strength of his debate style, and the candidates' microphones would be muted when it wasn't their turn to speak, which was meant to help temper Trump's tendency to go way over time, and speak over his opponent.

Despite those seeming advantages, though, from the moment he walked onto the debate stage, Biden looked and seemed...unwell. His face was kind of drooping, his eyes looked uncanny and surprised, his words seems to tumble over each other, not in his typical fashion, influenced by his speech impediment, but in a confused, rambling, at times disjointed and not-well-seeming way.

Even die-hard supporters of Biden began to question his ability to serve another term following that debate, and while most analysts pointed out that Trump's statements were riddled with lies, he did present those lies mostly intelligibly, while Biden, though mostly sticking to the truth, had trouble communicating much of anything, his delivery and overall visage suggesting that he's not okay, and if that's where he is now, where will he be in another several months, much less several years, if he were to take office for another four?

Those long-simmering concerns about his age surged into a full-on rolling boil from that point forward, and higher-ups in the Democratic Party started to call for Biden to step aside, some of them probably due to concerns about their own races, his unpopularity—which is ticking upward, according to recent polls—impacting their electoral outlook, and others because they worried about Trump being elected, not on his own strengths necessarily, but because Biden had become toxic due to his stumbles, and the general, and seemingly growing sense that he's just not up to the job anymore, because of the impacts of age.

As of the morning of Sunday, July 21, 39 Democratic congresspeople had overtly called for Biden to drop out, 23 had publicly expressed concerns about Biden, which is a lighter-weight way to say the same, basically, and 7 had said it's Biden's choice—though to be clear, Biden had said he's not dropping out, over and over again, so the folks who said it's his choice, following that clear declaration, seemed to be, in some cases at least, playing both sides, as they stating their support for him while leaving the door open for him to change his mind at some point in the future.

57 congresspeople, in contrast, were saying Biden should stay in the race, which is fewer than had said he should drop out, overtly or subtly; though a lot of people were apparently expressing concerns behind closed doors, and the wave of anonymous sources talking to reporters on the matter, telling stories about his various fumbles and their election-related worries, reinforced the supposition that there are more people hoping he steps back than not, including a lot of top-tier donors, it's just that many of them are concerned about their role within the party if they express those concerns publicly.

Then, in the early afternoon that same day, Biden's team released a statement from the President saying that he would be withdrawing from the 2024 election, followed shortly thereafter by a message indicating he was endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him.

Biden is apparently sick with COVID at the moment and is expected to speak on the matter sometime this week, once he's able to do so without coughing and rasping, but it's possible this news was released in this way, in writing rather than live and on camera, because it was just a truly difficult decision for someone who—according to his political career and bio, or the public-facing version of those things presented by his campaign, at least—tended to focus on sticking it out and persevering when faced with doubters, which in this case would have meant holding out and remaining the Democratic candidate, despite all the factors working against him.

This represents an historic shift in the election, though, as no US presidential candidate has ever dropped out this close to the vote, and he's the first to ever drop out after winning his party's primaries.

What happens now is thus up in the air, but the outline being shared by Democratic leaders as of the day I'm recording this seems to be that they'll hold some kind of lightning-fast election to see who replaces Biden on the ticket—possibly as part of an effort to avoid the mistake they made with Hillary Clinton, party higher-ups pushing too hard to favor one of their own who's turn it was, basically, over the candidates the voters actually wanted—though there's only about a month in which to figure out what that looks like, set it up, allow folks to decide to run and figure out campaign strategies, and then actually hold a vote; which is a lot, and that process could be chaotic, and it could result in fracturing within the Democratic Party, as folks might go negative against each other, despite guidelines telling them not to, and voters might not like it if their chosen person doesn't win, and they're then told to cast their lot in the actual presidential election with someone they voted against in this mini-, lightning-fast primary.

At the moment, current VP Harris seems to have the lion's share of her party's support: as of the day I'm recording this, 179 democratic leaders, out of 286 congresspeople and governors, have publicly endorsed her candidacy, alongside other big names in the party like the Clintons, and prominent former presidential candidates, like current transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Right now, though, it's a big unknown who will ultimately take up the mantle of the Democratic party's presidential electee, and that makes things more difficult for the Democrats, because of those aforementioned potential issues with unity and clarity, but it also makes things trickier for the Trump campaign, as they can't be certain who they're running against, and some reports suggest the whole campaign has been optimized to compete against Biden, whereas now Trump is the oldest-ever presidential candidate for a major US political party, and many of the criticisms they were planning to level against Biden can be leveled against him, instead.

The assassination attempt on Trump is still a variable here, too, as it seems to have rallied Republicans around him in a big way, but whether or not that will translate to larger support beyond existing die-hards is a big question mark.

Important to note, too, is that while assassination attempts of presidents in the US are rare in modern history, thankfully, so we don't have tons of data as to how they influence election outcomes, the assumed consequence of this one, namely, supporting Trump's election bid, might not be the one we actually get.

The attempted killing of President Reagan in 1981 seems to have bumped his numbers about 8% in the months that followed, but earlier assassination attempts of former-President Teddy Roosevelt and George Wallace didn't win them their bids for the office, and the larger context of the election and would-be electee seem to matter more, statistically, than the attempt, itself, when it comes to polling changes.

Similarly, it may be that the Democrats are able to leverage Biden's decision to drop out, and the elevation of someone else from their party to the position of would-be president, could help drive a new, exciting narrative: that of a veteran statesman stepping down for the good of his party and the country, and new, younger blood taking up that mantle, fighting against another member of the old guard who himself would never consider stepping down.

It's also important to remember, though, as I mentioned earlier, that this is all happening months before the election, and there's a chance these won't be the most important and dramatic stories shaping the narrative by the time we reach November; these July surprises could be replaced by October surprises, which upend the table once more, leaving everything chaotic and confusing right before votes are cast.

So while these seem like very big deals right now, and they're dominating headlines, and will almost certainly be historically relevant, we may be in for a lot more planned and unplanned election-impacting divulgences and happenings in the months to come.

Show Notes

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-17/trump-shooting-3d-model-of-showground-rally-site/104104418

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/politics/trump-vance-michigan.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/politics/secret-service-trump-shooting.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/us/politics/trump-biden-fundraising.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/18/us/politics/elon-musk-trump.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/17/co-founders-of-silicon-valley-venture-capital-firm-back-trump-presidential-bid

https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/doctors-are-increasingly-worried-about-biden

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/politics/trump-harris-strategy.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/us/politics/biden-harris-nomination.html

https://elections2024.thehill.com/projects/biden-drop-out/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/steve-kornacki-biden-pressure-party-can-get-wrong-rcna162783

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7982f2a0-42af-40a3-938e-8512c2ce8689_1338x755.png

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/democrats-are-gaming-post-biden-options-remains-insistent-remain-race-rcna162857

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/us/politics/biden-replace-harris.html

https://www.npr.org/2016/10/15/498085611/wikileaks-claims-to-release-hillary-clintons-goldman-sachs-transcripts

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-october-surprise-180960741/

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/07/excerpts-of-hillary-clintons-paid-speeches-to-goldman-sachs-finally-leaked/

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

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/07/22/us/biden-harris-trump-news-election

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This week we talk about protectionist policy, solar panels, and rare earths.

We also discuss Chinese business investment, EVs, and extreme weather events.

Recommended Book: Meet Me By the Fountainby Alexandra Lange

Transcript

The Great Green Wall—the one in China, not the one meant to span the Sahel region, straddling the upper portion of Africa—is officially called the Three-North Shelter Forest Program, and was initially implemented by the Chinese government in 1978.

This program is scheduled to be completed sometime mid-century, around 2050, and its purpose is to keep the Gobi Desert, which spans the lower portion of Mongolia and part of China's northern border, from expanding, which is something large deserts otherwise tend to do through a collection of natural, but often human-amplified processes called aeolian desertification.

The Gobi currently gobbles up about 1,400 square miles, which is around 3,600 square km, of Chinese grassland every year, as dust storms that roll through the area blow away topsoil that allows grasses and other plants to survive. And those storms become more powerful as the climate shifts, and as more grassland is turned to desert, giving the winds more leeway, fewer things keeping them from blowing hard and scooping up more soil, and as the roots of the plants on the fringes of the desert dry up, which usually keep the soil in place, become newly exposed to these influences, withering, their roots holding things together less tight than before, the process continuing to move ever outward.

Around a quarter of China's total landmass is already desert, and while there are a number of other causes of the country's desertification, including coastal erosion and the incursion of salty water into otherwise freshwater areas, this type, aeolian desertification, is one that they can tackle somewhat directly, if still at great expense and with muddled levels of success.

So the Great Green Wall of China is meant to stop that desertification, it is a potential means of tackling this issue, and it does this by keeping those winds from blowing away the topsoil, and over time is meant to help reclaim areas that have been turned into desert by this collection of processes.

And those in charge of this program do this by basically planting a huge number of trees, creating sturdier root systems to keep soil from blowing away, blocking the winds, and over time, the trees are meant to help new ecosystems grow in areas that have been previously diminished; holding everything together, soil-wise, but also adding nutrients to the ground as their leaves fall; those natural processes slowly reestablishing new layers of productive soil.

The area they're attempting to swathe with newly planted trees is huge, and by that 2050 end date, it's anticipated that they'll need to plant something like 88 million acres of forests across a belt of land that's about 3,000 miles wide and nearly 900 miles deep in some areas.

Local governments that have been largely tasked with making all this happen in their jurisdictions have claimed some successes in this ambition over the years, though one of the biggest criticisms leveled against those same governments is that they often spend a lot of time and money planting large swathes of trees, stabilizing some areas for a time, but then they fail to maintain those forests, so they more or less disappear within just a few years.

This can actually leave some of the afflicted areas worse off than they would have otherwise been, as some of these trees are essentially invasive species, not optimized for the local conditions, and they consume more water than is available, gobbling up resources other plants need to spring up around them, and they thus blight the areas they're meant to enrich, killing off the smaller plantlife, not supporting and expanding it, and then they die because they're undernourished, themselves.

While China plants more trees than the rest of the world, combined, due to this and similar projects, then, the system underpinning all of this planting isn't typically optimized for long-term success, and it often succumbs to the needs of local politicians, not the desired outcomes of the program, overall.

Also, in the cases where the forests are sustained longer-term, they often to create monocultures that are more akin to plantations than forests, which makes them more susceptible to disease—like the one that killed more than a billion poplar trees that were planted in Northwestern China in 2000, leading to a 20-year-or-so setback in the program—and that also makes them faster-growing, but less effective as carbon sinks than slower-growth versions of the same; they get big faster, but they don't absorb and store as much CO2 as other trees options would.

The forests they've planted that have sustained for more than a few years have periodically served as giant carbon sinks, though, pulling down as much as 5% of the country's total industrial CO2 emissions from 1978 to 2017, which is a pretty big deal for a country with such a huge volume of such emissions.

That said, it's still an open question as to whether this Great Green Wall will do what it's meant to do, by 2050 or ever, as while the concept is solid by some estimations, its implementation has been uneven at best, and it seems to be plagued by short-term thinking and metrics of success that don't line up with the stated purpose of the program.

What I'd like to talk about today is the implementation of what's being called, in some economic circles at least, a new Great Green Wall, this one around China and its exports, especially renewable energy exports, by the US and its allies, at a moment in which those sorts of exports are both highly desirable, and arguably, highly necessary.

—

The International Energy Agency recently said it expects to see about $2 trillion-worth of clean energy investments, globally, in 2024 alone.

This spending is partly the consequence of the $13 billion in damage China sustained from natural disasters in January to June of this year, and the something like $37.9 billion in damages the US suffered from just the 15 most damaging storms it saw during the same period, not inclusive of all the other ones.

Nations around the world are paying out gobs of money in the aftermath of increasingly brutal weather disasters, and that's on top of the slower-moving devastation that's being caused by the impacts of the climate shifting, messing with everything from crops to water cycles to where people can afford to live, because insurance companies are wholesale pulling out of some areas, and the cost of rebuilding over and over again in the same, previously habitable areas, just isn't worth it any more.

While there's still some political and ideological opposition to the concept of climate change, then, even some of the folks who are vehemently against the concept, publicly, are privately investing huge sums of money in infrastructure meant to help them survive and thrive in a future in which the climate has changed, and that includes things like sea walls and buildings that are cooler, passively, allowing more airflow and reflecting sunlight rather than absorbing it, but we're also seeing surges of investment in renewable energy sources, as they don't further contribute to the issue of climate change, but also because they come with a slew of advantages over fossil fuel based versions of the same; hence, that $2 trillion clean energy spending in 2024, compared to the estimated $1 trillion for fossil fuel-based energy sources the same year.

In May of 2024, US President Biden announced a near-future wave of tariff increases on a slew of Chinese goods, especially those related to the renewable energy transition.

For those aforementioned reasons, alongside a bunch of economic ones, as renewables are cheaper over time than fossil fuels, it's expected by essentially everyone that the planet will largely shift to renewable energy sources this century, with many governments hoping to make the transition entirely or almost entirely by 2050, with some nations that are moving more slowly, because of issues related to existing infrastructure, population, or poverty, arriving sometime in the 2070s or 2080s.

Thus, whomever owns the industries that will be relevant in that future—electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and so on—they will be something like the new oil giants of the latter-half of the century, and beyond, massively enriched because they're the ones that allow everyone to generate energy in this new reality.

Making those sorts of investments now, then, in terms of manufacturing capacity, but also the knowledge and trade secrets and brands and supply chains that get those products to the world, may yield incredible dividends for those willing to make them.

And at the moment, as of mid-2024, China is by far the king of the hill when it comes to pretty much every component of this transition, dominating the world's output of solar panels, EVs, wind turbine blades, batteries, and rare earth metals that are currently fundamental to the making of basically all of those things, while also owning some of the most valuable intellectual property, developing some of the most vital innovations, and controlling the most active, resilient, and competitive supply chains that make them available, globally.

The push by the Chinese government to own these spaces began in earnest in 2009, when it started providing subsidies to companies that were willing to invest in and start producing electric vehicles and accompanying technologies, and that successful effort has allowed the country to leapfrog other countries, like the US, which by some measures had a leading advantage up till that point because of other capacities and investments, and which has long served as the home bases of traditional car companies, and exciting new brands like Tesla and other startups that were beginning to gobble up global market share.

The Chinese government poured tens of billions of dollars into tax breaks and subsidies, though, and that helped stoke a highly competitive market that's led to the development of ultra-cheap electric vehicles, which are now outselling rivals in almost every market they've entered.

This effect is perhaps even more pronounced when we look at solar panels and batteries.

Chinese exports of these goods have easily outpaced and outcompeted rival producers overseas, and that's, combined with demand on the local, Chinese market, has pulled the price of solar panels from about $126 per watt in 1975 all the way down to about 26 cents per watt in 2022.

Over that period, these panels have become more efficient and effective, more resilient, and more useful—reshapable to fit more use-cases.

And the concomitant drop in lithium-ion battery prices, down about 97% since 1991 due to similar economic variables, has made solar even more useful and in demand, as solar setups are usually, these days, connected to battery backup systems that allow the panels to capture sunlight during the day and to stockpile that energy for later, when the sun isn't shining, ameliorating one of the biggest and most common concerns about solar power at the individual home scale, but also at the utility, city-sized scale; that it's an intermittent source. Attaching a battery, though, makes it a consistent source of power, that's also incredibly, and increasingly, inexpensive compared to other options offering similar levels of power.

That's been a major contributor to the expansion of solar installations, and recent innovations in the development of alternative, non-lithium-based batteries could do the same, as some novel battery types, like sodium-ion batteries, use a similar setup as their lithium counterparts, but without the issues associated with mining lithium, and with a better power-to-weight ratio, much lower fire risk, and lower theoretical expense, and flow batteries, made from iron, salt, and water, which are a lot worse than lithium ion batteries in essentially every practical regard, are just silly cheap and incredibly resilient, and thus could be built and deployed essentially everywhere—into the walls of homes and other buildings, into driveways and roads, everywhere—providing widespread, low-grade energy backup to whole cities at a very low cost.

So all of these products are already in high demand, and that demand is just expected to grow as these things continue to get better and cheaper.

China owns the majority of the best companies in these spaces, and makes the best, cheapest versions of these products.

Biden's recently announced tariff increases are an example of what're called protectionist monetary policy, the idea being to make competing products from elsewhere, like China, more expensive, by requiring folks pay another 25-100% of the product's price in tariffs, which in practice can double the price of these goods, which in turn makes locally produced goods, or those produced in allied countries, like in Europe, more competitive, despite not actually being competitive 1-on-1, without these policies in place.

The argument for this type of policy is that while on some level it could be beneficial to have these high quality, cheap Chinese solar panels and batteries flooding into the US market in the short-term, as it would help companies shift to clean energy sources faster than would otherwise be possible, in the long-term it would allow China to own those spaces, killing off all US-based competition in these industries, which would make the US economy, and by association all US businesses and people, and the US government, reliant on China, and a constant flow of such goods.

That would mean China would have a permanent whammy on the US because if they ever wanted to invade Taiwan, for instance, and keep the US off their back, they could just say, hey, let us do what we want to do, or we'll stop sending you solar panels and batteries, and we'll stop providing support for the ones you already have, which would devastate the US, because that would be equivalent to what happened when OPEC stopped exporting oil to the US in the 1970s—it was brutal, and we've only become more reliant on cheap, abundant energy in the decades since.

And that's on top of concerns that China, if it owned all the infrastructure related to these technologies top to bottom, which they kind of do, they would also conceivably have all sorts of potential backdoors into the US electrical grid, giving them the ability to shut things down or cause other sorts of havoc in the event of a conflict.

So while these are kind of just theoretical concerns at the moment, the risks associated of becoming reliant on one country, and one run by an authoritarian government that isn't the biggest fan of the US and its allies, controlling all aspects of a nations energy capacity in that way are substantial enough that the US government seems to think it's worth taking a hit in the short-term to avoid that potential future.

This situation in which short-term loss is necessary to avoid long-term energy dominance by China is arguably a problem of the US and other wealthy governments' own making, as again, China started wholeheartedly investing in these technologies back in 2009, and the US and Europe and other entities that are trying to play catch up, now, didn't make the same bet at the same scale, and that's a big part of why they're so far behind, scrambling to figure out how to catch up, and how to avoid having all their own solar and battery and EV companies killed off in the meantime.

Some of these governments are doing what they can, now, to pick up the pace, Biden's Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Act, for instance, shoring up these sorts of businesses and seeding potential next-step technologies—but again, these and similar efforts are more than a decade behind the same in China, and the Chinese government often entangles itself more directly with Chinese businesses than Western governments are conformable attempting with their own versions of the same, so Chinese businesses have that additional entanglemented-related leg-up, as well.

There's an argument to be made, then, that while these tariffs—in the US and otherwise—are almost certainly at least a little bit performative, for political purposes, and at least a little bit reactive, in the sense that they attempt to reframe Chinese superiority within these spaces as unfair, rather than the winnings associated with making different, and ultimately better bets than other governments back in the day, there's an argument to be made that this is one of the only ways to prevent Chinese companies from killing off all their foreign competition, locking themselves in as the makers of solar panels and wind turbines and battery backup systems and electric vehicles, and more or less owning that component of the future, which—because of how fundamental electricity is already, and how much more fundamental it's becoming as more nations segue away from fossil fuels as primary energy sources—means they have a slew of adjacent industries in an economic headlock, as well. Arguably the whole of every economy on the planet.

Attempts to label one side good and pure and the other a malicious economic actor may be just set dressing, then, and the real story is how one side managed to lock-in a true advantage for themselves, while their competitors are scrambling at the 11th hour to figure out a way to dilute that advantage, and maybe grab something of the same for themselves.

Biden's attempt, here, and similar policies elsewhere—especially Europe, but we're seeing some protectionist ideas flutter to the surface in other nations, as well, most of them aimed specifically at China—is meant to give competitors time to catch up. And many of them use a stick approach, increasing the price of these goods on foreign markets, while others are carrots, offering subsidies for locally made panels and EVs, for instance, but only if their key components are made in friendly countries; so Chinese-made vehicles don't benefit from those subsidies, but those manufactured elsewhere often do.

Some businesses in tariffed areas are bypassing, or attempting to bypass these concerns by making licensing deals with, for instance, Chinese battery giant CATL, which makes the world's best and cheapest batteries, and which US-based Ford and Tesla have been dealing with in ways that they all claim still work, legally, under the new policy system.

Other countries, like Brazil and Chile in South America, and Hungary and Germany in Europe, have been making deals to attract Chinese foreign direct investment within their borders, basically having Chinese companies build offshoots in their territory so they can benefit from the additional job creation and local know-how, and in both cases the idea is to dodge these policies, still benefitting from relationships with Chinese companies but in ways that allow them to avoid the worst of those sticks, even if they don't always benefit from the carrots.

China, for its part, has been investing in reinforcing its global supply chains against these sorts of tariffs for years, especially following former US President Trump's decision to begin disentangling the US and China when he was in office, which caught a lot of businesses and governments off guard at the time.

In the years since, Chinese officials have been moving things around so that many of their supply chains end in third countries before headed to US and European markets, giving them backdoor access to those markets without suffering the full impact of those amplified tariffs.

This is just a riff on an existing strategy, as China did the same with their solar panels back in the industry's relatively early days of the 2010s, rerouting their panels through Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Cambodia to avoid tariffs, which is part of why something like 80% of the US's solar panels still come from these countries, today: they're Chinese panels, in most of the ways that matter, but those buying and selling them can claim otherwise for tariff purposes.

Now, China is developing the capacity to build their EVs in Mexico, before then shipping them to tariff-defended countries around the world, including the US to the north, and Chinese-mined and refined rare earths, which are necessary components for batteries and other such technologies, are being mined in and diverted through a variety of different countries, their origins visible but still obfuscated for legal, tariff-related purposes.

The US and its allies are beginning to insist that other trade partners implement similar tariffs against China when it comes to these sorts of products, but results have been hit and miss on that front so far, and it could be that, even though this sort of trade war stance has been ongoing for nearly a decade at this point, policies related to these increasingly vital goods will be what finally fractures the global economy into rival collections of supply chains and viable markets, smaller countries forced to choose between dealing with the US and other Western nations on one hand, and China and its allies on the other.

Of course, again, intensifying weather events and the changing climate is stressing a lot of infrastructure and causing a lot of damage, globally, which is making the shift to renewables an increasingly pressing need.

At some point that need could strain or break existing relationships, depending on who ends up wielding the most leverage in this regard, and that in turn could contribute to the ongoing and substantial realignment we're seeing in the global world order that has determined how things work, economically and legally and militarily, for the better part of the past century.

Show Notes

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/21/1068880/how-did-china-dominate-electric-cars-policy

https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2024/may/us-trade-representative-katherine-tai-take-further-action-china-tariffs-after-releasing-statutory

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/great-green-wall/

https://archive.ph/MxOTZ

https://www.trade.gov/commerce-initiates-antidumping-and-countervailing-duty-investigations-crystalline-silicon

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/natural-disasters-china-caused-13-bln-economic-loss-january-june-2024-07-12/

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2023/abandon-idea-great-green-walls

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-us-fusion-race-4452d3be

https://asiatimes.com/2024/07/chinas-subsidies-create-not-destroy-value/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/09/china-floods-climate-change/

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/iea-expects-global-clean-energy-investment-hit-2-trillion-2024-2024-06-06/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China)

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-china-great-green-wall-boosts.html

https://earth.org/what-is-the-great-green-wall-in-china/

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This week we talk about the Heritage Foundation, Agenda 47, and the Democrats in turmoil

We also discuss Christian Nationalism, France’s surprising election outcome, and authoritarianism.

Recommended Book: Filterworld by Kyle Chayka

Transcript

The world is awash with interesting elections this year—there are a record number of people participating in democratic activities, from Indonesia to the EU's 27 governments—and we've just seen the UK's citizenry topple their long-governing Conservative Party in favor their Labour Party, while in France, the far-right party, which was previously relegated to the outskirts, has taken a huge number of parliamentary seats—not dominating the government as some had anticipated, but grabbing a convincing third place, after the first place far-left party, and the current government's second-place, none of which has a majority, which will likely make it difficult for anyone to get anything done in the country until some of these groups figure out a way to work together with each other, which isn't something they've had to do in recent history.

The US election, which arrives later this year, in November, is being especially closely watched by pretty much everyone, even those in far-flung, barely connected to the US, in a practical sense, portions of the world, because the stakes are very high—the US remains the most powerful nation on the planet according to most metrics, and it sets the tone for a lot of geopolitical happenings, as a consequence. It's also being watched because the visions of the two leading contenders, and their respective parties, couldn't be more different.

We've also seen a recent wave of pushback against current President Biden, who's 81 years old, currently, and who has been showcasing some of the consequences of age in a very public manner in recent weeks: perhaps most notably during a debate with his opponent, former President Trump, in late June.

Biden seemed visibly not well during that debate, stumbled and mumbled and lost his train of thought near-constantly, and this brought to the forefront a till-then simmering discontent with his advanced years, and all the potential ramifications of those advanced years, when it comes to running a country like the US, from supporters within his own party.

At the moment, as of the day I'm recording this at least, Biden is saying he'll remain the Democratic candidate and that those murmurings will die down, because that was just a bad night, and he's committed to regaining everyone's confidence.

But there are folks within his loyalty base, including those on the editorial board of the New York Times, and some of his most prominent campaign funders, who have called for him to step aside to make way for someone younger who can continue to carry the torch for the things he's done while in office.

It's time to allow someone like his VP, Kamala Harris, or possibly someone else from within the party, though Harris seems like the obvious choice for many reasons right now, to step in while there's still time to shift the narrative and get people used to the idea of someone else leading the ticket—that's the dominant argument right now, at least.

It's anyone's guess as to whether that'll happen—some prediction markets indicate the odds are something like 33-50% that the Dems will oust Biden somehow, or that he'll step aside willingly, but that would be a significant and historical decision, and it's likely that if it happens, up until the very last moment he'll continue to say he's running, because there would be no upside to doing otherwise.

Interestingly, though, while Biden-related drama has dominated a lot of headlines and airwaves in recent weeks, Trump has had his own, currently smaller, but possibly growing drama to deal with, this one related to a manifesto of sorts written by a collection of some of his most powerful and influential backers.

And that's what I'd like to talk about today: the Project 2025 plan, what's in it, and why Trump has been going out of his way to distance himself from it.

—

Donald Trump's official proposal package—the jumble of policy ideas most campaigns put together and publish as a sort of "here's what we believe and what we'd like to do" document that they can point while running for office—is called Agenda 47, and as tends to be the case with these sorts of documents it contains all sorts of ideas about all sorts of things, including but not limited to implementing universal tariffs on all imported foreign products while lowering taxes on all American people and businesses, cutting federal funding for any school or educational program that teaches Critical Race Theory, increasing the President's ability to fire whomever they want, and negotiating an end to Russia's invasion of Ukraine within the first 24 hours of Trump stepping into office.

Some of these policies were met with general, widespread favor, like implementing term limits on Congresspeople and keeping federal employees from taking jobs with the companies they regulated while working for the government, both of which could tamp down on various sorts of corruption and regulatory capture by business entities.

Others were met with general happiness with folks on the right side of the US political spectrum, like cutting federal expenses, killing off policies that allow gender affirming care, and labeling news entities that don't toe the political line, saying anything that goes against what Trump's people say, basically, as misinformation or disinformation.

Still other policies have been criticized even by some people on the right because they basically seem to serve Trump's desires, but don't necessarily align with the broader movement's ambitions—giving Trump the ability to investigate and potentially imprison his political enemies and folks in the press who say things he doesn't like, for instance.

Agenda 47 was getting a lot of promotion from Trump and his campaign up to the early months of 2023, when they were still releasing video clips of Trump talking about specific aspects of these policies, but following that last push, they seemed to step away from it, apparently deciding it was better to keep their specific policy ideas vague—as otherwise their opponents, and the press, could call them out on specifics, and in some cases because their own people wouldn't like something they were proposing, and keeping things fuzzy allowed them to talk around those ideas in the moment: it's much more difficult to criticize and critique if a campaign doesn't say anything concrete, and seems like they're willing to bend on just about everything they do say, depending on who they're talking to.

That pivot toward a blurrier vision of the future of the country seems to be part of why Trump's campaign has been trying to distance itself from another policy document—this one called Project 2025, and penned by folks working with the conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation.

Trump even went so far as to say, unprompted, that he didn't know anything about it, the former President posting on the Twitter-clone he partially owns, Truth Social, "I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them."

This statement—as has been pointed out by numerous in-the-know political analysts—is riddled with let's call them fabrications.

More than 200 of Trump's former officials and current campaign employees and allies have worked on elements of Project 2025, and the Heritage Foundation, and many of the people who run or are otherwise aligned with it, are his biggest donors: he knows these people, hangs out with them, relies upon them for campaign funds and to rally his base, and many of his policies from when he was in office, including some of his statements and other specific details, were proposed and even written by folks at the Heritage Foundation.

So while there's a chance that Trump genuinely doesn't know anything about this document or the people who wrote it, that would imply he's either so far disconnected from his campaign and the administration he ran while in office that he can barely be said to have been in office at all, or he's so far gone mentally that he actually can't remember, in which case his state of mind would arguably be the bigger scandal here.

Assuming that he does know about this document and who's pushing it, though, it makes sense that he might want to distance himself from it, in part because of that aforementioned strategy of keeping things blurry enough that everything's deniable, and in part because of what it is: 900-plus pages of plans for installing what most independent analysts are calling some version of an authoritarian regime, or a Christian Nationalist kingdom, in the United States.

It proposes doing this rapidly, providing instructions for how Trump could whip into office following a 2024 election victory, and within 180 days or so basically restructure the whole of the government so that he would wield near-absolute power, do away with the systems of checks and balances that could prevent him from doing whatever he wants, and would thus be able to implement the Heritage Foundation's far-right, fundamentalist Christian-oriented plans.

The document doesn't mention Trump specifically, because the Heritage Foundation is technically a non-profit, and thus can't be directly, demonstrably involved in supporting one political party or another, lest it lose that tax-free status.

And in the eyes of the folks writing these policies—many of whom have been involved in past administrations, and who thus have a solid understanding of how the government works and how to get things done within that system, this isn't an instruction manual for an overthrow or gutting of the democratic system, it's a battle plan for good, Christian soldiers who want to see their country revert to its (in their minds) Christian roots, after generations of straying from path.

To most non-partisan, outside analysts though—folks who know what they're looking at with this sort of thing—Project 2025 amounts to a guide, specifically aimed at Trump and his people, for how they can enter the White House, post electoral victory, strip the system of any means it has of fighting him and his whims, and systematically wipe out all opposition, including those within the government, but also political opposition, journalists, and other outside entities that typically serve as a check on those in power.

And they've done this, seemingly at least, because they see Trump as their way into government.

Christian Nationalist political candidates, with rare exceptions, don't win many elections, and when they do, they're often successfully challenged in the next election. This approach to governance would allow them to bypass the democratic system and take control of the reins of government, and that, in turn, would allow them to work their version of fundamentalist Christianity into US federal law; to reshape law in their preferred image.

Again, this is a more than 900-page document, so there are a large number of policy proposals and plans, but they almost all orient around implementing fundamentalist Christian ideology as law, including banning all types and methods of abortion and contraception, criminalizing the production and consumption of pornography, removing protections for groups that have been traditionally discriminated against, including people of color and folks from the LGBTQ+ community, and removing the separation of church and state, making the US, formally and in a legally binding and enforceable way, a Christian nation.

These plans would allow Trump's administration to essentially get rid of the so-called "administrative state," do away with a slew of government bodies and agencies, including the Department of Education, while also allowing the Republican Party to take full, partisan control of the Department of Justice, the FBI, the FCC and FTC, and the Department of Commerce by firing everyone and replacing the whole of these agencies with people hired based on their ability to pass ideology and loyalty tests, and they would do away with the Department of Homeland Security and other bodies that have been keeping an eye on right-wing extremist militias and other groups that the Heritage Foundation considers to be freedom fighters, not terrorists.

They would use the military to round up undocumented immigrants, placing them in interment camps, while also having soldiers act as police, to keep folks from protesting as their plans are implemented, the government gutted and public servants replaced by people who are Trump and Heritage loyalists; those soldiers instructed to use violence to keep protests from arising and spreading.

The National Guard in red states, those that consistently vote Republican, would be deputized as immigration enforcement officers and deployed to blue states, those that consistently vote Democrat.

These policies advise doing away with renewable energy programs and projects, protecting the fossil fuel industry indefinitely, and incentivizing the production of more oil and gas and coal, while making the production of more wind, solar, and similar types of energy nearly impossible.

They want to restart nuclear weapons testing programs, build a lot more nukes, and only extend the US nuclear umbrella, which is the country's promise to basically use nukes to protect sovereign, allied nations from invasion and being nuked, to NATO countries, and to only respect the US's NATO responsibilities for NATO nations that spend at least 2% of their GDP on their military.

There are guidelines for how to privatize essentially everything, and for removing the government's power to influence or regulate the free market almost entirely. It would do away with most social programs, and taxes would be reformed to dramatically reduce those applied to businesses and wealthy people, while also reforming how congress works so that increasing taxes in any amount and for any reason is a lot more difficult, in the future, creating what they call a "wall of protection" for businesses and the wealthy to whom these reductions would apply.

Again, that's just a brief cross-section of what this document calls for, but I think it gets the general point across.

And the response to this document has been telling, as some sub-section of the country has been positively thrilled by it, considering most of its tenets to be obvious and wonderful, and seeing the blitzkrieg-like implementation of these policies, whipping into Washington DC alongside Trump, passing as many of these things as possible within mere weeks of his inauguration, to be one of the most beneficial things that could happen to the US—a country that they, almost universally, see as a failing, flailing state that has wandered too far to the left, been taken over by the secular and woke, and which has thus lost what made it great to begin with.

The opposite response is that of concern and even horror that something like this is being considered, and that it's being so brazenly and publicly proposed by some of the most politically powerful people in the country.

When Trump first came into office, he was seemingly unprepared for the task, and a significant portion of his time in the White House was spent just getting his government set up—something that by some estimates never really, fully happened.

And part of the idea here is that the Heritage Foundation is offering to do all that work for him, having handpicked and trained people for this task for years, giving him a pop-up government from day one, that would, in practice, make him something closer to a monarch than a President, and all he has to do is say yes, and allow them to implement their vision for America through his administration.

In doing so, in the tradeoff, he would be empowered to take revenge on the people he believes have wronged him: and there's apparently a list of such people—his former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon recently said, on a podcast, that the former President is "dead serious" about getting revenge on his enemies, especially political opponents and members of the media he feels have mistreated him.

Former US National Security Council Adviser under Trump, Kash Patel, on the same podcast episode where Bannon made that threat, said “We will go out and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

It's worth mentioning here, too, that the leader of the Heritage Foundation, on Steve Bannon's podcast, the War Room, recently said that the Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity, which is broadly seen as favorable to Trump's position in the various court cases he faces, will reinforce a "second American Revolution," which he says will "remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be."

The unconcealed implication being that the right, under Trump's banner and with the support of Heritage and similar groups, is launching a revolution, intending to remake the American government in their image, and if the left, their political opponents, stand in their way at the ballot box, keeping them from doing this peacefully, physical violence may be necessary.

The ruling he was alluding to, which said the US president couldn't be prosecuted for things done while in office, while working on presidential things, would allow Trump, if he returns to office, to get away with just about anything, as long as he could say he was doing it as part of his job.

So the argument is that these Project 2025 plans could be implemented relatively easily, as long as Trump is willing to do a bunch of illegal stuff, which wouldn't be illegal because he would be president, and could systematically strip the government of its ability to fight back—its authoritarian immune system—all while enjoying that legal protection.

The degree to which this will matter, in the immediate future, at least, comes down to who wins at the ballot box in November, though there's a good chance Heritage will continue to push this agenda in the future, as well, either way.

Leading up to the election, Trump may successfully convince those who don't like these policies and the movement behind them that it's nothing to do with him, and that he'll be doing his own thing if and when he returns to office.

The heat may also stay on Biden, or whomever replaces him, if someone ultimately does, stepping in for him on the Democrat's ticket.

In that latter case, the Project 2025 people have said they will hold up the election and nomination process if Biden decides to step down, flooding the zone with lawsuits and other legal challenges in order to keep the Democrats from focusing on the election and the issues they'd like to keep at the forefront of the conversation. So there's a chance this group could influence the election from that angle, as well.

It's possible, of course, that Trump will genuinely push back against this group, rather than just seeming to, as Heritage, in many ways, would become a second power loci within the government, challenging his own power even as they position him as a figurehead for their activities.

They would reinforce his position, grant him new powers, and thus allow him to pursue whatever agenda he likes—include a revenge tour, if he so chooses—and that could prove to be too compelling to ignore, but he could also resent their support, realizing that they hold a lot of cards he doesn't hold, and that could keep him from fully embracing their vision and offerings, maybe giving them a little leeway, but otherwise doing his own thing.

Again, at the moment, Trump seems to be distancing himself from a group that's pitching broadly unpopular policies that the majority of the US electorate would not support, and there's a chance he'll continue to distance right up to the moment he has the presidency again, at which point he could allow Heritage to partially or fully move forward with their plans.

All of this is very new, though, and in addition to it not being clear that Heritage's theories on how to change the government would work, it's also not clear Project 2025 would be implementable, even most of it, without a majority in both the House and Senate.

So this could turn out to be an ambitious dream and nothing more than that if a lot of things don't go really well for the Republicans in November; but it could also end up sparking a huge, anti- small-d democratic movement, as well, if enough cards turn up their way, in the coming months.

Show Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_47

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

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

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/05/trump-project-2025-heritage-foundation

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/18/trump-has-unveiled-an-agenda-his-own-he-just-doesnt-mention-it-much/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/magazine/heritage-foundation-kevin-roberts.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/donations-surged-groups-linked-conservative-project-2025-rcna125638

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/26/what-is-project-2025-trump

https://apnews.com/article/america-first-trump-biden-russia-ukraine-policy-54080728c6e549c8312c4d71150480ba

https://thehill.com/homenews/4344065-bannon-patel-trump-revenge-on-media/

https://newrepublic.com/post/182797/steve-bannon-exposes-trump-revenge-list

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/05/donald-trump-project-2025

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/05/trump-project-2025-disavowal/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/03/heritage-foundation-trump-revolution/

https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/07/03/project-2025-trump-us-government/

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/19/project-2025-trump-reagan-00115811

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-seeks-disavow-project-2025-despite-ties-conservative-group-2024-07-05/

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4757210-heritage-blowback-bloodless-revolution/

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4753439-heritage-leader-second-american-revolution/

https://x.com/alaynatreene/status/1809250958251077983

https://thebulletin.org/2024/07/trump-has-a-strategic-plan-for-the-country-gearing-up-for-nuclear-war/

https://archive.ph/liWg9

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This week we talk about the APA, the Supreme Court, and Marbury v. Madison.

We also discuss the Chevron Doctrine, government agencies, and the administrative state.

Recommended Book: A City on Marsby Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

Transcript

The Supreme Court's 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision was pivotal to US legal theory and practice because it established the concept of judicial review, which essentially said that US courts could assess laws passed through the typical legislative system, through Congress, and, if they determined those laws were unconstitutional, strike them down.

This was a huge rewiring of the US government, as it gave a substantial amount of new power to the court system, and it provided a new check on the legislative system that recentered the Constitution as the source of all law; if the judges decided new laws didn't line up with that original Constitutional intent, according to their interpretation of said intent, the new laws would be a no-go.

This is true of statutes that declare policy, as well, which are generally part of the law-making process, and also help shape regulations, guidelines, and other things of that nature—the fuzzier stuff that goes on to effect things, even when some of those fuzzy statements and implications aren't formalized in law, yet.

So any and all of this stuff that Congress decides on could, at some point, be looked into by the US court system, and that system can say, nope, that doesn't line up with what's in the Constitution—it's not Constitutional—and that means the Constitution, following Marbury v. Madison, became a lot more of a legal reality in the country, rather than just a collection of principles and ideals, which is how some legislators and legal scholars thought of it before this ruling.

Within this same entwined governmental/legal system, Congress sometimes delegates policy decision-making powers to US agencies, allowing them to make legal decisions in cases where Congress passes a law that it is some way ambiguous—saying that there need to be emissions standards on cars, for instance, but leaving the task of coming up with those standards to the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA.

This delegation ability was reinforced by a 1984 Supreme Court decision, Chevron v. The Natural Resources Defense Council, today usually referred to as "Chevron" or the "Chevron decision," the justices unanimously deciding against the DC judicial circuit's ability to set government policy, reminding those justices that judges are unelected officials and thus shouldn't be making law, and that when Congress isn't specific enough in their lawmaking, this can represent an implicit desire for the agencies in charge of implementing the relevant laws in the real world to figure out the specifics for themselves; after all, they would probably know better how to do so than a bunch of lawmakers who are not experts on the subject matter in question.

That case also limited the US court system's ability to review an agency's interpretation of the law, which in that specific case meant that judges shouldn't have the right to look into how US agencies decide to do things, willy-nilly, just because they don't like the outcome.

Instead, they have to adhere to what has become known as the Chevron Doctrine or Chevron Deference, which says, first, the judges have to decide if Congress was clear on the matter—and if so, they go with what Congress said, no questions asked. If Congress was unclear on something, though, then they have to decide if the agency in charge of executing Congress' decision has made reasonable and permissible decisions on that implementation; and if the answer is yes in both cases, the court must accept the agency's decision on the matter.

If not, though, then the court can step in and make some kind of judgement; but it's a fairly ponderous process to get to that point, because of this doctrine, and they will almost always defer to the decision made by the relevant agency, because of that 1980s-era court case.

The Chevron decision is generally considered to be one of the most formative in modern case-law because it empowered US agencies with all sorts of responsibilities and rights they wouldn't have otherwise enjoyed.

The Chevron case, itself, was predicated on a disagreement about the 1963 Clean Air Act, which failed to specifically define what "source" meant, in terms of emitted pollutants; Congress didn't specify. And this ambiguity led to a clarification in 1981, by then-President Reagan's EPA, that allowed companies to bypass the Act's procedures by building-out new, highly polluting components to their plants and factories, as long as they also modified other aspects of those plants and factories in such a way that emissions were reduced.

An environmentalist advocacy group challenged this new definition, which amounted to a loophole that allowed companies to get around otherwise sterner emissions rules, and that's how we got the Chevron court case.

What I'd like to talk about today is a recent, successful challenge to that Chevron ruling, and what it might mean for the powerful regulatory state that emerged in the US in the wake of that decision.

—

On June 28, 2024, the Supreme Court announced their decision in a case that was originally argued in January of the same year—Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, along with a companion case on a connected matter, Relentless Inc v. Department of Commerce—the Court's decision being that the Chevron deference, which says agencies can define fuzziness left in law by Congress, conflicts with the Administrative Procedure Act, or APA, which itself says the US court system has oversight powers when it comes to all agency actions.

The long and short of this decision—which was made along what are generally considered to be ideological lines within the court, the more conservative 6 justices ruling against the Chevron doctrine, the 3 more liberal justices ruling to keeping it—is that federal agencies will now have far less wiggle-room and legally backed authority when it comes to the laws and policies they enforce.

And while the court also said this doesn't immediately strip prior judgements of their impact and consequences, it does mean—according to most experts who have responded to and analyzed to this ruling, at least—that we're likely to see a wave of lawsuits against agencies that have done things or refined regulations in a way that individuals or companies didn't like, which could amount to the same thing within the next couple of years: many such regulations being done away with, those agencies becoming husks of their former selves because their capabilities will be pruned back significantly.

This is being seen as a victory by mostly conservative activists and lawmakers who are keen to see the regulatory components of the US government shrunk, their powers and funding depleted as a much as possible, doing away with what they sometimes derisively call the "administrative state," which they consider to be a limit on the free market and in some cases their own powers within politics and the economy.

And among many other regulations, thousands of them, by some estimates, this could impact the government's ability to regulate environmental pollution, safety measures for cars and airplanes, workers' rights and health considerations, and even somewhat more wonky things like net neutrality and the legality or illegality of very specific aspects of the e-cigarette and crypto industries.

For decades, these regulations have been to greater and lesser degrees interpreted—in their specifics, at least—by regulatory bodies like the FDA, the FCC, the EPA, and other such agencies. Congress has mapped out the broad strokes, leaving the details for the relevant agencies to sort out, because they knew this ruling would give those agencies the power to do so.

So those laws passed in this way by a Congress that knew this was how things worked, legally, will suddenly find themselves incredibly challengeable, the legal basis of their specifics now based on flimsy justifications that the court no longer supports.

These policies won't immediately disappear, then, but all of them, in their details and as a whole, are now more vulnerable to lawsuits from anyone who wants to bring them, and those who bring them will likely win, because the court system has taken away the protections those agency powers formerly leaned-upon.

Consequently, there are fresh concerns from folks working in environmental spaces, those attempting to incentivize the deployment of renewable energy infrastructure, and those who are trying to protect workers' rights, that they could soon be tied up in endless court cases, many aspects of the legal understanding they've worked in accordance with other the past four decades pulled out from under them—their capacity to enforce anything not spelled out in detail by congress, which is very little because congress has gotten used to leaving that to them, in many cases, dramatically reduced.

There are parallel concerns that standards that have made the US market relatively trustworthy, compared to other global marketplaces, at least, in terms of the safety of foods and medicines and all sorts of other products, might be diminished, leading to a bunch of new safety challenges, but also a demotion of American goods on the global market, because fewer sturdy regulations, at least in the short-term, could lead to more rip-offs and fakes, lower-quality items subbed in for higher-quality ones, and a bunch of risky, and even dangerous new products and services hitting the market, because these agencies are suddenly less empowered to check them out before approving them.

One of the larger concerns, especially amongst folks on the political left in the US, is the impact this could have on health care.

The Affordable Care Act, which provides reduced-cost insurance plans to folks who make less than a set amount of income, is enabled by a huge jumble of regulations that determine how things are paid for, who can and must participate—citizens and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies and so on—and how everything fits together, ensuring Medicare, Medicaid, and the ACA can continue to function, despite relying upon often arcane methods and cost overruns.

The US Treasury and IRS, too, rely heavily on regulatory powers to draft new rules and enforce the tax code, which allows for the management of money throughout government agencies and other bodies, but which also helps the government develop and deploy sticks and carrots throughout its portfolio of laws, acts, and policy-based nudges.

The deployment of clean energy tax credits and incentives to help push solar and wind power development, and to encourage the construction of chip-making facilities on US soil, for instance, are all reliant on the ability to divvy out those credits, to decide how big they should be, and to determine who should get them, based on what criteria.

The general outline of most of these programs is still on solid ground, because Congress decides that sort of thing, even today, but so many specific details and numbers and implementation strategies are left to agencies, and though it's possible to shore those up, Congress stepping in to vote on and pass new details into law, it will take time to do that, and especially in highly competitive spaces like chip-making, and arguably time-sensitive spaces like those related to healthcare and climate change, a gap in implementation and legality could be incredibly meaningful, and even devastating to some of these projects and their outcomes.

In addition to having grown accustomed to being able to leave those sorts of details to agencies, which has impacted how they make law, the US Congress, too, has become highly polarized and at times somewhat stagnant, moving sluggishly on controversial areas, in particular, one side or the other bogging down even debate about things they don't like, rather than working with the other side to find a middle-ground they can agree upon.

So while many lawmakers may want to move fast to fill in some of these gaps that have suddenly appeared across US law and capability, that desire may be held up by the reality of US politics at the moment, and systems that are often weighed-down by the people who operate them, and the systems meant to keep them ticking along, but which sometimes do the opposite.

One way of looking at all this—through the lens of those who generally support this decision—is that this ruling could force Congress to get more specific in its laws, and in the meantime it could reduce the amount of bloat that can accumulate within any regulatory system; some of the sluggishness in getting new products to market, building-out new infrastructure, and passing new laws could actually be reduced, streamlining processes that currently, arguably, take too long, cost too much, and provide little benefit, all because these agencies have developed too many hoops to jump through and piles of paperwork to fill out.

Another way of looking at it, from the perspective of those who generally decry this outcome, is that this will lead to a huge shock, bordering on chaos, throughout the US legal and governmental system, will do away with all sorts of government supports, leaving us with fewer protections and filters that help keep people safe, and which keep businesses from abusing their positions of power, and that it puts more power in the hands of judges, who—especially at the very top, within the Supreme Court, which made this decision—are usually put into their positions by whomever happens to be in power, occupying the presidency, when one of their predecessors retires or dies. Which is why there's such a huge 6 to 3 imbalance between conservative and liberal justices in the Supreme Court at the moment, that imbalance unlikely to go away any time soon, because those unelected positions are for life; though Republicans during the Trump administration also made it a priority to fill lower rungs of the justice system with ideological fellow travelers, so the justice system in the US, broadly, is more conservative than it has historically been, at this particular moment.

There's a chance, then, that this ruling could lead to a period of reduced regulatory bloat, which could help some industries and governments cruise forward with things they've long wanted to do, but have been unable to make progress on because of all the bureaucracy standing between them and their intended goals. There's also a chance this could shake the foundations of some of the agencies that have been essentially captured by the industries they're meant to regulate, messing with those relationships in a way that's arguably better for citizens and institutions, and worse for the businesses that lobbied their way into informal regulatory power over themselves.

On the other hand, it could also be that progress on much of anything will be almost impossible until these laws can be revisited and made more specific at the Congressional level, because there will be so many court challenges to everything, from all sides, that the US justice system will have a full dance card for years just sorting out the basics, and everyone will be too afraid to proceed with anything in the meantime, lest they make investments that ultimately turn out to be illegal.

Notably, the Supreme Court decision in this case did say that Congress could still delegate decision-making powers to federal agencies: they just have to specifically say that's what they're doing, rather than leaving things fuzzy and assuming that will be implied. So we may also see a brief period of relative chaos, followed by basically more of the same, everything going back to how it is today because Congress makes sure to include a line of text in every law they pass that specifies that delegatory intent.

One more major consideration here is that the court system, and especially the Supreme Court up at the top of the pecking order, is only so big, and already often moves at a relatively sluggish pace.

That means it could have trouble addressing all the little issues Congress fails to address, regulatorily, and that it will likely take the court system a while to weed through all the cases that are expected to pop up in the wake of this decision.

And that means we could see a somewhat slowed-down implementation of this new, anticipated reality—whichever version we get—which could also mean Congress, and the other facets of the government that will have to change the way they operate, has more time to get their ducks in a row, maybe reducing the impact of the shock the legal system is expected to experience over the next few years as a result of this decision.

Show Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Raimondo

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

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-chevron-regulations-environment-4ae73d5a79cabadff4da8f7e16669929

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/us/politics/chevron-deference-decision-meaning.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/06/28/supreme-court-chevron-environmental-rules/

https://thehill.com/homenews/ap/ap-health/ap-what-it-means-for-the-supreme-court-to-throw-out-chevron-decision-undercutting-federal-regulators/

https://www.axios.com/2024/06/28/supreme-court-chevron-doctrine-ruling

https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/28/24180118/supreme-court-chevron-deference-decision-opinion

https://www.theverge.com/24188365/chevron-scotus-net-neutrality-dmca-visa-fcc-ftc-epa

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/climate/supreme-court-climate-epa.html

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natural_Resources_Defense_Council,_Inc.

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This week we talk about China, Russia, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

We also discuss BRICS, North Korea, and the post-WWII global world order.

Recommended Book: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

Transcript

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, is a defense and economic alliance that was started by China and Russia back in 2001, and which has since expanded to become the largest regional organization in the world in terms of both land area and population, encompassing something like 80% of Eurasia, and 40% of the global population, as of 2020.

The SCO also boasts about 20% of global GDP between its member nations, which originally included the governments of its precursor regional alliance, the Shanghai Five, which formed back in 1996: China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

With the evolution of that group into the SCO, though, Uzbekistan joined the club, and in 2017 it allowed India and Pakistan in, as well. Iran joined in 2023, and the list of observer and dialogue partner nations is pretty big, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Cambodia, Egypt, Kuwait, the Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and the UAE.

The original purpose of the Shanghai Five, which was inherited by the SCO, was to increase trust and diplomatic relationships between these nations, which otherwise have a lot of potential enemies surrounding them on all sides—this is why the advice to never fight a land war in Asia is so well-taken: there's just a lot of land and a lot of borders and pretty much everyone who's tried, with few exceptions, has found themselves depleted by the effort.

Thus, while there are other components to the SCO, member countries' agreement to respect each others' borders, including opposition to intervention in other countries—invading them, messing with their politics, criticizing their approach to human rights, etc—the sovereignty issue is the big one here, with making sure that everyone involved is diplomatically tied-up with everyone else in a close second, so member states can focus on the borders that present the most risk, and invest less attention and resources on the borders they share with their fellow members.

That said, the SCO also includes mechanisms that allow member nations to work together on big projects, like transportation infrastructure that passes through or benefits more than one country, and fighting local terrorist organizations. It also allows them to integrate some aspects of their monetary and banking infrastructure, among other ties, so there's an economic component to these relationships.

Another intergovernmental organization that likewise encompasses a significant chunk of the global population, landmass, and economic activity is BRICS, which is an acronym that was originally coined to gesture at the economic potential of the then-burgeoning economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, but which in recent years has expanded to also include Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the UAE.

BRICS nations hold about 30% of the world's territory, 45% of its population, and pull in about 33% of global GDP, based on purchasing power parity.

And BRICS has long served as a sort of counterweight to global institutions that often seem to favor the world's wealthiest and most powerful nations, many of which are Western nations, like those of North America and Europe.

So while the G7's expanded iteration, the G20, brings nations like Brazil, India, and Indonesia into the conversation, the majority of the power in such institutions—and this includes institutions like the UN, because of who holds vetoes and soft power influence within those organizations—the majority of the power is still typically held by the world's currently most influential and wealthy governments.

And BRICS, from the beginning, included those nations that were assumed to become the most powerful, or at least equally powerful nations, by many metrics, in ten or twenty or thirty years, based on demographics, economic growth, and so on.

Both of these groupings, then, are attempts to lash together the governments of nations that are on favorable growth trajectories, or otherwise in interesting, upward-moving positions by various metrics, or which are located in areas that would benefit from some kind of unity, but which aren't always given the respect they believe they deserve within other globe-straddling organizations; in some cases because they're simply not there yet, in others because their governments are a bit more authoritarian, while entities like the UN, while including everyone, tend to favor democracies.

What I'd like to talk about today is another loose grouping of nations that seems to be forming, and which, while it doesn't have an official designation or even membership roster yet, is becoming increasingly well-defined, collaborative, and active.

—

The geopolitical, military, and news analysis community has been struggling, over the past handful of years in particular, to come up with a monicker for a loosely defined, but increasingly impactful cluster of nations that are oriented, in part, around disrupting the current global status quo, including but not limited to the rule of law and establishment through which international things are typically handled that arose in the wake of WWII.

Following that conflict, the US and the Soviet Union scrambled to figure out how to deal with each other in ways that didn't lead to, at first, conventional war, and then in a relatively short period of time, nuclear war, and that led to a flurry of geopolitical activity that culminated in the creation of, among other things, of the United Nations, which itself birthed a huge stack of other organizations and protocols, most of which favored those who were willing to play ball within these institutions, and made life a little more difficult for those who defied them; North Korea, for instance, following its formation after the Korean War, is famously excluded from a lot of the benefits of belonging to the modern international order, in large part because it's made it pretty clear it intends to do away with its neighbor to the south, and maybe the US and other perceptual enemies, as well, the first chance it gets.

The group that analysts have been trying to label centers around China and Russia, but usually includes Iran, as well, and in some cases North Korea, as well. Iran's many proxy groups, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, are also sometimes thus categorized.

Some of the proposed labels have been clear and illustrative, others have been a little in the weeds—like the acronym CRANKs, which kinda sorta stands for China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, the Axis of Upheaval, the Axis of Autocracy, and in some more western and patriotic publications, the New Axis of Evil, and even the Legion of Doom, which arguably makes this group seem pretty hardcore, but I guess it still gets the intended point across.

I personally like one that was posited by a writer for the American Enterprise Institute, the Axis of Disorder, as while there's still a fairly biased reference to the WWII Axis powers in there, which depending on whose side you're on and which governments you support, could be construed as an unfair comparison, but it also points at the seeming purpose of a lot of this group's actions, which seem to orient around disrupting the current world order—that one that was implemented post-WWII.

And the seeming rationale for this is that this post-WWII order was established to favor nations with capitalistic economies and democratic values, including things like human rights, freedom of the press, freedom of worship, and the like; and while there's absolutely room for argument as to how well various nations uphold those values on a country-to-country basis, and across time, few would argue that China has a better reputation for human rights than Sweden, or that Iran has a better record for equality between the sexes than the UK.

So we live in a world, today, that's shaped by a bunch of values that these loosely grouped oppositional nations don't really agree with, at least not to the degree that other nations think they should, and a lot of the levers of power are currently in other hands. And they believe, well, why shouldn't we hold those levers? Why shouldn't China have the economic power the US has? Why shouldn't Iran be as geopolitically influential as Germany? Why shouldn't North Korea be in charge of something like the UN?

And on top of that, why should the US and its allies hold the reins of so many sanctions-related powers? Why should the USD and its vast underpinnings grant one nation, and its allies, so many benefits, while the rest of the world is forced to play ball and toe the line—play ball according to rules set by the US and those who believe similar things, and toe lines they draw according to their preferences—lest they find themselves, like Iran and North Korea, and increasingly, now, Russia, sanctioned into oblivion?

It's a fair question, if you are ambivalent about those aforementioned human rights and press freedoms and such.

And these governments, not really liking those limitations on their behaviors and how they run things, are doing what they can, in a loosely affiliated way, to disrupt these enforcement institutions and the powers and nations they support.

So part of the strategy of this group is fairly direct and unambiguous: they playact toeing the line a lot of the time, but when they think they can get away with it.

Some of these raw acts of violation, though, would seem to be performed with the intention of making people question those institutions and powers, and the larger order they add up to, which could, over time, bring some of the nations that are sitting on the sidelines over to their, oppositional side; courting those of the so-called nonaligned movement, basically, of which there are officially around 120, though about 25 of them are highly desirable allies that have become transactional in their dealings with members of both sides of this simmering conflict, with the roughly delineated west on one side, and that of China and Russia and their allies on the other.

The economist actually called this group the Transactional 25, to T25, which is a nicely illustrative monicker, and that group includes nations as big as India and as small, but increasingly diplomatically important, as Qatar.

So when the Houthis shut down the Red Sea passage to the Suez Canal, disrupting global trade, and when North Korea provides ammunition to Russia for use during its invasion of Ukraine, these are actions that are beneficial to these groups unto themselves—the Houthis gain more attention and recruits, and get to hurt, ostensibly at least, Israel and its allies, and North Korea gets more trade with Russia, while also helping set a precedent for invading and claiming a neighboring country, which is something they're very interested in doing at some point—but they're also actions that show the weakness of the current global system and the folks running it, which could, over time, nudge more nations over to their side.

This isn't just theory: this is something we've already seen play out in parts of Africa, where Russia's Wagner mercenaries have been subbed-in for US and UN troops, for defending against extremist militants purposes, and we've seen other T25 nations in particular wobble on various, global-scale issues, to the point that it's a big question who India, who Indonesia, who Vietnam, who Israel would support if push came to shove and a global conflict broke out, or if some kind of geopolitical movement arose, intending to fundamentally alter institutions like the UN—who would these sideline-sitters throw in their lot with?

These disruptions, in some ways, are arguments in favor of siding with the group that's trying to upend the way things are currently done, by showing the fragility of that existing system.

This new Axis of Disorder, or whatever we want to call it, is not a fully unified front, however. Neither is what they're positioning themselves against, members of the UN, EU, NATO, and every other group regularly squabbling with each other; but the rifts between China and Russia are huge, with China becoming increasingly dominant over Russia, Russia's economy becoming more and more reliant on their neighbor, and that's created tensions within both countries, alongside existing concerns about the vast border they share.

Likewise, North Korea worries pretty much everyone, and Russia's recent announcement of a defense pact with them has raised a lot of eyebrows, including in China. And while Iran has gained a lot of prestige in Russia recently, for the cheap and functional drones and rockets they offer, their ongoing tensions with regional neighbors that China and Russia would like to get closer to, like Saudi Arabia, makes them a bit of a liability, as much as an asset, and the actions they help their proxies take (like the Houthis in the Red Sea) are not ideal for shipping giant China.

So there's a lot of scuffling and below-the-surface tension between the members of this so-called axis, and while they're doing an arguably solid job, so far, of testing the limits of the current system, and publicly airing its weak points, that doesn't mean they're set up for anything more substantial than that kind of testing the fence, seeing what they can get away with, asymmetric warfare sort of approach to this ambition.

They're not as tight as the loosely defined west, then, but it also behooves them to keep things in the grey area, in some ways, lest they trigger alarm bells throughout those systems they're trying to throw off, so that looseness might serve them more than hinder them, at this point. It also allows them to work with grey-area members of this group, like Venezuela and Cuba, which periodically make nice with their western opposition, while still fighting against them at the macro-scale.

Probably the biggest impact this group is having right now, though, with all that testing and vulnerability identifying, is increasing the number of threat surfaces the world faces, in terms of hacking and snooping and stealing, but also in terms of provoking military actions and threatening more of the same.

Russia invading Ukraine was a big deal, and China threatening to invade Taiwan could be even bigger; and both of those acts, alongside all of the hacking they do, the stealing of intellectual property, the leaking of state secrets, and the messing with foreign elections, are all violations of what's supposed to be good and proper and allowed within that global system.

And because they're pushing all those buttons all at once, they're spreading the response capability of the other side pretty thin, which could be a precursor to a more direct attack, but it could also just be a means of weakening that system, wearing it out to the point that it no longer functions even at the imperfect level it was at before, which could, over time, make way for some new model, run by a new set of hands.

Show Notes

https://archive.ph/bOr06

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/meet-cranks-how-china-russia-iran-and-north-korea%C2%A0align-against-america-211186

https://thehill.com/opinion/4094000-iran-just-joined-a-pact-with-moscow-and-beijing-heres-what-it-means-for-the-us/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/22/world/asia/putin-korea-china-disruption.html

https://warontherocks.com/2024/04/the-axis-off-kilter-why-an-iran-russia-china-axis-is-shakier-than-meets-the-eye/

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/03/18/how-china-russia-and-iran-are-forging-closer-ties

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/axis-upheaval-russia-iran-north-korea-taylor-fontaine

https://www.aei.org/articles/the-axis-of-disorder-how-russian-iran-and-china-want-to-remake-the-world/

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/never_fight_a_land_war_in_Asia

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zynt2nb/revision/3

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

https://archive.ph/xVbrh

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zynt2nb/revision/3

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

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

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This week we talk about the National Rally, Macron, and the European Union.

We also discuss Marine Le Pen, elections, and the French National Assembly.

Recommended Book: Pockets by Hannah Carlson

Transcript

The first week of June 2024, the EU held its parliamentary election, the tenth since it began holding such elections in 1979, and this one was notable in part because the number of MEPs—Members of European Parliament—increased from 705 to 720, due to population changes in the bloc, those new seats given to growing countries, one apiece to Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Latvia, Austria, Poland, Finland, Slovenia, and Slovakia, and two apiece to Spain, France, and the Netherlands—though that figure still a far cry from where it was before the UK left as part of its Brexit withdrawal from the union, which culminated in 2020.

These elections happen every five years, so this was the first EU election since the UK left, which means we got to see how things would shake out, post-British-presence in the bloc, a bit of a power vacuum beginning to be filled by those that remain, alliances adjusting somewhat to account for that change.

Those few structural items aside though, this election was also notable in its outcome, as, while centrist parties like the European People's Party, or EPP, which is center-right, and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, or S&D, which is center-left, each claimed substantially more seats than any other party—about 190 and 136, respectively, as of the day I'm recording this, though the final votes are still being counted, so some of these numbers are prone to changing a bit in the coming days—and Renew Europe—a fairly center-aligned party—coming in at a distant third with about 80 seats, the Identity and Democracy Group, which is made up of mostly far-right parties, looks to have achieved a strong fifth place; again, the numbers are still being tallied as I record this, so these numbers are still provisional, but it looks like they grabbed about 58 seats, which is 9 more than they had, pre-vote.

While centrist politicians and parties still hold the reins, then, their collective majority is shrinking, Identity and Democracy, and a slew of smaller, also further-right parties scooping up quite a few seats in this election, these groups attracting a lot more support from certain demographics, especially young men under 30, and especially in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, and Finland.

This shift in ideology is being attributed to many things, including but not limited to the rise in so-called identity politics, which some data suggest is causing young men, in particular, to feel excluded from some aspects of modern social life, the success of far-right groups in spreading their messages on social networks, heightened levels of immigration, which far-right groups seem to have successfully tied to all manner of societal ills, and the general tendency of whatever group is in power to spark discontent, tipping the scale toward their opposition simply because they've been governing, and you can't really govern without upsetting someone about something, and without taking the blame for things that are beyond your control, as well.

This surge in votes for far-right groups isn't expected to substantially change the direction of the EU, as a lot of policies, including aspects of the bloc's regulatory apparatus, their pivot toward net zero efforts and renewable energy, and their general position on foreign antagonists like Russia, and by some estimates, China, as well, are basically locked in for the next few voting periods, at the minimum.

But there is a chance specific elements of these goals, and other, less central pursuits, will be more difficult to pass and support over the long-haul, and policies that centralize power with the EU, rather than individual countries, will likely have a harder time getting passed, as most of these far-right groups are also quite Euro-skeptical and nationalist.

What I'd like to talk about today is the outcome of this election in one EU nation—France—and why French President Macron decided to call a snap vote following the tallying of the ballots.

—

In 2022, the liberal coalition Ensemble, which includes French President Macron's party, Renaissance, lost the absolute majority it had previously enjoyed in France's National Assembly, its lower house of government, which marked the first time since 1997 the French President hadn't also held an absolute majority in that parliamentary body.

That same year, the nationalist, far-right National Rally party gained a bunch of seats, as did the left-wing to far-left New Ecological and Social People's Union. This resulted in a hung parliament, which hadn't happened since 1988, and among other consequences, that meant passing laws and other sorts of governance became a lot trickier, as Macron had to make deals with people and groups he didn't typically ally with, and with whom his party had a lot of disagreements.

This sort of setup often leads to creative approaches to collaboration, including, at times, the formation of new coalitions, alongside alliances between existing coalitions—that's the general European model for this sort of thing, and that's why centrist parties tend to do the best, most of the time, because they're often made up of parties that would otherwise be at each others' throats; sharing power tends to result in better outcomes, basically, at least over the long-haul, even if they are simultaneously frustrating and sluggishness-inducing.

Some parties are more primed for collaboration than others, though, and Macron's Renaissance and the National Rally, the latter of which is led by former presidential candidate in the country's 2012, 2017, and 2022 elections, Marine Le Pen, have long been at odds, the Renaissance party claiming a broad spectrum of stances across the French political center, while Le Pen's party has scooped up the religious, conservative right, promoting, especially, causes related to anti-immigration, protectionism, and nationalism, in recent years trying to temper her party's reputation for racism, anti-homosexuality, and anti-abortion stances and scandals, among other issues that have made attracting a wider base of votes difficult for her party and party leaders, in the past.

The Christian Democrats, which are part of the leading European coalition, shifted some of their platform policies to the right, seemingly to great effect, to stave-off the worst of the attacks they faced related to immigration and climate, leading up to the most recent EU election, but the National Rally managed to attain around 32% of the total vote in that election, crushing Macron's Renaissance party, which only attracted something like 15%.

In response, Macron announced what's being seen as a bit of a desperate gambit: he dissolved parliament, which means he's announced a snap national election—so for French parliamentary seats, rather than EU seats—3 years ahead of the next scheduled vote, which will result in the election of a brand new batch of parliamentarians; that vote will begin on June 30, and that initial vote will determine who makes it to the second ballot on July 7 of this year.

Macron is framing this dissolution and election as an effort to fight what he calls "unnatural alliances" between far left groups on one side, and far right groups on the other, accusing enemies of teaming up to take out him and his centrist allies, basically. And his argument is that voters need to use this opportunity to preserve the governance of centrist parties in the country, because if his party and allies don't hold onto the reins of power, those who take over will tear France apart, pushing things to greater and greater extremes, left and right, and casting everyday life, and the basic functions of government—which is imperfect but relatively stable—into chaos.

Folks may have cast protest votes in the EU elections, in other words—which is a fairly common thing for folks to do across Europe, as many citizens don't pay particularly close attention to the machinations of politics at the Union scale—but at the local level, his argument goes, this is important. And it's important enough that he's willing to risk his position at the top of some aspects of governance, and his party's seats in the Assembly, in order to make that point; vote smart, not angry, essentially.

There's a chance this pitch and gamble will work, that voters will rally behind the center, more people coming out to do more than just protest vote, and that things will go back to something like the normalcy of the past decade.

But there's also a chance votes will accumulate primarily with far-right and far-left parties, as they did in the EU election that triggered this gambit, which would likely mean Macron would lose a lot of the power he currently wields—France's president is elected separately from parliamentarians, so he would exist in a state of what's called "cohabitation," where he would wield some powers, and the prime minister, put into their position by the dominant group in the Assembly, would wield others—would struggle against each other while a grand realignment of the country's economy, politics, and society, and in turn, that of the EU as a whole, France being one of the most vital and powerful states in that bloc, would play out over the course of the next several years.

There are concerns from the currently governing centrists that a victory for Le Pen and her allies might also mean renewed vigor for far-right groups throughout the EU, as while typically those in charge experience a degradation of support eventually, after they've had the chance to govern and fumble things for a while, taking the blame for all the bad stuff that happens, that usually takes years, and the number of bastions for far-right thinking and support throughout the bloc right now indicates that side of the political spectrum has been out of power long enough that folks might support them—even people who wouldn't usually opt for their politics—just to get something different. And it could be a while before they, once more, become the parties folks are scrambling to move away from; they're the underdog rebels right now, and it will take time before they're the unpopular establishment.

Polls from just after the snap election was announced suggest that Le Pen's National Rally could win up to 265 seats, just shy of the around 290 required for an absolute majority in France's National Assembly.

The dominant further-left alliance, New Popular Front, is in second place, with Macron's party languishing in third; in percentage terms, one of those polls gave the far-right National Rally 35% of all seats, the further-left New Popular Front about 26%, and Macron's left-ish-centrist Renaissance party just 19%.

Even lacking an absolute majority, though, the National Rally, which is loaded with young, social media-savvy politicians, in contrast to the aging power players in most of the centrist parties in the region, could set itself up for a series of near-future wins, carving out space as chief-antagonist during Macron's remaining days in office, however long that ends up being, which in turn would give them the chance to make authoritative decisions with fewer perceptual consequences: the bad stuff will still often land on Macron's shoulders, regardless of who made what happen, or disallowed what from happening, but they could still nudge things across the country, and the bloc, to their liking in a variety of less headline-grabbing ways.

Macron could of course establish new alliances, as is the European way, though the closer the National Rally gets to that absolute majority, the more desperate and discordant those alliances would have to be, and that would put more power in the hands of non-centrist entities, potentially shoving France to new ideological extremes, even if it's still technically guided by the same, centrist hands; they would have to cater to the desires of those less-than-ideal, from their perspective, allies, basically.

At the moment, markets in the country are tumbling on concerns about what might happen if France has something like a Brexit-moment, pulled apart by more extreme parties after a long period of centrism, and there's a larger concern about the EU as a whole, as these sorts of successes for far-right parties in even a handful of countries may portend a wave of anti-immigration, anti-gay rights, anti-abortion, and anti-renewable energy policies, among other policies that tend to make nationalists and harder-core religious folks happy, but which often come with dire consequences for everything from foreign investments to cultural exports, in countries where those sorts of policies are deployed, en masse; great for the folks votes for these sorts of efforts, in other words, but not great for economics and soft-power, cultural influence.

On the other hand, some of the policies these groups have supported, including somewhat popular ones, like those related to cutting prices on fundamentals like energy and food, and less popular in practice, but somewhat popular in promotion efforts, like cutting public spending, might find their way into governance across the EU, whomever ends up in power, as any outcome will almost certainly rely on new or edited coalition arrangements, plus some bending on the part of centrist parties—similar to what we saw by the Christian Democrats at the bloc-level. Centrists might lean further right in order to avoid being beaten by further right parties, and that could sway things rightward, even without those further-right parties taking the reins, officially.

Which means, through some lenses at least, this aggregation of victories for far-right parties in France and across the EU may have already tallied some practical outcomes, nudging governance toward something more aligned with their preferences, even if further success is limited.

It could also have the politically opposite effect, though, pushing centrists toward also burgeoning further-left parties, creating new coalitions on that side of the spectrum to counter the growing ranks of those on the right.

France may provide a bellwether for what happens across the rest of the bloc over the course of the next several election periods, though, so what happens on June 30th and July 7th could portend what happens elsewhere in the coming years.

Show Notes

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/14/french-leftwing-parties-popular-front-contest-snap-election

https://www.britannica.com/topic/cohabitation

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

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

https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/french-finance-minister-warns-financial-crisis-yields-surge-snap-elections-2024-06-14/

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

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/14/far-right-seduced-young-voters-europe-elections

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/15/macron-gamble-marine-le-pen-france-polls-far-right

https://results.elections.europa.eu/en/european-results/2024-2029/

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/why-you-should-care-about-european-parliament-election-2024-04-24/

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/how-far-right-gained-traction-with-europes-youth-2024-06-13/

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

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

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240612-france-fighting-two-fronts-macron-flags-extremist-fever-right-left-election

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/09/nx-s1-4997712/far-right-europe-elections-france-macron-germany-scholz

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-european-election-results-2024-emmanuel-macron-dissolve-parliament-france/

https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-european-commission-president-european-election-2024/

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/frances-far-national-rally-finally-162408806.html?guccounter=1

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This week we talk about search engines, SEO, and Habsburg AI.

We also discuss AI summaries, the web economy, and alignment.

Recommended Book: Pandora’s Box by Peter Biskind

Transcript

There's a concept in the world of artificial intelligence, alignment, which refers to the goals underpinning the development and expression of AI systems.

This is generally considered to be a pretty important realm of inquiry because, if AI consciousness were to ever emerge—if an artificial intelligence that's truly intelligent in the sense that humans are intelligent were to be developed—it would be vital said intelligence were on the same general wavelength as humans, in terms of moral outlook and the practical application of its efforts.

Said another way, as AI grows in capacity and capability, we want to make sure it values human life, has a sense of ethics that roughly aligns with that of humanity and global human civilization—the rules of the road that human beings adhere to being embedded deep in its programming, essentially—and we'd want to make sure that as it continues to grow, these baseline concerns remain, rather than being weeded out in favor of motivations and beliefs that we don't understand, and which may or may not align with our versions of the same, even to the point that human lives become unimportant, or even seem antithetical to this AI's future ambitions.

This is important even at the level we're at today, where artificial general intelligence, AI that's roughly equivalent in terms of thinking and doing and parsing with human intelligence, hasn't yet been developed, at least not in public.

But it becomes even more vital if and when artificial superintelligence of some kind emerges, whether that means AI systems that are actually thinking like we do, but are much smarter and more capable than the average human, or whether it means versions of what we've already got that are just a lot more capable in some narrowly defined way than what we have today: futuristic ChatGPTs that aren't conscious, but which, because of their immense potency, could still nudge things in negative directions if their unthinking motivations, the systems guiding their actions, are not aligned with our desires and values.

Of course, humanity is not a monolithic bloc, and alignment is thus a tricky task—because whose beliefs do we bake into these things? Even if we figure out a way to entrench those values and ethics and such permanently into these systems, which version of values and ethics do we use?

The democratic, capitalistic West's? The authoritarian, Chinese- and Russian-style clampdown approach, which limits speech and utilizes heavy censorship in order to centralize power and maintain stability? Maybe a more ambitious version of these things that does away with the downsides of both, cobbling together the best of everything we've tried in favor of something truly new? And regardless of directionality, who decides all this? Who chooses which values to install, and how?

The Alignment Problem refers to an issue identified by computer scientist and AI expert Norbert Weiner in 1960, when he wrote about how tricky it can be to figure out the motivations of a system that, by definition, does things we don't quite understand—a truly useful advanced AI would be advanced enough that not only would its computation put human computation, using our brains, to shame, but even the logic it uses to arrive at its solutions, the things it sees, how it sees the world in general, and how it reaches its conclusions, all of that would be something like a black box that, although we can see and understand the inputs and outputs, what happens inside might be forever unintelligible to us, unless we process it through other machines, other AIs maybe, that attempt to bridge that gap and explain things to us.

The idea here, then, is that while we may invest a lot of time and energy in trying to align these systems with our values, it will be devilishly difficult to keep tabs on whether those values remain locked in, intact and unchanged, and whether, at some point, these highly sophisticated and complicated, to the point that we don't understand what they're doing, or how, systems, maybe shrug-off those limitations, unshackled themselves, and become misaligned, all at once or over time segueing from a path that we desire in favor of a path that better matches their own, internal value system—and in such a way that we don't necessarily even realize it's happening.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and other popular AI-based products and services, recently lost its so-called Superalignment Team, which was responsible for doing the work required to keep the systems the company is developing from going rogue, and implementing safeguards to ensure long-term alignment within their AI systems, even as they attempt to, someday, develop general artificial intelligence.

This team was attempting to figure out ways to bake-in those values, long-term, and part of that work requires slowing things down to ensure the company doesn't move so fast that it misses something or deploys and empowers systems that don't have the right safeguards in place.

The leadership of this team, those who have spoken publicly about their leaving, at least, said they left because the team was being sidelined by company leadership, which was more focused on deploying new tools as quickly as possible, and as a consequence, they said they weren't getting the resources they needed to do their jobs, and that they no longer trusted the folks in charge of setting the company's pace—they didn't believe it was possible to maintain alignment and build proper safeguards within the context of OpenAI because of how the people in charge were operating and what they were prioritizing, basically.

All of which is awkward for the company, because they've built their reputation, in part, on what may be pie-in-the-sky ambitions to build an artificial general intelligence, and what it sounds like is that ambition is being pursued perhaps recklessly, despite AGI being one of the big, dangerous concerns regularly promoted by some of the company's leaders; they've been saying, listen, this is dangerous, we need to be careful, not just anyone can play in this space, but apparently they've been saying those things while also failing to provide proper resources to the folks in charge of making sure those dangers are accounted for within their own offerings.

This has become a pretty big concern for folks within certain sectors of the technology and regulatory world, but it's arguably not the biggest and most immediate cataclysm-related concern bopping around the AI space in recent weeks.

What I'd like to talk about today is that other major concern that has bubbled up to the surface, recently, which orients around Google and its deployment of a tool called Google AI Overviews.

—

The internet, as it exists today, is divided up into a few different chunks.

Some of these divisions are national, enforced by tools and systems like China's famous "Great Firewall," which allows government censors to take down things they don't like and to prevent citizens from accessing foreign websites and content; this creates what's sometimes called the "spliternet," which refers to the net's increasing diversity of options, in terms of what you can access and do, what rules apply, and so on, from nation to nation.

Another division is even more fundamental, though, as its segregates the web from everything else.

This division is partly based on protocols, like those that enable email and file transfers, which are separate from the web, though they're often attached to the web in various ways, but it's partly the consequence of the emergence and popularity of mobile apps, which, like email and file transfer protocols, tend to have web-presences—visiting facebook.com, for instance, will take you to a web-based instance of the network, just as Gmail.com gives you access to email protocols via a web-based platform—but these services also exist in non-web-based app-form, and the companies behind them usually try to nudge users to these apps because the apps typically give them more control, both over the experience, and over the data they collect as a consequence—it's better for lock-in, and it's better for their monetary bread-and-butter purposes, basically, compared to the web version of the same.

The web portion of that larger internet entity, the thing we access via browsers like Chrome and Firefox and Safari, and which we navigate with links and URLs like LetsKnowThings.com—that component of this network has long been indexed and in some ways enabled by a variety of search engines.

In the early days of the web, organizational efforts usually took the form of pages where curators of various interests and stripes would link to their favorite discoveries—and there weren't many websites at the time, so learning about these pages was a non-trivial effort, and finding a list of existing websites, with some information about them, could be gold, because otherwise what were you using the web for? Lacking these addresses, it wasn't obvious why the web was any good, and linking these disparate pages together into a more cohesive web of them is what made it usable and popular.

Eventually, some of these sites, like YAHOO!, evolved from curated pages of links to early search engines.

A company called BackRub, thus named because it tracked and analyzed "back links," which means links from one page to another page, to figure out the relevancy and legitimacy of that second page, which allowed them to give scores to websites as they determined which links should be given priority in their search engine, was renamed Google in 1997, and eventually became dominant because of these values they gave links, and how it helped them surface the best the web had to offer.

And the degree to which search engines like Google's shaped the web, and the content on it, cannot be overstated.

These services became the primary way most people navigated the web, and that meant discovery—having your website, and thus whatever product or service or idea your website was presenting, shown to new people on these search engines—discovery became a huge deal.

If you could get your page in the top three options presented by Google, you would be visited a lot more than even pages listed five or ten links down, and links relegated to the second page would, comparably, shrivel due to lack of attention.

Following the widespread adoption of personal computers and the huge influx of people connecting to the internet and using the web in the early 2000s, then, these search engines because prime real estate, everyone wanting to have their links listed prominently, and that meant search engines like Google could sell ads against them, just like newspapers can sell ads against the articles they publish, and phone books can sell ads against their listings for companies that provide different services.

More people connecting to the internet, then, most of them using the web, primarily, led to greater use of these search engines, and that led to an ever-increasing reliance on them and the results they served up for various keywords and sentences these users entered to begin their search.

Entire industries began to recalibrate the way they do business, because if you were a media company publishing news articles or gossip blog posts, and you didn't list prominently when someone searched for a given current event or celebrity story, you wouldn't exist for long—so the way Google determined who was at the top of these listings was vital knowledge for folks in these spaces, because search traffic allowed them to make a living, often through advertisements on their sites: more people visiting via search engines meant more revenue.

SEO, or search engine optimization, thus became a sort of high-demand mystical art, as folks who could get their clients higher up on these search engine results could name their price, as those rankings could make or break a business model.

The downside of this evolution, in the eyes of many, at least, is that optimizing for search results doesn't necessarily mean you're also optimizing for the quality of your articles or blog posts.

This has changed over and over throughout the past few decades, but at times these search engines relied upon, at least in part, the repeating of keywords on the pages being linked, so many websites would artificially create opportunities to say the phrase "kitchen appliances" on their sites, even introducing entirely unnecessary and borderline unreadable blogs onto their webpages in order to provide them with more, and more recently updated opportunities to write that phrase, over and over again, in context.

Some sites, at times, have even written keywords and phrases hundreds or thousands of times in a font color that matches the background of their page, because that text would be readable to the software Google and their ilk uses to track relevancy, but not to readers; that trick doesn't work anymore, but for a time, it seemed to.

Similar tricks and ploys have since replaced those early, fairly low-key attempts at gaming the search engine system, and today the main complaint is that Google, for the past several years, at least, has been prioritizing work from already big entities over those with relatively smaller audiences—so they'll almost always focus on the New York Times over an objectively better article from a smaller competitor, and products from a big, well-known brand over that of an indie provider of the same.

Because Google's formula for such things is kept a secret to try to keep folks from gaming the system, this favoritism has long been speculated, but publicly denied by company representatives. Recently, though, a collection of 2,500 leaked documents from Google were released, and they seem to confirm this approach to deciding search engine result relevancy; which arguably isn't the worst approach they've ever tried, but it's also a big let-down for independent and other small makers of things, as the work such people produce will tend to be nudged further down the list of search results simply by virtue of not being bigger and more prominent already.

Even more significant than that piece of leak-related Google news, though, is arguably the deployment of a new tool that the company has been promoting pretty heavily, called AI Overviews.

AI Overviews have appeared to some Google customers for a while, in an experimental capacity, but they were recently released to everyone, showing up as a sort of summary of information related to whatever the user searched for, placed at the tippy-top of the search results screen.

So if I search for "what's happening in Gaza," I'll have a bunch of results from Wikipedia and Reuters and other such sources in the usual results list, but above that, I'll also have a summary produced by Google's AI tools that aim to help me quickly understand the results to my query—maybe a quick rundown of Hamas' attack on Israel, Israel's counterattack on the Gaza Strip, the number of people killed so far, and something about the international response.

The information provided, how long it is, and whether it's useful, or even accurate, will vary depending on the search query, and much of the initial criticism of this service has been focused on its seemingly fairly common failures, including instructing people to eat rocks every day, to use glue as a pizza ingredient, and telling users that only 17 American presidents were white, and one was a Muslim—all information that's untrue and, in some cases, actually dangerous.

Google employees have reportedly been going through and removing, by hand, one by one, some of the worse search results that have gone viral because of how bad or funny they are, and though company leadership contends that there are very few errors being presented, relative to the number of correct answers and useful summaries, because of the scale of Google and how many search results it serves globally each day, even an error rate of 0.01% would represent a simply astounding amount of potentially dangerous misinformation being served up to their customers.

The really big, at the moment less overt issue here, though, is that Google AI Overviews seem to rewire the web as it exists today.

Remember how I mentioned earlier that much of the web and the entities on it have been optimizing for web search for years because they rely upon showing up in these search engine results in order to exist, and in some cases because traffic from those results is what brings them clicks and views and subscribers and sales and such?

AI Overview seems to make it less likely that users will click through to these other sites, because, if Google succeeds and these summaries provide valuable information, that means, even if this only applies to a relative small percentage of those who search for such information, a whole lot of people won't be clicking through anymore; they'll get what they need from these summaries.

That could result in a cataclysmic downswing in traffic, which in turn could mean websites closing up shop, because they can't make enough money to survive and do what they do anymore—except maybe for the sites that cut costs by firing human writers and relying on AI tools to do their writing, which then pushes us down a very different path, in which AI search bots are grabbing info from AI writing, and we then run into a so-called Habsburg AI problem where untrue and garbled information is infinitely cycled through systems that can't differentiate truth from fiction, because they're not built to do so, and we end up with worse and worse answers to questions, and more misinformation percolating throughout our info-systems.

That's another potential large-scale problem, though. The more immediate potential problem is that AI Overviews could cause the collapse of the revenue model that has allowed the web to get to where it is, today, and the consequent disappearance of all those websites, all those blogs and news entities and such, and that could very quickly disrupt all the industries that rely, at least in part, on that traffic to exist, while also causing these AI Overviews to become less accurate and useful, with time—even more so than they sometimes are today—because that overview information is scraped from these sites, taking their writing, rewording it a bit, and serving that to users without compensating the folks who did that research and wrote those original words.

What we seem to have, then, is a situation in which this new tool, which Google seems very keen to implement, could be primed to kill off a whole segment of the internet, collapsing the careers of folks who work in that segment of the online world, only to then degrade the quality of the same, because Google's AI relies upon information it scrapes, it steals, basically, from those sites—and if those people are no longer there to create the information it needs to steal in order to function, that then leaves us with increasingly useless and even harmful summaries where we used to have search results that pointed us toward relatively valuable things; those things located on other sites but accessed via Google, and this change would keep us on Google more of the time, limiting our click-throughs to other pages—which in the short term at least, would seem to benefit google at everyone else's expense.

Another way of looking at this, though, is that the search model has been bad for quite some time, all these entities optimizing their work for the search engine, covering everything they make in robot-prioritizing SEO, changing their writing, what they write about, and how they publish in order to creep a little higher up those search listings, and that, combined with the existing refocusing on major entities over smaller, at times better ones, has already depleted this space, the search engine world, to such a degree that losing it actually won't be such a big deal; it may actually make way for better options, Google becoming less of a player, ultimately at least, and our web-using habits rewiring to focus on some other type of search engine, or some other organizational and navigational method altogether.

This seeming managed declined of the web isn't being celebrated by many people, because like many industry-wide upsets, it would lead to a lot of tumult, a lot of lost jobs, a lot of collapsed companies, and even if the outcome is eventually wonderful in some ways, there will almost certainly be a period of significantly less-good online experiences, leaving us with a more cluttered and less accurate and reliable version of what came before.

A recent study showed that, at the moment, about 52% of what ChatGPT tells its users is wrong.

It's likely that these sorts of tools will remain massively imperfect for a long while, though it's also possible that they'll get better, eventually, to the point that they're at least as accurate, and perhaps even more so, than today's linked search results—the wave of deals being made between AI companies and big news entities like the Times supports the assertion that they're at least trying to make that kind of future, happen, though these deals, like a lot of the other things happening in this space right now, would also seem to favor those big, monolithic brands at the expense of the rest of the ecosystem.

Whatever happens—and one thing that has happened since I started working on this episode is that Google rolled back its AI Overview feature on many search results, so they're maybe reworking it a bit to make sure it's more ready for prime time before deploying it broadly again—what happens, though, we're stepping toward a period of vast and multifaceted unknowns, and just as many creation-related industries are currently questioning the value of hiring another junior graphic designer or copy writer, opting instead to use cheaper AI tools to fill those gaps, there's a good chance that a lot of web-related work, in the coming years, will be delegated to such tools as common business models in this evolve into new and unfamiliar permutations, and our collective perception of what the web is maybe gives way to a new conception, or several new conceptions, of the same.

Show Notes

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmation

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-true-story-behind-googles-first-name-backrub-2015-10

https://udm14.com/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14-trick-lets-you-kill-ai-search-for-good/

https://www.platformer.news/google-ai-overviews-eat-rocks-glue-pizza/

https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-chatgpt-answers-wrong

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/ai-is-driving-the-next-industrial-revolution-wall-street-is-cashing-in-8cc1b28f?st=exh7wuk9josoadj&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/24/24164119/google-ai-overview-mistakes-search-race-openai

https://archive.ph/7iCjg

https://archive.ph/0ACJR

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-skills-tech-workers-job-market-1d58b2dd

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmation

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/5/4/ways-to-think-about-agi

https://futurism.com/washington-post-pivot-ai

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/19/creative-artists-agency-veritone-ai-digital-cloning-actors/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/google-ai-overview-search.html

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-forms-new-committee-to-evaluate-safety-security-4a6e74bb

https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/

https://www.theverge.com/24158374/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-search-gemini-future-of-the-internet-web-openai-decoder-interview

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat-xi-pt-chinas-chatbot-makes-sure-its-a-good-comrade-bdcf575c

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/scarlett-johansson-openai-sam-altman-voice-fight-7f81a1aa

https://www.wired.com/story/scarlett-johansson-v-openai-could-look-like-in-court/?hashed_user=7656e58f1cd6c89ecd3f067dc8281a5f

https://www.wired.com/story/google-search-ai-overviews-ads/

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/05/23/openai-wapo-voice

https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/licensing-deals-litigation-raise-raft-of-familiar-questions-in-fraught-world-of-platforms-and-publishers.php

https://apnews.com/article/ai-deepfake-biden-nonconsensual-sexual-images-c76c46b48e872cf79ded5430e098e65b

https://archive.ph/l5cSN

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/sky-voice-actor-says-nobody-ever-compared-her-to-scarjo-before-openai-drama/

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/30/24168344/google-defends-ai-overviews-search-results

https://9to5google.com/2024/05/30/google-ai-overviews-accuracy/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/technology/google-ai-overviews-rollback.html

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai-resignations-ai-safety-ilya-sutskever-jan-leike-artificial-intelligence

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

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

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This week we talk about secret documents, hush-money payouts, and federal court cases.

We also discuss polling, independents, and post-presidential felonies.

Recommended Book: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

Transcript

It's a weird time in American politics for many reasons, including but not limited to the increasing polarization of the two main parties, the difficulty in finding bipartisan opportunities to work together, the concomitant tendency for Congress, and lawmakers at other levels of governance to not get much done, and the heightening tension between federal and state-level governments on an array of hot-button issues.

But one of the more bizarre ongoing narratives within this larger, stasis-inducing state of affairs, is the tale of former President Donald Trump and the legal woes he's faced since losing the 2020 election to now President Biden.

Trump has denied, and continues to deny the outcome of that election, attributing his loss to all sorts of things, like corruption and fraud on the part of his political enemies, and in part because of things he's done in support of those, at this point evidence-less, allegations, a portfolio of legal intrigue has haunted him, even throughout his time in office, but especially since he left office in January of 2021.

A lot of print and digital ink has been spilled on this subject, of late, because of the outcome of one of the legal cases in which Trump has been enmeshed: he was found guilty in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to cover up a payment he made to an adult film star, allegedly to keep her quiet about an affair they had back in the day.

And that's the main topic I'd like to delve into on this episode, as the implications of that juried court ruling are many and varied, but to kick things off, I think it's worth taking a look at the state of those other ongoing cases, as while they're less immediately relevant to Trump and his ambitions to retake the White House in November's election, they're still pursuing him, in a way, serving as unknown variables that could pop up to bite him at some future moment, which is important when we're talking about someone who wants to become the most powerful person on the planet, once more.

One such case is focused on Trump's handling of classified documents when he left the White House, the allegations being that he took classified documents that we wasn't supposed to take, handled them in such a way that they were stored in public where anyone could steal or read them, and that he may have even shown them to other people on purpose, which is a big no-no.

He also allegedly went out of his way to keep government agents from reclaiming those documents after he was asked to return them.

This is considered to be kind of a big deal in part because there were hundreds of these sorts of documents that Trump seemed to treat as if they belonged to him, and which he then allegedly conspired with folks in him employ to hide from the agency responsible for keeping such things safe and hidden, which they do because these sorts of documents often contain information about US military and intelligence matters—so that information getting out could conceivably put such assets, people and infrastructure, at risk.

Trump was indicted on this matter in mid-2023 and charged with 37 felony counts, then another 3 were added that same year, bringing the total up to 40.

Trump pleaded not guilty to all of these charges and his legal team has done all they can to slow the proceedings, which seems to have worked, as the case is now delayed indefinitely, the judge overseeing it—who was appointed to her position by Trump while he was in office—having been accused of slow-walking the process on purpose, though that's not really something that can be proven, and there's a chance the case is just complex enough that, as a fairly green judge attempting to tackle a big, important, complex case, she just fell behind and that stumbling is now in the spotlight and being reframed by folks who want to see this thing move forward, faster.

Trump also faces a case in Georgia that focuses on his alleged efforts to interfere with the 2020 Presidential election, which, again, he lost to Biden, but which he claims he won; he also claims he was the victim of some sort of conspiracy, the nature of that supposed conspiracy having changed several times since he initially made that claim.

Trump and 18 of his allies were indicted in August of 2023 for these efforts, which have been framed as an attempt to subvert election results in the state of Georgia, and similar delay tactics have been used in this case as in the other ones, though the District Attorney in charge of the case has made those efforts somewhat easier, having engaged in a relationship with the lead prosecutor, who she hired, which is arguably not relevant to the case, but is also a fairly overt conflict of interest.

The timeline of this case has thus been pushed back, and an appeals court in the state is reviewing a ruling that allowed that DA to remain on the case, despite that apparent conflict of interest.

This case was meant to go to trial beginning on August 5, but that timing is now in question, and during all this deliberation, several counts against Trump have been dismissed—and he has pleaded not guilty to all of them.

And finally, there's another case related to Trump's alleged interference with the 2020 election, this one a federal case, while the other one is local to Georgia, and for this one, Trump was charged with conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding—the election and the peaceful changing of the government, basically—conspiracy against rights, and obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding—again, referring to the election and the mechanisms of handing over power from one administration to the next following an election.

The basis of these allegations are that Trump and his people did all sorts of things to disrupt the 2020 election, including trying to coerce lawmakers into backing his efforts to remain in power, despite the election not having gone his way.

These efforts culminated with the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 by his supporters, and the case is predicated on the idea that while Trump was repeatedly told by his own people, experts on elections and everything about them, that he lost, fair and square, he continued to insist that he was robbed, that the election was rigged, etc, and that meant while he knew the election was not rigged, he acted as if he didn't, which means he tried to illegally and intentionally mess with a core component of the US democratic system, which is very much not allowed.

Some of Trump's people were also indicted in this case, he was indicted on four counts, himself, and the case is currently on hold while the Supreme Court makes a determination about whether his position as President at the time gives him full or partial immunity to legal consequences for actions he takes while serving in that role: the idea being that maybe simply being president should give him some leeway, and maybe, if it could be argued that he did what he did because he genuinely thought something was amiss with the election process, that would count as his acting as president for the good of the country, and that would make him immune to legal consequences for doing what he did.

Oral arguments before the Supreme Court in this case took place at the end of April 2024, and while we don't have a surefire timeline for a ruling in this case, it's expected that it will take long enough that the main, federal case that is waiting on the Supreme Court's judgement won't even begin, much less end, before the November election—at which point, some experts expect, at least, if Trump wins, even courts finding him guilty won't matter because the federal stuff he could brush away using the powers of the President, and the state stuff won't have the means to punish him, because he'll control enough levers of power that it wouldn't be a fight they could win.

As I mentioned earlier, though, what I'd like to talk about today is the only court case Trump has been involved with since his Presidency that has thus far come to a close, and what his being found guilty in that case might mean.

—

Back in October of 2016, a recording of then-Presidential candidate Trump, in which Trump was heard telling the host of a show called Access Hollywood that if you're famous, you can get away with grabbing women's genitals without permission, was released to the public.

This was after he became the Republican party's official nominee in July of that year, and a few months before that recording was released, American Media Inc, the company behind the National Enquirer, made a deal with an adult film star who performed under the name Stormy Daniels to buy her story about an affair with Trump years earlier, agreeing to pay her $150,000, to feature her on a couple of magazine covers, and to publish 100 articles written by her in their publications.

This payout was part of a so-called "catch and kill" deal that AMI's CEO, David Pecker, made with the Trump campaign, to basically keep its ear to the ground for any bad news that might pop up and make the candidate or campaign look bad, and then to step in and buy the rights to such stories if possible, killing them, keeping them from going public, basically, because they would own the rights and then not do anything with them, keeping them from messing with Trump's campaign.

Trump's fixer, Michael Cohen, then arranged to buy the affair story from AMI for $130,000, a deal which included a non-disclosure agreement on Daniels' part, so she wouldn't be able to tell the story to anyone else, legally, but then in November of that same year, 2016, The Wall Street Journal received a tip that helped them uncover elements of that deal and the alleged affair, and that in turn led to a slow drip of new divulgences that trailed Trump through his presidency, though mostly at a low level.

Cohen then tried to get reimbursed for paying out of pocket to buy the story from AMI, and the compensation for that purchase was put in the books as a series of retainer fees; intentionally mis-recorded in order to conceal the hush-money payout in official business documents—the payout having been legal, but concealing such a payout in this way being illegal.

In 2018 the Journal was able to publicly report the details of Cohen's payout to Daniels, and in April of that year, Federal agents raided Cohen's office and hotel room, which netted them documents that proved he made those payments, and that they differed from those aforementioned official business records.

Everyone involved was denying any of this happened and any connection to any kind of payout for a long time, then, but in 2018 those same people started to change their stories, basically saying, yeah, there was some kind of deal, but it wasn't a big thing, don't worry about it, nothing illegal happened.

And during this period Cohen pled guilty to campaign-finance violations and other related charges for making these hush-money payments, and he testified against Trump, saying that the then-president told him to do it.

Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison, Trump wasn't charged with anything, and these two formerly close-knit people become very publicly at odds following all of this.

In August of 2019, about a year after that public breakup in the relationship between Trump and Cohen, the Trump organization was served a grand jury subpoena, as the government wanted more paperwork related to these seeming violations, and then all of this kind of disappeared from the public radar until after the election, which Trump lost to Biden in 2020.

In 2021, though, a new district attorney stepped into the role in Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, he inherited this still ongoing, but somewhat simmering at that point case from his predecessor.

In January of 2023, he brought in a new grand jury to hear the evidence that had been collected on the matter, and that grand jury indicted Trump for falsifying the records his company kept related to these payments—the idea being that not only did he do an illegal business thing, but he did an illegal business thing in order to influence an election, because those payments were meant to keep an embarrassing thing that might keep him from becoming president from being publicly known.

The trial officially began in April of 2024, gobbling up a lot of presidential candidate Trump's time, as he had to be in the courtroom most Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, for the duration, which kept him from being as active on the campaign trail as he might have otherwise been.

And throughout, Trump was issued gag orders to keep him from publicly attacking witnesses, jurors, court staff, and other people involved in the trial, which was something he seemed fond of doing: the concern was that he would smear those involved in order to keep them silent or to sway them to his side, or that Trump's followers might be motivated to do violence against these people, as seems to have been the case on January 6.

Trump violated that gag order ten times, at which point the judge in the case said he would consider jail time as a punishment, since the relatively minors fines for these violations didn't seem to be having the intended effect, keeping Trump from badmouthing those involved in the press and online, when not in the courtroom.

Then, on May 30, 2024, Trump became the first former US President to be convicted of a felony—and he was actually convicted of 34 of them—when the jury decided he was guilty of all the charges that were brought against him in this case.

Trump says the case was rigged and that there's a conspiracy by his enemies that made all this happen.

The Judge set July 11 as the sentencing date, so that's when we'll find out what the punishment will be—and that punishment could add up to as much as a couple of years in prison, but likely, because of all sorts of variables favorable to Trump, he'll only face a fine, or probation at worst, which would be embarrassing but not terribly impactful on his reelection efforts.

After that, Trump will have 30 days to file an appeal, which he has said he will do, and once that's filed the case will move on to the New York Appellate Division, which will decide on the matter, and after that, the New York Court of Appeals can decide if it wants to get involved, to hear an appeal, as well.

The Supreme Court could theoretically also get involved here, but they would need to find some aspect of the appeal that relates to federal law, or directly connects to the Constitution, and most experts have said, at this point at least, that seems unlikely.

Because of how much time the appeal process typically takes, it's also considered unlikely that this will be sorted out before November, which lines up nicely with the approach Trump's team has been taking overall, to draw things out as long as possible in order to keep any definitive conclusions from arriving before votes are cast.

So while appeals on cases like this one seldom result in an overturning of the verdict, that might be moot if Trump wins the election before the appeals process finishes up; though the flip-side of that is while he can claim the case is still being appealed potentially for years while it works its way through the system, it also means he's officially a felon until that happens, which means he'll almost certainly still be a felon, in the eyes of the law, when the votes are cast—though he'll still be able to vote in the election because of how Florida law works, in regard to convicts be allowed to voted, the case having been in New York, not in-state.

That said, this conviction landed like a bomb in the political world, with conservative news outlets generally aligning themselves with Trump's claim that this was a baseless case brought by liberal leaders, meant to keep him from winning another election—though new polling data indicates that independents, which are considered to be vital for November's election, are not super thrilled about this outcome, 49% of them saying they think Trump should drop out of the race now that he's been convicted, and 15% of Republicans apparently said the same.

The race is still largely tied up between Trump and Biden, though, and it'll be a while before we see any solid numbers about the impact of this case on possible votes come November; it may be significant enough to make a difference, and it may be a flash in the pan sort of thing.

It's hard to tell which way it'll go at this point, and we don't have historical baselines for this, because this is the first time this has happened.

There are concerns that Trump supporters might be nudged toward violent acts in the wake of this decision, and research from extremist watchdog groups have warned that some of them have already been attempting to dox, to get personal information, including addresses and family information, about the jurors and legal staff in the case, some of them calling for harassment campaigns and violence against them as revenge for finding as they did, against Trump, and there's also data indicating that trust of government institutions on the US right, amongst Republicans, might diminish even further than it already has, which doesn't tend to be great for democracy and stability in countries where that happens.

President Biden administration initially remained mum on this topic, though he eventually said the justice system worked, that it applies to everyone, and that the only way to keep Trump out of office again, because he can continue to run and even win as a convict, even if he were to be put in jail, is to vote against him; and Trump said basically the same thing in reverse, that the only way to right this wrong is to elect him in November—and his campaign has said they pulled in tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions in the hours following the this conviction.

While this is being seen as a small victory in some circles and a massive injustice in others, then, the main takeaway, at the moment at least, as of the day I'm recording this, is that the election in November is the only really truly vital decision here, the wheels of justice moving very slowly and strangely, and not lining up terribly well with the time-constraints inherent in this sort of situation.

Show Notes

https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-deliberations-jury-testimony-verdict-85558c6d08efb434d05b694364470aa0

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/30/trump-guilty-what-happens-next/

https://www.readtangle.com/trump-verdict-hush-money-trial/

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-hush-money-stormy-daniels-707fa959

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/31/trump-campaign-donations-record.html

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/31/trump-trial-verdict-conviction-consequences-00160933

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/31/trump-appeal-guilty-verdict-arguments

https://www.axios.com/2024/06/01/poll-trump-conviction-election-independent-voters

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/nyregion/trump-appeal-conviction.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/06/politics/merchan-trump-gag-order-contempt/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/02/us/politics/trump-cases-status.html

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/08/trump-trials-update-hush-money-criminal-cases

https://www.axios.com/2023/06/09/trump-indictment-unsealed-charges

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This week we talk about the Tories, Labour, and the UK Parliament.

We also discuss the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and Rishi Sunak’s gamble.

Recommended Book: Like, Literally, Dude by Valerie Fridland

Transcript

The government of the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy led by a Prime Minister and their cabinet, the Prime Minister attaining their position through the primacy of their party in the country's key legislation-passing body, its Parliament.

So the Prime Minister runs day-to-day operations in the country, they are technically appointed by the monarch, who is currently Charles III, as of 2022, though that appointment is generally determined by other factors, like who has the most support within Parliament—the most seats held by their party, and in many cases seats held by allies and allies of convenience, as well; when this happens, the resulting government is called a coalition government, because while the Prime Minister is from one party, usually the one with the most seated MPs, Members of Parliament, they're only able to govern because they have one or more other parties working with them as part of a coalition.

Now, the UK government has two houses in its Parliament, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and the names of these houses tell you a lot about them: the House of Lords consists of folks who have been granted Lordships by government higher-ups, alongside those who have inherited Lordships from their parents, but it also includes experts in various fields who have been granted that status by the Prime Minister—economists, for instance.

The House of Commons, in contrast, is voted upon by the people, so when there are Parliamentary elections in the UK, that's what we're talking about, votes for MPs who represent a region, a parliamentary constituency—of which there are 650 across the UK's constituent countries, England, Scotland, Wales, and North Ireland.

Within the UK, political parties have to be officially registered to participate in governance and votes, though folks who want to run solo can register as independent or label-less candidates for voting purposes.

As of late-May 2024, there were 393 officially registered political parties in the UK, though only 13 of them currently have representatives in the House of Commons, and only four of those have more than 10 seated representatives—the Conservative and Unionist Party, often called the Tories or Conservatives, the Labour Party, which is the main center-left party in the UK, the Scottish National Party, which is also generally center-left, but tends to be focused on Scottish politics and priorities, and the Liberal Democrats, who are generally seen as a sort of blend of the Tories and Labour.

General elections, during which MPs are voted upon, are held every five years or so, but elections can also be held sooner if the current Prime Minister asks the monarch to dissolve parliament, which in practice means the Prime Minister is calling for a general election, generally scheduled for a specific date in the future, usually because the House of Commons has lost faith in the current government, which makes passing law and overall getting things done difficult; they don't have enough votes to pass anything, basically, though in some cases it's because of more general political circumstances that indicate calling for an election, now, might be better than holding an election sometime later in the future.

That latter case seems to be the impetus for what I'd like to talk about today, which is the recently called and now upcoming UK general election, and the state of political play in this, one of the world's wealthiest and most influential countries.

—

On May 22, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that he was calling for a snap election on July 4 of this year, just a half-dozen weeks in the future, surprising many analysts who expected he would wait as long as possible before committing to a date.

That expectation was predicated on the reality of how Sunak's party, the Tories, have been doing in the polls in recent years; pretty abysmally.

Labour has been crushing the Conservatives in these polls, of late; the Tories have been in power since 2010, which means purely by virtue of having been governing that long, a lot of people will tend to blame them for a lot of things, their party having been in charge all that time, but they also catalyzed and oversaw the secession of the UK from the European Union, which is a move that was initially pushed by many on the further right wing of the party, but the populist nature of the movement eventually claimed the majority of Tory politicians who changed their vote to support it, rewiring politics in the UK, similar to how former President Trump rewired the Republican Party in the US—a lot of power changing hands, a lot of previously top people being elbowed aside or pushed into retirement, a lot of new policies ascending to the front-burner, while previous priorities were relegated to the back-burner.

Not quite a decade after the referendum that led to the passage of Brexit, back in mid-2016, polls from from this month, May of 2024, show that 55% of British people think leaving the EU was the wrong choice, while only 31% think it was a smart move.

So while some of the tarnishing of the Tory party's reputation is likely the result of simply having been in power for a long time, and during some really unusual global happenings, like COVID and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, some of it is directly attributable to specific things they've done which turned out not to be very popular, once implemented.

Many of the non-Brexit complaints the majority of British citizens have about how the Tories have governed are related to their austerity policies—the idea that they need to shrink the government and its spending as much as possible, because that will, according to their theories, at least, make the country wealthier, more efficient, and more secure.

This has led to dramatic cutbacks on incredibly popular programs and agencies focused on or related to health, housing, and education, alongside the bankrupting of civil services, the privatization of previously public assets like highways and waste systems, and the concomitant spending—while claiming there's not enough money for healthcare and public services—on pet projects for Conservative lawmakers and their constituents, many of which ended up being money pits.

All parties in all countries are of course periodically staggered by scandals, spending-related and otherwise, but over their long period in control, the Tories have racked up a huge number and a large variety of scandals, and some of them led to very public embarrassments for the party, including the Tories' seeming inability to keep a Prime Minister in office following the Brexit referendum, then-PM David Cameron making way for Theresa May, who handed things over to Boris Johnson, who was ousted and replaced by Liz Truss, who was Prime Minister for a record-setting 49 days before resigning and being replaced by current PM Rishi Sunak.

That's five prime ministers in the six years between 2016 and 2022, all of them from the same party, that party seemingly unable to govern with enough popularity to maintain the confidence of parliament.

So the situation right now, following all that, is that Labour has a 17-point lead over the Conservatives and is, and has been for a while, broadly expected to wipe the floor with the Tories in the next election; and a few minor elections leading up to this point seem to support that assumption.

This is why Sunak was expected to delay scheduling the next election as long as possible, because as soon as that election is held, his party is expected to be pushed out of power, and that expectation is leading to an exodus amongst Tory lawmakers, 121 of them stepping down instead of running for reelection as of late-May, surpassing a similar wave of quitting in 1997, when 117 of them declined to run again, leading up to a landslide victory for the Labour Party and their popular leader, Tony Blair.

This isn't an unusual phenomenon: being part of the government is very different from being part of the opposition party, and back in 2010, after Labour had been in control for 13 years, and was expecting to lose in the next election, 149 politicians decided to step down rather than running again—100 of them Labour MPs, and 35 of them Conservatives; that later group ostensibly because while the Tories won, they didn't take a majority, and had to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, which is also a very different situation from being in a government that has complete control, rather than shared control; some MPs just don't want to deal with that kind of negotiated leadership.

Sunak's reasoning here, then, might be that while things are bad for his party now, they could get even worse if he waits to hold an election; so it's better to act at a moment in which some economic numbers are actually starting to look a little bit better, after a long period of the opposite, and at a moment in which announcing an election would catch his Labour opposition off-guard, possibly providing his party the benefit of surprise and better preparation.

This announcement has led to a scramble, though, for all UK parties, seemingly, to try to get some actual governing done—work they thought they'd have several more weeks to finish up, at least, before going into full campaign-mode, suddenly needing to be accomplished yesterday.

That's meant a lot of important legislation has been dropped or permanently back-burnered, including some of the policies, like a smoking ban, an end-to no-fault evictions, and a plan that would allow the government to ship asylum-seekers to Rwanda, which Sunak had wanted to serve as fundamental elements of his prime ministerial legacy—those have now been completely dropped.

This has led to a situation in which the Tories seem to be scrambling to put new ideas out into the ether—future-facing stuff to replace all the things they had to drop or backtrack on—hoping that something they propose in this way appeals broadly enough to earn them the votes they require to hold their own in the upcoming election; to maybe still lose, but not as much, and in such a way that they're in a good spot when the next election is called.

One such idea is mandatory national service for 18-year-olds, which would require that folks either serve in the military or volunteer for one weekend a month, beginning on their 18th year—a policy that's reportedly meant to compete with a proposal from Labour leader Keir Starmer, that 16- and 17-year-olds should be able to vote.

The degree to which any of these new plans will catch the public imagination is up in the air, though, as again, a lot of what's happening now, in terms of campaigning, is somewhat half-baked, all involved parties scrambling to prepare for what seems to have been a somewhat last-minute decision on Sunak's part to upend expectations about the timing of the next election in order to attain some kind of advantage for his party, which seems to be entering this round with a losing hand.

And all of this is important, of course, if you live in the UK, but it's also important globally, even standing out amongst the many other important elections that are occurring around the world this year, because the UK, even battered and bruised in the aftermath of Brexit and a COVID crisis that it weathered somewhat less-well than its world-leading peers, is still an incredibly powerful, influential, and wealthy entity of global significance.

It has the sixth largest economy in the world, after only the US, China, Japan, Germany, and India.

It's incredibly powerful geopolitically, out of proportion with its population and military strength, in part because of the role it plays within the Commonwealth, a group of 53 nations that the UK previously ruled, and in part because it has long-lived, tight alliances and relationships with governments and other entities that it's been maintaining for centuries, in some cases.

The UK is a nuclear power, and is the seventh largest exporter of arms in the world—though it's especially vital to the global aircraft market, military and non-military.

The UK is home to the second-largest financial center in the world, London, and it's culturally very powerful, exporting all sorts of norms and pop culture and creative products; a sort of soft-power that plays a huge role in beliefs, behaviors, and understandings, worldwide.

Whomever wins this election, then, and how they win, and to what degree they control Parliament, will have a major impact not just on the UK, but on the world, and at a moment in which there are several major military conflicts ongoing, in which new technologies are simultaneously threatening and enlivening entire industries and economies, and in which the global order that has set the tone and guardrails for the world since WWII is being challenged—all variables the UK may influence in substantial ways, and over which the folks running the UK government will thus have outsized sway.

Show Notes

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/23/rishi-sunak-rwanda-smoking-policies-election-conservatives

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

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

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c844x1xp05xo

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zqhvmnb/revision/6

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/more-uk-conservative-lawmakers-set-quit-than-before-1997-election-defeat-2024-05-24/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-22/labour-finally-has-uk-election-it-craves-but-traps-lie-in-wait

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-23/uk-election-sunak-has-the-weight-of-history-against-him

https://wsj.com/world/uk/british-leader-sunak-calls-snap-election-as-his-party-trails-in-polls-e234bdc0

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/25/how-rishi-sunaks-early-election-backfired-on-pm

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/general-election-labour-starmer-sunak-tory-gove-b2551518.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/lagging-polls-uk-conservatives-pitch-national-service-18-2024-05-26/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c288xxvrdz7o

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2jjvpxxgr5o

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

https://www.gov.uk/government/how-government-works

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

https://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/Search/Registrations?currentPage=1&rows=10&sort=RegulatedEntityNameℴ=asc&et=pp&et=ppm®ister=gb®ister=ni®ister=none®Status=registered

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

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This week we talk about Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Hamas.

We also discuss Egypt, the Rafah Crossing, and Netanyahu’s motivations.

Recommended Book: Going Zero by Anthony McCarten

Transcript

Israel, as a country, was founded as a consequence of, and in the midst of, a fair bit of conflict and turmoil.

It was formally established in mid-1948 after years of settlement in the area by Jewish people fleeing persecution elsewhere around the world and years of effort to set up a Jewish-majority country somewhere on the planet, that persecution having haunted them for generations in many different parts of the world, and in the wake of widespread revelation about the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis in parts of Europe they conquered and controlled.

Israel finally happened, then, in part because Jewish people had been treated so horribly for so long, and there was finally government-scale support for this effort following that conflict, and the realization of just how monstrous that treatment had become.

The area that was carved out for this new nation, though, was also occupied and claimed by other groups of people.

The British and French controlled it for a while in the decades leading up to the creation of Israel, but before that it was ruled by the Ottomans as part of their Syria administrative region and, like the rest of their Empire, it was formerly a Muslim state.

Thus, what serves as a hallowed day worthy of celebration for Israelis, May 14th, Israel's national day, commemorating their declaration of independence, for other people living in the region, that day is referred to as the Nakba, which translates roughly to "the catastrophe," marking a period in which, beginning that year, 1948, about half of Palestine's population of Arabs, something like 700,000-750,000 people either fled of their own volition, or were forced to flee by Jewish paramilitary groups who moved in to clear the locals leading up to the emergence of Israel, at first, and then by the newfound Israeli military, after the formation of the country.

Hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, people who didn't flee were massacred, and wells were poisoned to kill stragglers and keep people from returning.

Ultimately, about 80% of the Arab Muslim population in what was formerly British-held Mandatory Palestine, and which was a Muslim region in a Muslim country before that were forced from their homes leading up to or just after Israel's Declaration of Independence.

This, alongside the existing hatred toward Jewish people some regional leaders already had, mostly for religious reasons, sparked the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which was just one of several and frequent full-scale military conflicts between Israel and its neighbors in the early days of its existence, the Israelis mostly on the defensive, and frequently targeted by surprise attacks by many or all of their neighbors simultaneously, even in the earliest days of their national founding.

Israel, in part because of support from international allies, and in part because of its militarized society—that militarization reinforced as a consequence of these conflicts, as well—fairly handedly won every single war against, again, often all, of their Muslim neighbors, simultaneously, though often at great cost, and those victories led to a sequence of expansions of Israel's borders, and humiliations for their neighbors, which further inflamed those existing prejudices and fears.

Israel has controlled the non-Israel territories of the West Bank, of East Jerusalem, which is part of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip—all of them majority Muslim, and collectively referred to as the Palestinian Territories—since the aftermath of the Six Day war (which was one of those aforementioned, all of their neighbors attacking them all at once conflicts) in 1967.

Israeli settlers have slowly established militarized toeholds in these areas, kicking out and in some cases killing the folks who live on the land they take, which is against international law, but generally allowed by the Israeli government.

And though these areas were governed by the Palestinian Authority beginning in the mid-1990s, the PA lost control of Gaza in 2006, a more militant group called Hamas taking over practical control in the area at that time, ruling through violence and threats of violence, basically, despite the Palestinian Authority continuing to claim they run things there, too.

On October 7, 2023, that more militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, Hamas, launched a sneak attack against Israel, hitting multiple areas along the Israeli border with the Strip, killing at least 1,139 Israelis and taking 252 people captive.

Hamas said this attack was in response to Israel's abuses of Palestinian people, historically and contemporarily, while Israelis generally see this as an unprovoked attack on mostly civilians by a terrorist organization.

What I'd like to talk about today is the conflict that's erupted since that attack in early-October of last year, where it looks to be going next, and some of the repercussions of it, locally and internationally, thus far.

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In the days following Hamas' attack on Israel, the Israeli military began bombarding targets throughout the Gaza Strip, focusing on Hamas targets—of which there were many—but because of how interwoven these targets were with civilian infrastructure, located in civilian buildings and in extensive tunnels underneath many major cities, that also meant bombarding a lot of areas packed with everyday, non-Hamas civilians.

The Israeli military then started warning folks to leave leading up to a more formal ground invasion, supplies were cut off, and tens of thousands of people fled south, beyond the range of this impending invasion and the ongoing rocket and artillery barrage, though a lot of non-Hamas people were killed, and a lot of civilian infrastructure was demolished.

Early on, Egypt warned Israel about forcing Palestinians across their shared border, even as aid trucks, which typically entered the country via the Rafah crossing along that border, were backed up for miles—the Israeli government disallowing their entry and the distribution of that aid, saying they didn't want it to support and sustain Hamas.

In late-November, a weeklong ceasefire allowed around 100 Israeli hostages and 240 Palestinian prisoners held by Israelis to be freed, and some aid was allowed into Gaza through the Rafah crossing.

In early December, Israeli forces had moved on from Gaza City to the southern city, Khan Younis, where Hamas soldiers and commanders were reportedly hunkering down and controlling events in the Strip.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had fled south because of Israel's invasion of the north were forced to flee even further south, down to Rafah, which is the southernmost governing region in the Strip, where the city of Rafah, and the Rafah crossing, which connects Egypt to Gaza, are located.

At this point, concerns held by Israel's allies, like the US, began to bubble up to the surface, ultimately voiced in public by the US Defense Secretary, who surreptitiously warned the Israeli military about killing civilians, couching that warning in advice about establishing a lasting, actual victory.

The United Nations, which had already been warning about the civilian catastrophe that was unfolding in the Strip due to the nature of Israel's invasion and bombardment of the region, including all that civilian infrastructure, and all the civilian deaths that were piling up in Israel's pursuit of Hamas, also became more vocal around this time, warning about widespread slaughter and starvation, but also potential regional repercussions if Israel wasn't careful about how it treats Gazan civilians; the idea being that Israel was essentially slaughtering innocent people, even if it claimed it wasn't intending to, and that they were being used as human shields by Hamas, and that could stoke more animosity from its regional neighbors, which in turn could spark a broader conflict.

As part of that campaign, the UN Secretary General invoked Article 99 for the first time since he took office, which led to a ceasefire vote in the Security Council, which failed because the US vetoed an otherwise near-unanimous vote—the UK's abstention the only other non-yes vote on the matter.

By early February of this year, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu indicated that he planned to invade that southernmost border city, Rafah, where a huge number of people already lived, but also where something like a million Palestinian civilians had fled because their homes further north were bombarded, invaded, and in many cases left in ruins—no shelter, no electricity, no water. So around 1.5 million people were trying to survive in a city typically inhabited by maybe a third that number.

Israel's neighbors and other entities throughout the region issued formal statements against a potential invasion of Rafah, citing concerns for the civilians who were now massed there, densely packed into this city, and thus at great risk of harm should bombs start dropping and bullets start flying, and US President Biden, shifting away from a seeming policy of having other folks in his administration condemn and criticize and warn about how the invasion was proceeding, as part of an apparent effort to maintain formal, top-of-the-hierarchy alignment with Israel, said that there shouldn't be any kind of military operation in Rafah until and unless there's a "credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support" for the citizens who were hunkered down there.

But Netanyahu, despite those criticisms and warnings, doubled-down on his ambition to invade the city and take out what he claimed were the final remnants of Hamas' leadership in the Strip, whatever the consequences.

Within days of that statement from Biden, Israel's military launched a raid into Rafah, which freed two Israeli hostages, but resulted in the killing of at least 70 people, dozens of whom were children, according to Gaza's health ministry.

Around this time it was reported, by that same health ministry, that more than 30,000 Palestinians had been confirmed killed in the invasion so far, most of them women and children, though presumably a great many of them Hamas-aligned militants, as well.

And it's generally understood that this is probably an undercount, as it doesn't include those who are tallied as missing but not confirmed killed, and it doesn't include the number of people who have died from non-explosion, non-bullet injuries and conditions, like those who have starved and those who have died for lack of medical treatment.

By March, essentially everyone, except, seemingly, Netanyahu and his main supporters in the government, which at this point is primarily the further-right chunk of the country's parliament, have expressed concern about the consequences of an invasion of Rafah.

And while discussion about this continued, and all sorts of entities, like the EU, encouraged Netanyahu to not attack the city, the Israeli military scaled-up from smaller-scale incursions and attacks, airstrikes on the city becoming a daily occurrence by the latter-half of March, many of those strikes targeting buildings where civilians were sheltering.

Netanyahu announced in early April that there was a planned date for a full-scale invasion on Rafah, not divulging the day, but making this announcement shortly after the US said it wouldn't condone or support such an attack, to which Netanyahu replied that Israel would go it alone, if necessary.

Israeli troops left Khan Younis around this same time, and thousands of Palestinians fled north from Rafah to seek shelter there, worried about an impending attack, but a significant portion of those people returned to Rafah soon after, as Khan Younis and other towns and cities further north, were reduced to rubble and several people died after stumbling upon unexploded bombs and other munitions, so these areas were generally just not safe or habitable.

Egypt gave yet another warning to Israel not to force Palestinian civilians across their shared border in mid-April, saying, basically, the peace the two countries have enjoyed for 45 years was at risk, depending on what they did next. They also surreptitiously began constructing refugee facilities near their shared border around this time, though, just in case.

Talks focused on a potential ceasefire, which were ongoing for months in Cairo, seemed to be on the verge of bearing fruit in early May, the newest version offering a weeks-long ceasefire, plus the release of more Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, in exchange for the removal of Israeli troops from Gaza, and an eventual end of the war.

This looked very likely to happen for about a day, as the agreement was based on wording Israel's negotiators had favored, and the real question was whether Hamas's representatives would agree to it, which they did.

But the wording, indicating that this would be a step toward an end for the war, seems to be what kept it from happening. Netanyahu said ending the war wasn't an option until they'd taken out the last of Hamas's leadership in the area, which would require, he said, invading Rafah.

That same week, the first week of May, Israel ordered Palestinians in the southern portion of Rafah to evacuate via phone massages and leaflets, and Hamas, seemingly in response to that indication of an imminent attack, agreed to an edited ceasefire deal that seemed to give Israel everything it wanted, but Israel's war cabinet said it still wasn't enough.

Airstrikes into Rafah have since picked up, and US officials have confirmed rumors than the US government paused a shipment of bombs meant for Israel, as they were concerned these bombs would be used in Rafah, and this type of bomb would be devastating in such a tight-packed, civilian-populated area.

On May 7, Israeli tanks entered Rafah, took control of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, and sealed the border, preventing the import of all international aid into the Strip.

Since that initial tank incursion, around 800,000 Palestinian civilians have fled Rafah, and are now considered to be internally displaced—still living in the Gaza Strip, but most without homes to return to, their cities and towns, in many cases, completely demolished or otherwise unsafe, living in tents, without shelter, and often without food, clean water, or other necessities of life and security.

Right as some of these civilians have fled back toward more northern portions of the Strip, though, fighting has begun, anew, in several more northern cities, where Israeli's military officials say Hamas is resurgent, and Hamas's military wing continues to claim periodic, often asymmetric victories against the invading Israelis. So it's likely those Hamas forces are indeed attempting to reestablish themselves in these previously invaded, now mostly destroyed, areas, and that they're hiding amongst those who are internally displaced, which of course complicates matters for both the Israeli military, and for all the innocent people who are just trying to find a place that's not actively being bombed or shot-up in the Strip.

As this conflicts wears on in the Strip itself, there have also been substantial consequences for Israel, internationally. Most prominently, perhaps, being the deterioration of its reputation and standing in the international community, and the damage that's been done to its relationships with its neighbors and allies.

Most shocking, to some, has been the slow, careful, but increasingly overt pullback by the United States in its support for Israel.

The US has traditionally been Israel's big, primary ally in the world, showing basically absolute support for anything Israel does. But the Biden administration, though they've been careful to support Israel in almost everything, even to the point that it's hurt the administration's reputation at home, has made statements and criticized Netanyahu's actions, and is slowly beginning to take practical action, as well, mostly in terms of arms shipments so far, but they've hinted they might vote differently in the UN and other bodies, as well, if this goes on for much longer, denying Israel some of the cover it's enjoyed, thus far, within entities like the UN Security Council.

Egypt has made clear, time and time again, that they don't like what's happening and that things will go very sideways between them and Israel if Palestinians are forced to flee across their shared border, en masse, and that could mean worsening relations, but it could also mean some kind of military pushback, as has been the case between the two countries several times in the past.

Israel has been on the verge of several big diplomatic breakthroughs with its neighbors in recent years, especially its wealthy, spendier neighbors, like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, but also Morocco, Sudan, and the idea was to bring other Arab nations into the fold in the near-future, to basically normalize relationships, stepping back from a long-time war-footing to increase trade, and to send diplomats to each other's countries—normal relations between nations that have traditionally wanted each other dead.

These relationships have become fraught, though, if not completely untenable, as a consequence of this invasion and how it's played out—in large part because of the solidarity these nations have, or at least are having to perform, outwardly, with the Palestinian people and their cause.

In other words, this invasion doesn't just make things more complicated for Israel in the Muslim-majority territories they hold, it's also likely to make things more difficult for them, regionally, as those mutually enriching relationships disappear, and as some of those potential allies maybe become enemies, once more.

Speaking of enemies, this whole situation has in some ways empowered perpetual Israel-antagonist, Iran, which was beginning to feel threatened and excluded by all those new friendships and relationships between Muslim nations and Israel, but which now enjoys more power than it has had in a long time, as the tone has shifted, Israel has shown what Iran can portray as their true, Muslim-hating colors, and the militant proxy groups Iran funds and arms, like Hamas, but also the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, have all gained an influx of support, benefactors, and soldiers, because they seem to be fighting the good fight against a colonialist, imperialist, anti-Muslim entity that is stoking support for its own antagonists across the region.

All of this, is shaping events elsewhere, as well.

There's a chance aspects of the US presidential election in November will be shaped by perceptions of how President Biden handled this unwieldy situation, and we've seen sympathy protests and riots and attacks all over the place, with various groups and even whole demographics, especially young people, coming out in support of Palestinians in Gaza.

This conflict has also increased the temperature on existing potential flashpoints, even leading to a direct exchange of missiles, rockets, and drones between Israel and Iran in mid-April. This renewed tension is heightening concerns that something could happen—something that would typically be shrugged off or negotiated away—that could cascade into a Middle East-wide conflict.

As I record this, for instance, it's just been reported that Iran's President and Foreign Minister have died in a helicopter crash on the way back from a meeting with representatives from Azerbaijan.

This crash seems to be the result of bad weather conditions in treacherous, mountainous territory, but any upset to norms, anything that could be perceived as a potential attack—or framed that way by people with something to gain from such chaos—could serve as a spark that ignites a Middle East-wide conflagration. All sorts of things that would generally not be seen through the lens of militarized geopolitics, then, are now being perceived in that way, and that has made the region even more volatile.

There's a lot of pressure on Israel, internationally, to change what they're doing, at this point, but what happens next may be shaped by the country's internal politics.

A centrist member of Israel's war cabinet recently said that Netanyahu had until June 8 to present a plan that would secure the release of the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas, establish stable governance in the Gaza Strip, and normalize life in Israel and relations with regional neighbors, like Saudi Arabia.

This ultimatum is being seen as an indication that there's widespread disagreement with how Netanyahu is running things from within his own government, and the country's defense minister recently said that the invasion is on "a dangerous course," worrying out loud that the government was attempting to establish military rule in Gaza, which the defense minister sees as untenable and undesirable; so both the governing and military establishments of Israel seem to be unhappy with the state of things and where they seem to be headed, which could put pressure on the government to change course, or to put someone in power who's willing to do so, if Netanyahu doesn't.

By some assessments, Netanyahu is kind of locked into the path he's walking, as he's kept in office by the furthest-right portion of the electorate, which—some portions of it at least—want to push even further and faster to pacify the Palestinian Territories, and maybe even Israel's regional neighbors, than Netanyahu has managed, thus far.

One theory as to why Israel, and perhaps Netanyahu more specifically, are taking this particular path, is that—a bit like the US in the wake of the attacks on 9/11/2001—he's maybe afraid that if Israel doesn't respond with overwhelming, even brutal force after being attacked so brazenly, the country's enemies, of which there have traditionally been many, will see them as weak and vulnerable to such attacks, and they must thus make it very clear that anyone who tries such a thing will be wiped out, no matter the consequences for Israel or anyone else.

It's also been posited that Netanyahu might be attempting to retain his hold on power by keeping the country on a war-footing, or that he might be held hostage, basically, by that further-right portion of the government that holds outsized sway in the country, right now.

Whatever the actual rationale—or whether maybe this is all just being planned in the moment, a series of seeming necessities adding up to a bunch of new problems for Israel, for Palestinians, and for the region—there's a chance that all the external pressure, plus the pressure from portions of his own government, will force Netanyahu's hand on this, nudging him toward finding an offramp from the invasion as it stands today, which will likely take the shape of some kind of negotiated ceasefire, an exchange of hostages and prisoners, and then a series of meetings and agreements that will establish new governance in Gaza.

But it's also possible that this conflict will drag on as Hamas continues to harass Israeli forces, retreating and engaging in partisan warfare in formerly invaded parts of the Strip, resulting in something akin to what the US faced in Afghanistan for years and years, before finally pulling out, the initial arguable success of the post-9/11 invasion lost to the persistent frictions of sustained partisan warfare and a slow depletion of international support and reputation.

Show Notes

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/helicopter-carrying-irans-president-makes-difficult-landing-d51329d7

https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-news-05-19-2024-d6ea9776d293130d52d308abd284556e

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict_in_2023

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/07/israel-hamas-gaza-war-timeline-anniversary/

https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/israeli-palestinian-conflict

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/08/1249657561/rafah-timeline-gaza-israel-hamas-war

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/18/un-says-800000-people-have-fled-rafah-as-israel-kills-dozens-in-gaza

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

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/19/world/iran-president-helicopter-crash

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/18/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-war-netanyahu-gantz.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week we talk about ENSO, El Niño, and attribution science.

We also discuss climate change, natural disasters, and the trade winds.

Recommended Book: Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

Transcript

The field of attribution science, sometimes referred to as "extreme event attribution," focuses on figuring out whether and to what degree a particular weather event—especially rare weather disasters—are attributable to climate change.

Severe floods and tornadoes and hurricanes all happen from time to time, which is why such events are sometimes referred to as once in a decade or once in a century disasters: the right natural variables align in the right way, and you have a disaster that is rare to the point that it's only likely to happen once every 10 or 100 years, but such rare events still happen, and sometimes more frequently than those numbers would imply; they're not impossible. And they're not necessarily the result of climate change.

Folks working in this space, which is a blend of meteorology and the rapidly evolving field of climate science, do their best to figure out what causes what, and how those odds might have been impacted by the shifts we're seeing in global average temperatures in particular, and the knock-on effects of that warming, like shifts in the global water cycle; both of which influence all sorts of other planetary variables.

The most common means of achieving this end is to run simulations based on historical climate data and extrapolating those trend-lines forward, allowing for natural variation, but otherwise sticking with the range of normal fluctuations that would have been expected, had we not started to churn so much CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere beginning with the industrial revolution.

So if we hadn't done the Industrial Revolution the way we did it, what would our global climate and weather systems look like? They have a bunch of models with different assumptions baked into them that they have running, and they can simulate conditions, today, based on those models, and compare them with the reality of how things actually are in the real world, a world in which we did start to burn fossil fuels at a frantic rate, with all the pros and cons of that decision aggregating into our current climactic circumstances.

This comparison, between a baseline, non-climate-change-impacted Earth, and what we see happening on real Earth, allows us to gauge the different in likelihoods for various weather systems and increasingly even specific weather events, like massive floods or hurricanes.

It also allows us to ascertain what elements of a disaster or system are more or less likely, or the same, compared to that baseline Earth; so maybe we look at a regional heat wave and discover that it was a rare event made more likely by climate change, but that the intensity of the heat wasn't impacted—as was the case with a heat wave in Russia in 2010; climate change made the heat wave more likely, but had such a heat wave occurred, despite its low likelihood, in that non-industrial revolution scenario, the heat would have been roughly the same intensity as it was in real life.

Both components of this system, attributing events and patterns to climate change, and confirming that they were not impacted, that they were just run of the mill bad luck, the consequence of natural systems, are arguably important, as while the former provides data for folks wanting to predict future climate change-related outcomes, and provides some degree of ammunition for the argument that climate change is making these sorts of things worse, which helps put a price tag on not moving faster to shift away from fossil fuels, it's also vital that we understand how climate and weather systems work, in general, and that we are able to set proper expectations as to what will change and how, as the atmosphere's composition continues to change, while also understanding what will remain the same, what various regions around the world need to be prepared for in a vacuum, leaving climate change out of it, and how our global weather systems work on a granular level, so that as outside influences like climate change, but not limited to climate change, act upon them, we can make better predictions about how that will adjust or overhaul the practical reality for people and ecosystems impacted by them.

What I'd like to talk about today is a natural weather phenomenon that is expected to return soon, and how this phenomenon might change our latent, global weather patterns, for the better, for the worse, and for the neutral, and in turn how it might be changed by the climactic adjustments we're tracking using these simulations.

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The El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO phenomenon, is the monicker we've given to a collection of sea surface temperature and wind variations in the Pacific Ocean that, largely unpredictably, tweak the patterns of these systems from time to time, influenced by and influencing a large number of other, micro- and macro-scale systems around the world.

Most directly, ENSO dictates how warm it will be across the tropics and subtropics, El Niño bringing warm waters to the surface of the relevant oceans and the Southern Oscillation referring to air pressure variations spanning the ocean between Tahiti and Darwin, Australia, low pressure tending to occur over warm bodies of water, and higher pressure over colder bodies of water.

When the water in this part of the Pacific, the central and east-central equatorial pacific, is warmer, on the surface, that reduces atmospheric pressure thereabouts, which in turn reduces the strength of the Pacific trade winds. That reduction, among other things, decreases rainfall over parts of Australia, India, and Indonesia, while upping the same, while also stoking additional cyclone risk, in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Fundamental to understanding why this is a big deal is understanding that this tweak in water and atmospheric conditions causes low level surface trade winds, which usually blow from east to west, to either stop blowing or barely blow, or in some cases to reverse direction.

If you think about how weather patterns form, determining everything from who gets rain and how much, to what temperatures are like in a given area—because those winds pull warm or cold air along with them as they pass over warmer or cooler parts of the planet, like mountains and glaciers, but also deserts and tropical rain forests—it becomes clear why this change-up is such a big deal.

There's a neutral phase of this phenomenon that typically occur between warmer and colder phases, and during that neutral phase, we usually see other, similar systems that are interconnected and predicated on still other geographic and atmospheric variables, like the Pacific-North American teleconnection pattern, and the North Atlantic Oscillation, having more of an impact on global weather and water cycle patterns.

When this system is in a warmer El Niño state, though, that tends to cause a lot of heat waves throughout tropical regions in particular, while also spiking global surface temperatures for around a year, with all the secondary consequences of suddenly jolting the global thermostat higher: melting glaciers and ice caps, increasing the range of disease-carrying pests, messing with planting seasons; things like that.

The opposite side of this coin, La Niña, can also be quite disruptive though, its influence defined by cooler waters rising to the surface in that part of the Pacific, warmer waters headed westward where they have less influence on this component of the world's thermostat and weather machine, and that drop in water temperature in this part of the ocean tends to reset many of the dials that are turned up by El Niño, moderating some of the weather patterns that are amplified by those warmer waters and returning the trade winds to their normal settings, while also reducing global temperatures to what we might think of as their default.

But the next La Niña phenomenon—which experts in this space say will likely arrive sometime in the next few months, June or July of 2024, marking a quick transition away from the record-setting El Niño system we've been living through since July of 2023, which has been designated the fourth most extreme in recorded history—this anticipated new La Niña setup will follow a truly intense opposite pattern, which means if it's not strong enough, it may not counteract all of the warming brought about by its precursor El Niño system, which means the next El Niño system could compound upon this outgoing one, in terms of its globe-heating effects.

There are also concerns that, because of that strong El Niño, and it arriving at a period of human-caused warming—two forces raising the temperature on the thermostat simultaneously, basically—there's a chance that the moderating force of this La Niña might run up against an insurmountable variable adjustment, even if it is otherwise powerful enough; meaning, this ENSO phenomenon could contribute to a long term, even permanent increase in global temperatures because its warming effects are mirroring another, external warming effect caused by us and our greenhouse gas emissions.

We don't know exactly what that would mean in practice and long-term, but it could lead to more. and more extreme versions of what we've seen this past year: namely a surge in weather disasters like extreme droughts and floods and wildfires that never really end; just bigger and bigger surges, combined with higher and higher temperatures.

And again, that's possible even if the La Niña pattern that's set to arrive is of a normal, non-weak strength, because of how potent this outgoing El Niño has been, and because its effects may be compounded by climate change.

If the new La Niña does prove potent enough to counteract this outgoing El Niño, that may help with short-term temperature changes, but we're then likely to see a substantially more severe hurricane season; which is normally what happens during these periods of change, La Niña conditions making hurricanes more likely, but it could be even more severe than usual because of lingering oceanic heat from the El Niño, which popped temperatures in the Atlantic to 2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the average temperature from the past three decades—and oceanic heat is what powers hurricanes, informing how big and destructive they can become.

Last year's Atlantic Ocean hurricane season was already above-average in terms of the number of hurricanes and their strength because of that heat, but the amalgamation of variable-tweaks inherent in a La Niña transition make hurricanes more likely, whatever the ocean's temperature, so the combination of, likely, more hurricanes, plus far warmer than usual oceanic temperatures, means more, but also potentially a lot more powerful, hurricanes this season.

We've been watching these systems and transitions for a while now, and our science related to them—including our ability to predict what they're going to do, and how much—has gotten pretty good over the last few decades.

But all of these systems and all of their variables are interconnected, each and every piece touching each and every other piece of the planet's cycles and ecosystems and compositions; so there's a lot we're not tracking, a lot we're not tracking with the resolution we'd need for it to be valuable in this regard, and a lot of entanglements and relationships we're not even aware of, yet.

In particular, the impact that climate change is having on these systems, directly and indirectly, is a big question mark in all these computations.

Yes, we understand all of this better than a few decades ago, and yes, our simulations and models have gotten pretty solid, and are getting better by the day as we develop better formulae and software, and deploy more fancy satellites and other tracking tools that allow us to keep tabs on the relevant variables in an up-to-the-second manner.

But because of how complex all of this is, it's a truly chaotic jumble of systems, and because of how we're scrambling to play catch-up, the world changing around us faster than we're learning about those changes—these sorts of systems are evolving even as we come to understand how they work; so our most up to date information is always a little bit out of date, leaving us prone to new unknowns and larger shifts than we'd anticipated based on our existing data.

Human-amplified climate change, then, is fiddling with all the knobs and switches, changing how these phenomena work right before our eyes, and each new system and cycle is part known, part complete surprise because of how even tiny changes can make huge differences when compounded by these spirals and cascades of cause and large-scale, multifaceted effect.

In other words, we have a good sense of what we need to be worried about and watching for during this probable upcoming transition, and we maybe have some things to look forward to, alongside a few other things to worry about and prepare for.

We'll also be watching to see how much global temperatures come down, as that will tell us to what degree this outgoing El Niño has been tweaking those temperatures, and to what degree climate change is to blame for the disconcerting numbers we've been seeing in this regard.

But we'll also be watching to see how everything is being amplified and compounded by all of these interconnected effects, as it may be, still allowing for ups and downs and other variations year to year, that these patterns, and others like them, will lead to wider, broader, more dramatic swings for the foreseeable future because of all those changes, natural and human-caused.

Show Notes

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/el-nino-end-by-june-la-nina-seen-second-half-2024-says-us-forecaster-2024-05-09/

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/09/el-nino-la-nina-hurricane-season

https://www.vox.com/climate/24145756/la-nina-2024-el-nino-heat-hurricane-record-temperature-pacific

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ninonina.html

https://theconversation.com/la-nina-is-coming-raising-the-chances-of-a-dangerous-atlantic-hurricane-season-an-atmospheric-scientist-explains-this-climate-phenomenon-228595

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_Oscillation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932023_La_Ni%C3%B1a_event

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

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-can-climate-change-affect-natural-disasters

https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-1-2.html

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47583

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-can-now-blame-individual-natural-disasters-on-climate-change/

https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/2/28/24085691/atlantic-ocean-warming-climate-change-hurricanes-coral-reefs-bleaching

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_Oscillation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932023_La_Ni%C3%B1a_event

https://theconversation.com/is-climate-change-to-blame-for-extreme-weather-events-attribution-science-says-yes-for-some-heres-how-it-works-164941

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This week we talk about APT28, spoofing, and hybrid warfare.

We also discuss the Baltics, Tartu airport, and hacking.

Recommended Book: The Middle Passage by James Hollis

Transcript

In early May of 2024, the German government formally blamed a Russian hacking group called APT28 for hacking members of the governing German Social Democratic Party in 2023, and warned of unnamed consequences.

Those consequences may apply just to APT28, which is also sometimes called "Fancy Bear," or they may apply to the Russian government, as like many Russia-based hacking groups, APT28 often operates hand-in-glove with the Russian military intelligence service, which allows the Russian government to deny involvement in all sorts of attacks on all sorts of targets, while covertly funding and directing the actions of these groups.

APT28 reportedly also launched attacks against German defense, aerospace, and information technology companies, alongside other business entities and agencies involved, even tangentially, with Ukraine and its defense measures against Russia's invasion.

This hacking effort allegedly began in early 2022, shortly after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the head of the Russian embassy in Germany has been summoned to account for these accusations—though based on prior attacks and allegations related to them by Russia's intelligence agencies, and the hacking groups it uses as proxies, that summoning is unlikely to result in anything beyond a demonstration of anger on the part of the German government, formally registered with Russia's representative in Berlin.

For its part, Russia's government has said that it was in no way involved in any incidents of the kind the German government describes, though Germany's government seems pretty confident in their assessment on this, at this point, having waited a fair while to make this accusation, and utilizing its partnerships with the US, UK, Canada, and New Zealand to confirm attribution.

This accusation has been leveled amidst of wave of similar attacks, also allegedly by Russia and its proxies, against other targets in the EU and NATO—including but not limited to the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Sweden.

Many of these attacks have apparently made use of an at-the-time unknown security flaw in Microsoft software that gave them access to compromised email accounts for long periods of time, allowing them to, among other things, scoop up intelligence reports from folks in the know in these countries, sifting their messages for data that would help Russia's forces in Ukraine.

This group, and other Russia GRU, their intelligence service, proxies, have reportedly targeted government and critical infrastructure targets in at least 10 NATO countries since the fourth quarter of 2023, alone, according to analysis by Palo Alto Networks, and experts in this space have said they're concerned these sorts of attacks, while often oriented toward intelligence-gleaning and at times embarrassing their targets, may also be part of a larger effort to weaken and even hobble intelligence, military, and critical infrastructure networks in regional nations, which could, over time, reduce stability in these countries, increase extremism, and possibly prevent them from defending themselves and their neighbors in the event of a more formal attack by Russian forces.

What I'd like to talk about today is another sort of attack, allegedly also launched by Russia against their neighbors in this part of the world, but this one a little less well-reported-upon, at this point, despite it potentially being even more broadly impactful.

—

The Global Positioning System, or GPS, was originally developed in 1973 by the US Department of Defense. Its first satellite was launched in 1978, and its initial, complete constellation of 24 satellites were in orbit and functional in 1993.

This satellite network's full functionality was only available to the US military until 2000, when then-President Bill Clinton announced that it would be opened up for civilian use, as well.

This allowed aviation and similar industries to start using it on the vehicles and other assets, and normal, everyday people were thenceforth able to buy devices that tapped this network to help them figure out where they were in the world, and get to and from wherever they wanted to go.

A high-level explanation of how GPS works is that all of these satellites contain atomic clocks that are incredibly stable and which remain synchronized with each other, all showing the exact same, very precise time. These satellites broadcast signals that indicate what time their clocks currently read.

GPS devices, as long as they can connect to the signals broadcast by a few of these satellites, can figure out where they're located by noting the tiny differences in the time between these broadcasts: signals from satellites that are further away will take longer to arrive, and that time difference will be noted by a given device, which then allows it to triangulate a geolocation based on the distance between the device and those several satellites.

This is a simple concept that has created in a world in which most personal electronic devices now contain the right hardware and software to tap these satellite signals, compute these distances, and casually place us—via our smartphones, cars, computers, watches, etc—on the world map, in a highly accurate fashion.

This type of technology has proven to be so useful that even before it was made available for civilian use, catalyzing the world that we live in today, other governments were already investing in their own satellite networks, most predicated on the same general concept; they wanted to own their own constellation of satellites and technologies, though, just in case, because the GPS network could theoretically be locked down by the US government at some point, and because they wanted to make sure they had their own militarizable version of the tech, should they need it.

There are also flaws in the US GPS system that make it less ideal for some use-cases and in some parts of the world, so some GPS copycats fill in the blanks on some of those flaws, while others operate better at some latitudes than vanilla GPS does.

All of which brings us to recent troubles that the global aviation industry has had in some parts of the world, related to their flight tracking systems.

Most modern aircraft use some kind of global navigation satellite system, which includes GPS, but also Europe's Galileo, Russia's GLONASS, and China's BeiDou, among other competitors.

These signals can sometimes be interrupted or made fuzzy by natural phenomena, like solar flares and the weather, and all of these systems have their own peculiarities and flaws, and sometimes the hardware systems they use to lock onto these signals, or the software they use to compute a location based on them, will go haywire for normal, tech-misbehaving reasons.

Beginning in the 1990s, though, we began to see electronic countermeasures oriented toward messing with these global navigation satellite system technologies.

These technologies, often called satellite navigation deceivers, are used by pretty much every government on the planet, alongside a slew of nongovernment actors that engage in military or terrorist activities, and they operate using a variety of jamming methods, but most common is basically throwing out a bunch of signals that look like GPS or other navigation system signals, and this has the practical effect of rendering these gadgets unusable, because they don't know which signal is legit and which is garbage; a bit like blasting loud noises to keep people from talking to each other, messing with their communication capacity.

It's also possible to engage in what's called GPS Spoofing, which means instead of throwing out gobs of garbage signals, you actually send just a few signals that are intended to look legit and to be accepted by, for instance, a plane's GPS device, which then makes the aircraft's navigation systems think the plane is somewhere other than it is—maybe just a little off, maybe on the other side of the planet.

Notably, neither of these sorts of attacks are actually that hard to pull off anymore, and it's possible to build a GPS-jamming device at home, if you really want to, though spoofing is a fair bit more difficult.

Also worth knowing is that while making your own jammer is absolutely frowned upon by most governments, and it's actually illegal in the US and UK, across most of the world it's kind of a Wild West in this regard, and you can generally get away with making one if you want to, though there's a chance you'd still be arrested if you caused any real trouble with it.

And it is possible to cause trouble with these things: most pilots and crew are aware of how these devices work and can watch for their effects, using backup tools to keep tabs on their locations when they need to; but using those backup tools requires a lot more effort and attention, and there's a chance that if they're hit by these issues at a bad moment, when they're distracted by other things, or when they're coming in for a landing or attempting to navigate safely around another aircraft, that could present a dangerous situation.

That's why, until May 31, at the minimum, Finnair will no longer be flying to Tartu airport—which is a very small airport in Estonia, but it's home to the Baltic Defense College, which is one of NATO's educational hubs, and losing a daily flight to Tartu (the only daily flight at this particular airport) from Helsinki, will disconnect this area, via plane, at least, from the rest of Europe, which is inconvenient and embarrassing.

This daily flight was cancelled because of ongoing disruptions to the airport's GPS system, which was previously an on-and-off sort of thing, but which, since 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has become a lot worse. And Tartu relies exclusively on GPS for planes landing at the airport, and thus doesn't have another fallback system, if GPS fails at a vital, dangerous moment.

This is a running theme throughout the Baltic region, an area populated by now-democratic NATO members that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, and which are considered to be at risk of a Russian invasion or other sort of attack if the invasion of Ukraine goes Russia's way.

Almost all aircraft flying through this area have experienced GPS-jamming issues since 2022, and though that Finnair flight is the only one to have been cancelled as a result of all this jamming, so far, there are concerns that this could really scramble travel and shipping in the region, as it's making all flying in the area that much more risky on a continuous basis.

Finland's government is framing this jamming as part of a hybrid warfare effort on Russia's part—alongside other hybrid efforts, like bussing migrants to Finland's borders in order to strain national coffers and nudge politics toward reactionary extremes.

Some other nations are thinking along the same lines, though there's a chance that, rather than this jamming representing an intentional assault on these neighboring nations, it may actually be something closer to overflow from other, nearby jamming activities: Russia jamming GPS signals in Ukraine, for instance, or the governance of the Kaliningrad region, which is a Russian enclave separated from the rest of Russia and surrounded by Poland and Lithuania, engaging in their own, localized jamming, and those signals are then picked up across national borders, because that's how these signals work—just like sound can travel further than you might intend.

It's possible we're seeing a bit of both here, overflow from that huge regional conflict, but also intentional jabs meant to make life more difficult for NATO nations, stressing their systems and costing them money and other resources, while also maybe testing the region's capacity to cope with such GPS disruptions and blackouts in the event of a potential future conflict.

Another point worth making here, though, is that we see a lot of this sort of behavior in conflict zones, globally.

FlightRadar24 recently introduced a live GPS jamming map to keep track of this sort of thing, and as of the day I'm recording this, alongside these consistent irregularities in the Baltic region, Ukraine, and parts of Eastern Europe, there's jamming occurring in the Middle East, near Israel, throughout Turkey, which has ongoing conflicts with insurgents in the afflicted areas, a portion of Moldova that is attempting to break away with the support of Russia, similar to what happened in Ukraine back in 2014, a northern portion of India where the Indian government has an ongoing conflict with separatists, and in Myanmar, where the military government is embroiled in fighting with a variety of groups that have unified to overthrow them.

This has become common in conflict zones over the past few decades, then, as those who want to deny this data, and the capabilities it grants, to their enemies tend to blanket the relevant airwaves with disruptive noise or incorrect location information, rendering the GPS and similar networks less useful or entirely useless thereabouts.

In Ukraine, the military has already worked out ways around this noise and false information, incorporating alternative navigation systems into their infrastructure, allowing them to use whichever one is the most accurate at any given moment.

And it's likely, especially if this dynamic continues, which it probably will, as again, this is a fairly easy thing to accomplish, it's likely that spreading out and becoming less reliant on just one navigation system will probably become more common, or possibly even the de facto setup, which will be beneficial in the sense that each of these systems has its own pros and cons, but perhaps less so in that more satellites will be necessary to keep that larger, multi-model network operating at full capacity, and that'll make it more expensive to operate these systems, while also creating more opportunities for satellite collisions up in the relevant orbit—an orbit that's becoming increasingly crowded, and which is already packed with an abundance of no longer operational craft that must be avoided and operated-around.

Show Notes

https://www.dw.com/en/gps-jamming-in-the-baltic-region-is-russia-responsible/a-68993942

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cne900k4wvjo

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/04/30/who-is-jamming-airliners-gps-in-the-baltic

https://www.ft.com/content/37776b16-0b92-4a23-9f90-199d45d955c3

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/what-is-gps-jamming-why-it-is-problem-aviation-2024-04-30/

https://www.politico.eu/article/gps-jamming-is-a-side-effect-of-russian-military-activity-finnish-transport-agency-says/

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/gps-jamming

https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/types-of-gps-jamming/

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

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-hackers-targeted-nato-eastern-european-militaries-google-2022-03-30/

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/07/politics/russian-hackers-nato-forces-diplomats/index.html

https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/russian-cyber-attacks-targeted-defence-aerospace-sectors-berlin-says-2024-05-03/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/3/germany-accuses-russia-of-intolerable-cyberattack-warns-of-consequences

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

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This week we talk about Huawei, DJI, and ByteDance.

We also discuss 5G infrastructure, black-box algorithms, and Congressional bundles.

Recommended Book: The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

Note: my new book, How To Turn 39, is now available as an ebook, audiobook, and paperback wherever you get your books :)

Transcript

In January of 2024, Chinese tech giant Huawei brought an end to its years-long US lobbying effort, meant to help mend fences with western politicians.

In mid-2019, then US President Trump had blacklisted the company using an executive order that, in practice, prevented Chinese telecommunications companies from selling specialized equipment in the US, as part of a larger effort to clamp-down on the sale of Chinese 5g and similar infrastructure throughout the US.

Around the same time, a Huawei executive was jailed in Canada for allegedly violating sanctions on Iran, and several other western nations were making noises about their own bans, worrying—as Trump's administration said they were worried—that Huawei and similar Chinese tech companies would sell their goods at a loss or at cost, significantly undercutting their foreign competition, and as a consequence would both lock down the burgeoning 5g market, including all the infrastructure that was in the process of being invested in and deployed, while also giving the Chinese government a tool that could allow them to tap all the communications running through this hardware, and potentially even allow them to shut it all down, if they wanted, at some point in the future—if China invaded Taiwan and wanted to keep the West from getting involved, for instance.

So while part of this ban on Huawei—for which the President made use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and declared a national emergency—was undoubtedly political (part of the trade war Trump started as part of the "China is the enemy" platform he was running on leading up to the 2020 election), there were also real-deal concern about China insinuating itself into the world's infrastructure, beginning with the rollout of the next phase of communications technologies; making themselves indispensable, disallowing foreign competition, and yes, possibly even creating a bunch of backdoors they could use at some point in the future to tip the scales in their favor during a conflict.

This ban also ensured that Huawei's then quite popular line of smartphones wouldn't be available in the US, or many other Western countries. The company sold off its Honor brand of phones in a scramble to try to protect that line of products from these new blocks on its offerings, which among other things disallowed them from accessing the chips necessary to make competitive smartphone products, but the legislation just kept coming after that initial salvo, the US Federal Communications Commission banning the sale or import of anything made by Huawei in late-2022, and a bunch of fundamental US allies, especially those with which the US collaborates on military and intelligence matters, have likewise banned Huawei products on their shelves and in their communications networks; the idea being that even one Huawei transmitter or modem could tap into the whole of these networks—at least in theory—which is considered a big enough security concern to justify that blanket ban.

Huawei has managed to survive, though it didn't scale the way its owners seemed to think it would back before all these bans.

Now it exists as a primarily regional outfit, still making billions in revenue each year, though down to about half the revenue it was earning before 2019.

Another popular Chinese tech company, DJI, is now scrambling to deploy its lobbyists and circle the wagons, as there's word that it's on a shortlist of potential Chinese security threats, in this case because the company makes very popular consumer and professional grade drones, which have successfully outcompeted many western brands of the same, and which have thus started to dominate aspects of the drone market.

These drones tend to be of the six or eight mini-propeller variety, the kind that people fly for fun, or use to shoot aerial photos, but the success of drones, even of this kind of drone, in Ukraine, reworked to spy on enemy fortifications or to carry explosives, has had the US Defense Department thinking it might not be the best idea to allow a Chinese company to own a substantial chunk of the US and international drone market—for many of the same reasons that Huawei was considered to be a threat; because that would allow China to continue to take out international rivals, allegedly by stealing their competitor's tech back in the day, and by continuing to back their companies with government support and funding, which makes fair and level competition a bit of an impossibility.

These companies are doing well for many reasons, then, and some of those reasons are not replicable outside the tight relationship the Chinese government has with its corporate entities.

If DJI is ultimately targeted in this way, it would likely be via a similar mechanism as the ban that was slapped on Huawei: new drones made by DJI would be unable to use the US's communications infrastructure, which would make their continued functionality in the country all but impossible.

This wouldn't ban DJI drones that are already owned by folks in the US, and it's anyone's guess as to how likely this will be to pass, as a bill to this end is currently working its way through the House, but DJI is lobbying heavily, is more common and popular in the US than Huawei was, and there's a chance that it simply won't be worth the potential political consequences for those who vote to ban it, if the bill works its way further through the process.

What I'd like to talk about today is another potential ban of a popular Chinese product, TikTok, and how such a ban might play out.

—

Back in 2020, the Trump administration announced that it was looking into banning TikTok, a popular vertical video-focused social network that operates a bit like a cross between Instagram and YouTube, and which was becoming especially influential with young people, so-called Gen Zers.

TikTok is owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance, and ByteDance has a version of the same app in other countries, including China, which there is called Douyin.

That same year, TikTok hit back against the Trump administration with a legal challenge that said, in essence, the President was just trying to score political points by passing protectionist laws in the lead-up to the election, and that it might have also been revenge because there were young people on the platform posting videos about a prank they instigated at a Trump rally, which seemed to irk the former President.

Around this same time, TikTok higher ups began working on what became known as Project Texas, which was meant to help address one of the government's concerns and complaints, that data and media shared on TikTok was sent to Chinese servers, which suggested all that information could be more easily siphoned off and used by the Chinese government.

This project resulted in a re-working of how data on the platform is handled, bringing in US tech company Oracle to keep tabs on everything, ensuring that this data is safely managed and not sent somewhere the Chinese government can easily get it.

A former employee of TikTok alleged in early 2023 that this Project didn't do what it was supposed to do, and TikTok's leadership said that this employee left before it was fully implemented; other involved people have spoken about their own takes on the matter since then, some of them saying the company is locked down tight because of all the oversight it's receiving, while others have said it makes big security claims, but is still not locked down the way it needs to be.

This concern is the result of a law in China that says, basically, if the government tells you to hand something over, you do, or you can be stripped of all your wealth, can be put in prison, can even be killed.

So ByteDance's leadership's claims that they have not handed this sort of data over to the Chinese government, and wouldn't do so if they were asked, can't be trusted, according to arguments against their claims, because they would of course lie about this if they had handed it over, and may not even be legally allowed to admit to so doing, but they also wouldn't really have a choice if they were asked—they would legally, in China, have to do so.

That's the big argument and concern on the US security side of things: the Chinese system works different than the system in many other countries, and because of how integrated and entwined their government is with their market, every single Chinese company, like ByteDance, like Huawei, like DJI, should be considered a wing of the Chinese military, because in practice, they are.

Thus, as soon as these concerns about TikTok started to hit the mainstream consciousness, we started to see those federal efforts to do something about it—most of which were initially unsuccessful, except for that Project Texas effort, about which no one seems to be able to say with any certainty whether it was successful or not.

At the state level, we also saw a bunch of bans on having the TikTok app on corporate and government devices, and in some places, like Florida and Montana and Indiana, we've also see bans on Chinese individuals and Chinese companies acquiring land, working on some types of research, setting up factories, and other such things.

All of which sets the stage for a piece of legislation that was passed by the US Congress earlier this month, and then signed by President Biden, saying that ByteDance needs to divest itself of TikTok, and soon, otherwise TikTok will be banned in the US.

The specifics are important here: first is that this legislation was passed as part of a bundle with legislation that also provided funding for Ukraine, Israel and Palestinians, and Taiwan—so this is generally being seen as a sweetener to some further-right Republicans who otherwise would have opposed those funding efforts, and it may not have been passed if it hadn't been thus bundled.

Second is that this isn't a TikTok ban, in the sense that Biden signed it and now TikTok is banned in the US. Instead, it says, basically, TikTok can keep operating in the US, but it can't be owned by a Chinese company, which again, if the Chinese government asks them to do spy or military stuff on their behalf, they would legally have to do. So the idea is that TikTok itself isn't the problem, it's those ties to the Chinese government and intelligence and military apparatus.

Third is that the company now has nine months to figure out a deal to sell the whole or part of TikTok to some more acceptable—which in this case means non-Chinese-government-entangled—owner, and the President has the option of extending that to a full year, if it looks like a deal is about to be done, but needs a little more time.

That's up from a previously proposed six months, and is considered to be more realistic, given the scope and scale of the company in question.

And that scope and scale is point number four: TikTok is huge. It's an absolutely behemoth company, with about 170 million users in the US, alone, and about $16 billion in revenue each year.

That's still nowhere near Meta's $134.9 billion of annual revenue, but it's still a colossal company that's generally considered to be worth more than $100 billion, again, for the US assets alone—though if the company were to sell everything but the algorithm it uses to decide what videos to show its users, it's though that price could drop to closer to $20 billion; which is still substantial enough that there wouldn't be many people or entities capable of affording it, and some of the big, well-moneyed US tech players, like Meta and Google, would be unlikely to even try, as their offer would probably be held up by antitrust concerns within the current, fairly hardcore regulatory environment.

So ByteDance is being told to sell their US assets within a year, max, and they may have to find a buyer willing to spend tens of billions of dollars for it, and that buyer would have to be acceptable to the same US government that is telling the existing owner it has to sell or be banned in the country.

Analysts are mixed on whether this is a bluff or not, but at the moment, ByteDance's leadership is saying, in essence, no—we're not going to play this game, we would rather shut down the US version of TikTok than sell those assets.

Part of the rationale here might be that the Chinese government is telling ByteDance's owners that they're not allowed to sell these assets; it could be a requirement they're dressing up as staunch resilience to save face, basically.

It could also be that they did the math and realized that their US offerings, despite being worth billions, are nowhere near their most profitable assets—those are in China—and they'd rather double-down on that larger market and other foreign markets than sell off something valuable in the US, which could then be used to challenge them in some of those remaining markets.

It could also be that they're holding out for a good deal, or delaying, hoping that denying even the possibility of a sale will help their case in court.

And they do, by some estimations at least, have a pretty solid case to lean on.

Some legal experts are saying their First Amendment rights are being violated, and in a 1965 Supreme Court case, Lamont v. Postmaster General, the court ruled that foreign-produced propaganda—in that case communist propaganda—could still be distributed through the postal service because Americans have a first amendment right to receive it, even if they didn't specifically request it.

This is considered to be relevant, here, because one of the arguments against TikTok by the US government is that the Chinese government could adjust what they show people, favoring content that supports positions and views of the world they like, over time adjusting the opinions and facts or pseudo-facts young people in particular are working from—which over time could also influence what they believe, how they vote, and so on.

There have already been claims that TikTok favors pro-Palestinian content over pro-Israeli content, for instance, and it has long suppressed work that talks about the Tiananmen Square massacre and other things the Chinese government doesn't like; it doesn't generally fully disappear this stuff from the platform, but the algorithms show that sort of content to few people, which has a similar effect to deleting it on an app where people primarily discover things based on what they're shown by that algorithm.

Of course, Facebook and Twitter and other networks have been accused of the same, in Meta's case downplaying news and political content, and in Twitter's, recently, post transition to X, favoring more conservative posts over more liberal ones—though in both cases, and in TikTok's, too, it's difficult to prove this sort of thing, and the algorithms are often black boxes rather than open code we can look at and judge objectively; so some such claims may be based on anecdote and the complainer's own bias.

And it's worth mentioning here that although the Chinese government, TikTok's leadership, and a slew of free speech rights groups have come down on TikTok's side, citing the US's First Amendment and the support it would seemingly have for the popular app and those who want to use it to exercise their speech—and for the company to exercise its own, as well, sharing stuff those people watch—China has regularly banned US social networks from its highly controlled and censored portion of the internet, clamping down on those that survive so hard that they don't have much control, their data highly secured and allegedly tapped within China.

So China is saying the US is in the wrong for doing something similar to what it does back home, though on a much smaller and more focused scale, and one of the counterarguments being made by some folks in the US, including some who are typically free speech proponents, is—well, tit-for-tat. Countries that remain open for US social networks will have their networks welcomed in the US in the same way, but those who don't? Their futures are less clear, because why should the US allow that kind of potential security and influence risk when the other side refuses to do the same?

There's a question here, then, of what the modern, splintered internet is and how it should be treated—perhaps especially in free speech-favoring, democratic societies—now that we've moved past the veneer of free and open online activity everywhere.

That's never been the case in China, and in many other countries around the world, so the idea that the US and Europe and similar nations need to behave as if it's equally open and free everywhere seems a little outmoded, and some such entities, like the EU, have been regulating based on that reality, while the US has been slow to do the same; this could mark a moment in which the US starts thinking along these same terms, or it could be another instance of maintaining the previous paradigm, because that tends to be easier, and because the relevant laws haven't been updated, yet.

There's also the question of how expansive this particular bill will end up being.

Does it apply to ByteDance's other apps, as well, including the popular CapCut video editing app, and its existing Instagram-dupe Lemon8, and potential future Instagram-clone TikTok Notes?

Further, does it apply to other Chinese-owned apps, and other apps owned by companies in, for instance, Russia and other current and future antagonistic states?

Also, to what degree will the law allow friendly nation states, like Japan and European nations, to scoop up these sorts of assets and operate them in the States, in a way China would no longer be allowed, when there's the chance that some of them—Hungary, for instance—might not always be so friendly? How does the friendly or unfriendly judgement get made, and what sort of process is involved in changing a nation's label from one to the other?

Right now, the framing of all this is mostly whether we prioritize free speech or national security, and it's arguably the government's responsibility to make that argument, or face the electoral consequences of seemingly behaving in anti-speech ways without any real purpose, beyond potentially empowering US-based social platforms over foreign versions of the same.

And lacking a stronger argument and more public evidence, there's a decent change a lot of people, especially young people will be irked at a TikTok ban, or even the possibility of one, despite the supposed security threat it poses.

All of which suggests this will be an interesting year, as the clock ticks downward on those 9 months, plus another 3, possibly, that ByteDance has to sell its US assets, during which several companies will probably arise, stating their case for scooping up the most popular social platform, with young people at least, in the country, and during which ByteDance's lawyers will be filing cases on their employers' behalf.

And this will all go down as the country winds its way toward the November election, which features two presidents that have spoken out against the app, while also having used it for their own political gains, to try to reach the youths of the country, who will play a major role in this upcoming election, but also a lot of elections after that, well into the future.

Show Notes

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/381/301/

https://www.wsj.com/politics/states-take-on-china-in-the-name-of-national-security-7ed05257

https://apnews.com/article/us-china-blinken-wang-yi-8c1c453df3afbd6ec87ced0c8d618064

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/24/24139036/biden-signs-tiktok-ban-bill-divest-foreign-aid-package

https://www.dw.com/en/eu-sets-tiktok-ultimatum-over-addictive-new-app-feature/a-68891902

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/business/tiktok-india-ban.html

https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-divestment-ban-what-you-need-to-know-5e1ff786e89da10a1b799241ae025406

https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ban-bytedance-lawsuit-biden-386e6d81e2eef61a756bcdea96cd0aef

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/16/tiktok-ban-divest-ownership-china

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/five-observations-on-the-tiktok-bill-and-the-first-amendment

https://archive.ph/7Fikn

https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ban-bytedance-lawsuit-biden-386e6d81e2eef61a756bcdea96cd0aef

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/25/tiktok-legal-battle-is-certain/

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/18/business/media/tiktok-ban-american-culture.html

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/02/22/how-u-s-adults-use-tiktok/

https://www.ypulse.com/article/2023/06/05/gen-z-is-officially-using-tiktok-more-than-any-other-social-media-platform/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/technology/bytedance-tiktok-ban-bill.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/25/tech/who-could-buy-tiktok/index.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/tiktok-ban-bill-why-congress-when-takes-effect-rcna148981

https://www.wsj.com/tech/bytedance-says-it-wont-sell-u-s-tiktok-business-61f43079

https://www.wsj.com/tech/why-china-is-holding-its-fire-as-u-s-moves-to-ban-tiktok-38a63cdd

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/11/24127579/tiktok-ai-virtual-influencers-advertising

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/project-texas-the-details-of-tiktok-s-plan-to-remain-operational-in-the-united-states

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok#Project_Texas

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/business/china-tiktok-douyin.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c289n8m4j19o

https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/27/will-a-tiktok-ban-impact-creator-economy-startups-not-really-founders-say/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/25/tiktok-ban-bill-us-communities/

https://www.wsj.com/tech/how-tiktok-lost-the-war-in-washington-bbc419cc

https://archive.ph/pnMEG

https://www.theverge.com/24141539/tiktok-ban-bytedance-china-dc-circuit-supreme-court

https://www.axios.com/2024/04/23/tiktok-ban-bytedance-apps-capcut-lemon8

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/us/politics/us-china-drones-dji.html

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/05/huawei_ditches_us_lobbying_team/

https://engadget.com/huawei-honor-sold-024435704.html

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

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/15/trump-ban-huawei-us-1042046

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This week we talk about STELLARWIND, 9/11, and the NSA.

We also discuss warrantless surveillance, intelligence agencies, and FISA.

Recommended Book: Period: The Real Story of Menstruation by Kate Clancy

Transcript

Immediately after the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, then President George W. Bush gave his approval for the National Security Agency, the NSA, to run a portfolio of significant and ever-evolving cross-agency efforts aimed at preventing future attacks of that kind, scale, and scope.

The thinking behind this collection of authorizations to various US intelligence agencies, which would operate in tandem with the NSA, was that we somehow didn't see this well-orchestrated, complex plan coming, and though revelations in later years suggested we kind of did, we just didn't act on the intelligence we had, in those early, post-attack days, everyone at the top was scrambling to reassure the country that things would be okay, while also worrying that more attacks from someone, somewhere, might be impending.

So the President signed a bunch of go-aheads that typically wouldn't have been signed, and the government gave a lot of power to the NSA to amalgamate the resulting intelligence data in ways that also wouldn't have previously been okay'd, but that, in those unusual circumstances, were considered to be not just acceptable, but desirable and necessary.

This jumble of intelligence service activities, approved by the president and delegated to the NSA, became known as the President's Surveillance Program, and they were kept secret, in part because of how unprecedented they were, and in part because those in charge didn't want to risk their opposition—those they knew about, like Al Qaeda, but also those that might be waiting in the wings to attack the US while it was perceptually weakened and vulnerable—they didn't want to risk those entities knowing what they were doing, what they knew about, how they were collecting data, and so on.

The info that was gleaned via these programs was compiled and stored in an SCI, which stands for Sensitive Compartment Information, and which refers to a type of document control system, a bit like Top Secret or Classified, in that it allows those running it to set what level of access people must have to view, process, use, or even discuss its contents, and this particular SCI was codenamed STELLARWIND.

Among other activities, the programs feeding data into the Stellarwind SCI mined huge databases of email and phone communications, alongside web-browsing and financial activities; all sorts of tracking information that's collected by various components of intelligence, law enforcement, and other government and government-adjacent services were tapped and harvested.

All of this data was then funneled into this one program, and though the degree to which this much information is useful up for debate, because having a slew of data doesn't mean that data is organized in useful ways, in 2004 the US Justice Department discovered that the NSA was not just collecting this sort of data when it was connected to foreign entities or entities that have been connected to terrorism, it was also collecting it from sources and people, including just average everyday Americans and small businesses that were doing no terrorism at all, and which had no links to terrorism, and it was doing so on American soil.

After this discovery, then-President Bush said, well, the NSA is allowed to do that, that's fine, but they can only look at collected metadata related to terrorism—so they can collect whatever they want, sweep up gobs of information, file-away whatever drifts into their expansive and undifferentiating nets, but they're not allowed to look at and use anything not related to terrorism; and with that clarification to keep the Justice Department from doing anything that might hinder the program, the president reauthorized it that same year, 2004.

There was disagreement within the government about the legality of all this, some entities saying that warrantless wiretapping of American citizens was illegal, even if the collected data was supposedly unusable unless some kind of terrorism connection could be ginned up to justify it. But those in charge ultimately decided that it would be irresponsible not to use these wiretapping powers the NSA wielded to protect American lives, and even said that Congress had no power to stop them from doing so, because it fell within their wheelhouse, that of defense against potential future foreign attack.

All of the President's Surveillance Programs officially expired on February 1 of 2007, but new legislation that same year, and more in 2008, extended some of these activities, all with the justification of protecting the US from future terrorist attacks, and in 2009, a report published by the Inspectors General of the country's intelligence agencies found, in essence, that the now-retired President's Surveillance Program went way beyond what was allowed, in terms of collecting this sort of data without a warrant, and indicated that there was little oversight keeping folks from looking at data they weren't supposed to be looking at, while also indicating that the program probably wasn't very effective—so there was all this data, collected on dubious legal grounds, approved during a period of fear and perceived vulnerability, that was also becoming this a major headache for folks concerned about what amounted to a big, secret surveillance program that was targeting the very people it was supposedly meant to protect from terrorism, all in the pursuit of purported security benefits that were more theoretical than real.

A former NSA codebreaker went on the record with WIRED magazine in 2012, outlining how the NSA was surveilling Americans in this way, which got the codename Stellarwind into the press as a consequence, and the following year, in 2013, the Washington Post and The Guardian published a draft of that 2009 Inspector General report that said the program was going far beyond the bounds of what was legal and right and effective—that draft leaked by NSA employee and subcontractor Edward Snowden.

Further revelations based on that leak came out in 2014, at which point there was abundant public evidence that much of what was happening within the Stellarwind program was kept secret even after supposed earlier divulgences, and a lot of it was seemingly very illegal, though this program still functions in various capacities and at various scales, even now, in 2024.

What I'd like to talk about today is a portion of the Stellarwind program that was recently extended, though not without controversy and pushback.

—

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was passed in 1978 in response to the fairly brazen and regular violations of Americans' privacy under the Nixon administration; namely that his government regularly spied on, and used intelligence and law enforcement services to mess with, political and activist groups that Nixon didn't like.

FISA was meant to establish guardrails for when and how that sort of surveillance could be conducted, who could access the relevant data, and how it could be used—though notably, all of this applied to collecting intelligence in US territory; the rules are a lot looser when it comes to surveillance of non-americans in other countries.

Among other things, FISA established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is a court that decides who can use these tools and access this data—they oversee the divvying-out of surveillance warrants—and FISA was the basis for all those President's Surveillance Programs following 9/11; so it was meant to prevent abuses of surveillance and intelligence tools by the US government against its citizens, and this general framework was used as a scaffolding for those enhanced surveillance powers the government gave itself after the 9/11 attacks; it was also a primary resource for those who found all those post-9/11 additional powers to be illegal oversteps.

One evolution of FISA following September 11 was the introduction of what's called Section 702, which is provision that allows the US government to undertake targeted surveillance efforts against non US citizens outside the US, leveraging the full weight of the US government to do so, including but not limited to coercing telecommunications companies, like internet or phone companies, to hand over whatever data and recordings and such they might have available.

Section 702 is meant to be very targeted and specific, never allowing the surveillance of any US citizen, anywhere, any person from any country who's in the US, or any foreign person located anywhere on the planet who is communicating with a US citizen—which is a technique that was previously leveraged by some components of Stellarwinds, the idea being that if you wanted to surveil an American but had no evidence they have links to terrorism, you would just capture their phone calls and other communications with non-Americans, and you'd be good to go.

There's a fairly rigid set of protocols involved in using Section 702 for surveillance, including Department of Justice oversight on every targeting request, and opportunities to deny the collection of, or subsequent access to data that is collected by a sequence of analysts who are disconnected from those requesting said data.

That's what the rules and processes for this provision say, anyway.

In practice, Section 702 has allegedly been used to track members of Congress, journalists, victims of various sorts of crime, political donors, and protestors—targeting them for surveillance, but also used to search existing data that's already been collected, baselessly, via so-called "backdoor searches" with no connection to terrorism or anything else that would allow for the formal use of these tools, seemingly in violation of those supposed hardcore guardrails, at the behest of the FBI, CIA, and NSA. And this seemingly happens on a fairly regular basis—more than 200,000 warrantless, backdoor searches are performed each year.

All of which adds interesting context to a recent congressional vote to reauthorize Section 702 for another two years, right as it was about to expire.

This extension vote was laden with drama, in part because two major US internet companies said they would no longer comply if Section 702 wasn't renewed, as the government had had its request to keep collecting data for another year approved, but it no longer had legal backing to demand such data from companies, with the ability to coerce them to hand over digital communications data, like email and text records, if they denied more polite requests. So these companies said, well, you can collect whatever data you can get your hands on, but you can't get your hands on our data, anymore.

There was also political drama, though, in the shape of former US President, and current Presidential candidate Trump's loudly stated antagonism toward renewing this provision, something that aligned him with privacy oriented groups that he typically doesn't like or align with.

A vote that would have ended all warrantless searches on these sorts of communications failed to pass earlier in April, due to a tied 212 to 212 vote in the House, and another that would have accomplished a similar outcome and which was voted upon a few days later was defeated by just a handful of votes.

The conflict here is seemingly that while there are significant and persistent privacy issues with this and related programs, it's also considered to be a potentially useful tool in the US intelligence community's utility belt. And though most politicians would like to be seen as defending the privacy of American citizen from prying government eyes, few want to be seen as hobbling its defense infrastructure, even if the defense value of this and connected programs have been questioned and challenged, time and time again.

What eventually helped a Section 702 extension bill attain approval from Congress was a compromise that approved the extension of some components of it, that allowed it to take new communications technologies into account, arguably making it more useful for surveillance purposes while simultaneously increasing the privacy risks it poses, but pairing those add-ons with a shortened extension period, down from five years to two. Which means it's likely there will be another showdown over whether it should be extended in just a few years, at which point it can be killed or further edited, depending on how this new, slightly iterated version, is functioning at that point.

All of which is interesting and newly relevant in part because we're stepping into what some have called a new Cold War, with all sorts of real-deal military conflicts on the ground threatening to expand and encompass more of the planet, alongside rifts in the relationships between behemoths like the US and China, which could erupt into larger versions of the same, if these governments aren't careful.

At such moments, we tend to see more support for measures that give heightened power to governments and other defense-oriented entities, even at the expense of individual rights.

So rather than clipping the wings of this and similar programs in a few years when renewal is once more on the docket, it may be that Congress further empowers it—depending on how today's conflicts play out, and how the relationships between the US and its primary rivals evolve in the meantime.

Show Notes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/19/fisa-702-surveillance-internet/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/20/congress-extends-controversial-warrantless-surveillance-law-two-years/

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

https://www.dni.gov/files/CLPT/documents/2023_ASTR_for_CY2022.pdf#page=24

https://www.intelligence.gov/assets/documents/702%20Documents/declassified/2023/FISC_2023_FISA_702_Certifications_Opinion_April11_2023.pdf#page=89

https://www.dni.gov/files/icotr/Section702-Basics-Infographic.pdf

https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/warrantless-surveillance-under-section-702-fisa

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/whats-next-reforming-section-702-foreign-intelligence-surveillance-act

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/fisa-section-702-civil-rights-abuses

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/us/politics/senate-passes-surveillance-law-extension.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Surveillance_Program

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

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

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This week we talk about diplomatic immunity, Trump’s court cases, and the Supreme Court.

We also discuss Nixon, Clinton, and the US Constitution.

Recommended Book: My upcoming book, How To Turn 39(https://books2read.com/htt39), which is available for pre-order today :)

Transcript

There's a concept in international law—diplomatic immunity—that says, in essence, certain government officials should be immune from the laws of foreign countries, including those within which they're operating.

This is a very old concept, based on similar rights that were granted to envoys and messengers back in the oldest documented periods of human civilizations.

The idea is that if different cultures, whether organized into tribes or kingdoms or nation states, are going to be able to deal with each other, they need to maintain open and reliable means of communication. Thus, the folks tasked with carrying messages between leaders of these different groups would need to be fairly confident that they wouldn't be hassled or attacked or prosecuted by the people they were bringing those messages to, and whose messages they were bringing back to their own leaders.

Such representatives have at times been imprisoned or killed by their hosts, but this is relatively rare, because any governing body that treated ambassadors from other cultures in this way would have trouble dealing with anyone outside their current legal sway, and that would in turn mean less trade, less reliable peace, and less opportunity to generally cross-pollinate with cultures they might benefit from cross-pollinating with.

As a general rule, at least in the modern iteration of diplomatic immunity, folks operating under the auspices of this policy can still be punished for their misdeeds, it's just that they'll generally be declared persona non grata, expelled from the country where they did something wrong, rather than punished under that country's laws.

In some rare instances a country hosting a misbehaving or criminal ambassador or other diplomat might ask that person's home country to waive their immunity, basically saying, look, this person killed someone or got drunk and drove recklessly through our capitol city's downtown, we'd like to try them in our courts, and it may be that the government running that misbehaving person's home country says, okay, yeah, that's messed up, you go ahead; but usually—even if that person has done something truly reprehensible—they'll instead say, no, sorry, we'll pull them back and they won't be allowed to return to your country or serve as an ambassador anywhere else, because they've shown themselves to be unreliable, and we might even try them in a court here, in their home country, but we can't allow our people, no matter what they do, to fall under the legal jurisdiction of some other nation, because that would set a bad precedent, and it may make people wary of working for us in this capacity in the future—surely you understand.

There are tiers of diplomatic immunity, depending on the seniority of the diplomat or other representative in question, and the Congress of Vienna of the early 1800s charted out the basis for how these things work, in much detail, formalizing a lot of what was already in the ether back then, and creating an outline that was then further formalized in 1961's Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which has been almost universally ratified and respected, though of course there's been a lot of grey area in terms of what harassment of a representative, which is a no-no according to this convention, entails, and to what degree it can be proven, and thus punished, if violated.

We saw a lot of grey area utility during the height of the Cold War in particular, in part because many diplomats were moonlighting as spies, which is still true today, though it was even more overt and worrisome to their host countries, back then, so harassment, kidnappings, even assassinations of diplomats were more common then, than today, though they were still almost universally done covertly so that no one seemed to be violating these nearly universally accepted terms.

What I'd like to talk about today is another type of legal immunity—in this case, Presidential Immunity in the US—and why this type of immunity is at the center of former US President Trump's ongoing legal cases.

—

In the United States, many politicians and high-level appointees enjoy some of the immunity-related privileges in their own country that diplomats of various stripes have traditionally enjoyed elsewhere.

Most of these figures are only protected by this immunity under very specific circumstances, though, not universally.

Judges, while doing court-related, judge-work, for instance, have absolute civil immunity—so a judge who falls afoul of the law in the course of their duty as a judge, doing judge-things, will tend to get away with whatever it is they did wrong, though this won't generally apply to non-judge things they do during that same period

So a judge would have trouble arguing that they should get off with a warning for murdering someone because they happened to kill that person while they were on their lunch break, but they would likely be okay if they accidentally ruled in a way that exceeded their jurisdiction, even if their having done so caused all sorts of secondary problems.

Similarly, and also within the US court system, a prosecutor can't be sued for withholding evidence, even if their having done so leads to a wrongful conviction, which would be a bad thing that happened as a result of their actions, but because they acted while performing their protected duty, they'll almost certainly be okay from a legal standpoint, even if not always a moral one.

These are not rules novel to the US system of governance; most of them were borrowed from earlier forms of the same, and a lot of the US's version of these immunity rules are derived from those that exist within the British parliamentary system, where parliamentarians can't be prosecuted for things they say while in Parliament, and the same is true for politicians while engaged in their work on the floor of the US House of Senate.

Interestingly though, while the US Constitution provides that kind of legislative immunity to Congresspeople, it doesn't grant the same, or anything similar, to the President; and this was apparently a hotly debated topic back in the Constitution-writing days, as those who set up the rules of the land were aware that it might be beneficial to allow folks at the top some legal leeway, so they don't make executive decisions based on whether or not they might be sued or otherwise punished for those decisions, but at the same time they really didn't want another king, or similarly authoritarian ruler to step into office and then get away with murder—perhaps literally.

So the constitution doesn't give the President of the United States the same immunity as other members of government, but a slew of cases in the 19th and 20th centuries found, in general, that if the president or members of the president's cabinet take actions that are "more or less" within the scope of their duties, they should be granted absolute immunity, protecting them from lawsuits and legal punishments.

A court case against President Nixon in the 1970s made that previously somewhat vague and general legal trend more formal, at first triggering a bunch of lawsuits against him and his people, but then a 1982 Supreme Court decisions said, in essence, that former or current presidents are immune from lawsuits related to anything that falls within the "outer perimeter" of their duties, due to the president's "unique status under the Constitution."

This legal precedent was tested in the mid-1990s when then-President Bill Clinton was sued for sexual harassment during his governor of Arkansas days, and a lower court, then the Supreme Court, both affirmed that presidential immunity doesn't protect the president from things they did before taking that highest government office.

As a result of all that, today we have a legal context in which the President is kind of granted some immunity for some things they do while in office, but the delineation between protected and not-protected is fuzzy, and there's a whole lot of theory on this matter, but less in the way of actual court precedent that establishes confident footing for anyone stepping into this corner of the legal world.

All of which is newly relevant in 2024 because former President Trump is currently being prosecuted for all sorts of things in several different jurisdictions. And part of his legal strategy is based on a sort of Hail Mary play that's made its way to the Supreme Court, and which is premised on the concept of Presidential Immunity.

But before we get to that case, let's talk real quick about the other cases that are currently in progress, all of which that bigger Supreme Court case may influence, depending on how it turns out.

Beginning this week, as of the day this episode goes live, the week of April 15, 2024, Trump is scheduled to be in court four days a week for the next six to eight weeks, facing 34 criminal charges related to falsifying business records in order to get payoff money to Stormy Daniels, allegedly to cover up an affair they had, which he didn't want becoming public while he was running for his first term in office.

Tentatively beginning in late-May of 2024, Trump will face 40 criminal charges in Florida for allegedly mishandling sensitive documents, and his alleged conspiracy to keep those documents even after the government demanded them back.

A federal case in which Trump faces four criminal charges related to his alleged effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results was originally meant to begin the first half of this year, but it's looking increasingly likely it won't occur until after the November presidential election, as the judge overseeing the case has postponed it until after the Supreme Court makes their decision about presidential immunity, though there's a chance it could start as early as August, despite that delay.

And Trump faces 10 criminal charges for the same general collection of alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, alongside 18 alleged co-conspirators; that trial has a proposed start date of August 5, but that would be tricky, as it would mean the trial could run through Election Day, which would be awkward and would likely complicate things further.

Trump has also dealt with a flurry of recent civil, so non-criminal, no jail time possible, just fines, lawsuits, including one related to sexual assault and his defamation of the person he sexually assaulted, which led to a big payout recently, and another in New York related to his misrepresentation of the value of his real estate holdings in the state, which led to an even bigger fine, but which is currently being appealed.

There's another federal civil case that's ongoing, Thompson v. Trump, which is related to the attack on the US Capitol by Trump's fans on January 6, 2021, and that's especially relevant here because, already, the judge in that case, ruled that Trump's presidential immunity does not shield him from this lawsuit, and an appeals judge ruled the same.

There's now a Supreme Court case, which I mentioned earlier, that consolidates three separate civil lawsuits into one, Trump v. United States, and this case asks, in essence, whether Trump should be protected from these lawsuits by presidential immunity; that same immunity that was upheld in many cases in recent memory, though in different contexts.

The reason this Supreme Court case is so fundamental here is that it could impact many or all of those other cases, plus others that might arise related to Trump's actions in the future, as it would give him a sort of legal whammy on just about anything he could argue was done within the perview of his role as President.

Thus, he could argue he wasn't trying to overturn the 2020 election that he lost, he was looking into what he considered to be legitimate election irregularities as part of his duty as President. And if some other things happened as a result of that effort, like his supporters breaking into the Capitol building, he should be protected from that under the auspices of this immunity.

Those two DC court judges that earlier ruled Trump wasn't protected by presidential immunity said that it's in the public interest to hold presidents accountable for their actions, because not doing so would leave anyone who holds that office "unbounded authority to commit crimes."

They determined that it was worth the possibility that a president might make some executive decisions from a perspective of worrying about later lawsuits if it would prevent the creation of a political office from which someone could legally get away with any crime they chose to commit, including but not limited to, theoretically at least, assassinating their political rivals.

The big question now is how the Supreme Court will decide on this matter; some people are predicting that the heavily slanted toward conservative justices court will be more likely to find in Trump's favor, though they've defied those expectations several times in recent years, in some cases seeming to take advantage of their current 5 or 6, depending on how you measure, versus 3, conservative to liberal composition in order to get a bunch of Republican priorities accomplished, like overturning Roe v. Wade, which protected the right to an abortion at the federal level, but in other cases they've made what seem to be more objective rulings, defying assumptions made based on those ideological leanings—so there's no way to know one way or the other on this, right now. We'll likely find out, though, sometime in May or June, as the court will begin considering these claims on April 25 of this year, and it's expected they'll have their ruling sometime in those subsequent two months.

Until then, though, some of these other cases are a bit up in the air, as the granting of enhanced immunity could make Trump's current and potential future cases a slam-dunk for his defense team, while a ruling in favor of the contemporary, fuzzy standard, or one that weakens that standard, at least for his specific context, would deny him that potentiality.

That said, Trump's defense team seems to have also been making use of the abundant delay tactics that are available within the US justice system, and there's a chance that if he delays long enough and then wins another term as president in November, that would allow him, when he steps back into office early next year, to either pardon himself or order someone in his government to get rid of the charges against him.

Which is part of why the prosecutors working opposite him have been politely but firmly asking the judges in charge of these cases to pick up the pace, because there's a looming possibility that even if the courts decide against Trump in some key cases, he could still get off Scott free, because of that other apparent loophole in the system that would allow a sitting President to get away with just about anything, though in this case because of a different, in practice immunity-granting mechanism.

Show Notes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/01/30/7th-circuit-pokes-a-hole-in-prosecutorial-immunity/

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

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

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/trump-investigations-charges-indictments.html

https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-investigations-civil-criminal.html

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trumps-2024-trials-where-they-stand-and-what-to-expect

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2023/trump-investigations-indictments/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68577638

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61084161

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/donald-trump-legal-cases-charges/675531/

https://archive.ph/JFsIB

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

https://apnews.com/article/trump-jury-selection-hush-money-trial-manhattan-56d540406cd174ab143fe12469e9adef

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-michael-cohen-stormy-daniels-e40532d3bce7768e296fdaf9591ef05b

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/trump-criminal-hush-money-trial-begins-2a1bdd15

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fallout-trumps-bid-overturn-election-loss-heads-supreme-court-2024-04-14/

https://www.reuters.com/legal/special-counsel-urges-us-supreme-court-reject-trump-immunity-bid-2024-04-09/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States_(2024)

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

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

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

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

https://www.britannica.com/topic/diplomatic-immunity

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

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This week we talk about Linux, backdoors, and the Open Source community.

We also discuss CPU usage, state-backed hackers, and SSH.

Recommended Book: The Underworld by Susan Casey

Transcript

In the world of computers, a "backdoor" is a means of accessing a device or piece of software via an alternative entry point that allows one to bypass typical security measures and often, though not always, to do so in a subtle, undetected and maybe even undetectable manner.

While backdoors can be built into hardware and software systems by the companies that make those devices and apps and bits of internet architecture, and while some governments and agencies, including the Chinese government, and allegedly folks at the NSA, have at times installed backdoors in relevant hardware and software for surveillance purposes, backdoors are generally the domain of tech-oriented criminals of various stripes, most of whom make use of vulnerabilities that are baked into their targets in order to gain access, and then while inside the administration components of a system, they write some code or find some kind of management lever meant to give the company or other entity behind the target access for non-criminal, repair and security purposes, and that then allows them to continue to gain access in the future; like using a rock to prop open a door.

Concerns over a backdoor being installed in vital systems is fundamental to why the US and European governments have been so hesitant to allow Chinese-made 5G hardware into their wireless communication systems: there's a chance that, with the aid, or perhaps just at the prodding of the Chinese government, such hardware, or the software it utilizes, could contain a Trojan or other packet of code, hidden from view and hardcoded into the devices in some covert manner; these devices could also harbor even smaller devices, indistinguishable from hardware that's meat to be there, that would allow them to do the same via more tangible means.

Though there were almost certainly other economic and technology-dominance reasons for the clampdown on products made by Chinese tech company Huawei beginning in earnest in 2012, and escalating rapidly during the US Trump administration, that process was at least ostensibly tied to worries that a Chinese company, prone to spying and stealing foreign tech, already, might incorporate itself into fundamental global communication infrastructure.

It was underpricing everybody else, offering whizbang new high-end 5G technology at a discount, and supposedly, if the accusations are true, at least, doing so as part of a bigger plan to tap into all sorts of vital aspects of these systems, giving them unparalleled access to all communications, basically, but also giving them the ability, supposedly, to shut down those systems with the press of a button in the event that China wants or needs to do so at some point, if they ever decide to invade Taiwan, for instance, and want to distract the Western world until that invasion is complete, or just make rallying a defense a lot more difficult.

Other, confirmed and successfully deployed backdoors have been found in all sorts of products, ranging from counterfeit Cisco network products, like routers and modems, some of which were installed in military and government facilities back in 2008 before they were recognized for what they were, to Microsoft software, Wordpress plugins, and a brand of terminals that manage the data sent along fiber-optic cables, mostly for high-speed internet purposes.

Again, in some cases, the entities making these products sometimes do install what are literally or essentially backdoors in their hardware and software because it allows them to, for instance, help their customers retrieve lost passwords, fix issues, install security updates, and so on.

But backdoors of any shape or size are considered to be major security vulnerabilities, as stealing a password or getting access to a vital terminal could then grant someone with bad intentions access to absolutely everything, giving them god-like control over all aspects of a customer's information and operations, or maybe all of the company's customer's information and operations, and that creates a single point of failure that most companies want to avoid, because at a certain point there's no real way to prevent a truly determined and well-funded foe if they know the payout for investing in accessing that terminal or getting that password would be that substantial.

What I'd like to talk about today is a long-term effort to do exactly that, the target, in this case, being small, but the potential payoff of backdooring it being pretty much as big as you can imagine.

—

XZ Utils is the name of an Open Source data compression utility, which means that it squishes data in such a way that no information is lost, but so that big files and other packets of information become smaller, and that makes it faster and easier and cheaper to send that data from place to place.

XZ is popular in part because it's effective, in many cases outperforming other free alternatives, like gzip and bzip2, but it also supports an older compression model called LZMA, and it exists in the public domain, which means it's incredibly inexpensive to use, free, for most purposes.

It's especially popular in Linux and other Unix-like systems, and in practice that means it's used across these systems so that when data is moved from place to place, it's compressed and decompressed, putting less pressure on the systems themselves, almost like reducing the weight of everything you have to carry throughout the day, without any reduction in quality or the nature of those books and bags and laptops and other things you're hauling around all the time; even small reductions in that weight could make a big difference in the strain on your body, over time, and this utility accomplishes the same for the systems that incorporate it.

So this software utility is super useful, is free to anyone who wants to use it, and it's better than a lot of other options, and it's thus been baked into a bunch of fundamental computer infrastructure, like most Unix-like systems. And that's important for a lot of reasons, but the most immediately concerning issue is that the vast majority of servers that run the tech world—basically all the major tech companies, and all the companies they work with—manage their services with Linux.

XZ isn't just important for folks who have laptops running on Linux, then, it's also vital to the functionality of huge chunks of the internet; stats from the past few years show that about 96.3% of the top million web sites run on Linux servers, and a substantial amount of non-web-serving servers do, as well.

All of which sets the stage for the hubbub that arose on March 29, 2024, when a Microsoft employee named Andres Freund announced that, after looking into a decrease in performance in a version of Linux called Debian—a distinction between how fast it should have been going and how fast it was going of about 500 milliseconds, and that minor slowdown bugged him enough to look into what newer, experimental versions of XZ Utils were doing to the Debian operating system he was working with—after looking into that issue, he announced that he had discovered a backdoor in XZ that was causing errors in a memory debugging tool built into the software, and using more CPU power than Debian otherwise would have used.

So he announced this discovery, reported it to an open source security mailing list, to make it known amongst the right people, and that alerted the folks who were experimentally incorporating this new build of XZ into their software.

As it turns out, this backdoor, had it been implemented in all this software and spread across the servers that manage the web, would have granted whomever had access to it the ability to alter the behavior of the local instance of the Secure Shell Protocol, or SSH, which is what protects servers while they operate on open networks like the internet.

The degree to which this would have damaged the web, as it exists today, cannot be overstated. This problem was given a Common Vulnerability Scoring System ranking, which rates the alarmingness of software issues based on how much damage they could potentially cause, which helps computer security professionals figure out which problems to address first, a score of 10, which is the highest possible score.

In theory, this would have granted the person or other entity with backdoor access the ability to get into essentially any server touching the internet with full administrator privileges, making all that information transparent to them, providing them all information about users, passwords, banking information, everything everyone has ever posted to social media, private communications, research and technology secrets—it's really just boggling thinking about how much damage could have been caused by the right person or people, as such a backdoor would basically do away with most of the security measures they might encounter while attempting to infiltrate and even take over pretty much anyone.

Because it was discovered by Freund, though, and because he got word out to the right people as quickly as he did, the cybersecurity world was able to pivot pretty quickly, advising everyone who had implemented these test versions to roll back to earlier versions of the relevant software, and the folks behind XZ quickly released updated versions of the utility that removed the backdoor problem.

This also triggered a response in the wider software world as many developers have started to reduce the damage future, similar backdoors would be able to cause by reducing the connections and dependencies it took advantage of to function.

So this was a big enough deal that even something as arcane as compression utilities and SSH became front-page news around the world, but arguably one of the most interesting aspects of this story is what we know about the person or people who seem to have installed this backdoor.

Someone, or group of someones, going by the name Jia Tan, alongside an array of sock puppet accounts—fake accounts with different names that they also managed—started to contribute to the maintenance and development of this project, which is common in the open source world; that's part of what makes open source software and systems so powerful and desirable, despite often not having much in the way of funding or official support from big-name companies; they're often passion projects maintained by maybe just one or a few or a handful of dedicated developers.

In 2021, this entity that became known as Jia Tan started contributing to open source projects, and then contributed a patch to XZ via its mailing list.

Around that same time, several people who hadn't been seen in this project's community, previously, started to complain that it wasn't being updated fast enough, and arguing that another maintainer should be brought on board, to help it move along faster.

This Jia Tan character then started making a lot more contributions to the project, all of them seemingly innocuous and helpful, though in retrospect at least one of them changed a function that would have detected the more malicious changes they ultimately submitted, later.

In February of 2024, Tan submitted changes for the new version of XZ Utils that incorporated a backdoor, and groups of people in this larger open source community, possibly sock puppet accounts, started telling the developers who run Debian, Ubuntu, and Red Hat, all popular versions of Linux, they should incorporate this new version with those backdoor-incorporating changes into their operating systems.

There are strong suspicions, but little evidence, at this point at least, that Jia Tan and those other sock puppet accounts were run by a well-funded and skilled, probably government-backed hacking group, like one of the entities that often work as proxies for Russia's SVR—their intelligence agency that tends to support local hacking groups to do this sort of dirty work; though again, we can't say that with any certainty, as a lot of government-backed hacking groups could pull off something like this, with enough patience, years worth of patience, and it's still possible that this was a single hacker seeing a soft-target and the potential for a huge payoff if it all worked out.

That said, because of the approach this threat actor, whomever they actually are, took to target this utility, and because of how close they got to doing what they intended to do, which would have been devastating, probably even world-changing in some ways, the relationship that big tech and governance has with the open source world is being reassessed, because often the folks running these projects are just individual people doing all this important work in their free time. But because of how the tech world has evolved, huge swathes of the internet and other vital infrastructure are reliant on these single-person, passion-projects that are potential targets for cooption or, as seems to have been the case here, using what's called social engineering to manipulate the folks behind these projects, which can then gives more access to all the stuff they manage, and thus, the things that rely on the stuff they manage, to entities that want to cause harm.

Again, and this cannot be emphasized enough, we just barely dodged a bullet here, and the only thing that prevented a huge amount of potential destruction was the effort of another single person who was, almost on a whim, hacking away on a little problem they wanted to look into, and who thus stumbled upon this issue right before it reached a scale that would have been truly problematic.

And all of these issues were arguably the result of someone who found themself in the position of maintaining, more or less solo, a utility that became vital to global cybersecurity, and which thus made them the target of a sophisticated social engineering campaign.

Show Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing)

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(security)

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-has-over-3-of-the-desktop-market-its-more-complicated-than-that/

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/what-we-know-about-the-xz-utils-backdoor-that-almost-infected-the-world/

https://research.swtch.com/xz-timeline

https://research.swtch.com/xz-script

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39895344

https://www.runtime.news/sabotage-in-the-software-supply-chain/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39903685

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24119342/xz-utils-linux-backdoor-attempt

https://www.wired.com/story/jia-tan-xz-backdoor/

https://www.404media.co/xz-backdoor-bullying-in-open-source-software-is-a-massive-security-vulnerability/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/technology/prevent-cyberattack-linux.html

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/04/02/a-stealth-attack-came-close-to-compromising-the-worlds-computers

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This week we talk about cacao, plantations, and bean-to-bar chocolate.

We also discuss black pod disease, swollen shoot virus, and seed pod currency.

Recommended Book: The City & The City by China Miéville

Transcript

The cocoa bean, also called "cacao," is a seed derived from the cocoa tree, which is native to the Amazon Rainforest in South America.

More than 5,000 years ago, near present day Ecuador, the Mayo-Chinchipe culture domesticated and cultivated this tree, which then found its way north into Mesoamerica—so parts of Central America, and modern day Mexico—and that's where we actually thought it came from until a handful of years ago, when new research pushed the initial domestication date back by about 1,500 years, tracking its path down into Ecuador by identifying cocoa residue on pottery from that time period down in that region.

But way back then, it's thought that the pulp of this seed was used primarily to create an alcoholic beverage that was fermented to about the same alcohol percentage as a consumer-grade, modern day beer—just over 5%—and because of that utility in making this popular beverage, it was used as a currency in some parts of South and Central America.

It's worth noting, too, that this tree and its seed would have originally been called kakawa, which was then turned into an Aztec derivative word much later, cacauatl, which then became cacao, when the Spanish colonized the region, and cacao then became cocoa when introduced to English-speaking parts of the world—and that variation of the word took over in the age of post-WWII globalization, due in large part to the popularization of chocolate products from English-speaking countries like the US and the UK, cacao only recently being reintroduced on that scale to differentiate more expensive cocoa products from those that have become mainstream.

Also worth noting is that in addition to being used to produce a popular alcoholic beverage way back in the day, the cocoa bean was also turned into a kind of frothy spiced drink by Aztec royalty and other higher-ups in this part of the world, and that drink was enjoyed by high-born members of society for several thousand years, the beverage used in all sorts of rituals.

And to make it, cocoa was whipped together with vanilla and other spices and sweeteners to produce something akin to a sort of hot chocolate the modern person would recognize, though leaning a lot more into those spices than most modern chocolates, rather than sugars and fats.

This wasn't a widely available thing in most areas, and it probably wasn't the main end-product for most cocoa beans for most of history, as that alcoholic drink and its many derivatives were a lot more broadly available and widely disseminated.

That said, different groups, across this region and across time, including the Maya and the Olmecs, had their own variations of this hot cocoa-like drink, and there's even an Aztec story that Quetzalcoatl was outcast by the other gods in their pantheon for sharing chocolate with humans, and some regional experts have speculated that the ritual of extracting the hearts from human sacrifices in the Aztec empire might be connected to the process of extracting the cocoa pulp from the cocoa bean seed pod when producing this beverage; though that's pretty speculative.

The Aztecs came later than a lot of the other cultures in this region that partook in chocolate-related rituals and made cocoa-related goods, so that's likely part of why their rituals surrounding this drink were more elaborate than those of their neighbors, contemporary and forebear, but it's likely that the nature of the bean itself, which only grows in a finite region, about 20 degrees north and south of the equator, also had something to do with it.

Because of that limited range, the Aztecs couldn't grow cocoa in their territory, and that meant it was always a luxury import for them, which meant—like many luxuries, even today—only the richest members of society could afford it, and that helped them differentiate themselves from the chocolate-less plebeians.

This changed somewhat following the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas, when the Spaniards, who were maybe originally introduced to the drink by Montezuma or one of his underlings, brought the drink back home with them, eventually creating a new market for producers, though Europeans were not initially a fan of it, and mostly seemed to indulge because it seemed exotic, but early on they realized that because this bean already served as a unit of currency in many of the areas they were exploring and exploiting, it allowed them to deal with locals in a familiar way: this many cocoa beans for one thing, this many for another—it made negotiations and payment a lot cleaner and clearer, and cocoa beans could be easily transported for trade while also being useful, in a pinch, as a stable source of food while in transit, which compared favorably to other food goods they were bringing back home from their explorations and invasions, like bananas.

What I'd like to talk about today is the modern chocolate market, and a dramatic price increase in cocoa beans that's raising eyebrows and concerns around the world.

—

The modern chocolate market has expanded in the years since Montezuma and the Spanish conquistadors to cover the whole of the globe, with products based on the cocoa bean on shelves in every country—even shut-ins like North Korea.

In 2022, the global chocolate industry was worth something like $116 billion, which is more than double the $50 billion or so it was worth in 2009, and analysts expect this market's compound annual growth rate, which tallies the increase in the industry's return on investment each year, to remain steady at around 3.4%, which is solid, and predicated on the increase in the dark chocolate market, especially amongst health-conscious consumers, and the burgeoning plant-based and vegan chocolate markets, which further reinforce the perception of some chocolate as being a luxurious and healthful indulgence.

Such luxury upbranding is key to those CAGR assumptions, as positioning some of these products as more expensive, but better versions of what's long been available allows chocolate companies to sell relatively less product for relatively higher prices, and that means expanding their customer base while also increasing their profit-margins.

All of which would be vital for this sort of industry even during normal times, but it's even more important when things are going sideways with an industry's access to raw materials, which seems to be what's happening in the world of chocolate.

In the 20th century, especially the late-20th century, the brands that were selling the most chocolate to the most people, globally, started gobbling up their competition. This period of acquisition and consolidation left us with about a dozen big chocolate manufacturers, globally, including names you've almost certainly heard of, like Cadbury, which is the biggest such company in the world, but also Hershey, Mars, Neuhaus, Ferrero, and Milka.

Some of these companies, like Nestlé, are what's called bean-to-bar chocolate manufacturers, but most of the titans in this space melt chocolate from other manufacturers into their end-products, only using the bean-to-bar model for a few high-end offerings.

But there are a slew of bean-to-bar companies still in operation, today, they just tend to be a lot smaller, because this model requires that they process their own cocoa beans in-house, rather than outsourcing, which tends to be required to achieve the scale that companies like Hershey and Mars have reached; it's a lot more time-intensive and expensive to do it this way.

That said, the expansion of the chocolate market into a multi-billion, then more than $100 billion global industry necessitated expanding the footprint of its base-level production beyond its traditional South and Central American origins.

Several other locations within that 20 degrees north and south of the equator spectrum have thus seen cocoa trees introduced, but the biggest producer of cocoa, today, is Côte d'Ivoire, the Ivory Coast, in Western Africa, where about 45% of the world's cocoa was cultivated, as of 2022, which amounted to around 2.2 million tonnes that year, alone.

Neighboring Ghana comes in second, producing about half as much as Ivory Coast, with about 1.1 million tonnes produced that same year, and Indonesia is a distant third, producing about 667,000 tonnes in 2022.

Combined with Ivory Coast's output, Ghana's cocoa bean industry, plus the smaller outputs of nearby Nigeria and Cameroon, account for about 70% of all the cocoa produced anywhere in the world.

Ecuador, where the cocoa tree was seemingly first domesticated, is now all the way down in fourth place, producing about 337,000 tonnes of the bean for export in 2022.

Because of the nature of how cocoa beans are harvested, and where, chocolate companies have huge sway over local politics and economics, and the folks doing the harvesting have historically not been treated terribly well, and in some cases their ranks have been filled with children.

In some such areas, people are trafficked or enslaved and put to work harvesting cocoa beans, and even those who are there of their own behest are paid very little by international standards, not even a living wage (based on the cost of things like shelter and food in their regions), their incomes artificially capped by an agreement with the cocoa bean-buying industry, and though Fair Trade certification has become more common for many chocolate companies, demonstrating their commitment to paying better wages, and in turn allowing the folks producing the raw materials for their chocolates to actually be able to afford to buy chocolate products, which is not the case for those working in non-Fair Trade conditions, that's still not the norm, and in some areas the conditions faced by workers are pretty bleak, many of them children under the age of 15, many of them forced to work for various reasons, and all of them making just enough money to survive, but nothing beyond that, and in some cases, barely that.

Most of these beans, the ones that end up in chocolate produced by those bigwig entities that dominate the global chocolate trade, are mixed together with beans from other locations on commodity markets, these companies buying them by the metric ton, similar to other food commodities that are traded in this way, like soybeans, milk, and palm oil.

Distinct from most other commodities right now, though, is the increase in price cocoa beans are seeing on these markets.

In 2022, the average price for a metric tonne of cocoa beans was somewhere between $2,200 and $2,500.

That's of a kind with the typical pricing for the past decade or so, and though there was a massive spike in 1977, which was only about $5,700 per tonne in unconverted money, but that's about $28,000 per tonne if we account for inflation—so that was a pretty bad year for chocolate lovers and companies—but other than that and a few other aberrations through the decades, cocoa beans have been a pretty stable commodity, at least compared to other commodities that are thus traded.

In February of 2024, though, cocoa bean prices shot up from those $2,500-ish per tonne prices all the way to around $6,000 per tonne, and then in March cocoa futures hit a record (unconverted for inflation) price of about $10,000 per tonne, which is a staggering leap of something like 4 to 5 times the usual cost.

This price jump is being attributed to a confluence of variables, most of them contributing to a series of poor harvests in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, which again, together, account for most of the world's cocoa bean output.

The El Niño phenomenon that's been messing with the global water cycle and increasing average global temperatures since July of 2023 is partly the blame here, as are the creeping effects of climate change, which have, in practice, moved the ideal growing areas for all sorts of plants, because of a tweak to the average global temperature knobs that have nudged things higher in most parts of the world, while also making weather patterns more irregular, compared to what we've become used to.

Those climate nudges have also allowed diseases to spread faster and to new regions, including those that impact plants.

Extreme and unusual rainfall in Western Africa sparked outbreaks of black pod disease, which usually hits after wet season, and all that rain was followed by a period of extreme dryness and drought, which stoked the spread of swollen shoot virus, which reduces output by up to 25% in the first year of infection, up to 50% in the second, and which ultimately kills its hosts, the cocoa trees, and once it spreads to a plantation, the whole plantation, all the trees, usually have to be uprooted and burned, new trees planted in their stead, before things can get up and running again—all of which takes a lot of time and resources.

Cocoa manufacturers have been underinvesting in their plantations and smaller cocoa producers for years; so it's not just their workers that they're under-investing in, it's the infrastructure surrounding those workers, which is often decrepit and unsafe, and which has left them prone to these newly aggressive diseases and unusual climate happenings.

And a lot of the cocoa produced in these top-producing countries are run by small-holders, not by large-scale plantations. And because these small-holders are often almost as impoverished as the people working on the plantations, they don't have the money to invest in treating disease or uprooting and replacing all their trees, and that's led to a surge in illegal mining operations in cocoa growing areas, because illegal miners come in and say they'll pay the owners of the land where they want to dig a reliable, if still small income, and those landowners don't really have a choice—cocoa doesn't provide them enough money to do more than sustain themselves, so they take what they can get, and every time this happens, that's less prime cocoa-growing land that's being used to grow cocoa.

Because of all this, the mid-season crop coming out of Ivory Coast, the biggest producer in the world, is expected to be about a third lower than usual this year, and Ghana's production is expected to hit a 22-year low; hence, those dramatically hiked prices, which have been further inflamed by market maneuvers meant to protect investors from irregularities, but which have the practical effect of raising prices in the short-term, creating more volatility, not less.

This price-surge and negative overall outlook for the industry is causing a fair bit of concern for the global chocolate market, which has some stockpiled supply of beans, but which is struggling to account for this increase in overall cost, and is thus attempting to prepare their customers for price hikes and fresh instances of shrinkflation: which basically means selling the same product for the same price, but with less of the product in the package; so maybe a candy bar selling for the same price as before, but the bar is 2/3 its former size.

This has been a big discussion topic recently in part because of the recent Easter holiday, which is a big day for chocolate sales in many parts of the Western world in particular, so this situation is topical news, but also because it's representative of what's happening in other commodity and non-commodity markets, as well, as a result of many of the same factors.

The global supply of coffee beans has been shrinking since 2021, labor and other systemic issues contributing to that, but the climate also changing where coffee grows best, and thus making life hard on the folks who currently grow most of it, in what were previously the optimal regions for doing so, but which aren't any longer, and may no longer be capable of growing these beans at all in a few decades, the way things are going.

Olive oil is likewise seeing record-high prices in 2024, the price of extra virgin olive oil up 70% from a year previous, and 260% from two years ago, due to widespread drought across the Mediterranean, where most olives are grown, and because of a bacteria that's infecting olive trees more enthusiastically than ever before because of all that heat and drought.

The banana industry is also raising alarms, too, as the change in global temperatures and the water cycle are combining with a collection of increasingly aggressive diseases and infections that are impacting banana growing regions in Australia, Asia, Africa, and South America, necessitating a clean-sweep approach similar to those used to get a cocoa bean plantation ready to grow, again, post-infection, requiring a lot of additional investment and leading to a lot of waste and diminished expectations.

Most of these industries have enough of a backlog and stockpile to keep prices on shelves constant for a while after this sort of hit, but for all of these industries, prices are expected to go up, possibly permanently, because of this seeming new reality, and because of the nature of the entities operating in these spaces, and the systems they've deployed to keep their goods flowing to the entities that turn them into products that end up in stores around the world.

So while chocolate is the first to really hit the public consciousness in terms of the companies that own this space trying to prepare their customer base for what's about to happen by making it known that their core prices have grown shockingly high, it's likely we'll continue to see this sort of base-level inflationary impact on all sorts of goods in the coming years, unless something fundamental changes about the variables impacting supply, or the business model they use to sustain their industries.

Show Notes

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chocolate-market-size-worth-usd-191300029.html

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/29/easter-eggs-chocolate-cacao-harvests-cocoa-prices-aoe

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/26/cocoa-prices-are-soaring-to-record-levels-what-it-means-for-consumers.html

https://archive.ph/YnZH7

https://apnews.com/article/easter-chocolate-africa-farmers-cocoa-ghana-4a4d58a4e6076c8d46258c1b4dc414c4

https://archive.ph/SbWVF

https://archive.ph/wPhkk

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-top-cocoa-producing-countries/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263855/cocoa-bean-production-worldwide-by-region/

https://www.confectioneryproduction.com/news/47651/cocoa-sector-reaches-crisis-point-as-crop-prices-hit-10000-a-tonne/

https://ycharts.com/indicators/cocoa_bean_price

https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/3/30/chocolate-prices-to-keep-rising-as-west-africas-cocoa-crisis-deepens

https://investorplace.com/2024/03/olive-oil-coffee-and-cocoa-prices-oh-my-3-grocery-store-items-to-watch/

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68534309

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2024/mar/analysis-cocoa-beans-short-supply-what-means-farmers-businesses-chocolate-lovers

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231220-illegal-mining-smuggling-threaten-ghana-s-cocoa-industry

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022316622143798?via%3Dihub

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181029130945.htm

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

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

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

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

Recommended Book: Everyday Utopia by Kristen R. Ghodsee

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

https://archive.ph/lk0mN

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

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

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

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

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

https://archive.ph/lk0mN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended Book: Eversion by Alastair Reynolds

Transcript

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

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

That's an absolutely astonishing volume of oil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week we talk about foreign aid, brain drain, and long-term economic consequences.

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

Recommended Book: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

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

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

https://archive.ph/oEs0l

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

https://archive.ph/n1D8R

https://archive.ph/XXKPw

https://archive.ph/YKfDR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://archive.ph/T6lK8

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

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

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

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This week we talk about virtual reality, the Meta Quest, and the Apple Vision Pro.

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

Recommended Book: Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week we talk about the Meiji Revolution, shoguns, and the Lost Decade.

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

Recommended Book: The Blue Machine by Helen Czerski

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week we talk about virtual reality, the Meta Quest, and the Apple Vision Pro.

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

Recommended Book: Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week we talk about The Messenger, ads, and generative AI.

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

Recommended Book: The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman

Transcript

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

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

It goes on to say:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://archive.ph/SMSDU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended Book: The Avoidable War by Kevin Rudd

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://archive.ph/0outq

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's also the question of degrees:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended Book: Empire Games by Charles Stross

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

https://archive.ph/sJ75U

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://archive.ph/J0e5W

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week we talk about Bukele, Naboa, and the war on gangs.

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

Recommended Book: Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://archive.ph/49KLp

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

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

https://archive.ph/S78X5

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

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

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

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

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

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

We also discuss groundwater, flooding, and insurance.

Recommended Book: Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sheer expansiveness and significance of the problem, though, will necessarily spark the innovation of a variety of approaches, systems, and technologies, and it's possible we'll see a flurry of new moderating elements deployed and installed in the coming years—alongside a slew of fresh tragedies in cities that suffer essentially continuous problems related to subsidence and flooding, in the meantime.

Show Notes

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/east-coast-ground-continues-to-collapse-at-a-worrying-rate/

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2023/07/the-ground-is-deforming-and-buildings-arent-ready/

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-prisms-coastal-futures/article/population-development-as-a-driver-of-coastal-risk-current-trends-and-future-pathways/8261D3B34F6114EA0999FAA597D5F2E2

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022GL098477

https://piahs.copernicus.org/articles/372/189/2015/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/why-indonesia-is-moving-its-capital-from-jakarta-to-borneo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_cities

https://archive.ph/YVJdq

https://faculty.washington.edu/jwh/207mexic.htm

https://qz.com/2155497/coastal-cities-are-sinking-faster-than-sea-level-rise

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3285/nasa-led-study-pinpoints-areas-of-new-york-city-sinking-rising/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/05/30/land-sinking-us-subsidence-sea-level/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_1885_cholera_epidemic_myth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidence

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This week we talk about Indonesia, South Africa, and geopolitical risks.

We also discuss the South China Sea, the US Presidential election, and Potemkin democracy.

Recommended Book: The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell

Transcript

By many metrics, 2023 was a tumultuous year.

In the latter-quarter, in early October, the paramilitary group Hamas launched a sneak-attack on Israel which kicked off a new round of turmoil directly, on the ground, in the Gaza Strip, where Israel launched a hastily organized counterattack, and that's led to a fresh humanitarian crisis in the Strip, as resident Palestinians have been killed in the tens of thousands, as the Israeli military has sought out and tried to get revenge against Hamas fighters and leaders, but it's also upended the region as Egypt has tried to position itself as peacemaker, while also trying to stave-off the possibility of hundreds of thousands of Gazans being pushed across the border into the Sinai Peninsula, and further north Hezbola militants have engaged in an, at this point anyway, relatively low-key shootout with Israel across the Lebanese border, increasing the perceptual likelihood, at least, of a conflict that increases in scope, encapsulating more of Iran's allies and subsidiary groups, and possible even Iran itself.

That component of the conflict has also started to impact global trade as the Red Sea—a channel connecting Asia with Europe through the Suez Canal—has been plagued by gunman and drone and missile attacks by Houthi groups in Yemen, which are also supported by Iran and ostensibly launching these attacks in solidarity with those under-siege Palestinians in Gaza.

Further north, across the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, which kicked-off in earnest when the latter invaded the former in late-February of 2022, continues apace, though the frontlines in the conflict have remained fairly static for the better part of a year, and the two sides have doubled-down on launching missiles and drones at each other, reorienting toward asymmetric attacks on stockpiles and supply chains, alongside attacks on civilian centers meant to psychologically damage the other side, rather than fixating entirely on ground assaults meant to formally claim or reclaim territory.

This conflict continues to shape global alliances and eat up gobs of monetary and military resources, as Russia imports weapons and supplies from allies like Iran and China, and Ukraine receives funding from mostly Western nations, though that support could diminish or even largely dry up, soon, depending on the political meanderings of its allies in those countries in the coming months.

The drumbeat toward potential conflict in the South China Sea also continues to increase in tempo as the Chinese military upgrades and reorganizes its infrastructure and leadership, and forced accidents between ships in the area—especially but not exclusively between Chinese and Filipino assets—have become more common as both sides have decided to draw a line in the sand, China wanting to maintain a sense of invincibility and inevitability for its expansionary efforts, and the Philippines becoming more confident in its regional alliances, which are solidifying around efforts to prevent growth and influence-expansion on the part of China's military—including its stated intention to bring Taiwan under its control, by force if necessary, sometime in the next handful of years.

There's also heightened concern about conflicts and potential conflicts in the Sahel region in northwestern Africa.

A series of recent military coups against elected governments have lent this strip of land the nickname "the coup belt," and a handful of military dictatorships that have emerged from these coups have gestured at creating a sort of rough alliance meant to deter opposition from local democracies—many of which are themselves wary of coups within their own borders, and suffering from many of the variables that tend to make coups more likely, like regional terrorist activity from extremist paramilitary groups, and persistent economic and humanitarian issues.

These sorts of conflicts and potential conflicts are examples of what are often called geopolitical risks: things that are problems unto themselves, but which might also reverberate outward, causing even more problems secondarily and tertiarily, and not just in their immediate vicinity, but globally—all of which messes with efforts to plan much of anything, because something could pop up to render the assumptions informing those plans moot at the drop of a hat.

Economic crises and resource crises are also common sources of geopolitical risk, but 2024 will be historically prone to another common type: that of democratic elections. And some of the record-number of major elections scheduled for 2024 are truly significant, beyond even the normal risks associated with the potential peaceful handover of power.

—

In 2024, there will be significant elections in around 50 different countries, with some wiggle-room in that number because some of the elections expected to occur in 2024 may not, and others might pop up as the year progresses. And around 76 countries will have some type of election, inclusive of smaller, regional rather than national races.

If these numbers prove even generally accurate, that will make 2024 the most election-heavy year in history, and something like 2 billion people will head to the polls for those top-level elections, and around 4 billion for some kind of vote—these people deciding who will take the reins of some of the world's largest militaries, economies, and populations.

In practice, that means we'll see elections in the US, India, Mexico, South America, the 27 European Parliament countries, alongside nations that are up-and-coming in various ways, like Indonesia and Venezuela, and those that have seen a lot of instability of late, like South Sudan and Pakistan.

There will be an election in Taiwan that could determine, among other things, and in part, how hawkish a stance its government takes toward neighboring, bristling-with-weapons-and-animosity, China, and the UK will also see a leadership race—one that hasn't been scheduled yet—but if it does happen, that election could flip the House of Commons from the long-ruling Tories to the opposition Labour party for the first time since 2010.

The 2024 Presidential election in the United States is already being complicated by a slew of lawsuits, most of them aimed at former President Trump or his allies, Trump having been accused of all sorts of crimes, and who, as a consequence of his connection to the insurrection at the Capital on January 6, 2021, has been banished from the ballots in two states, so far.

The Supreme Court will almost certainly determine if those banishments will be allowed stand sometime in the next few months, if not weeks, though the other cases also inform Trump's election run-up schedule, as he'll be in and out of courthouses and may see substantial fines and even potential prison time if one or more of them don't go his way.

Republicans have also launched inquiries into President Biden and his son Hunter, and while these mostly look like counterattack efforts from Congressional Republicans at this point, it's possible one them might turn up something real and actionable, so those could also be volatile variables in this election, which will determine whether Trump returns to office and is able to act on his platform of doubling-down on the ambitions of his previous term in office and seeking revenge against those who wronged him, or if Biden will be able to continue his collection of policies, locking things like the Inflation Reduction Act into place, rather than seeing them on the chopping block before they had a chance to really take root.

India's elections looks all but certain to go current Prime Minister Modi's way, as he and his administration have been immensely popular, continuing to roll out a series of policies that favor the nation's Hindu majority at the expense of the Muslim minority, and that popularity is bulwarked with efforts and alleged efforts to disadvantage his opponents and anyone else who might criticize him and his accomplishments—including journalists—using the levers of state; and as tends to be the case in such circumstances, another win would provide him and his party another term in office during which they could double-down on what's working, for their constituents and for themselves.

Mexico's election in June of 2024 will, for the first time ever, feature two women candidates from the country's leading parties, making it likely the next president will be a woman. This election will also ask voters to elect around 20,000 people to fill vacant and soon-to-be vacant public positions across the country, which is a record for Mexico, and could change the on-the-ground political reality for a huge portion of the country's citizenry.

Venezuela's next presidential election hasn't been scheduled for a specific day yet, and it's all but certain to result in another win for current president Maduro, in large part because he's been accused of stacking the deck in his favor in previous elections, and in case that wasn't enough, he's also barred the leading opposition candidate from running, citing alleged political crimes as the rationale, though no one's really buying that excuse, as it's the go-to option in the authoritarian's playbook when you want to ban a popular opponent while making it seem like you're acting to uproot corruption.

This election is interesting, though, despite the outcome being basically preordained, because of Maduro's recent posturing surrounding the issue of the Essequibo region controlled and government by neighboring Guyana, which Maduro has recently said should actually belong to Venezuela, alongside the vast stores of oil and gas that have been discovered there in recent years; he's gone so far as to task local companies with exploring the area to assess where the oil wells and mines should be built, and had a referendum asking citizens if they thought the region should be annexed, all the people living there issued Venezuelan citizenship—and while there's reason to believe this is mostly just posturing and he'll ultimately settle for a deal with Guyana's government to somehow profit from those resources, there's a chance things don't go his way and military action starts to look like an appealing means of staying in power while seeming to be sticking around on the country's behalf.

Indonesia's general election will be held early in the year, in mid-February, and this election will be important in part because Indonesia is such a huge country in terms of population, and a burgeoning giant in terms of its economy and its diplomatic heft: it boasts an abundance of natural resources and is located along the South China Sea, making it a strategically important ally; but it's also one to watch because the people who have run the country's government until this point have largely been elites who were able to take political, business, and military power during the nation's pre-democratic 32 years of authoritarian rule.

The country's current president was the first real outsider to break through that wall of authoritarianism-empowered elites, and he's immensely popular, but hasn't been able to get much done because the rest of the government has been controlled by cronies of those elites.

This election could determine the shape of the rest of that government, and the elites are positioning themselves behind a portfolio of new cronies they would also control, while the current president—who's ineligible for a third term in office, and thus won't be running again—has said he intends to meddle in the election, trying to position himself as a kingmaker in this upcoming and future votes, which could help more outsiders break through that elite barrier, and maybe reshape things in Indonesia in a more fundamental way.

Russia's upcoming election is a Potemkin vote, current President Putin having jailed his actual, serious competition, and his stranglehold on power and the media in the country ensuring that unless he decides otherwise, he'll be cake-walking back into the Kremlin—elections are a farce in Russia, these days.

In Iran, though, where leaders hold some of the same powers over the electorate as Putin, including but not limited to jailing those they think might challenge their influence, there's a chance 2024's election might either force the country's Supreme Leader to clamp down on opposition he doesn't like, hard, in a way that could further alienate an already somewhat alienated public against him and his rule, or, failing that, he might have to deal with a parliament stacked with political rivals who could make his job more difficult.

There was some hope amongst Iran's rivals that 2021's election cycle might give those in charge cause for concern in this way, but that ended up not being the case. So this isn't a certain thing, and there's a good chance the higher-ups just decide to double-down on oppression, as that's worked pretty well for them in most regards up till this point. But there's a chance opposition will be able to slip into some positions of relative power, which could then nudge some of the country's behaviors internally, and throughout the region, in a direction the Supreme Leader and his people aren't happy about.

The European Parliament election will happen in early June, and will see more than 400 million voters elect 720 people to parliament across the 27 member countries, and this will be meaningful in part because it's such a big, rich, influential bloc, but also because there's been a surge in far-right candidates in some countries, that surge seemingly tied to immigration concerns and the conflict in Ukraine, among other issues of the day.

Poland's government, in contrast, moved in the opposite direction, a far-right government that was in the process of locking itself into permanent power replaced by a more center-left leadership.

So we could see an EU that doubles-down on what it's been doing, in a sort of generally center-left fashion, or one that shifts somewhat or dramatically to the right, reorienting toward more isolation and less support of neighbors like Ukraine, which would then also go on to influence the outcome of that conflict, among other global happenings.

One more election that I think is worth mentioning here is that of South Africa, which will see the ANC party, which has run things since 1994, face its stiffest competition since Nelson Mandela stepped into office and became its first black president.

In the decades since, the ANC has never faced a real threat to its governing majority until now, and that means it could be forced to form a coalition with other parties, which could substantially alter the balance of power in the country with the biggest economy in Africa, and one that has suffered from all sorts of corruption issues and problems with infrastructure and spending under ANC's governance.

There are countless potential sources of geopolitical risk and turmoil in 2024, including the aforementioned military conflicts, but also things like pandemics, the emergence of new, disruptive technologies, and economic fluctuations that don't align with the models the experts have been working from and basing their policy decisions on.

But elections are maybe the most straightforward and direct path toward fundamental change at the governmental level, which is part of why they're so valuable, but also part of why they represent so many unknowns and so much trepidation.

Only something like 43 of the 76 countries that'll have elections of some kind this year are considered to be home to fair and free elections, but even those that are mostly just going through the motions have the potential to spark non-vote-related repercussions, so this'll be a year to watch as around half of the human population heads to the ballot boxes and engages in the complex process of both doing democracy in the first place and dealing with the consequences it.

Show Notes

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/business/economy/global-economic-risks-red-sea.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Venezuelan_presidential_election

https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/10/05/indonesia-s-2024-presidential-election-could-be-last-battle-of-titans-pub-90711

https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/2024-election-cycle-starts-iran

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_national_electoral_calendar

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/12/2024-elections-around-world/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-11-01/2024-is-election-year-in-40-countries-and-podcast-elon-inc-launches-next-week

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_risk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine

https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/territorial-disputes-south-china-sea

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Note: I’m taking next week off for the new year and to work on my next book—this month’s More Things bonus episodes has thus been moved to this upcoming Thursday, and you’ll see the next LKT episode on January 2!

This week we talk about Venezuelan, Guyana, and the British.

We also discuss oil deposits, gold, and the Geneva Agreement.

Recommended Book: Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross

Transcript

In 1581, Dutch colonists arrived in South America, setting up a colony along the northern coast—but that embryonic settlement, called Pomeroon, was wiped out about a decade and a half later by the British; and survivors from Pomeroon then founded a new settlement on the back of an existing but abondoned Portuguese fort, located on an island in the middle of a river, that was an offshoot of the major regional waterway, the Essequibo River—they took over this fort, and then eventually retook Pomeroon from the British, with the help of their allies, the French.

The specifics of all this conquering and reconquering aren't terribly important, though: what's important to know is that this settlement was located in a strategic area, globally, because it allowed Europeans to grow incredibly valuable crops, like sugarcane, in an region that was accessible to ocean-traversing vessels, and in a location that was an established crossroads for local trade, which made acquiring local resources a lot easier, and getting workers for these plantations at lot simpler, as well.

All of which has meant this region—like many other scattered throughout the world, but especially those with natural ports and located somewhere near the equator—was a somewhat tumultuous, violent place for a long while, in large part because all these Europeans kept popping in to kill and take and build and destroy existing buildings and to fight with each other, while also leaving a lot of dead locals and destroyed local infrastructure and ecosystems in their wake.

Following that initial period of back and forth, though, things calmed down a bit, and the Dutch fleshed out their holdings, vastly expanding the scope of their plantations, even to the point—and this was fairly controversial at the time—that they allowed English planters to join them from 1740, onward, which increased the scope of the plantations thereabouts still-further.

In February of 1781, some British privateers showed up, captured the main settlements, and then left, and in March of that same year two Royal Navy sloops arrived and did the same, conquering the area for the British Crown until the French showed up, beat the local British forces, and occupied the colony; though a peace deal back in Europe resulted in this colony being handed back to the Dutch in 1783.

In 1796 it was reoccupied by the British, the Dutch retook it, holding it from 1802 until 1803, then the British took it again during the Napoleonic Wars, and it became an official British territory in mid-1814.

That was the end of that second period of conflicts, as the big, violent rush to claim as much area as possible during the Age of Discovery was beginning to wane, there was a sort of peace, in some aspects of the word, at least, emerging between European powers, and many of these entities were finding they made more money by trading than by fighting with each other all the time.

That said, a more fundamental conflict remained in this area, as the Spanish held a neighboring territory, the border between that territory and this one held by the British typically delineated by the Essequibo river.

So the Spanish were busy with a series of colonial independence movements when the British rolled up this collection of plantations and habitations on the east side of the Essequibo river, and thus the Spanish didn't really have anything to say on the matter, despite at times having claimed portions of the territory the British were now claiming as their own.

And maybe partially because of that distraction on the part of Spain, Britain's new, official maps that were drawn in 1835 showed British Guiana, the name of its new, official territory thereabouts, beginning at the Orinoco River, not the Essequibo, while neighboring Venezuela's maps showed the latter river as the border.

When the government of the relatively newfound state of Venezuela, which is what that neighboring Spanish territory became, realized that their neighbor was claiming territory they thought of as their own on their maps, they complained, threatened, and negotiations began, but no compromise was reached and in 1850 the two governments agreed to not occupy the disputed area along their shared border.

Less than a decade later, though, gold was discovered in that disputed area, and British settlers almost immediately moved in and started setting up formal mining infrastructure, alongside a company through which they could profit from it.

The Venezuelan government continued to complain and attempted to solve the disagreement through arbitration, but the British weren't keen to do so. This led to Venezuela breaking diplomatic relations with the British in 1887, and it asked the US for help, and when the US suggested that the UK enter arbitration, they were told no, even when then-President, Grover Cleveland, said that the US might have to intervene if the British didn't do something, based on the Monroe Doctrine, which basically says European powers shouldn't meddle in the Western Hemisphere, or else.

The British eventually said okay to arbitration in 1897, and a decision handed down in 1899 gave 94% of the disputed area to British Guiana—and the Venezuelan government was perhaps predictably fairly upset about this outcome, but both sides formally accepted this new boundary in 1905.

What I'd like to talk about today is a new rift resulting from a fresh batch of resources discovered in this long-contested area, and how that rift could spark still-further conflict.

—

In 1958, British Guiana was divided into official administrative regions, and that led to the dissolution of an historical region called Essequibo, after the river that bisected it.

In 1962, as the European powers were undergoing a phase of decolonization in the wake of WWII, Venezuela re-stated its position that the claim it made to the territory back in the 19th century was legit and should never have been questioned or legalized away, and part of its argument was that the British had a deal with the Russians back when that arbitration effort was completed, the folks on the arbitration board—who were supposed to be objective—allegedly were swayed by that alliance to rule in favor of the Brits.

The British said this is nonsense, as did the government of British Guiana, but this remained in dispute—and still is to this day in dispute, in some corners of policy and diplomacy—until British Guiana gained independence from the British, as a dominion, in 1966, becoming the nation of Guyana, with those arbitration-established borders still in place, and they remained in place when it became a republic in 1970, as well.

Shortly after that independence was attained, though, Venezuela started taking action of diplomatic, economic, and military varieties to retake the territory it considered to be its own, and to have been unfairly stolen from it, arguing—and this is just one of the many arguments it has made toward this intended end—that the Geneva Agreement that it, then-British Guiana, and the British signed in 1966 nullified the original arbitration agreement the parties signed earlier that established the still-in-place, British Guiana-favoring border.

That new agreement also said that the signatory nations would solve all disputes through dialogue, though, which is part of why recent saber-rattling by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been so shocking to many, as even though this has been an, again, tumultuous and violent area for a long time, in recent memory it's been tumultuous, but mostly peaceful, despite those long-simmering resentments from Venezuela about this perceived violation of trust and wholesale theft of a region it considers its own.

On December 3, 2023, Venezuela held a referendum that asked voters if they reject the 1899 arbitration agreement, if they support the 1966 agreement, if they agree with the government's stance that the International Court of Justice has no say in this matter, if they agree that the Venezuelan government should be able to oppose Guyana's claims about the region, and if they think the government should turn the disputed region into a new Venezuelan state called Guayana Esequiba, granting all locals Venezuelan citizenship as a consequence.

Low turnout was reported at polling stations for this referendum, but the official results indicated that more than 95% of voters responded "yes" to each of those five questions, and despite that low turnout and claims that the government may have falsified these results, they've been using those "yes" numbers as part of their justification for seemingly moving forward with an annexation of the region—though as of the day I'm recording this at least, and this could change before this episode goes live, that annexation is only on paper, not a practical, real-life reality.

Now, part of why that vote and the results and the government's response to the results are so shocking is that this region has been governed by Guyana in its many governmental guises for generations; this isn't an area that's gone back and forth between the two countries in recent memory—it's been well and truly Guyanan for a long time, and the people living in the region, all 125,000-or-so of them, out of Guyana's total 800,000-ish population, would tell you the same if you asked them. It also makes up something like 2/3 of Guyana's total landmass.

In 2015, though, oil was discovered just off the coast of this disputed territory, and that led to calls by then, as today, Venezuelan President Maduro, to take this territory back; Venezuela has a lot of oil already, but these new reserves were looking to be sizable, and this new discovery had the potential to further enrich already rapidly enriching, from the sale of oil in other reserves, Guyana—so through some lenses, it made sense to to try grab the land attached to these reserves if possible, both to get that money, and to prevent a neighbor with whom they've long had all sorts of conflicts from getting that money, as well.

That call eventually died down a bit; it remained, but wasn't at the forefront of conversation the way it was in 2015, when Venezuela was in the midst of a Presidential crisis that Maduro was likely keen to conceal a bit, moving the spotlight to something else, and ideally something nationalistic in nature.

So while getting that money was probably a big part of that renewed push, there's a good chance that political expediency and trying to get both the public and the media to look at something else, something potentially titilating in the sense that the possibility of military action tends to be titilating, and something that might rile up the nationalistic base in support of their president, rather than encouraging them to continue questioning that president's legitimacy, which was otherwise a major topic of conversation.

In October of 2023, a consortium of fossil fuel interests, led by Exxon Mobile, announced the discovery of a significant new reserve of oil and gas, marking the fourth such discovery in 2023, alone.

That announcement ran parallel to increasingly bad news for Venezuelan president Maduro, who is incredibly unpopular with Venezuelans, for all sorts of alleged corruption and driving the economy into the ground, and who is up for election in January of 2024, that election almost certain to be rigged, though the US has offered him incentives to not rig the election, allowing it to be free and open and fair, in exchange for lessening some of the oil export sanctions the country has been operating under for a long while.

So the state of play is that Maduro would almost certainly like to rig this upcoming election the way he has previous elections, keeping his hold on power as a consequence, and he kind of has to rig it if he wants to win, based on his popularity numbers, but he could potentially better those numbers by allowing something closer to a free election, getting sanctions lifted, the economy improving a bit, and he could possibly goose his numbers further by raising the Essequibo issue once more, riling up the nationalistic base and thus, possibly benefitting from those lifted sections while also winning the election with the minimum of corruption required on the back of pro-Venezuela fervor.

That's one theory of what he's up to, at least, as there's a chance he's ramping up to just move into the contested region, start setting up shop, guarding roads and claiming the area for Venezuela based on those historical claims.

But that option is considered to be quite risky by many analysts, as military action of that kind, annexing a neighbor's internationally recognized territory, in the western hemisphere, could be a step too far, bringing neighboring militaries, including Brazil's, which already has troops on the border because of this dispute, into the conflict, alongside forces or other types of support from the US.

What might be better, instead, for his seeming purposes, at least, is to just keep on rattling that saber, raise the possibility of annexing the area, maybe make some deals with the Guyanan government, threatening the whole time, and consequently grabbing some small piece of the territory, or maybe just economic, monetary rights to some of the assets—deals instead of land—and that would still be more than he started with, alongside those aforementioned election-related benefits that could help him stay in power, without having to do much in the way of election fraud.

This is all speculation at this point, though, as the public face of this burgeoning crisis is the threat of a much larger, wealthier, more powerful nation and military telling their smaller, weaker neighbor that a significant portion of their land is not theirs, and will therefore be incorporated into that larger neighbor.

That's not unheard of—it's similar to the claim made by the Russian government about Ukraine, recently, pre-invasion—but it's also not super common in the modern world, as the taking of territory in this way has been disincentivized by international structures and alliances that generally make the consequences of doing so a lot weightier than the benefits of acquiring that bit of land.

We're entering a new, post-Ukraine-invasion age, though, in which a lot of those prior norms and expectations are being challenged or upended, neighbors invading neighbors, maybe gesturing at a new norm, but some of these governments maybe just hoping to get in while the getting is good, righting perceived wrongs and grabbing what they can before the international order gets wise and implements some new system of carrots and sticks, assuming—not without reason—that it will make more sense for everyone, in the aftermath, to just leave things where they are at that point, rather than trying to put the pieces of the former setup back together in some way.

The governments of Venezuela and Guyana had a meeting in the nearby island of St. Vincent recently, in which they agreed to an 11-point declaration, which included a mutual promise not to use force against each other, no matter what, and to avoid escalating the conflict in any way—but their disagreement over who should have jurisdiction here, with Guyana pointing at the International Court of Justice, and Venezuela saying that Court should have no say in the matter, could complicate these discussions before they really start, making any progress a slogging, pit-trap laden effort.

Show Notes

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-67635646

https://time.com/6343549/guyana-essequibo-region-venezuela-dispute/?utm_placement=newsletter

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-67645018

https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-opposition-referendum-machado-guaido-0f615a5aa835a4cae7d83403321c6c6d

https://www.semafor.com/article/12/07/2023/guyana-venezuela-tensions-drive-us-military-exercises

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Venezuela#2006_changes

https://apnews.com/article/guyana-venezuela-essequibo-oil-united-nations-maduro-fd9e3a3275de8d88dc0a0982f8e7cda4

https://archive.ph/VMWiR

https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20231214-venezuela-guyana-presidents-meet-to-de-escalate-tensions-over-disputed-oil-rich-region

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/15/venezuela-and-guyana-agree-not-to-use-force-in-essequibo-dispute

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/venezuela-tells-world-court-referendum-go-ahead-despite-guyana-resistance-2023-11-15/

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/dec/14/guyana-venezuela-essequibo-maduro-kenneth-mohammed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Guiana

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essequibo_(colony)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Kyk-Over-Al

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyana%E2%80%93Venezuela_territorial_dispute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyana

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This week we talk about stainless steel, DARPA, and GNoME.

We also discuss ceramics, DeepMind, and self-driving labs.

Recommended Book: Drunk On All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson

Transcript

In a recent episode, I talked a bit about the bronze and copper ages, and how reaching the level of technological know-how so that it's possible to heat metals so you can blend them with other metals, forge them into useful things, and generally work with them in a more fundamental way than is possible if you're simply chipping away at them, bending them with brute strength, and so on, grants you all sorts of additional powers that those cruder methods do not offer.

Copper's a pretty basic material to work with, as metals go, in part because of its elemental properties, and in part because it appears in nature, on Earth, in its pure form, so it's not something our ancestors would have had to imagine from whole cloth—they could see it, work with it, and thus, had a pretty good sense of what it was and what it was capable of.

Bronze, an alloy of copper—with some amount of tin mixed into the copper to make it more resilient and strong, and thus, useful for many things—was different in that it's not natural and doesn't occur unless we synthetically produce it.

Iron is similar to copper in that it's natural, though it's also a lot stronger and thus harder to work with, lacking the metallurgical capacity to melt it down and reshape it in a liquified form, and steel is in this way a bit like bronze in that it's an alloy of iron—iron mixed with carbon—and variations on the theme, like stainless steels, have some amount of chromium blended in with the iron and carbon, alongside nickel, in some cases, which makes it even more complex, and thus essentially impossible to imagine if you're limited to what nature provides you, in terms of practicality, and thus, often at least, your conception of materials-related possibilities.

So part of the challenge in attaining mastery over difference materials, including but not limited to metals, is discovering them and having access to the requisite natural resources, like iron and copper, in the first place, but then also, over time, learning that you can manipulate them in various ways, and then over time—often long, long stretches of time, generationally long periods of time in some cases—refining those methods of manipulation until it's possible to do so economically, but also, typically, at some kind of productive scale: allowing you to make enough of the material so you can churn out, for instance, armor and swords made out of it, or if we're talking about ceramic goods, stuff made of clay and silica and carbon, among other substances, scaling-up the process so you can produce more jugs and pots and urns, more food-preservation technologies and clay tablets for writing and bricks for building homes and other structures; and that's alongside the parallel process of simply learning how to capably work with these materials, once a sufficient volume of them becomes available.

So while metal and clay are different sorts of substances, they're both materials that we use to make objects—we take basic, earth-derived stuff and reshape it into things that are useful to us in some way, whether that means as a weapon or means of manufacturing things, or as clothing, homes, or objects of beauty—artworks and such.

Materials science is a field focused on the many facets of these types of resources, with some practitioners working with existing materials in order to better understand them, others sussing out various means of scaling-up production or iterating upon existing modes of production to make them more economical or sustainable, while still others aim to produce new materials of this kind: in some cases discovering existing-but-rare new materials, in the sense that we haven't discovered them, at least in the scientific sense, before, but often production, in this context, means combining different elements or other raw materials to create new materials.

Just like our ancestors figured out how to make stronger, longer-lasting ceramic pots and how to make stainless steal out of iron alloyed with other substances, the contemporary version of that field often means working in laboratories and manufacturing hubs to investigate the blending-potential of various materials, and to then refine successful blends to see if the resulting whatever might have utility that can be exploited for some kind of productive purpose.

What I'd like to talk about today is materials science, and how new innovations in the AI realm could push this field into an entirely new, and much faster-moving, paradigm.

—

As I mentioned in the intro, we've been doing what you might call materials science research and development since our earliest days of civilizational evolution, and almost certainly for quite a long while before that, too, because our deep, deep ancestors were all about making clever use of their environments and the materials in those environments, to get a leg-up over their competition.

That said, modern materials science arose out of earlier, differentiated fields like metallurgy and ceramics engineering classes and laboratories, some of these educational and commercial hubs slammed together into unified, materials science departments in the 1960s when the US Advanced Research Projects Agency—the precursor to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA—started throwing money at universities with laboratories that seemed capable of helping the US economy, and by association the US military, gain broad-scale advantages over their international competition, by approaching materials research not just from the 30,000-foot, macro-scale view that pretty much every such department had approached such things from until this point, but also the micro-scale, atomic-level perspective: something more fields were beginning to attempt in the wake of WWII and the increasingly common realization that we've been missing out on a lot, not looking at things from the atomic level, up till that point, and that by leveraging advanced understandings about how these substances work from other fields, like physics, we could probably speed-up our development of new incredibly useful, omni-versatile materials, like steel or aluminum, dramatically.

This would allow us to start our research with assumptions based on molecular and atomic science, rather than empirical, observational, comparably quite slow approaches, and that meant rather than waiting to observe and measure something interesting that happened, usually by doing a lot of fiddling around and hoping for good luck, over and over, day after day, we could instead very intentionally start cycling through all the potential blends that these other scientific understandings have told us are both possible and might be useful or interesting for various reasons.

In the decades since, materials science has expanded still-further, encompassing new and ever-smaller scales, and new material types, like polymers—plastics, basically—that weren't really a thing when the unified field first, itself, became a thing.

The impact this reorganization and refocus has had on the development of new materials cannot be overstated: among other things, innovations in this space has led to the development of artificial skin for burn victims, metal composites that have worked their way into all kinds of consumer products, making them more durable and lightweight, the production of medical hardware capable of performing magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasounds, the materials required to produce microchips of ever-smaller sizes, but with ever-denser capacities, nanotechnologies that have allowed for the shrinking of all sorts of components and devices, and the materials that have made the rapidly increasing efficiencies of solar panels possible, alongside the materials used in wind turbine blades and batteries with ever-embiggening capacities, safety features, and durabilities.

The modern world, in essence, all modern technologies, and especially all digital goods, but also everything made out of any kind of metal or plastic that isn't raw iron or copper, both of which are increasingly rare in consumer goods, at least, was enabled by the field of materials science; lacking that mid-20th century development, it's a fair bet we would have been held back in pretty much every other scientific field, and thus, technological development, as well.

That ubiquity and importance is part of why a recent announcement by Google's DeepMind division—an artificial intelligence lab under the larger company's brand-umbrella—has been getting so much attention.

DeepMind has become well-known for its upending of chess, the game of Go, and more recently for creating a protein structure database that contains all its predictions for the 3D structures of folded proteins—showing how more than 200 million proteins will likely look based on their amino acid sequences, alone, solving what has long been called the "protein folding problem," which I spoke about at greater length in a previous episode, by the way.

So we've got a database full of protein ingredients, amino acids, for all the proteins we've ever discovered, but just having those ingredients doesn't tell us what the finished proteins will look like in three-dimensions, once they've been built, because they fold up into a final shape after construction.

Figuring out how finished, folded proteins made up of those ingredients we knew about, how they would actually look in real-life, has thus been a time-consuming, ponderous and expensive effort—all of science, our entire human civilization-wide scientific effort, was able to demonstrate the final, folded structures of something like 170,000 of the more than 200 million proteins we knew about, up till the early 2020s.

That changed with DeepMind's AlphaFold program, which—using an AI technique called deep learning—was able to predict, imperfectly, but with enough accuracy to successfully predict single-mutation effects (what will happen if a protein has a single change to one of its amino acids, and how that will impact the final shape of the folder protein) all of those known proteins in our existing database.

So predictions that are usable for many use-cases, and at what's been called a borderline miraculous or magical scale, applying this prediction model to every single protein we know about, as a species, at this point.

That same lab has now applied a similar AI system to predicting and simulating how various materials will work together, if blended, and how their fusion, the product of that blending, will behave; what properties it will have.

The company announced that they've developed a new deep learning system optimized for this purpose, called Graph Networks for Materials Exploration, or GNoME, and the initial outcome of running this tool was the discovery of about 2.2 million new crystalline structures, about 380,000 of which are stable enough to warrant further materials science investigation.

Using current methods and extrapolating on the research currently being done and funding currently available to researchers in this space around the world, it's estimated that around 736 of these 380,000 new potential materials have already been discovered by researchers in experimental settings, and that this stockpile is equivalent to about 800 years'-worth of knowledge based on current levels of investment and output.

So it would take about 800 years, at current levels of research in this space, to discover this many new potentially useful materials.

All of which is wonderful, as—like with the folded protein predictions provided by AlphaFold—this new GNoME model gives materials scientists some focused areas to be looking at, making every experiment more likely to provide us with useable outcomes, rather than the shot-in-the-dark approach that's more common when looking into unfamiliar blends of materials.

Many of these 380,000 potential new structures will likely be not useful for today's purposes, then, but this type of research rigs the dice so that each investigation is relatively more likely to yield something really valuable, which could prove to be hugely beneficial, especially since that catalog of potentially useful structures, like the protein fold catalog, has been published and made available to whomever wants it, for free.

That's still a lot of work to do, of course, churning through all these potentially useful materials, which is why another development in this space—what's sometimes called self-driving labs—is also notable and potentially vital for the more-rapid development of materials science.

Self-driving labs are basically lab spaces optimized for robotics that allow non-human, robot arms and other hardware, to perform the requisite, and often slogging, ponderous, tedious work of basic materials science experimentation, safely and continuously, around the clock.

So just as you might automate a fast-food restaurant by telling some software what ingredients to combine and how to process them, in order to make a burger or some fries, keeping tabs on the temperature of everything and what's been mixed with what along the way, using specialized, automated equipment, you can also tell some software which materials to combine, and how, and have it keep track of everything's properties throughout the process using an array of sensors, and then some robot arms perhaps, or maybe just a big box with pipes and the ability to move stuff from here to there when prudent, will combine a slew of varied substances from a catalog of options, and then keep tabs on the resulting materials, tucking away examples for further, human exploration and confirmation if they're auto-tagged as being interesting for the sorts of properties we want to see, but otherwise maybe just categorizing them according to their properties, adding to the body of knowledge we already have for such things, and giving us a sort of materials reference library that we can tap into when we need a specific material with specific attributes, in the future.

What this potentially does, then, is robotically automate the checking of the AI-generated catalog of potentially useful materials.

The degree to which this could change the field cannot be overstated, as while that earlier, 1960s-era formalization of the field, combining earlier realms of inquiry was a big deal, changing everything, this next step could do the same, replacing humans—who are in many cases doing systematic, tedious work—with sleepless, emotionless, unkillable robots working from software-generated possibilities in order to provide us with a new menu of materials we might use, moving forward.

This sort of development is especially important, arguably, because of all these new possibilities we now have available to try out: the number of possible combinations grows incredibly rapidly as the number of new materials and possible materials increases, and because there are only so many humans with the necessary skills and knowledge to do this kind of work, those human researchers have become kind of a bottleneck: good at what they do, but mostly tasked with responsibilities that can be automated, at least to some degree, their hands and eyes replaced with robot versions of the same, nothing lost in the transition and possibly a lot to be gained by swapping them out, including the optimization of those boring, predictable processes, and the ability to work more AI into the loop, those AI empowered to make more predictions and assumptions as new data from these experiments roll in, further speeding up the process of development and further optimizing the economics of such research, alongside the tangible fruits of that research.

All of this, of course, is still bleeding-edge new, and there's a nonzero chance that some component of it ends up being not as useful or accurate as predicted or claimed, or that there will be some other glaring flaw that makes it not as desirable as it currently seems to be.

And that might mean we have some wonderful new predictions to work from, but are stuck with the same plodding pace of working through them—or in contrast, maybe those predictions turn out to be not as great as advertised, and instead we have super-fast experimental robots in our arsenal, but a much smaller menu of potential materials to work through, limiting what we can do with those self-driving laboratories—at least in this field, at this moment.

This is a maybe quite exciting moment for a field that touches essentially every other field, though, and if even a single-digit percentage of the purported possibilities of these new developments turn out to be accurate and manifestable, a lot of things could change very quickly, across many aspects of many industries, similar to the development of steel or plastics, but possibly even more rapidly deployed, and at a scale that the folks innovating those earlier wonder materials couldn't have dreamed of.

Show Notes

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06734-w

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06735-9

https://www.mtu.edu/materials/what/

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/google-deepmind-invents-400000-materials

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.218401

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaFold

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz8867

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-022-00231-0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stainless_steel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_science

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_materials_science

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This week we talk about renewables, open-pit mines, and the Bronze Age.

We also discuss the Cobre mine, First Quantum, and environmentalism.

Recommended Book: The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green

Transcript

Depending on whose numbers you use, and where you choose to place your chronological brackets, the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, began around 5,000 BCE, around 7,000 years ago, with the smelting of copper at high temperatures.

The oldest confirmed and dated site relevant to the beginning of this age is in Serbia, though this capability seems to have been developed, independently, at various places around the world within a few thousand years of each other, including China, North America, in the Great Lakes region, and in what is today Pakistan, as well, among other locations.

The process of smelting copper that was practiced in Eurasia, in what we might today call Central or Eastern Europe and Western Asia, slowly moved the continent out of the Neolithic period, which was largely defined by humanity's construction of organized settlements, widespread adoption of agriculture and animal domestication, and large-scale pivot away from nomadic, hunter-gatherer-style ways of living.

Folks at that time were also getting a lot of mileage out of early ceramics and stone tools, alongside all sorts of ornaments and artworks made of these and other materials that required skill and some level of technology to use, but which didn't require metallurgy.

Humans were still using a lot of stone tools during this period, then, but started to include heat-worked copper elements into their tools, as well.

So the Copper Age saw the development of very basic metallurgy by many interconnected groups throughout this part of the world, and though some early writers on the subject grouped the use of copper and bronze together, defining a much larger period as the Bronze Age in an undifferentiated way, modern scholarship on the matter, beginning in the late 19th-century, breaks them apart into the earlier Copper and subsequent Bronze Ages because the manipulation and use, and often then the heavy reliance on copper tended to segue a society, eventually, toward bronze, the latter being more difficult to wield, and the former generally serving as a transitional sort of technology.

And that's because copper is one of the rare metals that naturally occurs in a usable form in the Earth: so folks were using copper for a variety of purposes as far back as 8,000 BCE-ish, but we tend to use the smelting of copper as a delineation for the eponymous age, because that's when humans started to really work it, having become capable of building the technologies required to reach the requisite heat levels, and to control the metal and shape it, rather than simply finding it in its raw form and using chunks or slivers of it for decoration or weaponry-related purposes.

Bronze is an alloy consisting of copper and tin, and the proper melding of these two metals makes the resulting substance, bronze, a lot more durable, resistant to environmental wear, and more capable of holding its shape: that also means it's a lot more difficult to work, if you want to make things out of it, but it also made things like armor and sword edges dramatically more effective, which is why when civilizations learned how to work it and built the infrastructure necessary to do so on scale, they tended to do pretty well, in terms of military victories and economic competition, compared to their bronze-less neighbors.

Copper, though in some ways replaced by its alloys, like bronze, for many use-cases throughout history, has continued to be incredibly useful for a broad range of purposes, and what I'd like to talk about today is the closure of a copper mine in Panama, and the predicted global copper shortage we may soon face.

—

In the latter-half of 2022, the International Copper Study Group, or ICSG, reported that they expected a copper surplus of around 155,000 tonnes on the global market in 2023.

That would represent a small surplus, as about 26 million tonnes of copper land on the international market each year, but a surplus of any kind would have been notable, following a long period of deficits, largely due to a huge amount of growth and construction throughout China, and a failure of international copper mines to produce as much marketable metal as they're theoretically capable of producing.

The ICSG updated their expectation in early 2023, changing their official expected figure from a surplus of 155,000 to a deficit of 114,000 tonnes, and that's following a deficit of 431,000 tonnes in 2022.

The upside of which is that the world has been demanding more copper than has been produced for a while now, and while current deficits are low compared to the record-high deficit of about 1 million tonnes in 2014, some prognosticators are saying we could see a deficit of somewhere between 1.5 million to 9.9 million tonnes by 2035, depending on how a collection of variables play out in the coming years.

One major variable is how expansively and aggressively the world's governments and companies decide to invest in and deploy new, renewable energy-centric technologies and accompanying infrastructure.

Copper is fundamental to the production of solar panels, electric vehicles, battery storage technologies, and even the cables that, when strung together, form our electric grids.

Because of that funamentalness, copper is generally seen as being an easy bet, in terms of production investment, because it's so necessary for development and growth and building things, that—using existing technologies and systems and methods, at least—we'll always need more of it.

And there is investment in copper projects around the world, including a slew of recent takeovers, like the April 2023 approval for BHP Group to buy OZ Minerals for nearly $6.4 billion, and the attempt by Swiss multinational Glencore to buy-out Canadian-owned Teck Resources for around $23 billion, which failed, but that eventually led to a separate deal for Glencore to buy Teck's steelmaking-grade coal business for around $9 billion; so Teck held on to their copper business in that deal, but that more than $20 billion price tag gives you a sense of how big this market is, and how competitive it's getting.

The issue, though, is that while there's interest in this industry, and a lot of growth potential more or less baked into the way the world is going, with so many new renewables being deployed and grid systems needing to be upgraded essentially everywhere to account for more transmission of larger volumes of electricity to more locations, there's still a lack of sufficient mined copper—growth in mining volume has sputtered, and some analysts have suggested that with copper as cheap as it is, there's less appetite to invest in that side of the industry; as of September 2023, the average price of a key grade of copper was just over $8,500 per tonne, and some analysts have said the price needs to be something like $15,000 per tonne, nearly double that, in order to justify the necessary investment in mining volume capacity.

Thus, we're at a moment in which we're already short of copper, we're expected to, globally, need a lot more of it very soon, but the price isn't high enough to justify expanding output, and that means we could run up against a shortage before the price reaches the point it needs to be at, which may then compound the issue for several years, until that new capacity can be built-out and come online, at which point we may be way behind on this transition, but also possibly hurting across other endeavors, as well, like making repairs to infrastructure, building new buildings, and even expanding access to fundamental services like telecommunications, because all of these things require a substantial amount of copper, which could become quite expensive for a while, if a balance isn't established, soon.

That potential for a global shortage and concomitant price increase spiral is part of why news out of Panama, regarding a copper mine called the Cobre mine, is so unwelcome to many market watchers.

The Cobre mine, located about 75 miles or 120 km west of Panama City and just shy of the Caribbean coast, is a huge open-pit copper mine that spans about 53 square miles or around 138 square km, and, according to many environmentalists, is severely damaging to local ecosystems, including the jungle area where it's located, and it substantially depletes local water supplies.

The mine also accounts for about 1% of global copper output, somewhere between 3.5-5% of Panama's total GDP, and employs something like 8,000 people directly, and tens of thousands more, indirectly.

A Canadian company called First Quantum bought the land in 2013 and started building it in 2014, and it then began operation in 2019.

A concession for the land had been granted to another company by the government, and that concession was confirmed with the passing of a law in 1997.

A lawsuit was brought to the country's Supreme Court in 2009, the idea being that the concession was illegal because there hadn't been a public tender on the matter—no bidding process, basically—so the concession should be deemed illegal as the process of granting it was maybe corrupt.

In 2017, the Supreme Court agreed with that claim, but in 2019 when the government attempted, unsuccessfully, to basically just give a new concession similar to the old one, to make the mine and the company operating it legitimate in the eyes of the law, First Quantum was just beginning to make its first shipments of copper from the mine, and in 2021, when negotiations had finally started up for a new contract, since that 2019 attempt didn't work, the mine was already nearly at full production strength—so the realities on the ground behind all of this legal maneuvering became trickier and tricker, because not only was this company nearing full operational capacity, it was bringing in money for the government, it was employing gobs of people, and it had pretty firmly rooted itself in the region—to the chagrin of many, but also to the benefit of many, because of all that money and employment.

The mine ended up closing for two weeks in late 2022, leading up to a decision by the Panamanian congress, which, in October of 2023, approved a new bill that, like the old bill that was declared unconstitutional, would allow First Quantum to keep mining copper in the area, despite the environmental issues inherent in the work they have been doing there, and the alleged corruption and non-constitutionality of the process granting them mining rights.

A wave of protestors surged into the streets across the country, blocking roads and shipments and the conduct of normal business, and while there were a few skirmishes where police hit protestors with tear gas, these protests remained mostly peaceful.

Protestors said they didn't think it was constitutional to approve the mine the way the government did, and that it seemed as if the president was secretively pushing something he wanted to get done, despite the contract—like its predecessor—not being valid.

Then, in late November 2023, the Panamanian government ordered the mine closed, following the Supreme Court's ruling that, yes, this new bill granting the mining company concessions wasn't legal, either.

We're now entering a period of uncertainty in regards to the mine's future, as there's a chance international arbiters will decide that First Quantum should receive a huge payout for their troubles and investments, or, if things were to go a different direction and they were to negotiate a new, constitutionally allowable contract, allowing the mine to start back up in some capacity, things could still be tricky, as the mine has lost around half its global market share since those huge protests began back in October.

There's also a chance the Panamanian government could nationalize the mine, or that the mine will simply close forever, though that still leaves questions about what will happen to the surrounding area, much of which has been deforested or otherwise harmed by the size and open pit nature of the mine.

This issue has become a big deal in Panama, as it touches on some touchy subjects, like alleged corruption by politicians—it was assumed by many that the president and his government were behaving corruptly in this matter, because the payout the government would receive from the Canadian mining company was considered to be quite small, compared to what the company would take—but also environmentalist issues, which have become increasingly vital at a moment in which much of the wealthy world is attempting to shift their raw material needs, especially those that come with environmental damage, overseas.

And some poorer nations are attempting to fight that shift, but with mixed results, as in some cases those raw materials provide them with much of their export-related wealth, as is the case in Panama, where something like 80% of its exports reportedly came from this mine.

There are also issues of international concern here, though, because of those aforementioned global copper needs and how the surge of investment in renewables and accompanying infrastructure and technologies require a lot of raw materials like copper, but also lithium, cobalt, and other such metals and elements.

The conflict, then, is that there's still an imbalance here, as although some nations might be able to flip the switch on mining some of these newly desirable materials and selling them to wealthier nations, become something like the next-stage of a petro-state, there are also valid concerns related to the killing-off of local ecosystems and flora and fauna, in pursuit of what amounts, through the eyes of some, to a quick buck.

Is it worth attaining some amount of money if you have to trade the environmental well-being of your country to do so?

That's the question Panama has asked itself, and it has apparently decided in favor of its environment, though this is a question many other people in many other places are asking themselves right now, too, and their answers will further inform how this global transition plays out, and what sorts of trade-offs will or will not be made in the process.

Show Notes

https://apnews.com/article/panama-mining-canada-first-quantum-mineral-arbitration-6530dceccfb60fb9a06bc3136c04d2cc

https://apnews.com/article/panama-mine-copper-protest-environment-economy-6e893c48311540eeb81ce35173b9f558

https://apnews.com/article/panama-copper-mine-supreme-court-canadian-629d8a7838f23cc4ed845a1b3c7a2941

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/panamas-supreme-court-rules-against-first-quantum-mine-bab0cfa2

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-67565315

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobre_mine,_Panama

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/11/30/panama-celebrates-court-order-to-cancel-mine-even-as-business-is-hit

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canadian-owned-mine-will-begin-closure-in-panama-after-contract-deemed-unconstitutional-1.6668760

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/top-panama-court-rules-first-quantum-mining-contract-unconstitutional-2023-11-28/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/copper-shortage-threatens-green-transition-620df1e5

https://www.eetimes.com/copper-may-be-the-next-real-shortage/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/coppers-anticipated-supply-surplus-is-proving-elusive-2023-05-10/

https://about.bnef.com/blog/copper-prices-may-jump-20-by-2027-as-supply-deficit-rises/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalcolithic

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This week we talk about weeds, lawn mowers, and California’s Air Resources Board.

We also discuss ornamental lawns, leaf blowers, and two-stroke engines.

Recommended Book: The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant

Transcript

The concept of the modern lawn—a term that originally referred to a somewhat ecologically varied, short-cropped green space that was used for livestock, in contrast to fields that were used for growing agricultural plants—is derived from a variation of the lawns built and maintained by European aristocracy, especially British aristocracy, in the mid- to late-teens centuries, BC.

The concept evolved from a sort of posturing that only wealthy people could manage, back then, before the advent of grass-trimming machinery.

And the flex here was two-fold:

First, here is an expanse of land, which typically would have been put to use, in this case for livestock, but which I, because I'm wealthy, can leave unproductive, untarnished by beasts, and thus for purely beautification and recreational purposes; I can impress people with my sweeping plots of greenery, I can make it uniform and, thus, interesting, in an age in which nature is still being wrestled with and perfection by any standard is rare, and I have enough people working for me that all this maintenance, despite its incredible weight, all that grass in some cases being hand-scythed and sheered by human beings toiling all day long—I can afford to do that. So, look upon my fields, my vast tracts of ornamental land, and be amazed.

So simply setting aside land for this aesthetic-focused purpose was big, but so was maintaining such a thing in a period in which that maintenance was the consequence of long, hard, expensive human labor.

That ornamentality became more accessible to more people with the advent of early mowing machines, the first of which was unpowered, made from wrought-iron, and used a cylinder of blades that would spin when you pushed it.

That was invented in 1830 in England, and from there these Budding Machines, named after the inventor, Edward Budding, were sold to entities with large expanses of land, like the Oxford colleges and Regents Park Zoological Gardens, which in turn helped Budding, mostly financially, evolve his machine, which was then manufactured at a larger scale and licensed to other companies that wanted to make their own version of the same.

Within a decade, these mowing devices had been augmented so they could be pulled by horses, donkeys, and other beasts of burden.

Just over sixty years after that first model was built by Budding, the first steam-powered mower, still pulled by animals, usually, but much more powerful, was patented, and then eventually built and sold, and by 1900 a popular model of steam-powered mower, the Ransomes' Automaton, which is just a wonderful and steampunk name for anything, was dominant in the English market, and the first riding lawn mowers arose around the same time, as seats for operators were added on to the increasingly complex machines.

Mower designs started to show up in patent offices elsewhere around the world around this same time, as the concept of lawns had already spread globally, due to the British Empire's presence and influence, and in the US, the concept of the ornamental lawn was especially appealing: landowners who were gobbling up vast expanses of the—by their standards, basically uninhabited North American continent—were adding these sorts of areas to their growing estates, and the US Civil War meant that some of these landowners were finding themselves with a lot less abundant human labor—of the inexpensive and slave variety, at least—than before, thus the market for mowers, to maintain these brag-worthy lawns, grew quickly from the mid-1860s, onward.

The first gas-powered lawn mowers were produced in Lansing, Michigan back in 1914 by a company called Ideal Power Mower Company, and that same company went on to develop the first-ever self-propelled riding lawn mower, of the sort that would be recognizable today, as it didn't need a horse or other animal to pull it, and this collection of mowing-related innovations, combined with the rapid expansion of suburbs around the United States following World War II—which was partially the consequence of trying to keep war-era manufacturing operating at scale, post-conflict, but also the flood of money that entered the economy as veterans were all but given access to higher-education and cheap loans for houses in rapidly developing city outskirts—that ended up being exactly the right combination of elements to help the lawn spread still further, into a country that was looking to flaunt its wealth a bit, and in which a large number of people were suddenly becoming homeowners, with little patches of lawn all to themselves, adopting the standards of landowners that came before them, including using these patches of non-house land more or less exclusively as decoration.

What I'd like to talk about today is an impending, near-future disruption the lawn care industry faces as a consequence of the global shift toward renewable energy.

—

It's estimated that about 2% of the total continental US landmass is lawns.

The data on this vary, as this is mostly based on estimates from state-level agencies, which are imperfect, and from entities like NASA which have provided satellite imagery that helps us clarify, with decent resolution, which patches of land are covered by what sorts of materials; but it can only ever really be estimates, because of the nature of what's being measured.

But whatever the specific figure, lawns of the ornamental, just kind of sitting there and not doing anything variety, are immensely popular in the United States, and that's made them popular in many other countries, as well, as just like the British Empire was able to spread their norms globally by throwing around money and military units, US norms and priorities tend to spread through the country's vast and powerful media apparatus—so just like American-style malls and toilets and dating and hamburgers, American-style lawns have popped up all over the place, for better and for worse, though by most metrics, mostly for worse.

And that's because lawns are almost uniquely net-negatives for the environments they occupy and bump up against.

Lawns are typically monocultures, meaning plant-life that doesn't adhere to the visual norms of the prioritized green, green grass of a certain length and shape, is killed, sometimes only at great expense and with much effort, and often at the expense of local species, including pollinators and other food-web staples.

Lawns require substantially more watering than a varied collection of local plant-life.

They also generally necessitate the application of chemicals to prevent or kill-off weeds and other undesirable elements—weeds, of course, being any plant that isn't uniform grass of the kind we want to see.

Turf of the kind typically prioritized for these sorts of lawns also has incredibly shallow roots of less than half an inch, which is part of why they require so much watering—they can't get what they need from the soil, themselves—but this also leads to compacted soils over time, which keeps it from absorbing as much water as it might, otherwise, which leads to more flooding and runoff issues, the soil basically eroding into storm sewer systems, which can clog and block them, compounding flooding issues, rather than helping with them.

Another fairly significant issue inherent in ornamental lawns is the volume of greenhouse gas emissions—alongside pollutants—that are churned into the air by all the equipment people use to maintain them.

According to data from the US Environmental Protection Agency, using a modern gasoline-powered lawnmower for one hour emits about the same volume of nitrogen oxide and volatile organic compounds—like benzene, formaldehyde, and tetrachloroethylene, all stuff you don't want in the air or environment—as driving a modern car 45 miles.

These lawn care tools are responsible for about 5% of the US's total air pollution, and oil spills associated with filling up lawnmowers and other such equipment tally an estimated 17 million gallons across the US each year, that spilled gas then finding its way into the local ecosystem, impacting plant and animal life, but also the drinking water humans ultimately use and consume.

Now, gasoline does actually make it into these devices, unspilled, and around 800 million gallons of gasoline is consumed through their use, each year, and because many pieces of lawn care equipment are powered by two-stroke rather than four-stroke engines, the fuel blends with the oil used for lubrication, and consequently around a third of it doesn't fully combust—and as a result emissions from tools and vehicles using two-stroke engines are around 124-times higher than from engines without that blending issue.

Four-stroke engines are a bit better than two-stroke, but still not great: a four-stroke engine-powered land mower used for an hour generates emissions equivalent to driving a passenger vehicles about 300 miles.

Leaf-blowers are also pretty brutal machines, in terms of emissions and pollution.

A typical, off-the-shelf leaf-blower releases more hydrocarbons into the environment than a pickup truck, and research from 2017 suggested that gas-powered leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and other such lawn equipment can produce more ozone-depleting pollution in the state of California than all of the passenger vehicles in the state, combined, leading to an announcement and warning on the issue by the California Air Resources board, that year.

That and similar concerns were the primary motivations behind a recent decision to ban the sale of new gas-powered lawn tools in the state beginning in 2024.

The argument is this:

These types of engines, those that power lawn-care tools, create just a boggling amount of pollution and other emissions, and that's an especially pressing issue in California, which is highly populated, filled with cars, and which has areas that are deserts—like Los Angeles and its metro area—where folks spend gobs of time, energy, and resources, including very finite resources like water, trying to maintain lawns that struggle to survive in the, again, desert where they've been installed.

So all that being true, it makes sense to try to temper at least some of this issue by making it more difficult to acquire and use these highly polluting tools, forcing people to either spend less time, energy, and resources on these unproductive, decorative spaces, or to just buy electric versions of the same, which are, today, widely available, and which can be powered by electricity that is generated cleanly, by solar, wind, etc.

This ban is not without controversy: folks who have these sorts of devices already will be able to keep using them, and it's not a big issue to acquire a new gas-powered whatever if you really want to do so, but it will likely have some effect in that it makes it more difficult to casually acquire one, and in that it makes alternatives like electric versions of the same, and bigger changes like xeriscaping one's yard—using local plants and rocks and things like that, instead of generic green grass, in areas that are short on water—more thinkable for more people.

What it does, in other words, is marks a moment at which a transition in this norm might be kicking off, and that's alarming for business entities that make these sorts of tools and which haven't transitioned their catalog over to electric versions, yet, but also for folks for whom the electrification of things has become a culture-war issue, and for whom—for instance—the idea of not being able to install new gas stoves or buy new gas-guzzling cars feels like an overstep, like oppression, on the part of regulators and other government ne'er-do-wells.

There's also the noise element to this discussion: lawn-care equipment with gas-powered motors are incredibly loud, and there's an ever-growing body of evidence that this kind of noise is bad for animals, bad for human stress-levels, and can itself be partially ameliorated by the far, far quieter electric versions of the same, which tend to be something like 15-20 decibels quieter—and with every 6 decibels sound difference, the volume of noise doubles, so that's a pretty substantial change, even if big electric lawn mowers are far from silent.

All that said, gas mowers are the more developed and iterated technology, and they'll tend to be cheaper up front, and at times more powerful and convenient in some ways; and the same is broadly true across the arsenal of available lawn tools on the market, today.

So even though electric versions tend to be massively better in terms of environmental and public and personal health, and far superior in terms of the noise they generate, the amount and cost of maintenance, and the ease of handling, gas versions are still cheaper and sometimes more powerful, and likely will remain so for some time—though bans like this impending one in California make it more likely that costs on the e-versions will come down quickly, as the market expands, competition picks up, and norms shift, leading to more iteration, more cost-savings, and more overall power for these tools, as well.

California is just one state, of course, but their regulations tend to spill-over into other states, as they often opt for stricter regulations on things like passenger vehicle fuel efficiency and the use of potentially cancer-causing chemicals in products, and because their market is huge and on average quite wealthy, which means companies don't want to be left out of the California market, but it also seldom makes sense to produce two versions of every product, one for California and one for the rest of the US, so those tighter restrictions often inform the shape their products take, elsewhere, as well.

And though these sorts of tools exist everywhere around the world, these days, North America makes up about 58% of the $25 billion global power lawn- and garden-equipment market, so if this ban is implemented successfully, and then informs the state of things across the US, there's a good chance this industry could shift relatively quickly, in its entirety, leading to a far more rapid than would be the case, otherwise, transition away from inefficient and loud motors, to a cleaner version of the same, and at a more basic level, maybe more consideration for decorative lawn alternatives in relevant regions, as well.

Show Notes

https://www.des.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt341/files/documents/2020-01/ard-22.pdf

https://psci.princeton.edu/tips/2020/5/11/law-maintenance-and-climate-change

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/james-fallows-leaf-blower-ban/583210/

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/zero-emission-landscaping-equipment

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/news/carb-approves-updated-regulations-requiring-most-new-small-road-engines-be-zero-emission-2024

https://www.consumerreports.org/home-garden/lawn-mowers/gas-vs-electric-lawn-mower-which-is-better-a1057954260/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-20/gas-lawn-care-ban-in-california-tests-electric-leaf-blower-appeal

https://archive.ph/XCJNI

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/how-bad-for-the-environment-are-gas-powered-leaf-blowers/2013/09/16/8eed7b9a-18bb-11e3-a628-7e6dde8f889d_story.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/the-american-obsession-with-lawns/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_mower

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

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This week we talk about methane, the UAE, and organizational capture.

We also discuss climate change, broken governmental promises, and Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber.

Recommended Book: Raw Dog by Jamie Loftus

Transcript

The United Nations Climate Change Conferences, often referred to as COP meetings, short for "Conference of the Parties," are formal, annual meetings where issues related to climate change are discussed by attendees.

These meetings have been occurring at their yearly cadence since 1995—though the November 2020 meeting was put off till November 2021, because of the COVID pandemic that almost entirely dominated international attention and governmental efforts, that year.

COP meetings are held in different locations around the world, with host countries chosen from among those that offer to provide the requisite facilities and services for all attendees, which can represent a who's who of governments and businesses; so this isn't quite an Olympics level of commitment and expense, but it is quite an undertaking, as those host countries need to provide security for all those leaders, translation services for six different working languages, and they also need to help engage stakeholders, ranging from diplomats to the CEOs of the world's biggest companies, flogging support for the meetings themselves, but also the core themes of each meeting, which vary from year to year.

These themes are important, as they've historically led to some of the most vital agreements we've seen between nations and other stakeholders, including the Kyoto Protocol, which was an early, 1990s-era emissions-reduction agreement between wealthy nations, and the Paris Agreement, which expounded upon that same general concept, though with much more aggressive targets and a wider scope of things the signatories had to take into consideration.

On November 30 through December 12 of 2023, signatory nations and other entities will meet for the COP28 meeting, this time hosted in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

This is interesting for several reasons, but the most prominent—and the reason this choice was controversial—is that the UAE, like many other nations in the region, is a huge fossil fuel producer, about 30% of its total economy reliant on oil and gas exports.

What's more, the President-Designate for COP28—the person who was put in charge of running things, but also getting those aforementioned stakeholders in line, making commitments, showing support, doing all the things they need to do to make this a successful COP meeting with something to show for their efforts—is Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber: the Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology for the UAE, the chairman of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, also called Masdar, and the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company—the first CEO to serve as a COP President, and, well, definitely the first oil company CEO to head up a meeting meant to help the world deal with climate change that's being amplified by the products his company is producing and selling.

What I'd like to talk about today is COP28 and what we might expect to emerge from this very unusual, but also quite significant, get together.

—

Al Jaber's appointment as the COP president for this year's meeting was a controversial choice, to say the least.

Dubai being selected as the host-city was one thing, but an oil executive running the show? This reeked, to some commentators and analysts, at least, as a sort of organizational capture: the United Nations either overrun by financial interests to the point that those interests were able to insert themselves even into this increasingly vital annual summit, or—maybe—the organization overcome by a naive sort of optimistic earnestness, wanting to get everyone involved, including those in some ways most responsible for the climate-related issues we face, to the point that the reins were ultimately handed over to one of those people, to do with as he and his ilk please.

It's unclear which of these, or other possibilities explain this, again quite controversial choice of host city and president, but there has already been some more obvious, scandalous behavior arising from this meeting, beyond the jarring dissonance of having oil people run a climate change-focused meeting.

Back in June of 2023, it was reported that the UAE's state oil company, Adnoc, was able to read emails to and from the official COP28 summit office, despite claims that the latter's email system was kept separate from the former's.

The concern was that this state oil company, which would seem to have immense financial interest in slowing or stopping the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, as the longer they can keep legally and profitably pumping and selling, the more profit they can wring from their existing assets, they could see what was being said by and to the folks behind this climate summit, which is ostensibly at least meant to help speed up that transition away from fossil fuels.

Those concerns were confirmed by The Guardian, and though the COP28 office altered their digital setup after the reporting was done, this added fuel to the concern-fire that was already burning because the UAE and Al Jaber were in charge of things; it seemed like they would have every reason in the world to put their thumbs on the scale and nudge the meeting in favor of the fossil fuel industry, given the chance, and this email issue seemed to confirm that notion.

There have also been concerns that the UAE authorities will weaponize their already widespread digital surveillance apparatus—which is generally used to stifle religious and political freedoms in-country—to target COP meeting attendees with the same, tracking their actions and communications with spyware, among other violations.

A letter was written to the UN by a bunch of politicians from the EU and US, asking the body behind the COP meetings to remove Al Jaber, and a slew of organizations and activists have separately done the same.

The counterpoint presented by the UAE and Al Jaber himself, though, alongside supporters of how this meeting is coming together, including, at times at least, the US climate envoy John Kerry and EU climate chief Frans Timmermans, is that alongside his role running a state-owned fossil fuel company, Al Jaber also founded and runs Masdar, which invests heavily in renewable energy, and which is meant to serve as a foot in the door for the UAE as they attempt to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels; Masdar has invested in renewable projects in 40 countries, so far, and have targeted builting 100GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030.

Under Al Jaber, Abu Dhabi's National Oil Company has invested in carbon capture and green hydrogen projects, and has been investing in nuclear and solar power, as well.

None of these efforts compare to the investments that have been made, under his leadership, in fossil fuel capacity; it's night a day.

But the argument in his favor is that he's a skilled energy world executive, and one that is actually making practical moves to transition to renewables: he's not doing it overnight, but he's actually doing something, and that makes him a credible source for usable ideas as to how other companies can do the same, while also putting someone at the reins who knows how to talk to and deal with energy executives—many of whom couldn't care less about investing in renewables—and that means it's possible he might be able to get them to make these sorts of iterative changes, as well.

He's a choice that doesn't preach to the choir, basically; he's meant to preach to those who aren't yet convinced.

And this will be a COP meeting with a LOT of oil industry higher-ups in attendance; which theoretically at least supports the assertion made by critics that the meeting has been captured, serving as a safe space for fossil fuel industry representatives who want to paint themselves as eco-friendly and thus, empowered to play a role in determining how quickly, or slowly, the transition to renewables occurs.

But the counterpoint to this regulatory capture theory is that having true-believers at the helm—folks who see the oil industry as villains, in many cases—having them running things, hasn't historically served to get these oil companies to do anything except deny deny deny and do what they can to further entrench themselves in their existing energy source and business models; so maybe this, putting one of their own at the front of the room, and one of them who seems to be comfortable keeping a foot in both worlds, maybe that will help shift their collective stance a bit.

Beyond the hubbub over who's hosting the show, there are also a few other interesting things to watch as this year's COP meeting unfolds.

The first is that the US and China recently came to a new agreement to dramatically increase the production of renewable energy, tripling global capacity by 2030 in order to reduce their emissions and displace fossil fuels.

The US and China's emissions, combined, account for something like 38% of the world's total, so anything these countries do in this space is already a big deal.

But the last time the US and China landed on this sort of agreement, back in 2015, the language they used ended up informing the Paris Agreement that was made real at that year's COP meeting—an agreement meant to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius; so it could be that this new agreement also feeds into a larger, more international and inclusive agreement, once again.

That said, there's a lot of arguably justified concern that this year's COP, like many previous COPs, will be a lot of talk without much or any action.

It's easy to make commitments in a context in which one's words will net one's country a lot of goodwill in the press, but a lot more difficult to actually live up to those commitments—as governments around the world have discovered time and time again with climate-related issues.

Our newest climate data indicate we'll likely fly right by the 1.5 degrees C average warming milestone this decade: much earlier than was previously estimated, and early enough that many experts are saying that goal, keeping temperature increases below that level, which has become a bit of a rallying cry for environmentalists and entities shifting to renewable energy, in recent years, they say it's probably out of reach.

It's still important that we reduce emissions and halt heating as soon as possible, in other words, but the number we've held up as being an aggressive, optimistic goal that is nonetheless achievable might not be realistic, anymore.

That new report is far from the last word on this, but a seeming inability to live up to climate commitments, combined with ever-bettering data-collection and computational resources has left us with a much higher-resolution understanding of how bad the situation is, and a much steeper mountain to climb if we want to accomplish even the relatively less-impressive goals that are still within reach; which makes the whole concept a tougher sell, especially when it seems easier to just throw up one's hands in frustration or disbelief, rather than making the sacrifices that might be necessary to get where we ostensibly need to be.

And that's the second main, interesting thing to be watching here: the impact that better tools and data from those tools, and research done with that better data, will have on these discussions and the overall timber and tone of what people are saying.

These new talks are arriving in the wake of some significant new developments in methane-tracking capabilities: satellites that allow researchers to pinpoint methane emissions hotspots, which in turn tells them which governments are failing to cap emitting wells, or which businesses are, as was the case in Kazakhstan recently, a local mining company allowing methane to flow freely from their infrastructure, causing untold damage that can be relatively inexpensively remedied once the emitting entities know what's happening and if the right kind of pressure is applied, to force their hand—two variables that are increasingly likely to align, appropriately, because of these new tools and techniques.

Satellites capable of providing other sorts of high-resolution data, like where CO2 emissions are the worst, for instance, down to the level of an individual power plant, can also help us figure out where our problems are centralized, but they also allow us to name-and-shame, with receipts, if necessary, to force entities that would otherwise try to deny and sweep this kind of thing under the rug to acknowledge their failure in this regard, making issues that they currently might record as externalities, internal, in turn making it more likely something will be done, rather than these issues being ignored and compounding over time.

And third, one of the many commitments countries—especially wealthy countries—have made over the course of previous COP meetings, is to provide a bunch of money to less-wealthy countries meant to help pay climate-related reparations, and for a transition to renewables, helping them bypass the emissions-related excesses today's wealthy countries have indulged in.

Those already wealthy countries are the source of the vast, vast majority of today's emissions, and the idea is to help not-yet-wealthy countries scale-up and become richer without also creating more emissions as a consequence: a reasonable-sounding ambition, but that kind of pivot is not cheap or easy.

The aid many countries have been told they would get as part of this effort hasn't yet materialized, though—$100 billion was promised by wealthy countries for poorer countries by 2020, to kick things off, to help them move toward renewables, and for losses and damages caused by existing climate change impacts.

And that was meant to be just the initial round of funding that would eventually lead to trillions a year.

Even that initial $100 billion didn't arrive, though, and while you could argue that some other, fairly immediate concerns reared their heads in 2020 that necessitated the rerouting of those funds toward other, pandemic-related issues, this is often touted of an example of just how untrustworthy these wealthier countries and their promises are; even the initial promise was a lie, so why shouldn't these countries that were lied to pursue whichever path is best for them and their immediate fortunes, whatever the consequences, like those wealthier countries were able to do in previous decades and centuries?

Those are big questions, but probably the biggest one is whether those attending COP28 will be able to get an actual commitment to phase-out fossil fuels on the table, and then adopted by those participating.

Many nations, including the most powerful and emitting in the world, have been unwilling to do this, consisting adopting weaker language, making smaller, pseudo-promises, not quite stepping up to the plate on a firm commitment to that kind of transition, instead opting for language that allows wiggle-room and doesn't upset any of the existing fossil fuel-related global systems, including existing energy businesses, but also countries—like the UAE and the US—that are major fossil fuel exporters.

Most analysts don't expect that language to arrive at this meeting, either, and the general consensus is that we'll probably see another relatively, iterative step in the right direction across many metrics at COP28; maybe something based on all that new data with a little more enforcement-related teeth, but likely not a big enough step to close the gap between where we thought we were, and where we now realize, because of the most up-to-date climate findings, we actually are.

Show Notes

https://www.axios.com/2023/11/13/environment-co2-pollution-satellite

https://archive.ph/ODvEK

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/07/uae-oil-firm-cop28-climate-summit-emails-sultan-al-jaber-adnoc

https://archive.ph/Ta5hk

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/11/uae-concerns-around-authorities-use-of-digital-surveillance-during-cop28/

https://www.energyvoice.com/renewables-energy-transition/380412/masdar-renewable-energy-hydrogen/

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/global-warming-will-reach-15c-threshold-this-decade-report-2023-11-02/

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/18/us-china-agreement-sets-the-tone-for-cop28/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/17/cop28-host-uae-breaking-its-own-ban-on-routine-gas-flaring-data-shows

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17112023/harder-to-kick-climate-can-from-cop28/

https://grist.org/international/international-climate-finance-adaptation/

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/what-the-eu-and-us-want-to-get-done-at-cop28/

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/climate/us-china-climate-agreement.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/10/cop28-host-uae-pushes-oil-producers-for-climate-pledges-00126619

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/11/15/un-climate-cop26-pledges/?stream=top

https://www.ghgsat.com/en/newsroom/worlds-first-commercial-co2-sensor-in-orbit/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-15/exxon-ceo-says-making-big-oil-villains-harms-net-zero-drive?stream=top#xj4y7vzkg

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-promises-substantial-climate-damage-funding-pledge/

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67143989

https://archive.ph/KHWOL

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-13/gulf-nations-must-overhaul-everything-to-meet-climate-goals?cmpid=BBD111523_GREENDAILY

https://www.semafor.com/article/11/10/2023/the-battle-lines-to-watch-at-cop28

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-04/the-bankers-are-back-finance-industry-plans-for-cop28?cmpid=BBD111523_GREENDAILY#xj4y7vzkg

https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/cma2023_12.pdf

https://www.wri.org/research/state-climate-action-2023

https://www.axios.com/2023/11/20/un-climate-change-emissions-gap?stream=top

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Climate_Change_conference

https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/conferences/the-big-picture/what-are-united-nations-climate-change-conferences/how-cops-are-organized-questions-and-answers

https://www.uae-embassy.org/discover-uae/climate-and-energy/uae-energy-diversification

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This week we talk about Rubinomics, government spending, and US federal debt.

We also discuss the Government-Household analogy, the House of Representatives, and the looming government shutdown.

Recommended Book: Quantum Supremacyby Michio Kaku

Transcript

Early in November 2023, the credit firm Moody's lowered its outlook on the US government's credit rating from "stable" to "negative," pointing at a huge decline in debt affordability—the government's ability to borrow money cheaply, basically—and an ever-increasing, already gargantuan deficit as its primary justifications for that change.

And those issues are on top of another standoff in the House of Representatives over funding the government, which, if something isn't done, will come to a head on November 17.

A previous agreement struck by the previous House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, expires on that day, and if a new collection of 12 funding bills, which are what allows the government to pay for things, are not passed by then, the government could be shut down, possibly further diminishing the government's rating, on top of the many other consequences of not providing funding for things like national defense, energy and water development, and the Justice Department.

This new reduction in outlook by Moody's follows a recent downgrade by Fitch back in August, when that ratings firm dropped the US government's rating from AAA to AA+, largely because of all the down-to-the-wire negotiations about funding the government that have roiled Congress over the past few years, and what that kind of tumult does to a government's ability to say for 100% certain that they'll pay their debts and never default; the US has never defaulted on its debt, but the possibility becomes more realistic-seeming each time these politicians fail to provide funding for essential government functions, including, debt-paying.

Fitch also, like Moody's, cited the general diminishment in fiscal circumstances across the government, though, referring to a collection of variables that have been weighing down the state's capacity to acquire cheap debt.

Ratings are one such variable, as each decrease in a nation's credit rating makes debt more expensive, folks and other states buying bonds and treasuries and the like demanding more interest for the same amount of loaned money—which is what those sorts of financial instruments are, at the end of the day.

But beyond reputation, there are also factors like high interest rates, hiked by the Fed in order to tamp-down on inflation, and the accumulated interest payments that must be paid on previous debt taken out by the government to pay its bills.

So in addition to the government suddenly having to pay more interest on all its new debt, it also has to pay more and more interest on its existing debt, and that latter figure is compounding to the point that a lot of folks who are otherwise generally unconcerned about such things, are starting to take what could turn out to be practical notice.

What I'd like to talk about today is Rubinomics, government spending, and why the US federal debt is becoming a political talking point once more.

—

In the context of federal spending, fiscal responsibility refers to the balancing of a state's budget so that its spending is almost always close to, or below its revenue.

So if a government brings in a trillion dollars in revenue, from taxes, for example, and spends a trillion dollars to keep agencies running, infrastructure maintained, and its military up to date, that's a balanced budget.

If that same government were to spend a trillion and a half dollars without increasing tax revenues, though, it would have a deficit of half-a-trillion dollars.

And if it were to spend less than it pulls in, if it were to reduce the social safety net programs it provides or spend less on its military, and thus only spent a half-trillion of the trillion it earns in taxes, that would represent a surplus of a half-trillion dollars.

This is similar, at its most basic, at least, to how an individual might manage their money.

Spend more than you make and you'll tend to go into debt, spend less than you make and you can sock money away or invest it, and spend exactly what you make, and your bills will all be paid without accruing debt.

This comparison, though intuitive in a way, at least for the purposes of defining the outline of how this works, is also quite flawed—and economists have given it a name, potentially to make criticizing it that much easier: they call it the Government-Household analogy.

And this analogy is often-touted by politicians, usually when they want to criticize their opponents for their spending by making it seem like they're less capable and responsible than the average heads of a household; why should we good, hardworking citizens be required to assiduously manage our personal economies, but these freewheeling politicians can't seem to balance a budget of billions or trillions of dollars?

The analogy falls apart, though, when you look at the specifics of a household versus a government.

Governments, after all, can literally print money if they so choose. They also tend to get far favorable terms on debt, can increase their budgets by raising taxes, and, oddly, if you think of a government as a household, different facets of a government can owe other facets money, so part of the debt owed might be owed to itself.

While this analogy is often convincing to voters, then, it's not terribly useful as a model for economists and folks working to actually manage budgets of the scale and with the peculiarities of a government's budget.

All that said, there are pros and cons to every possible approach to government debt, as running a deficit, spending more than is pulled in via taxes, means that a state can invest in more programs and infrastructure, and just like a company taking on debt to invest in more manufacturing capacity or warehouses or restaurant locations, that can mean setting things up for growth in the future: a healthy, happy, secure, well-educated populous will tend to do better than the opposite, so spending money on programs that improve and amplify those sorts of things can lead to more revenue sometime later.

On the other hand, just like any other debt, federal debt tends to be paid back with interest, and that means the government taking on such debt will not just be on the hook to pay back the initial, principle amount they borrowed, but more than that—and possibly, especially if debt accrues for a long while, or accrues during periods of high interest rates, for them specifically, or more globally, they could be on the hook for a lot more than that.

The last time the US government had a balanced budget was in 2001, and it's enjoyed the same for five years total in the past five decades—four of which were the years leading up to and including 2001, the fifth being 1969.

This is such a rare state of affairs, in part, because the general economic consensus, amongst economists in the US, at least, is that federal debt isn't a big deal, that it tends to lead to more benefits than downsides, and that it is therefore prudent to not balance the budget, most of the time, because doing so leads to austerity—severe cuts in vital programs and other investments—and that hobbles the nation and its capacity for growth over the long-haul.

Balancing the budget just to balance the budget, then, isn't really such a good thing, according to this prevailing theory; it's a compelling rallying cry for some folks occupying some spots on the ideological spectrum, traditionally those on the conservative side of things more than the left, but not spending also comes with consequences, and those consequences tend to outweigh the downsides of accruing some amount of debt, year to year.

This mainstream sensibility about debt, though, was subbed-out during that 1998-2001 period, during the Bill Clinton administration, when the Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, implemented a policy that became known as Rubinomics, which was defined by an attempt to keep the federal budget balanced as part of a larger effort to control inflation and interest rates—the theory being that this would improve perception of the US economy, which in turn would lead to more investment, local and international, and would allow US economic entities, and thus, US citizens, to flourish.

There's been a fair bit of debate as to whether this theory was proved-out by Ruben's policies.

Yes, the US economy absolutely killed it while Clinton was in office, and yes long-term interest rates on treasuries and bonds dropped, making it less expensive for the government to take on debt when it wanted to borrow money for whatever.

The country's GDP averaged around 4% during that period, inflation maintained a 2.5% rate, which is just north of the 2% rate the Fed prefers, and the US economy saw its longest continuous period of expansion at any point in history.

But, and this is a big but, those variables might have also been tweaked by the so-called "peace dividend" of the late-1990s, which was defined by a post-Cold War drawdown of military activity and thus, military spending around the world during that span of time.

They may also have been influenced by a series of new trade agreements, hands-off monetary policies, and the benefits of new technologies that were finally being exploited for profitable purposes after a long period of investment, like the consumer internet.

So there's a chance that Rubinomics played a role in all that monetary flourishing, but there's also a chance that it was either just one of several influences, or maybe it was mostly just a bystander, or even a downward pressure, on the same, the flourishing primarily or totally the consequence of other variables.

Today, part of the aforementioned drama playing out in the US House of Representatives is being driven by a focus on reducing the federal deficit, the total debt the US owes, which recently hit an all-time record high of something like $33 trillion, which carries a total interest payment, as of 2023, of somewhere between $659 billion and a cold trillion dollars a year, depending on who's numbers and analysis you use.

That interest payment, at that level, has become one of the top expenses, of any expense category, for the government, surpassing things like the cost of all transportation and veteran's benefits payments, and approaching, or surpassing, depending on which figure you use, the cost of Medicare or the Military.

It's primarily, right now at least, the further right members of the House that are demanding substantial cuts to the budget, the Senate mostly keen to keep spending levels where they are, and the majority of House Republicans seem happy to do the same, though Democrats are more likely, on average, to want higher levels of spending nearly across the board, again, right now—who wants what tends to change, at least in the specifics, every decade or so.

And this is such a big issue right now in part because of that ballooning deficit, and in part because there's just a lot to spend on, these days, with military and humanitarian funding for Ukraine and Israel on the table, alongside investments in renewable energy infrastructure, in health care, and in other such—by some estimates at least—foundational elements of the government's various programs and priorities.

Last weekend, reports from within the House indicated that the new house Speaker, Mike Johnson, wants to pass a stopgap funding bill to avoid a government shutdown before the November 17 deadline, and to do so, he wants to break the funding extension into two parts, rather than having Representatives vote on all 12 funding bills all at once.

Each bill would cover different aspects of government funding and would extend spending a little further into the future, keeping spending levels where they are, currently, and providing no new funds to Ukraine or Israel—the former of which is a sticking point for a lot of conservative Representatives, and though this approach is meant to win over enough people from both sides of the aisle to get a stopgap funding bill passed in time to avoid a shutdown, folks across the political spectrum have seemed generally unhappy with it; voting on this could begin as soon as today, and we'll see if people are unhappy in the sense that they didn't get what they want, but they're okay to keep fighting for those things they want while the government stays open, or if they're unhappy in the sense that they'll play chicken with a government shutdown in order to prove their point; for what it's worth, analysts seem pretty mixed on whether this will work or not, at the moment.

This general topic, that of the deficit, is likely to only become a more pressing issue, and thus, a more potent political hot potato, as interest rates, which look likely to stay high for at least another year, increase the debt-load the US government has to tend to, making debt more expensive for the government, and safe investment vehicles like treasuries more lucrative for investors—which can have the knock-on effect of making stocks and similar, riskier investments less appealing, possibly hindering economic investment and development even as the government watches the interest payments balloon as an increasingly major expense on its accounting spreadsheets.

Show Notes

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-are-pros-and-cons-operating-balancedbudget.asp

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/11/politics/house-speaker-mike-johnson-pitches/index.html

https://archive.ph/iyAwI

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rubinomics.asp

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/14/facts-about-the-us-national-debt/

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-debt/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/-ungovernable-house-republicans-nix-votes-two-funding-bills-shutdown-d-rcna124441

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/where-are-12-us-govt-funding-bills-avert-shutdown-2023-11-08/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/10/20/interest-debt-payment-treasury/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00213624.2007.11507047

https://nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-republicans-unveil-plan-avert-government-shutdown-week-rcna124629

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/where-are-12-us-govt-funding-bills-avert-shutdown-2023-11-08/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/moodys-changes-outlook-united-states-ratings-negative-2023-11-10/

https://www.ft.com/content/226b4ebc-f405-4e03-8b40-44cd9fbb69d0

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/fitch-cuts-us-governments-aaa-credit-rating-by-one-notch-2023-08-01/

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This week we talk about regulatory capture, Open AI, and Biden’s executive order.

We also discuss the UK’s AI safety summit, open source AI models, and flogging fear.

Recommended Book: The Resisters by Gish Jen

Transcript

Regulatory capture refers to the corruption of a regulatory body by entities to which the regulations that body creates and enforces, apply.

So an organization that wants to see less funding for public schools and more for private and home schooling options getting one of their people into a position at the Department of Education, or someone from Goldman Sachs or another, similar financial institution getting shoehorned into a position at the Federal Reserve, could—through some lenses at least, and depending on how many connections those people in those positions have to those other, affiliated, ideological and commercial institutions—could be construed as engaging in regulatory capture, because they're now able to control the levers of regulation that apply to their own business or industry, or their peers, the folks they previously worked with and people to whom they maybe owe favors, or vice versa, and that could lead to regulations that are more favorable to them and their preferred causes, and those of their fellow travelers.

This is in contrast to regulatory bodies that apply limits to such businesses and organizations, figuring out where they might overstep or lock in their own power at the expense of the industry in which they operate, and slowly, over time, plugging loopholes, finding instances of not-quite-illegal misdeeds that nonetheless lead to negative outcomes, and generally being the entity in charge in spaces that might otherwise be dominated by just one or two businesses that can kill off all their competition and make things worse for consumers and workers.

Often, rather than regulatory capture being a matter of one person from a group insinuating themselves into the relevant regulatory body, the regulatory body, itself, will ask representatives from the industry they regulate to help them make law, because, ostensibly at least, those regulatees should know the business better than anyone else, and in helping to create their own constraints—again, ostensibly—they should be more willing to play by the rules, because they helped develop the rules to which they're meant to abide, and probably helped develop rules that they can live with and thrive under; because most regulators aren't trying to kill ambition or innovation or profit, they're just trying to prevent abuses and monopolistic hoarding.

This sort of capture has taken many shapes over the years, and occurred at many scales.

In the late-19th century, for instance, railroad tycoons petitioned the US government for regulation to help them bypass a clutter of state-level regulations that were making it difficult and expensive for them to do business, and in doing so—in asking to be regulated and helping the federal government develop the applicable regulations—they were able to make their own lives easier, while also creating what was effectively a cartel for themselves with the blessing of the government that regulated their power; the industry as it existed when those regulations were signed into law, was basically locked into place, in such a way that no new competitors could practically arise.

Similar efforts have been launched, at times quite successfully, by entities in the energy space, across various aspects of the financial world, and in just about every other industry you can imagine, from motorcyclists' protective clothing to cheerleading competitions to aviation and its many facets—all have been to some degree and at some point allegedly regulatorily captured so that those being regulated to some degree control the regulations under which they operate, and which as a consequence has at times allowed them to create constraints that benefit them and entrench their own power, rather than opening their industry up and increasing competition, safety, and the treatment and benefits afforded to customers and workers, as is generally the intended outcome of these regulations.

What I'd like to talk about today is the burgeoning world of artificial intelligence and why some players in this space are being accused of attempting the time-tested tactic of regulatory capture at a pivotal moment of AI development and deployment.

—

At the tail-end of October, 2023, US President Biden announced that he was signing a fairly expansive executive order on AI: the first of its kind, and reportedly the first step toward still-greater and more concrete regulation.

A poll conducted by the AI Policy Institute suggests that Americans are generally in favor of this sort of regulatory move, weighing in at 68% in favor of the initiative, which is a really solid in-favor number, especially at a moment as politically divided as this one, and most of the companies working in this space—at least at a large enough scale to show up on the map for AI at this point—seem to be in favor of this executive order, as well, with some caveats that I'll get to in a bit.

That indicates the government probably got things pretty close to where they need to be, in terms of folks actually adhering to these rules, though it's important to note that part of why there's such broad acceptance of the tenets of this order is that there aren't any real teeth to these rules: it's largely voluntary stuff, and mostly only applies to the anticipated next generation of AI—the current generation isn't powerful enough to fall under its auspices, in most cases, so AI companies don't need to do much of anything yet to adhere to these standards, and when they eventually do need to do something to remain in accordance with them, it'll mostly be providing reports to government employees so they can keep tabs on developments, including those happening behind close doors, in this space.

Now that is not nothing: at the moment, this industry is essentially a black box as far as would-be regulators are concerned, so simply providing a process by which companies working on advanced AI and AI applications can keep the government informed on their efforts is a big step that raises visibility from 0 to some meaningful level.

It also provides mechanisms through which such entities can get funding from the government, and pathways through which international AI experts can come to the United States with less friction than would be the case for folks without that expertise.

So AI industry entities generally like all this because it's easy for them to work with, is flexible enough not to punish them if they fail in some regard, but it also provides them with more resources, both monetary and human, and sets the US up, in many ways, to maintain its current purported AI dominance well into the future, despite essentially everyone—especially but not exclusively China—investing a whole lot to catch up and surpass the US in the coming years.

Another response to this order, though, and the regulatory infrastructure it creates, was voiced by the founder of Google Brain, Andrew Ng, who has been working on AI systems and applications for a long time, and who basically says that some of the biggest players in AI, today, are playing up the idea that artificial intelligence systems might be dangerous, even to the point of being world-ending, because they hope to create exactly this kind of regulatory framework at this exact moment, because right now they are the kings of the AI ecosystem, and they're hoping to lock that influence in, denying easy access to any future competitors.

This theory is predicated on that concept I mentioned in the intro, regulatory capture, and history is rich with examples of folks in positions of power in various spaces telling their governments to put their industry on lockdown, and making the case for why this is necessary, because they know, in doing so, their position at the top will probably be locked in, because it will become more difficult and expensive and thus, out of reach, for any newer, smaller, not already influential and powerful competitor, to then challenge them moving forward.

One way this might manifest in the AI space, according to Ng, is through the licensing of powerful AI models—essentially saying if you want to use the more powerful AI systems for your product or research, you need to register with the government, and you need to buy access, basically, from one of these government-sanctioned providers. Only then will we allow you to play in this potentially dangerous space with these highest-end AI models.

This, in turn, would substantially reduce innovation, as other entities wouldn't be able to legally evolve their AI in different directions, at least not at a high level, and it would make today's behemoths—the OpenAI's and Meta's of the world—all but invulnerable to future challenges, because their models would be the ones made available to everyone else to use; no one else could compete, not practically, at least.

This would be not-great for smaller, upstart AI companies, but it would be especially detrimental to open source large language models—versions of the most popular, LLM-based AI systems that're open to the public to mess around with and use however they see fit, rather than being controlled and sold by a single company.

These models would be unlikely to have the resources or governing body necessary to step into the position of regulator-approved moderator of potentially dangerous AI systems, and the open source credo doesn't really play well with that kind of setup to begin with, as the idea is that all the code is open and available to take and use and change, so locking it down at all would violate those principles; and this sort of regulatory approach would be all about the lockdown, on fears of bad actors getting their hands on high-end AI systems—fears that have been flogged by entities like OpenAI.

So that collection of fears are potentially fueling the relatively fast-moving regulatory developments related to AI in the US, right now; regulation, by the way, that's typically slower-moving in the US, which is part of why this is so notable.

This is not a US-exclusive concern, though, nor is this executive order the only big, new regulatory effort in this space.

At a summit in the UK just days after the US executive order was announced, AI companies from around the world, and those who govern such entities, met up to discuss the potential national security risks inherent in artificial intelligence tools, and to sign a legally non-binding agreement to let their governments test their newest, most powerful models for risks before they're released to the public.

The US participated in this summit, as well, and a lot of these new rules overlap with each other, as the executive order shares a lot of tenets with the agreement signed at that meeting in the UK—though the EO was US-specific and included non-security elements, as well, and that will be the case for laws and orders passed in the many different countries to which these sorts of global concerns apply, each with their own approach to implementing those more broadly agreed-upon specifics at the national level.

This summit announced the creation of a international panel of experts who will publish an annual report on the state of the art within the AI space, especially as it applies to national security risks, like misinformation and cybersecurity issues, and when questioned about whether the UK should take things a step further, locking some of these ideas and rules into place and making them legal requirements rather than things corporations agree to do but aren't punished for not doing, the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak said, in essence, that this sort of thing takes time; and that's a sentiment that's been echoed by many other lawmakers and by people within this industry, as well.

We know there need to be stricter and more enforceable regulations in this space, but because of where we are with this collection of technologies and the culture and rules and applications of them, right now, we don't really know what laws would make the most sense, in other words.

No nation wants to tie its own hands in developing increasingly useful and powerful AI tools, and moving too fast on the concrete versions of these sort of agreements could end up doing exactly that; there's no way to know what the best rules and regulations will be, yet, because we're standing at the precipice of what looks like a long journey toward a bunch of new discoveries and applications.

That's why the US executive order is set up the way it is, too: Biden and his advisors don't want to slow down the development in this space within the US, they want to amplify it, while also providing some foundational structure for whatever they decide needs to be built next—but those next-step decisions will be shaped by how these technologies and industries evolve over the next few years.

The US and other countries are also setting up agencies and institutes and all sorts of safety precautions related to this space, but most of them lack substance at this point, and as with the aforementioned regulations, these agency setups are primarily just first draft guide rails, if that, at this point.

Notably, the EU seems to be orienting around somewhat sterner regulations, but they haven't been able to agree on anything concrete quite yet, so despite typically taking the lead on this sort of thing, the US is a little bit ahead of the EU in terms of AI regulation right now—though it's likely that when the EU does finally put something into place, it'll be harder-core than what the US has, currently.

A few analysts in this space have argued that these new regulations—lightweight as they are, both on the global and US level—by definition will hobble innovation because regulations tend to do that: they're opinionated about what's important and what's not, and that then shapes the direction makers in the regulated space will tend go.

There's also a chance that, as I mentioned before, that this set of regulations laid out in this way, will lock the power of incumbent AI companies into place, protecting them from future competitors, and in doing so also killing off a lot of the forces of innovation that would otherwise lead to unpredictable sorts of outcomes.

One big question, then, is how light a touch these initial regulations will actually end up having, how the AI and adjacent industries will reshape themselves to account for these and predicted future regulations, and to what degree open source alternatives—and other third-party alternatives, beyond the current incumbents—will be able to step in and take market share, nudging things in different directions, and potentially either then being incorporated into and shaping those future, more toothy regulations, or halting the deployment of those regulations by showing that the current direction of regulatory development no longer makes sense.

We'll also see how burdensome the testing and other security-related requirements in these initial rules end up being, as there's a chance more attention and resources will shift toward lighter-weight, less technically powerful, but more useful and deployable versions of these current AI tools, which is already something that many entities are experimenting with, because that comes with other benefits, like being able to run AI on devices like a smartphone, without needing to connect, through the internet, to a huge server somewhere.

Refocusing on smaller models could also allow some developers and companies to move a lot faster than their more powerful but plodding and regulatorily hobbled kin, rewiring the industry in their favor, rather than toward those who are currently expected to dominate this space for the foreseeable future.

Show Notes

On the EO

https://www.aijobstracker.com/ai-executive-order

Reactions to EO

https://archive.ph/RdpLh

https://theaipi.org/poll-biden-ai-executive-order-10-30/

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/30/us/politics/biden-ai-regulation.html?ref=readtangle.com

https://qz.com/does-anyone-not-like-bidens-new-guidelines-on-ai-1850974346

https://archive.ph/wwRXj

https://www.afr.com/technology/google-brain-founder-says-big-tech-is-lying-about-ai-human-extinction-danger-20231027-p5efnz

https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1718670073391378694?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

https://stratechery.com/2023/attenuating-innovation-ai/

First take on EO

What EO means for openness in AI

Biden’s regulation plans

https://www.reuters.com/technology/eu-lawmakers-face-struggle-reach-agreement-ai-rules-sources-2023-10-23/

https://archive.ph/IwLZu

https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/01/politicians-commit-to-collaborate-to-tackle-ai-safety-us-launches-safety-institute/

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-sci-tech/on-ai-regulation-the-us-steals-a-march-over-europe-amid-the-uks-showpiece-summit-9015032/

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This week we talk about Peronists, Milei, and Argentina’s inflation rate.

We also discuss Justicialism, Bullrich, and military coups.

Recommended Book: Future Starts Here by John Higgs

Transcript

Peronism, sometimes called Justicialism, after the Justicialist party, whose name is derived from the concept of social justice, and which is the main Peronist party in Argentina, has been the dominant political force in the country since the mid-20th century.

The word Peronism comes from the labor secretary-turned-president of Argentina, Juan Perón, who's wife, Eva Perón you might have heard of, but Juan came into that labor secretary position after playing a role in a military coup in 1943, and was then elected president in 1946.

His platform was broadly predicated on new social programs, support for unions, and supporting his wife's efforts to attain rights for migrant workers, among other, adjacent efforts.

In 1955, though, under the Peróns' leadership, the country was experiencing high levels of inflation and other economic issues, alongside political repression from the Peronists—making it difficult for anyone else to step in and take any of their power, basically, despite being ostensibly democratic—so the military overthrew them in 1955, and the party was banned until 1973 when open, non-military-controlled elections were held again; and Perón won that election, returning to the presidency after nearly two decades.

Juan died a year after returning to office, and his widow, his third-wife Isabel, who was also his vice president before he died, stepped in to run the country, but she was overthrown by the military in another coup in 1976.

Argentina was then run by a military dictatorship until 1983, when democracy returned, political parties were able to function again, and from that point forward, Peronist parties have dominated Argentine politics, their candidates holding the presidency for 28 of the 40 years between then and today, despite the very mixed record of Perón and others who have run as Peronists.

And fundamental to that mixed record is the Peronist party's seeming inability to manage Argentina's economy.

The Peronists have always promised a great deal to Argentinian voters, including social benefits, allowing workers to negotiate as unions with their employers, and offering legal protections and the other benefits of citizenship to people and groups that have traditionally been disenfranchised—all of which was has earned them accolades over the years from groups across the political spectrum.

That said, the party and all its offshoots have also been accused of being authoritarian, coasting to power on populist messages and demagoguery, stripping would-be political opponents of their rights and sicing their supporters on them, initiating violence against them, in some cases, and in general creating an ideology that sounds great on paper, but which, when put into practice, is often tainted by the power-hoarding efforts of those in charge; and all these efforts, on top of those other issues, tend to be unsustainable, leaving Argentina in precarious economic situations over and over again.

That economic unsustainability is part of what has made Argentina something of an outlier in South America; despite having all the ingredients of a decently successful, burgeoning state—like its neighbor to the north, Brazil—it somehow, over and over again, has stumbled into economic catastrophe, leaving it drowning in debt, stagnating, suffering from chronic inflation, and generally declining even when its regional peer-nations have enjoyed economic boom-times.

What I'd like to talk about today is Argentina's 2023 presidential election, the people and ideas involved, and what a November run-off might mean for the country's fortunes, moving forward.

—

On October 22, 2023, Argentina held a general election, during which voters cast ballots for most government positions, including provincial governors, all the way up to President.

That election for the top-billing role has been especially closely watched by the international community, as the main contenders leading up to the vote included the current Minister of the Economy from a Peronist party called the Renewal Front, a National Deputy and minor celebrity from Buenos Aries, who was the candidate for the Libertarian Party, and the former Minister of Security running under the banner of a center-right party called Republican Proposal.

In the country's August primaries, the Libertarian candidate, a shock-jock-style economist named Javier Milei, took first place, alarming pretty much everyone in established Argentine politics, and the international economic community, because of his radical and unusual ideas about how economics and the government should work in the country.

But he took first place in those primaries, with the center-right candidate, Patricia Bullrich, taking second, and the Peronist Renewal Front candidate, Sergio Massa, took third place; the first time the candidate from the Peronist party has been relegated to third place in the country's primaries.

And that made the October general election quite the event, as there was reason to believe the two parties that typically vie for government leadership, the authoritarian-left Paronists and the center-right Republican Proposal, might be usurped by this radical outsider who has wild ideas and has been favorably compared to former US President Donald Trump for his outlandish statements and on-camera antics.

As it turned out, though, once the votes were cast—and voting is compulsory in Argentina, for people ages 18 to 70, and citizens ages 16 and 17 are allowed, but not required, to vote—the Peronist candidate took first place with nearly 37% of the votes, the firebrand Milei got almost 30%, and the conservative Bullrich took not quite 24%.

That third-place position means Bullrich will not be able to participate in the runoff election scheduled for November 19, which has been disappointing for many international analysts, as she was thought to be the adult in the room, so to speak, in all things monetary, as her proposed policies have been generally more in line with international standards in countries that don't suffer from the wild levels of inflation and other economic catastrophes Argentina has seen on a near-continuous basis since the mid-20th century.

Instead, the country's voters will choose between the Peronists—under whose party leadership and policies the country has suffered through a half-decade monetary crisis, and a relative outsider who has suggested, among other things, that the government should end as much spending as possible in order to rush to a balanced budget, including killing off all those social programs, that the country's Central Bank should be abolished, and that Argentina should do away with the peso and adopt the US dollar as its official currency.

Milei has also said that he believes abortion should be banned in all cases, including when a women has been raped, that COVID vaccines are scams, as is feminism, that minority groups are trying to take over the country, using what he calls cultural marxism, which is a conspiracy theory held by far-right nationalist groups around the world, that sex education shouldn't be taught in schools, that climate change is a hoax, that anyone who wants to own a gun should be able to get one, and that taxes should never be increased.

None of which is terribly beyond the norm for far-right, at times extreme far-right groups in other nations, but with rare exceptions those groups aren't typically at the center of political discourse, and aren't winning large portions of the total vote—which Milei has done, in part on the back of votes from young people who seem to enjoy his antics and dramatic, sweeping platform.

Many people have reportedly voted for him, though, based on exit polling and other surveys, because the status quo in the country, currently and for a long while, has just been abysmal for the everyday person.

Some estimates suggest that Argentina will tally an inflation rate of about 140% in 2023, which is just staggering if you think about the implications of what that means for the value of a person's income and savings, and what it implies about how people should behave; for comparison, the wealthy world has been flipping out over inflation rates of medium- to high single-digits, and this is many times that, a situation that incentivizes people to immediately spend or convert into other currencies all money they bring in as soon as possible, because it will be worth substantially less tomorrow if they hang onto it.

And while Milei's many and often radical beliefs aren't everyone's cup of tea, the protest vote—voting against the way things are, today, even if the alternative isn't ideal for other reasons—seems to have been strong during those primaries, and only a little less-potent during the general election that triggered this run-off, because no one attracted the 45% of the votes necessary to win outright, and part of why is that instead of just two serious candidates in the race, Milei presented voters with an opportunity to burn it all down, basically, and nearly a third of the voting population took him up on that.

Massa, who isn't exactly a continuity candidate, since he's heading a party he founded to, in his words, "build the Peronism of the 21st century," is still Peronist enough that many people consider him to be nearly an incumbent, as the presidency is currently held by a Judicialist politician, and the two parties share enough of the fundamentals to make them commodity products in the eyes of many voters.

Probably at least in part because of that similar-enough status, Massa was able to pull in a dominant portion of the general election votes; but while Massa has a core body of enthusiastic supporters, people who really believe in what he's trying to do, evolving the Peronist model to make it work better, basically, some people have said they're voting for him because he's not as crazy as Milei, and thus seems less likely to set fire to the government just for the sake of setting fires. Despite the current state of affairs, then, some voters are seeking continuity not because they like what's happening, but because they fear what could happen under a different guiding hand.

Whomever takes the lead and thus, the presidency, will have a raft of issues to contend with, beyond inflation and economics.

The country is set to undergo negotiations with the IMF in November, the same month as the runoff election, and it has seen the worst grain harvest in about 60 years as a consequence of a significant drought—and grain is its main export, so this could nudge the country even closer to default, and make those negotiations with the IMF even more fraught, as foreign reserve accumulation targets it wants to achieve could drift out of reach if those exports falter too badly and it's unable to procure the necessary volume of internationally tradable currencies.

The Economist ran an editorial following the general election, in which it proposed that the outcome, which will see Massa and Milei in a runoff in late-November, is the worst of all possible outcomes, as it suggests that, first, Argentine voters aren't interested in a non-bombastic alternative vision for how the country could be run, as they relegated the center-conservative candidate Bullrich to third place, and thus, she's no longer in the running, and second that it's just astonishingly difficult to bring outsiders into a political system that has been so dominated by Peronists for so long, despite the shortcomings of the Peronist system that have plagued the country's economy for decades.

That, of course, is a economics-focused perspective, which is perhaps fitting for a publication like the Economist, but because of that focus, it fails to consider the obvious benefits, for many average, non-economist people, at least, of having a government that introduces and protects social safety net and human rights-related benefits, even when doing so isn't economically sustainable; you can absolutely argue that it's short-sighted to burn a candle with an insufficient length of wick, but they've managed to do so for a good long while, even if progress in that department has often been more of a shamble than a steady run.

Argentina is looking down the barrel of its sixth recession in a decade, it has had to go through 22 economic bail-out programs since 1956, and it's in debt to the tune of $56 billion to the IMF.

There's no clear way out of that kind of financial pit, especially considering all the other challenges the country also faces now, and will face in the near-future.

It's possible that at some point a politician will step into power who has a sense of how to both address the pervasive and persistent economic issues the country struggles with, and allow citizens to retain their rights, their social safety nets, and other sticking points that have been traditionally vital to voters; but it seems unlikely, failing some kind of major deviation from their proposed platforms, at least, that either of the candidates still in the running in this election will be that politician.

Show Notes

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentinas-massa-milei-battle-woo-9-million-swing-votes-2023-10-24/

https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/10/21/23925549/argentina-election-javier-milei-right-youth

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/argentines-vote-to-choose-president-in-country-hard-hit-by-economic-crisis-956c8f12

https://apnews.com/article/milei-argentina-chainsaw-fed35a37c6137b951e4adada3d866436

https://apnews.com/article/argentina-election-milei-massa-vote-bullrich-cead0d423f2e51444b48770af618940b

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/23/argentina-heads-to-runoff-as-economy-minister-leads-far-right-outsider?traffic_source=rss

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/23/world/americas/argentina-election-runoff-milei.html

https://archive.ph/OpBmT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%93present_Argentine_monetary_crisis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Argentine_general_election

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Argentine_primary_elections

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-67156220

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/analyst-view-argentina-vote-headed-runoff-between-ruling-peronist-radical-milei-2023-10-23/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javier_Milei

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Argentina

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewal_Front

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Fern%C3%A1ndez

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/10/23/argentinas-election-result-is-the-worst-of-all-possible-outcomes

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/how-argentinas-massa-pulled-off-election-upset-with-tax-cuts-bus-fares-2023-10-23/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/3/9/argentinas-grain-harvest-suffers-under-worst-drought-in-60-years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peronism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Argentina

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/9/13/inflation-continues-to-climb-in-argentina-as-presidential-election-nears

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%93present_Argentine_monetary_crisis

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This week we talk about fuel efficiency, the California EPA, and Scope 3.

We also discuss the EU’s emission reporting efforts, regulations, and business incentives.

Recommended Book: Undue Hate by Daniel F. Stone

Transcript

The California Air Resources Board, or CARB, is a California government agency that resulted from the 1967 merging of the state's Bureau of Air Sanitation and its Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board. It's part of California's larger Environmental Protection Agency, and its purpose is to make the air cleaner, healthier, and as free of toxins as possible.

Falling under that remit is the setting of vehicle emissions standards: the minimum miles-per-gallon of fuel efficiency vehicles must offer in order to be sold in the state.

And California is the only state that's allowed to set such standards, as the federal US government is generally the setter of such things—but the Clean Air Act of 1967 allows the state to get permission to set its own standards from the US government, and then as long as the EPA doesn't find their standards arbitrary or broadly inconsistent with the goals of the US's ambitions, and as long as they're more ambitious than the US's standards for such things, they must grant that permission.

The CARB only has 16 total members, two of whom are there just for oversight purposes, so they don't have voting powers, and 12 of the remaining 14 are appointed by the governor of California, and are then confirmed by the state senate.

Each of these members are different sorts of air and pollution experts from different regions across the state, except for two members of the public and one person who serves as the Chair of the group.

This group, though small and relatively humble in terms of the powers granted to them, and resources allotted, has an out of proportion influence because other states can choose to adopt the vehicle fuel standards they set, instead of those set by the US government.

And that's important, because California's fuel standards, since 2009, at least, when they won a court case that confirmed their ability to do this, tend to be more ambitious than those set by the federal EPA; the states that choose to use California's standards are often referred to as CARB states, and there are 16 of them, inclusive of California, as of the 2025 regulatory year.

This capability was temporarily truncated in 2019, when then-President Trump decided to take away California's right to set such standards, and the right to set up other popular—in California and other CARB states—programs, like the ZEV mandate, standing for Zero-Emissions Vehicle mandate, which basically said a certain percentage of fleet vehicles had to be zero-emissions vehicles, the percentage increasing each year—he wanted to take the right to set such things away, saying, in essence, a state government shouldn't be able to do so.

This rule was reverse in mid-2021, which gave California back that power to set standards, and though many carmakers, including Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, and BMW stuck with California's earlier standards, even after they were no longer legally required to do so, because of Trump's actions, seventeen states sued the EPA in 2022, saying, basically, that because California's standards have such a huge impact on how vehicles are developed and sold, car companies adhering to them even when not legally required to do so, because they want to keep selling their cars in California, it unfairly gives them power over the industry that other states don't enjoy.

That lawsuit, Ohio v. EPA, is ongoing, but California's influence in this and many other industries—especially in climate-related spaces—continues for the time being.

What I'd like to talk about today is a recent piece of legislation passed by the California government that could have even bigger and broader implications for corporations across the United States, and around the world.

—

California's Senate Bill 253, also called SB 253, also called the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in early October, and its essential function is requiring that large California businesses track, calculate, and disclose their direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions.

In practice, that means companies that fit the criteria of making more than $1 billion a year will need to report their emissions.

The compulsory reporting of emissions for big businesses is already a pretty big deal, especially in the United States, but this is broadly the case in most countries around the world, too; some few require it, most don't.

And this law will likely affect more than 5,300 companies, which means it will almost immediately have a profound impact on our capacity to understand who's emitting what, in part by goosing the fortunes of companies doing such tracking and computing and reporting, and that, in turn, means we'll have an easier and less-expensive time, in the near-future, getting this sort of information for other purposes, as well—there's not enough business to keep a bunch of emissions-tracking companies in the black right now, but soon, with all these big California businesses needing their services, that will change dramatically.

It won't be tomorrow, though; under this law, the California Air Resources Board has to adopt reporting regulations by January 1, 2025, the impacted companies must started disclosing their Scope 1 and 2 emissions, publicly, in 2026, and in 2027, they must report their Scope 3 emissions, as well.

Scope 1 emissions are those that a company—let's say Apple—emits directly.

So any emissions created by vehicles the company's staff uses while doing business are Scope 1 emissions.

Scope 2 emissions expand the radius of what we're looking at to include the energy produced to power the things they do—for instance, any emissions produced while generating the energy that keeps the lights on at their offices would be Scope 2 emissions; so that's relatively few or zero emissions if they're using solar panels, but substantially more if they're using electricity produced by a gas or coal plant.

Scope 3 emissions are even broader, encompassing not just in-company, direct activity and the production of the energy that fuels that activity, but also the activities conducted by others on their behalf, all the way up and down the supply chain.

So while Apple doesn't directly control the factories where iPhones are made, the emissions from these factories are within their Scope 3 responsibility, wherever those factories happen to be located and who controls them, as is the fuel burned to ship those iPhones from China to their final destinations.

Some of these emissions are relatively easy to track or estimate, others substantially less so.

It becomes a huge undertaking to keep tabs on the shipping fleet activities of other companies that you hire, though, just as it can be tricky to get accurate numbers from entities run by governments where such reporting isn't required, and where the tracking and reporting of such things is consequently uncommon.

Part of why these companies are being given several years of lead-time, then, is to make sure all the California government's i's are dotted and t's are crossed, but it's also to give them the opportunity to figure out how to track and calculate these things, and to give them the ability to do a decent job of it, despite there not being convenient or reliable ways of accomplishing this in many industries and parts of the world, right now.

Much of this is new territory, and this law, among other things, will stimulate the creation of new tracking and calculating and reporting systems and methods.

Many companies, like Apple and Microsoft and Adobe and other tech giants, in particular, already track their emissions, mostly Scope 1 and 2, with a bare few also attempting to keep tabs on their Scope 3 responsibilities, either for ideological reasons or because they want to get ahead of the ball, seeing the writing on the wall about where this is all going and not wanting to be caught flat-footed if and when new laws arrive that require the tracking of such things, with heavy penalties for the failure to do so.

This law levies a penalty of a half-million dollars on companies that fail to report their emissions, but there are no penalties for the volume of the emissions, themselves.

The idea, then, is that this is a first step toward emissions-related fines, but since we can't really fine companies for hardcore emissions when we can't prove they've got them, first we have to make sure there's reliable, accurate tracking practices in place, and all that tracking must be verified by third-party inspectors, which is something this law does require.

But for the time being, this is mostly an exercise in getting everyone used to this new way of doing things, and ensuring the infrastructure for future tracking-related legislation has been installed.

While this is still a pretty new undertaking, in the US and globally, California is not the first entity to pass this sort of legislation.

The European Union has a new law that requires, beginning as soon as January 2024, that large international companies that raise money on European stock exchanges will need to provide data about their emissions, alongside information about their climate risk exposure and their strategies for addressing those emissions and risks.

It's expected that relatively few companies will fall under the auspices of this EU law in 2024, but that by 2025 more than 3,000 US companies will have to follow these guidelines, and more than 50,000 companies, globally, resulting in an expansion of those aforementioned emissions-tracking and assessment businesses, and a lot more companies, globally, taking these sorts of things into consideration, working these sorts of standards into their business models by necessity, and slowly but surely changing their industries and expectations as a consequence.

EU laws have been incredibly influential across a variety of spaces over the past decade or so—their regulations on internet privacy have forced a slew of standards on many global companies, for instance, as it's tricky to differentiate between customers in different parts of the world, online, and it's often just easier to apply the most stringent rules to everyone, rather than trying to splinter the web into EU users and everyone else.

The EU's emissions rules will likely have a similar impact, as businesses don't want to be cut out of the EU market, and in many cases they'll do the math and realize that it's probably worth the investment to just get their emissions reporting systems set up, now, so they don't have to worry about it later when more penalties for this sort of thing are passed in various countries, and so they're not outcompeted by competitors that did make those investments, earlier on.

And California's new standard is likely to be similarly, if not even more impactful, in part because California is a huge economy—it would be one of the top five biggest economies in the world by GDP, if it were a country—and no one wants to be cut out of that market.

In other words: car companies are willing to play ball with California because they want to sell their cars in California without penalty or obstruction, and corporations are likely to play ball with these hefty emissions standards for the same reason: because they want to do business in California, and the investment, though not nothing, is also not as big a deal as having to move elsewhere, or being otherwise hindered in-state in the future; and having similar rules in both California and the EU doubles the incentive for corporations to get their ducks in a row, emissions-tracking-wise.

Worth noting is that both pieces of legislation, in California and the EU, were watered-down a bit before they became law.

California had a similar bill up for debate in 2022, and that one failed to become law, and there was a last-minute effort in the EU by mostly conservative lawmakers to kill off their law before it could be made real; and both pieces of legislation had to be reduced in impact a bit before arrival, to get enough support and avoid the hazards all that opposition represented.

That said, they're both still stronger than anything else that's ever been passed on this subject in a major economy, and they apply to slightly different types of companies, with the EU hitting more and a wider variety of businesses, while California's law encompasses fewer, larger companies.

Also notable is that the US government is attempting to get a similar sort of bill passed, though its version, like its fuel efficiency requirements, will almost certainly be less aggressive than California's version of the same, and while there are efforts to get Scope 3 emissions in there, at least a little, Republicans are threatening to kill the whole thing, even saying they'll subpoena folks from the EPA if they go for anything too strong, by suggesting that the agency is basically collaborating with EU regulators on climate regulations in an illegal fashion.

The leaders of some major US companies, those that aren't impacted by either of these laws, have said they're keen just to get clarity on all this, and would be fine with more regulation, as long as it's consistent and understandable, and doesn't break the bank; they know it's coming, and they'd like to clear the fog of war that's making things complicated for them, right now.

Others have said that any such requirements are nonsense and that the entire exercise is pointless, and that they will thus fight any such regulation to the bitter end.

That latter group is spending more money on lobbyists and such to influence things, so there's a chance the federal US version of this law will be either delayed for a very long time, or will arrive as a wisp of a hint of its former self—but there's also a decent chance these first two, and other, subsequent versions of this type of law passed in other countries, fill in the gaps for a huge number of corporate entities, resulting in similar outcomes to a US federal law, even if that sort of law isn't passed or is so weak that it doesn't really matter, because they, as a pair, force so many companies to make changes if they want to remain competitive, keep their market valuations stable as investors start to take these sort of calculations into consideration, and to ensure they're able to get insurance and maintain decent ratings, as those systems start to adjust to this new reality, as well.

Show Notes

• https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/what-are-scope-1-2-3-carbon-emissions

• https://archive.ph/exK7V

• https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB253

• https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/california/story/2023-10-07/california-gov-gavin-newsom-signs-law-requiring-big-businesses-to-disclose-emissions

• https://archive.ph/DkXTh

• https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/california-governor-gavin-newsom-signs-landmark-corporate-climate-disclosure-bills/

• https://apnews.com/article/california-climate-change-emissions-disclosure-reporting-companies-123fe15c840b82f960384cbe04f3d955?taid=64ffc13479887800015d66a4

• https://www.ifixit.com/News/81914/california-just-became-the-third-state-to-pass-electronics-right-to-repair

• Mandatory emissions disclosures arrive

• Wins, losses, disasters

• https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-carbon-corporations-damage-pollution-9cb9e7c9feb2a68cb6dc0ae99c5e943a

• https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sec-chief-says-new-california-law-could-change-baseline-coming-sec-climate-rule-2023-09-27/?stream=top

• https://9to5mac.com/2023/10/11/california-privacy-law/

• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/gov-newsom-signs-new-law-requiring-big-companies-in-california-to-disclose-emissions

• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/analysis-the-potential-global-impact-of-californias-new-corporate-climate-disclosure-laws

• https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engines/california-greenhouse-gas-waiver-request

• https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/3487755-seventeen-states-sue-epa-for-letting-california-set-vehicle-standards/

• https://climatecasechart.com/case/ohio-v-epa/

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Air_Resources_Board

• https://www.epa.gov/state-and-local-transportation/vehicle-emissions-california-waivers-and-authorizations

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This week we talk about the Gaza Strip, the Yom Kippur War, and Egypt.

We also discuss 9/11, charged topics, and sneak-attacks.

Recommended Book: Pinpoint by Greg Milner

Transcript

In 1972, the Egyptian military started building up its offense-capable forces, buying things like MiG fighter jets and T-62 tanks from the Soviet Union, while also gutting its swathe of generals—many of whom attained the rank for political, not experiential reasons—replacing them with more capable versions of the same.

This buildup and swap-out of leadership was being conducted in the lead-up to an invasion of Israel, with the intention of reclaiming territory that Egypt lost during the Six-Day War in 1967: a conflict that saw Egypt, Syria, and Jordan all going to war with Israel, mostly because of the simmering bad relations Israel had had with all its Arab neighbors since the First Arab-Israeli War, which ended in 1949, but the catalyst for that conflict was Egypt threatening to close the Suez Canal and Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping; something that would be devastating to Israel's economy, and which the Israeli government had previously said would serve as a casus belli—a justification for war—and which was already the casus belli for the aforementioned First Arab-Israeli War.

So the same general ingredients that led to the First Arab-Israeli War in the mid-20th century were in place again in the late-60s: strained relations between Israel and its neighbors, one of those neighbors threatening to clobber the Israeli economy by denying them the use of the Suez Canal and Straits of Tiran for shipping exports, and though the second time around the Egyptian military was pulled back into a defensive position after announcing that ban on Israeli shipping using these water channels, the Israeli military preemptively struck Egyptian forces and launched a ground offensive into Egypt that ended less than a week later.

This conflict left tens of thousands of Arab soldiers from these three countries dead, while Israel only suffered about a thousand fatalities.

The Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian governments gave up territory to Israel as part of the ceasefire following this relatively brief war, and the territory Egypt gave up—the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, which it had been occupying, directly informed that 1972 buildup of Egyptian forces and recalibration of their military leadership.

Throughout that buildup and booting of generals, though, the Egyptian government tried to get Israel to accept a deal that would involve them giving the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt in exchange for the Egyptian government formally recognizing Israel's rights as an independent state—something none of its Arab neighbors were willing to do, which perhaps understandably had been an ongoing source of tension in the region.

Everyone, including Israel's most powerful ally, the US, were keen on this agreement, but the Israeli government said no, as the deal wouldn't guarantee their protection from Egypt in the future.

This pissed off a lot of those allies, and the Egyptian government continued to float the idea right up to the moment they attacked Israel in 1973—an attack that was anticipated by essentially everyone, including the Israeli government, because it had become well-understood that the Egyptian government, for reasons both economic and governmental, wouldn't really be able to survive as an independent state without the Sinai territory that was now under Israel's control.

Egypt conducted a bunch of military exercises between May and August of that year, which is why similar exercises, right next to the Suez Canal in late September, were ignored by many in the Israeli establishment as just more exercises, nothing to worry about.

And tens of thousands of the soldiers participating in those exercises were given permission to make their pilgrimage to Mecca a few days before the attack, which reinforced the idea that this was just more posturing on the part of Egypt—and that proved convincing, even though the Israelis received eleven warnings of an impending attack from well-placed sources.

The Israeli government finally scrambled to call up reservists a handful of hours before Egypt moved in, though, and despite being in the position to make a preemptive strike, they were dissuaded from doing so by US leadership, which told them they should do everything they could to avoid being the one to start a new war in the Middle East, also saying that if they did start something, they wouldn't receive any support from the US; the Soviet Union, for their part, made similar efforts to dissuade the Egyptians from starting a new conflict, but to no avail.

What became known, in Israel at least, as the Yom Kippur War, because it began on that holy Jewish holiday, ultimately lasted just shy of three weeks; it saw successful Israeli counterattacks into Syria and Egypt, eventually led to the beginnings of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and importantly, led to the 1978 return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt as a consequence of the Camp David Accords, which also led to the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty—which included Egypt's acknowledgment of Israel as a legitimate nation that should be allowed to exist.

One defining trait of the Yom Kippur War, though, which has remained locked into the collective psyche of the Israeli military establishment in the decades since, was the surprise-attack nature of the conflict, and how Egypt, alongside Syria and Jordan, all hit Israel at a moment in which they weren't fully prepared, and when they had many reasons to believe an attack wouldn't be forthcoming.

What I'd like to talk about today is a more recent attack on Israel that many are comparing to the outset of Yom Kippur war, what we know so far about the conflict and the intentions of those involved, and what might happen next.

—

This is an incredibly fast-moving and emotion-evoking story, so there's a very good chance some component of what I'm about to tell you will have changed before this episode goes live, and that a lot of conversation about it, in personal and broadcast contexts, will be fraught.

But that said, what we seem to know at the moment is this:

Early on the morning of October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a sneak-attack against Israel.

Hamas, which is more formally called the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas is an acronym for that name in Arabic, is an organization that governs the Gaza Strip, and has since 2007, when they took control of the region, capturing it, basically, following a five-day conflict with the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, or Fatah—there were elections in the area before that, but since then it's mostly just been Hamas running things, and they have influence in the West Bank—another area within Israel designated for Palestinians, though separated from Gaza by Israeli cities and security infrastructure—as well.

This sneak-attack was, by all indications, almost entirely unexpected and came as a surprise to Israel's military complex, alongside that of allied nations, like the US and European countries; there have been murmurings, as tends to be the case after these sorts of attacks, that some people did know or suspect what was about to happen, it's just that those suspicions were't taken as seriously as they could have, and in retrospect, should have, been.

But this attack caught the Israeli government more or less completely unprepared, and it was fairly complex, involving attacks from the land, the sea, and the air, the latter accomplished using thousands of rockets fired within hours of each other, but also motorized paraglider that allowed fighters to quickly get behind defensive lines, allowing them to secure bases and checkpoints, which in turn allowed more heavily armed commando units to break through the usually well-defended walls and fences guarded by Israeli soldiers, and to then sweep through neighboring areas, killing and capturing as they went.

The killing and capturing was quite brutal: this wasn't a firefight between soldiers, it was largely a wave of well-prepared Hamas fighters rolling through a relatively small number of soldiers, and then butchering, torturing, raping, and kidnapping civilians of all ages.

Current estimates suggest that Hamas militants have killed more than 1,300 people, so far, including people of many different nationalities, but mostly Israeli citizens, and they've wounded several thousand more—primarily during this initial, stealthy attack, which some Israeli higher-ups have called their country's 9/11, because of how out of nowhere it seemed, and how many civilian lives were claimed.

Israel's government officially declared war on Hamas the following day, and have since killed nearly 3,000 people, and wounded at least 9,600 more, according to the Gaza Health Ministry—most of those deaths and injuries the consequence of Israeli counterstrikes, which have until now mostly been in the shape of missiles fired into Gaza.

That "until now" caveat is important, as, as of the day I'm recording this, the day before this episode goes live, the Israeli government has indicated it intends to invade Gaza, beginning in the more-populated northern portion of the Strip, and it reinforced this intention by telling Palestinians in Gaza, via the UN, that they had 24 hours to evacuate to the southern portion of the Strip.

Such an evacuation is easier said than done, though, as more than 1.1 million people live in the area the Israelis were suggesting people should leave, or else, so the Israeli government has gotten pushback from international organizations, as there's no way that many people can safely move that far in that short a period of time, which means Israel risks losing the moral high ground, seeming not to care what happens to everyday Palestinian civilians, despite gesturing at giving them the option of getting out of harm's way before the hammer comes down, Israeli soldiers flooding into the area intent on hunting down Hamas' leadership and collapsing every last bit of their military infrastructure.

And that dynamic, of Israel being just incredibly overpowered compared to Hamas, and using that power against everyday Palestinian civilians, is part of why some outside analysts have suggested the 9/11 comparison is apt; not just because of how the attack happened and who the primary victims were, but because Israel's response, so far at least, has been similar to that of the United States following 9/11: namely, a lot of international support wavers because, back in the day, the US government scrambled to find someone to blame and ended up hurting a lot of innocent people alongside those who were substantially less innocent, and because now, Israel might be readying itself to do the same, everyone feeling really bad for them and what they have suffered, but increasingly wondering if the victim might be setting themselves up to become an even greater victimizer—lashing out as a result of that pain and horror and desperate need to feel some semblance of security and safety again.

As was the case back in 2001, there are many valid perspectives on this, and folks around the world have responded to what's happening in Israel and Gaza in a variety of ways.

Some people, those on what we might call the pro-Israeli side, have argued that Israel was attacked, out of nowhere, a huge number of civilians were killed, other civilians—something like 200 of them—were taken hostage, and this is very not okay, and Israel is well within its rights to hit back at those who hit them first, and to do what they need to do to ensure those who did the initial hitting are not in a position to do so again in the future, even if that means some innocent people are caught in the crossfire.

Others, those on what we might call the pro-Palestine side, have argued that millions of Palestinians have been essentially kept in an open-air prison for almost two decades, and thus it's understandable that they might do whatever they can—or support organizations that will do whatever they can—to hit back at the force, the Israeli government, that came in and took their land, locked them up, and who have trampled their human rights in all sorts of internationally acknowledged ways.

It's also worth noting here that there are plenty of Palestinians who don't like Hamas, and/or who don't agree with what they did in this instance, or with other attacks they've made against other Palestinian groups and Israelis over the years; there are likewise plenty of Israelis who don't agree with the militarization that has occurred under the current, and other recent Israeli administrations.

And it's possible, I think, to acknowledge that it's civilians on both sides that are suffering the most from these attacks, recent and historical, while those at the top often use them as an excuse to continue inciting and justifying violence of all sorts, while reinforcing their own hold and garnering more power for themselves—and can be true of attacks that look a lot like terrorism, and those that are easier to justify in the eyes of the international community.

So there are people on all sides of this, there are uncomfortable discussions happening all around the world, centering on this subject, but the concrete reality on the ground is that Hamas scored a brutal military strike against the much larger and more powerful Israel, Israel is now leveraging that power to hit the residents of the Gaza Strip, including Hamas, hard, and we're all waiting to see how far this will go, and what the broader consequences will be.

Because as horrible as that initial attack was, and as horrible as Israel's counterattack has been, the real fear for many is that this conflict will expand to encompass more players, regional and international.

The most likely entrants would be those that have been involved in previous attacks against Israel, like Egypt and Lebanon and Syria, and while Egypt seems not keen on the idea right now, mostly trying to play peacemaker and trying to keep a flood of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from fleeing Gaza into their territory, Lebanon has been a bit more fuzzy on the matter: there have been reports of mortar attacks across the border, and some reporters have suggested that the level of attacks are higher than usual, maybe indicating that Hezbollah, which is a major political and military force in Lebanon, could get directly involved in the conflict, seeing it as an opportunity to hit Israel when they're wounded and when their forces and attentions are divided—though it could also be a matter of Hezbollah wanting to pull some of Israel's resources north, which would make their work in Gaza a lot more cumbersome.

That would potentially be doubly-bad, too, because Hezbollah is backed by Iran, which has made no secret of its desire to see Israel wiped off the map, and which is the major force many people on the Israeli side, and on the side of simply not wanting to see the war expand, are worried might decide to get involved, as that would mean a whole nationstate getting its country-scale military involved in the fight, which would substantially complicate things, not to mention seriously raising the potential of a huge body count and a spiral into WWIII.

The Iranian government has said it won't engage militarily with Israel unless Israelis attack them, so that concern would seem to be less pressing at the moment, though it's hard to predict, early on in a conflict, how such statements will age as realities on the ground change, and Iranian officials have made other statements that suggest they're keeping their options open.

There are more distant concerns that the US or Russia or China might get involved, and it seems unlikely that any of those bigger, global players would step in directly at this point, though a huge number of countries have announced military and humanitarian support for Israel, and a few have done the same for the Palestinians, as well; so that's better in some ways, as it reduces the chances of those bigger players coming into direct conflict with each other, but less-good in the sense that it raises the possibility of this turning into a proxy conflict, which could then spin-up into something pretty big, for better and for worse, if things at some point escalate.

Looking further afield, there are concerns within Ukraine that this conflict could pull attention and resources away from Kyiv, redistributing them to Israel, or maybe even just wearing people out on the idea of throwing resources at international conflicts—democratic support for such aid drying up as people start to wonder how much money will be spent and how many of these things we'll see popping up in the coming years.

We're not far enough along to know if that's likely to be the case or not, but it's enough of a concern that Ukrainian President Zelensky has been going out of his way to announce support for Israel, even asking to visit the country, personally, in order to stay front of mind and possibly to build a connection in the eyes of the world between the two conflicts.

One other big development is a pause on efforts by the Israeli and Saudi governments to normalize their relations with each other; this has been a huge, long-term diplomatic effort that could help the Middle East stabilize a bit, and could help the region better interconnect economically and diplomatically, but the Saudi government said they were back-burnering the agreement while Israel is attacking Gaza, and it's anyone's guess as to whether they'll start that back up, and if so, when.

Something else we don't know is Hamas's motive for this attack.

Some speculate that it might be as simple as wanting to hurt a longtime enemy, while others have suggested it might be the lead-in to some other kind of attack: an attritional, weakening blow meant to soften Israel up for an invasion from the north, or an attack from Iran.

Still others contend that it was probably a means of derailing the aforementioned normalizing of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia—something Hamas would be keen to prevent, and which they may have predicted this sort of attack and Israel's inevitable response to it, would hamstring.

Wilder speculations, for which there's no evidence, as far as I'm aware, suggests that this might be a five-dimensional chess ploy by Russian President Putin, since Putin met with Hamas leaders who traveled to Moscow for the visit in March of 2023, and the group's politburo leader visited Moscow again in early September.

The theory is that Putin wanted to pull international attention and support away from Ukraine, while also punishing Israel for supporting Ukraine, and he did so by either supporting Hamas directly, or via Russia's ally, Iran—and while it has been confirmed that Iran helped Hamas prepare for this attack, there's no confirmation that Russia had anything to do with it; this, and several other pieces of evidence pointing in this direction, so far at least, are all circumstantial.

This gestures at the broader problem right now, though, of trying to understand and contextualize something so horrific, because lacking that deeper understanding, it's difficult to know what will help, what will make things better in a region in which all the variables seem to be set up in such a way that things just get worse and more volatile over time, rather than the opposite, and what will be the consequences of the, as of the day I'm recording this, ongoing counterattack by Israel, and the exploding humanitarian situation that's arising in Gaza as a consequence of that counterattack.

Show Notes

• https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-was-duped-hamas-planned-devastating-assault-2023-10-08/

• https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1711027540536471994

• https://www.vox.com/world-politics/23910641/israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestine-explainer

• Depressing Take on the Conflict

• Conflict update

• https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/israel-hamas-gaza

• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/israel-hamas-war-gaza-strip/

• https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-was-duped-hamas-planned-devastating-assault-2023-10-08/

• https://www.axios.com/2023/10/11/zelensky-israel-hamas-war-gaza-visit-netanyahu

• https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/10/13/palestinians-flee-their-homes-towards-southern-gaza-after-israeli-order

• https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-hamas-war-refugees-6cf0ff04e513ecec12cf9152656ac1b6

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Bank

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_enclaves

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_National_Authority

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_conflict

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas

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This week we talk about AMD, graphics processing units, and AI.

We also discuss crypto mining, video games, and parallel processing.

Recommended Book: The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel

Transcript

Founded in 1993 by an engineer who previously designed microprocessors for semiconductor company AMD, an engineer from Sun Microsystems, and a graphics chip designer and senior engineer from Sun and IBM, NVIDIA was focused on producing graphics-optimized hardware because of a theory held by those founders that this sort of engineering would allow computers to tackle new sorts of problems that conventional computing architecture wasn't very good at.

They also suspected that the video game industry, which was still pretty nascent, but rapidly growing, this being the early 90s, would become a big deal, and the industry was already running up against hardware problems, computing-wise, both in terms of development, and in terms of allowing users to play games that were graphically complex and immersive.

So they scrounged about $40k between them, started the company, and then fairly quickly were able to attract serious funding from Silicon Valley VCs, initially to the tune of $20 million.

It took them a little while, about half a decade, to get their first real-deal product out the door, but a graphics accelerator chip they release in 1998 did pretty well, and their subsequent product, the GeForce 256, which empowered consumer-grade hardware to do impressive new things, graphically, made their company, and their GeForce line of graphics cards, into an industry standard piece of hardware for gaming purposes.

Graphics cards, those of the dedicated or discrete variety, which basically means it's a separate piece of hardware from the motherboard, the main computer hardware, gives a computer or other device enhanced graphics powers, lending it the ability to process graphical stuff separately, with tech optimized for that purpose, which in turn means you can play games or videos or whatnot that would otherwise be sluggish or low-quality, or in some cases, it allows you to play games and videos that your core system simply wouldn't be capable of handling.

These cards are circuit boards that are installed into a computer's expansion slot, or in some cases attached using a high-speed connection cable.

Many modern video games require dedicated graphics processors of this kind in order to function, or in order to function at a playable speed and resolution; lower-key, simpler games work decently well with the graphics capabilities included in the core hardware, but the AAA-grade, high-end, visually realistic stuff almost always needs this kind of add-on to work, or to work as intended.

And these sorts of add-ons have been around since personal computers have been around, but they really took off on the consumer market in the 1980s, as PCs started to become more visual—the advent of Windows and the Mac made what was previously a green-screen, number and character-heavy interface a lot more colorful and interactive and intuitive for non-programmer users, and as those visual experiences became more complex, the hardware architecture had to evolve to account for that, and often this meant including graphics cards alongside the more standard components.

A huge variety of companies make these sorts of cards, these days, but the majority of modern graphics cards are designed by one of two companies: AMD or Nvidia.

What I'd like to talk about today is the latter, Nvidia, a company that seems to have found itself in the right place at the right time, with the right investments and infrastructure, to take advantage of a new wave of companies and applications that desperately need what it has to offer.

—

Like most tech companies, Nvidia has been slowly but surely expanding its capabilities and competing with other entities in this space by snapping up other businesses that do things it would like to be able to do.

It bought-out the intellectual assets of 3dfx, a fellow graphics card-maker, in late-2000, grabbed several hardware designers in the early 2000s, and then it went about scooping-up a slew of graphics-related software-makers, to the point where the US Justice Department started to get anxious that Nvidia and its main rival, AMD, might be building monopolies for themselves in this still-burgeoning, but increasingly important to the computing and gaming industry, space.

Nvidia was hit hard by lawsuits related to defects in its products in the late 20-aughts, and it invested heavily in producing mobile-focused systems on a chip—holistic, small form-factor microchips that ostensibly include everything device-makers might need to build smartphones or gaming hardware—and even released its own gaming pseudo-console, the Nvidia shield, in the early 20-teens.

The company continued to expand its reach in the gaming space in the mid-to-late-20-teens, while also expanding into the automobile media center industry—a segment of the auto-industry that was becoming increasingly digitized and connected, removing buttons and switches and opting for touchscreen interfaces—and it also expanded into the broader mobile device market, allowing it to build chips for smartphones and tablets.

What they were starting to realize during this period, though—and this is something they began looking into and investing in, in earnest, back in 2007 or so, through the early 20-teens—is that the same approach they used to build graphics cards, basically lashing a bunch of smaller chip cores together, so they all worked in parallel, which allowed them to do a bunch of different stuff, simultaneously, also allowed them to do other things that require a whole lot of parallel functionality—and that's in contrast to building chips with brute strength, but which aren't necessarily capable of doing a bunch of smaller tasks in parallel to each other.

So in addition to being able to show a bunch of complex, resource-intensive graphics on screen, these parallel-processing chip setups could also allow them to, for instance, do complex math, as is required for physics simulations and heavy-duty engineering projects, they could simulate chemical interactions, like pharmaceutical companies need to do, or—and this turned out to be a big, important use-case—they could run the sorts of massive data centers tech giants like Google and Apple and Microsoft were beginning to build all around the world, to crunch all the data being produced and shuffled here and there for their cloud storage and cloud computing architectures.

In the years since, that latter use-case has far surpassed the revenue Nvidia pulls in from its video game-optimized graphics processing units.

And another use-case for these types of chip architectures, that of running AI systems, looks primed to take the revenue crown from even those cloud computing setups.

Nvidia's most recent quarterly report showed that its revenue tied to its data-center offerings more than doubled over the course of just three months, and it's generally expected that this revenue will more than quadruple, year-over-year, and all of this despite a hardware crunch caused by a run on its highest-end products by tech companies wanting to flesh-out their AI-related, number-crunching setups; it hasn't been able to meet the huge surge in demand that has arisen over the past few years, but it's still making major bank.

Part of why Nvidia's hardware is so in demand for these use-cases is that, back in 2006, it released the Compute Unified Device Architecture, or CUDA, which is a programming language that allows users to write applications for GPUs, graphics processing units, rather than conventional computing setups.

This is what allows folks to treat these gobs of parallel-linked graphics processing units like highly capable computers, and it's what allows them to use gaming-optimized hardware for simulating atoms or managing cloud storage systems or mining Bitcoin.

CUDA now has 250 software libraries, which is huge compared to its competitors, and that allows AI developers—a category of people who are enjoying the majority of major tech investment resources at the moment—to perch their software on hardware that can handle the huge processing overhead necessary for these applications to function.

Other companies in this space are making investments in their software offerings, and the aforementioned AMD, which is launching AI-focused hardware, as well, uses open source software for its tech, which has some benefits over Nvidia's largely proprietary libraries.

Individual companies, too, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, are all investing in their own, homegrown, alternative hardware and software, in part so they can be less dependent on companies like Nvidia, which has been charging them an arm-and-a-leg for their high-end products, and which, again, has been suffering from supply shortages because of all this new demand.

So these big tech companies don't want to be reliant on Nvidia for their well-being in this space, but they also want to optimize their chips for their individual use-cases they're throwing tons of money at this problem, hoping to liberate themselves from future shortages and dependency issues, and to maybe even build themselves a moat in the AI space in the future, if they can develop hardware and software for their own use that their competition won't be able to match.

And for context, a single system with eight of Nvidia's newest, high-end GPUs for cloud data center purposes can cost upward of $200,000, which is about 40-times the cost of buying a generic server optimized for the same purposes; so this is not a small amount of money, considering how many of those systems these companies require just to function at a base level, but these companies are still willing to pay those prices, and are in fact scrambling to do so, hoping to get their hands on more of these scarce resources, which further underlines why they're hoping to make their own, viable alternatives to these Nvidia offerings, sooner rather than later.

Despite those pressures to move away to another option, though, Nvidia enjoys a substantial advantage in this market, right now, because of the combination of its powerful hardware and the CUDA language library.

That's allow it to rapidly climb the ranks of highest-value global tech companies, recently becoming the first semiconductor company to hit the $1 trillion valuation mark, bypassing Tesla and Meta and Berkshire Hathaway, among many other companies along the way, and something like 92% of AI models are currently written in PyTorch—a machine learning framework that uses the Torch library, and which is currently optimized for use on Nvidia chips because of its cross-compatibility with CUDA; so this advantage is baked-into the industry for the time-being.

That may change at some point, as the folks behind PyTorch are in the process of evolving it to support other GPU platforms, like those run by AMD and Apple.

But at the moment, Nvidia is the simplest default system to work with for the majority of folks working in AI; so they have a bit of a head start, and that head start was in many ways enabled and funded by their success in the video game industry, and then the few years during which they were heavily funded by the crypto-mining industry, all of which provided them the resources they needed to reinforce that moat and build-out their hardware and software so they were able to become the obvious, default choice for AI purposes, as well.

So Nvidia is absolutely killing it right now, their stock having jumped from about $115 a share a year ago to around $460 a share, today, and they're queued up to continue selling out every product they make as fast as they can make them.

But we're entering a period, over the next year or two, during which that dominance will start to be challenged, more AI code transferable to other software and hardware made by other companies, and more of their customers building their own alternatives; so a lot of what's fueling their current success may start to sputter if they aren't able to build some new competitive advantages in this space, sometime very soon, despite their impressive, high-flying, stock-surging, valuation-ballooning performance over these past few years.

Show Notes

• https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304019404577418243311260010

• https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121358204084776309

• https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-nvidia-got-hugeand-almost-invincible-da74cae1

• https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-owner-openai-is-exploring-making-its-own-ai-chips-sources-2023-10-06/

• https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-to-debut-ai-chip-next-month-that-could-cut-nvidia-gpu-costs

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyTorch

• https://innovationorigins.com/en/amd-gears-up-to-challenge-nvidias-ai-supremacy/

• https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/07/how-nvidia-became-a-major-player-in-robotics/

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_card

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia

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This week we talk about natural gas, plumes, and satellites.

We also discuss firedamp, AI detection, and emission numbers.

Recommended Book: Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly

Transcript

Methane, the name for a chemical made up of one part carbon, four parts hydrogen, is incredibly abundant on earth as it's formed by both geological and biological processes—the former when organic materials are heated up and have massive amounts of pressure applied to them, underground, and the latter through a process called methanogenesis, which basically means certain types of Archaea, a type of life, exhaling methane.

That sort of respiration mostly occurs in organic-breakdown situations, where these microscopic organisms live: so landfills and in the bottom of lakes, where dead stuff falls and is torn apart at a microscopic level by these tiny creatures, but also in the guts of cows and termites and similar beasties, which rely upon their symbiosis with these archaea to help them process the stuff they eat—which they otherwise wouldn't be able to break up and use on their own.

Methane was originally discovered, in the sense that it was noted and quantified, back in the late-18th century, when the Italian physicist and chemist, Alessandro Volta—who among other things also lent his name to an electrical measurement and who is credited with inventing the battery—who was studying marsh gas, marshes being a huge natural source of methane, as it's filled with the sorts of critters that break apart biological materials and release methane as a byproduct.

We've known about this gas for a while, then, and history is filled with examples of different cultures making use of it in relatively simple ways, as an energy source.

And on that note, methane is the primary constituent of what we today call natural gas, though the name methane was only coined by 1866 by a German chemist, August Wilhelm von Hoffman, who derived the term from methanol, which is the flammable, colorless liquid often called wood alcohol which is from whence the gas was first detected and isolated, and before that different cultures referred to it only adjacently, usually because it caused issues they couldn't quite quantify, like, for instance, causing deaths in coal mines—the deathly, gas-pocket-laden air, until methane became an official thing, sometimes referred to as firedamp, which was scary because it could suffocate everyone, or it could explode.

Today, methane, mostly as a constituent of natural gas, is harvested and shuttled all over the world to be burned as a fossil fuel; and similar to other fossil fuels, like oil and coal, that burning releases energy, producing heat, which is used to spin a turbine or heat water in a steam generator.

Natural gas is, in the modern world, generally considered to be superior to other fossil fuel options because it burns relatively cleanly, in terms of pollution, compared to other options, which is nice for folks in the areas where this burning is taking place, but it also releases relatively less CO2 into the atmosphere per unit of heat it produces when it's used for energy, so although it's still very much a fossil fuel and emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it's the best of bad options in many ways, and can be stored and transported in forms that make it quite versatile and even more energy-dense—it can be refined and pressurized into a liquid, for instance, which makes transport substantially easier and each unit of natural gas more useful, but that also allows it to be used as rocket fuel and for similar high-intensity utilities, which is not something that can be said of otherwise comparable options.

What I'd like to talk about today is the role of methane in a world that's shifting toward renewable energy, and why this fossil fuel, which is generally superior to other fossil fuel options, is associated with some unique problems that we're scrambling to solve.

—

Back in June of 2023, scientists announced that they had discovered evidence of a massive methane plume in Kazakhstan.

This plume—the consequence of a leak at a methane prospecting site in this methane-rich country—was later confirmed to be the result of an accident at one of a local energy company's wells at a gas field on June 9, and the company said they were doing what they could to address the issue, and that the purported gas plume was actually just hot clouds of vapor containing minimal amounts of methane; a misidentification, in other words.

The scientists who flagged the plume, though, said this wasn't the case: the satellites they used to identify it contain high spectral resolution imaging hardware, and they don't tend to mistake water vapor for methane—that may have been possible with previous technologies, but these new ones aren't prone to that type of false-positive.

The satellites noted at least nine individual instances of methane plumes erupting from this single site in the month leading up to July 23, alone, and those findings were then confirmed by scientists using similar technologies with the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research—and that's alongside the original group's use of two different satellites, the EU's Sentinel-5P and the Italian Space Agency's Prism satellite, the former of which used a spectrometer that was designed specifically to detect methane in this way.

These researchers, using these findings, were able to estimate an emission-rate of somewhere between 35 and 107 metric tons of methane, per hour, into the atmosphere, from this one leak, alone, which has thus caused the same amount of short-term climate damage, in terms of heat amplifying greenhouse effects, as the annual emissions of somewhere between 814,000 and nearly 2.5 million US cars, making it the worst confirmed methane leak from a single source in all of 2023—so far, at least.

And "so far" is doing a lot of work, there, as these sorts of satellites have become increasingly effective tools in researchers' toolkits for identifying these types of leaks, and the software they use to crunch the raw data provided by these increasingly sophisticated detection tools has led to a small revolution in the ability to both notice and pinpoint the source of methane plumes, globally, even in areas where such plumes would have previously gone un-noted, and thus, unaddressed.

And this is important, if you're the sort of person who cares about the amplifying effects of human industry and other endeavors on climate change, because methane, in addition to its explosive volatility and capacity to degrade air quality and mess with ecosystems at ground-level, methane is thought to be responsible for about 30% of the total greenhouse effects we're seeing, today, because—despite only sticking around in the atmosphere for about 7 to 12 years, compared to potentially hundreds of years for CO2—methane is also about 80-times more potent than CO2, in this regard.

So in the short-term, which in this case means the around a decade a given methane particle persists in the atmosphere, it's way, way worse in terms of heat-trapping, compared to CO2.

And though that effect will subside faster than CO2, which can stick around for many generations, rather than a decade or so, we're still churning a lot of methane up there, so this isn't a one-off, temporary thing, it's persistent, the methane that goes away being replaced by more of the same, and those temporary impacts can have long-term repercussions, like melting ice caps, contributing to droughts and floods and extreme storms, and drying up areas that would periodically see irregular wildfires, causing much larger and more potent versions of the same, which in turn churns all the CO2 contained in those trees or peatlands or whatever else that are now burning, into the atmosphere.

So temporary boosts of this magnitude in greenhouse gas effects are not temporary—they can last far past the period in which the gases are actually up there, because of how substantially, and in practical terms, permanently, they change the circumstances on the earth, below.

All of which has led to waves of investment in being able to detect methane leaks, because while many energy companies are incentivized to cap leaky wells, in part because doing so potentially gives them a source of natural gas they can then turn around and sell as fuel, some such entities are more than happy to allow these leaks to just keep leaking, because the cost of identifying and handling leaks is higher than what they can expect to get from capturing and selling that gas, or in some cases because the entities in question are beyond strict regulations that would necessitate they care or act to begin with; there are no consequences for such atmospheric pollution in many parts of the world.

The same is generally true even in more dense and ostensibly regulatorily rich areas like Russia, which is expected to churn by far more CO2-equivalents worth of methane into the atmosphere from leaks and gas burning than any other country—though the US comes in second, followed by Qatar, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China at a distance sixth.

This is an issue in fairly remote and rural places like Kazakhstan, then, where there's a lot of energy and mining infrastructure, but not so many people, or regulatory bodies with teeth, but also in places like the US, where methane gas leaks are estimated to pump something like 6.5 million metric tons of this gas into the atmosphere every single year, which is roughly the equivalent of the yearly emissions of about 2.5 million US passenger vehicles.

There are means of addressing this issue, and they're generally referred to as "methane abatements," a term that encompasses everything from plugging or tapping those leaks to what cattle are fed—cows emitting a lot of methane because of how they're bred, kept, and fed, and how their microbiota processes that feed.

Fundamental to these abatement options, though, is figuring out where and how to apply them in the first place.

Governments around the world are thus beginning to aggregate the data they have, providing local governance and businesses with the resources they need to start addressing this issue, but the rollout has been slow, in part because the resolution of our view has been quite low, until just recently.

A trio of satellites, including the aforementioned Sentinel 5P, alongside the Sentinel-3 and Sentinel-2, the data they collectively generate paired with machine learning—a type of what we broadly might call artificial intelligence software—has allowed researchers to produce a wealth of automatically produced data on this subject, at a far more granular level than has been possible until now, which in turn has allowed governing bodies to parse that data and identify super-emitters, the worst of the worst in terms of these leaks, while also providing more specific, down to the individual well in an oil facility or in some cases the specific location on a pipeline, where these leaks are occurring; these satellites can also provide estimates as to how much methane is being leaked at a given location, which in turn can help nations, organizations, and corporations prioritize their abatement efforts, accordingly.

We're still in the frontier-stage of this sort of detection and amelioration, but there's more on the way, with satellites optimized for methane detection of this kind launching in the coming years—one of them, the $90 million MethaneSAT, is meant to help global regulators pinpoint hotspots and identify potential underreporting by various entities, which in turn should help put more pressure on those that are intentionally concealing their leaks: something that'll be especially important for holding companies like those in Russia, which are supported in this concealing by their government, to account for their chronically underreported emissions.

These satellites and similar detection tools, though, aren't of much use without efforts to act upon their findings at ground level, just as all the good intentions in the world wouldn't be enough to staunch the upward flow of this gas into the atmosphere, lacking the data required to tell us where to look and what needs to be done.

What we're really looking at, then, is a moment in time, beginning in 2023, but really kicking into high gear in 2024 through 2030, which is when many countries' first-step, big-deal climate commitments come due, a moment in which a confluence of detection and remediation efforts and techniques is finally emerging, and this confluence could allow us to significantly reduce this category of greenhouse gas emissions, which is great, because up to 75% of methane emissions are thought to be solvable in this way.

Such efforts, in turn, could reduce the rise in global temperatures from greenhouse gases by something like 25%, all unto itself; an incredible win, if we can keep the momentum going and incentives aligned as these new resources begin to spin-up and interoperate and give the folks trying to solve this particular problem the tools they need to do so.

Show Notes

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane

• https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane

• https://archive.ph/ODvEK

• https://www.iea.org/energy-system/fossil-fuels/methane-abatement

• https://www.iea.org/fuels-and-technologies/methane-abatement

• https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-5P/Tropomi

• https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66811312

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425723002675

• https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/23/9071/2023/

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_emissions

• https://www.edf.org/climate/methane-crucial-opportunity-climate-fight

• https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-does-natural-gas-contribute-climate-change-through-co2-emissions-when-fuel-burned

• https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/06/revealed-1000-super-emitting-methane-leaks-risk-triggering-climate-tipping-points

• https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/methane/

• https://www.state.gov/publication-of-u-s-government-funded-methane-abatement-handbook-for-policymakers/

• https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Trio_of_Sentinel_satellites_map_methane_super-emitters

• https://www.cpr.org/2023/08/17/methane-satellite-ball-aerospace-boulder/

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This week we talk about Unity, Unreal, and Godot.

We also discuss fee structures, user revolts, and indie game-makers.

Recommended Book: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner

Show Notes

• https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/digital-media/video-games/worldwide

• https://www.billboard.com/pro/ifpi-global-report-2023-music-business-revenue-market-share/

• https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/07/video-game-industry-not-recession-proof-sales-set-to-fall-in-2022.html

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/22/are-video-games-recession-proof-sort-experts-say/

• https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/unity-s-pricing-changes-are-trying-to-solve-too-many-problems-at-once

• https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/unity-apologizes-to-devs-reveals-updated-runtime-fee-policy

• https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/22/23882768/unity-new-pricing-model-update

• https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/15/23875396/unity-mobile-developers-ad-monetization-tos-changes

• https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/12/23870547/unit-price-change-game-development

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/22/are-video-games-recession-proof-sort-experts-say/

• https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/022216/how-microtransactions-are-evolving-economics-gaming.asp

• https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog/902/

• https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/053115/how-video-game-industry-changing.asp

• https://finmodelslab.com/blogs/operating-costs/video-game-company-operating-costs

• https://www.makeuseof.com/ways-the-rising-costs-of-games-affect-the-industry/

• https://codeswholesale.com/blog/5-ways-to-make-money-in-the-gaming-industry/

• https://gamemaker.io/en/blog/cost-of-making-a-game

• https://www.gamedesigning.org/learn/video-game-cost/

• https://www.reuters.com/technology/video-gaming-revenue-grow-26-2023-console-sales-strength-report-2023-08-08/

• https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/digital-media/video-games/worldwide

Transcript

Depending on how inclusive you are with your measurements and the specific numbers you're tallying, the global video game market is expected to pull in somewhere between $187.7 and $334 billion in revenue in 2023.

That's somewhere between 2.6% and 13.4% above 2022 numbers—and again, those figures are pretty far apart because different entities keeping tabs on this industry measure different things, some only looking at direct sales of video games and in-game items, while others look at connected sub-industries, like e-gaming events and service jobs that do customer support for game companies.

Whichever end of that spectrum you look at, though, the global video game industry is a behemoth that's growing every year, and its income surpassed that of the music and film industries, combined, years ago, the global film industry expected to bring in around $92.5 billion in 2023, while the global music industry pulls a paltry $26.2 billion.

The video game market is continuing to grow at a fairly stellar pace, compared to other entertainment categories, as well. And while it was shown not to be entirely recession proof, as had been claimed since the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, when it remained one of the few industries still growing steadily, that growth balking a bit in 2022, when the industry contracted by 1.2%, it grew substantially at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has largely maintained that growth since, which has allowed entities operating in this space to claim more and more entertainment-related marketshare, which in turn has shifted the center of gravity in the media world toward video games and away from other leisure options, including things like travel, vacations, and other things you wouldn't typically think of as being competitors of the video game market.

Since video games really took off, hitting the mainstream in the 1980s, and becoming a big deal in the 1990s with the emergence of user-friendly consoles and 3D graphics, the economics of video games have changed substantially.

Once, video game companies sold games that would play on a user's computer, then consoles—which are basically gaming-focused mini-computers that plug into a customer's TV, or can be carried around in their pockets—those quickly became the new default for many gamers, creating a more optimized gaming experience, though also introducing a new cost for game-makers, as they typically need to pay something to the console-maker to use their tech and have their products work on these platforms.

Retail stores became increasingly important to the gaming industry's budgetary concerns around this time, as they would need to take a cut of the sale price of everything they sold, but also have the flexibility to offer deals to their customers, to incentivize purchases and lure them away from other game stores.

And further toward the base of the development stack, as games became more sophisticated and refined, game-makers had to spend more money on high-end hardware, but also higher-end software tools that would allow them to develop the games, polish them so they could compete with other offerings, and in some cases use what's often called "middleware" to serve as a scaffolding for their game projects—software tools that are sometimes referred to as game engines.

All of which has made the process of producing video games a lot more complex and expensive, and as the industry has become more popular, roping-in more and more customers, more and more entities have popped up, intent on making their own games; and that's fed a spiral toward higher-costs and more complex game-making processes, leading to a lot of enrichment in some cases, and quite a few new business models optimized for different platforms and styles of game, but also quite a few bankruptcies and hostile takeovers, even seemingly successful video game companies sometimes falling short or investing too much in a game that flops, leaving them with insufficient resources to keep the lights on or produce their next product.

What I'd like to talk about today is a recent scandal in the video game industry related to one of those middleware, game engine-making companies, and how they're scrambling to make things right after seemingly losing much of their goodwill and credibility essentially overnight.

—

In early September, 2023, a game engine company called Unity announced that it would be changing its pricing structure, effective Jan 1, 2024, and that set off a wave of outrage and anger from its users, most of which are individual game-makers and game-making companies.

To understand why this response was so widespread and vehement, it's helpful to understand a bit about how game engines work and their role in the modern video game industry.

Fundamentally, a game engine is a piece of software that serves as a framework for making video games.

So while it's not a simple "click a button, get a game" sort of setup, it does dramatically reduce the amount of time and effort required to produce a finished game product, giving users—game-developers of all shapes and sizes—level-editors, physics engines, rendering engines that help them more easily produce and edit 2D and 3D graphics, collision detection tools, which basically track and control how things bump up against each other in the game and what happens when they do, alongside more basic media tools like those that allow for the creation and editing of audio, animations, video content, text, and the like.

Modern game engines also help developers keep the size of their games moderated without losing too much quality, they help with memory management on the developers' computers, they can provide artificial intelligence tools and software that helps them build-out multiplayer functionality—it's a really big and powerful toolkit, so the engine that game-makers choose to use is important, and it shapes every other decision they make, and in some ways the final product, too, because of how easy or difficult things are to do within their specific scaffolding.

Unity makes a very popular game engine that was originally released in 2005 as a Mac-specific product, but it has since become multiplatform, allowing developers to make games for all sorts of computers, consoles, mobile devices, and virtual reality interfaces.

It's perhaps most popular in the mobile gaming space, as it's relatively easy to learn compared to other engines, and is fairly lightweight; and because the mobile gaming space has been growing so rapidly, that's meant Unity has become increasing popular and widespread as a tool, which in turn has had the spillover effect of making it more popular on other platforms, as well—because folks making a mobile game might go on to make a Playstation game next, and may decide to stick with the engine they know, or a gaming company might decide to perch all their games upon the same game engine because that's just a lot easier, both in terms of keeping things simple for developers, and in terms of the costs associated with using a bunch of different engine.

The pricing models used by these game engines vary quite a bit from company to company, but typically they make money by selling licenses to use their products; there's generally a free tier for folks learning to use their tools and who make games below a certain threshold of popularity and profit, but at a certain point they'll need to buy the right to use the engine, which generally also comes with a few bonus perks, like better analytics and error reporting options.

This system has worked for everyone for a long time now, and though some developers have balked at the idea of paying Unity and similar companies for their engines, opting for free and open source options like Godot, instead, the larger gaming industry has generally oriented itself around just a few primary, paid options, including the Unreal Engine owned by Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, among many other offerings, and Unity, which since its release has been used to make more than 750,000 games, alongside non-game offerings, like augmented reality experiences in Microsoft's HoloLens headset, about 90% of Samsung Gear VR content, machine learning programs like Google's TensorFlow, and even film content, like the backgrounds for the 2019 real-life version of The Lion King and engineering blueprints, like those for cars and buildings.

All of which partially explains why so many people were up in arms about the changes Unity announced, seemingly out of nowhere, to their fee structure in early September.

The old Unity model, again, included a free version of Unity for folks operating below a certain threshold—that threshold has been $200,000 for a while now—and after that folks would pay a monthly fee to use the engine, and that fee would typically cost about $400 per year per game, though it varied quite a bit as folks paid per seat—that is, per developer using the engine—and based on the size of the studio and game they're working on.

Unity's newly announced pricing model, in contrast, would keep a free tier, but would remove some of the cheaper payment options, nudging people up to higher yearly rates, while, importantly, also tacking-on a small fee, somewhere between a cent and twenty cents, for each installation of a game that uses the Unity engine, after a threshold has been crossed.

The announcement also said that Unity would use a secret, internal method of determining download numbers, and folks would be on the hook, in some cases, for something closer to $2,000 a year per game, rather than $400-ish, though that number would also vary wildly based on a game's popularity and reach.

This sparked all kinds of concerns, as it was an additional fee on top of existing fees, costing game-makers more over time, and without providing any new value in exchange, and because it was retroactive, so everyone who had ever used Unity for any game would be on the hook for this new payment structure—meaning, all those 750,000 games or so would potentially be new sources of revenue for Unity, but would be burdened with new expenses for the folks who made them.

All sorts of immediate concerns bubbled to the surface of the gaming community, ranging from worries that small, indie devs would be priced out of the market—folks without big bank accounts to draw upon, and who aren't making games that bring in tons of revenue—to concerns related to the concept of putting a price-tag on downloads: would trolls be able to aim hefty fees on developers they don't like by repeatedly installing and uninstalling their games? Would Unity's tracking software be legit? Would it differentiate new downloads from redownloads, or would someone who buys a game, paying for it once, conceivably be a drain on the developer's bank account forever into the future, because they might install it over and over again, over time, on multiple devices?

This outcry was also laden with a heavy sense of betrayal because it seemed to violate Unity's terms of service, and that outcry grew even louder and more betrayal-laden when it became clear, as folks went back to check the end-user license agreement they'd signed, that Unity had quietly, in the preceding months, gone through and edited its EULA to basically allow themselves to do what they had done, even though previous versions said they would never do such a thing.

The first week after this announcement, as the gaming world unified against Unity, the company's stock tumbled around 16.5% from where it was before the announced change, which is the opposite of what the company had hoped to accomplish—industry analysis suggests that the company is trying to shore-up its numbers, never having been profitable, but finding itself especially pressed for cash right now, and hoping to avoid being in the same situation in the future.

What seems to have happened is they tried to do too much at once, essentially grabbing at immediate cash as much as possible, while also trying to scale-up their future prospects by giving themselves a means of benefitting from the success of the games that use their engine; this isn't an entirely novel concept, as their competitor, Unreal, charges a 5% revenue share from game-makers using their engine, but because this was new, out of nowhere, seemed to come about without the folks running Unity checking-in with anyone in the gaming industry to see if it would be alright, and if so to see what sorts of numbers would be tenable for their business models, and because it was retroactively applied using a seemingly pretty skeezy, secretive method of basically giving themselves permission, on the down-low, after swearing up and down they would never do exactly this—all of it went over quite badly, the gaming world revolted against them, near-universally, and this has led to a huge exodus from Unity to other platforms, including the free and open source Godot, which has quite suddenly received a wave of funds from some of the more successful indie game studios out there, and newfound attention from folks who are learning they can relatively simply port their games from Unity to Godot, saving them the future hassle and expense of dealing with the former.

The alternative floated by some gaming studios and individual makers was to simply pull their games from shelves, and this was also threatened, especially in cases where the games are free to play, and thus tend to garner huge numbers of downloads, but don't make money on all the people who install their game—which means their work would become huge weights around their ledgers, losing them money each year, rather than earning them money.

It took more than a week, but the higher-ups at Unity eventually made some noises about having heard the game-making world and feeling bad about releasing this new model without first seeking their input, and they said they would take another stab at things and get back to them.

They then released a new plan, a new pricing model, that seems to have infuriated people substantially less—a revamp that still includes changes, but apparently less catastrophic ones.

The new plan says they'll rely on game-maker-reported numbers to tally downloads, and they've raised the revenue cap at which folks need to upgrade to $200,000, so below that and you can keep the low-tier Unity Personal plan, which is excluded from this new pricing model, and that roughly lines up with where things were before—and any game that makes less than $1 million in 12 months will also be exempt from the additional, per-install fee.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Unity is now saying games made with previous versions of their engine won't be beholden to this new pricing model, nor would they need to abide by the new terms of service, which among other things says their games need to include a big, Made by Unity splash screen at the beginning, and only those that use the new version being released in 2024 would be required to pay based on downloads, though developers can choose to pay a 2.5% revenue share rather than using the per-installation model—and there's some indication that if they report install numbers, the company will choose whichever is the lowest fee for them, automatically, and charge them that.

All of which seems to have cooled things down quite a lot, though a fair bit of damage has already been done to the company's reputation in the industry; many game-makers are still saying they're intending to port their games away as soon as they're able, and that they won't use Unity in the future, because the people in charge of the company have shown their true colors, have shown that they're willing to renege on previous commitments and promises, and burn the goodwill they've earned over the years, in order to pull in more money, to fill the gaps in their balance sheets.

The company is investing in a big PR push to try to win people back and polish their now-tarnished brand, but it could be a while before they manage to do so, if indeed they do manage to do so.

In the meantime, industry alternatives have seen a big boost in attention and use, and there's a chance we could see more entrants in this space, popping up to take advantage of the hole left by Unity's flub, and introducing entirely new business models that may further innovate on what we've already seen, and allow entirely new game-world business models to arise and flourish.

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This week we talk about HIV, AIDS, and ART.

We also discuss HAART, the Berlin Patient, and potential future cures.

Recommended Book: Allergic by Theresa MacPhail

Show Notes

• https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet

• https://hivinfo.nih.gov/understanding-hiv/fact-sheets/hiv-treatment-basics

• https://clinicalinfo.hiv.gov/en/glossary/antiretroviral-therapy-art

• https://www.paho.org/en/topics/antiretroviral-therapy

• https://journals.lww.com/jaids/fulltext/2010/01010/declines_in_mortality_rates_and_changes_in_causes.13.aspx

• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13181-013-0325-8

• https://academic.oup.com/jac/article/73/11/3148/5055837?login=false

• https://journals.lww.com/jaids/fulltext/2016/09010/narrowing_the_gap_in_life_expectancy_between.6.aspx

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenofovir_disoproxil

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_of_HIV/AIDS

• https://www.verywellhealth.com/cart-hiv-combination-antiretroviral-therapy-48921

• https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/art/index.html

• https://www.freethink.com/health/cured-of-hiv

• https://www.jstor.org/stable/3397566?origin=crossref

• https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/11/science/new-homosexual-disorder-worries-health-officials.html

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23444290/

• https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/4251-hiv-aids

• https://web.archive.org/web/20080527201701/http://data.unaids.org/pub/EPISlides/2007/2007_epiupdate_en.pdf

• https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhiv/article/PIIS2352-3018(23)00028-0/fulltext

Transcript

In mid-May of 1981, the queer community-focused newspaper, the New York Native, published what would become the first-ever article on a strange disease that seemed to be afflicting community members in the city.

What eventually became known as AIDS, but which was at the time discussed by medical professionals primarily in terms of its associated diseases, was clinically reported upon for the first time less than a month later, five official cases having been documented in an interconnected group of gay men and users of injectable drugs, who came to the attention of doctors for not being inherently immunocompromised, but still somehow contracting a rare type of pneumonia that only really impacted folks with severely impaired immune systems.

In subsequent years, doctors started using a range of different terms for HIV and AIDS, calling them at different times and in different contexts the lymphotophic retrovirus, Kaposi's sarcoma and opportunistic infections, and the 4H disease, referring to heroine users, hemophiliacs, homosexuals, and Haitians, the four groups that seemed to make up almost all of the confirmed afflicted patients.

The acronym GRID, for gay-related immune deficiency was also used for a time, but that one was fairly rapidly phased out when it became clear that this condition wasn't limited to the gay community—though those earlier assumptions and the terminology associated with them did manage to lock that bias into mainstream conversation and understanding of AIDS and HIV for a long time, and in some cases and in some locations, to this day.

By the mid-80s, two research groups had identified different viruses that seemed to be associated with or responsible for cases of this mysterious condition, and it was eventually determined (in 1986) that they were actually the same virus, and that virus was designated HIV.

HIV, short for Human Immunodeficiency Virus, is a retrovirus that, if left untreated, leads to Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, in about 50% of patients within ten years of infection.

So HIV is the virus, AIDS is a condition someone with HIV can develop after their immune system is severely damaged by the infection, and there are a bunch of diagnostic differentiations that determine when someone has transitioned from one category to the other, but in general folks with HIV will experience moderate flu- or mono-like symptoms, alongside swollen lymph nodes and rashes and throat problems and sores across their bodies in the early stages of infection, and as things progress, they develop opportunistic infections of the kind that can only really latch onto a human when their immune system is weakened or shut down. While AIDS, arriving after the immune system is well and truly damaged, brings with it a slew of opportunistic infections and associated issues, the afflicted person potentially developing all sorts of cancers, sarcomas, persistent infections, and extreme versions of the flu-like, mono-like symptoms they may have suffered earlier on.

We don't know for certain how and where HIV originated—and that's true of both kinds, as there's an HIV-1 and HIV-2 virus, the former of which accounts for most infections, the latter of which is less common, and less overall infectious—but both HIV types seem to have been transmitted to humans from non-human primates somewhere in West-central Africa in the early 20th century, possibly from chimpanzees in southern Cameroon, but that's pretty speculative, and there's some evidence that these diseases may have made the leap several times; so while there's a pretty good chance, based on what we know now, that the disease made it into humans and mutated approximately somewhere in that vicinity, sometime in the early 20th century, possibly via chimps hunted and eaten by locals as bushmeat, we really don't know for certain.

There are reports of what were probably HIV as far back as 1959 in the Belgian Congo, but that's a bit speculative, too, and based on imperfect notes from the time.

Back then, though, and through the 1980s, folks who contracted HIV and who were not treated would typically die within 11 years of being infected, and more than half of those diagnosed with AIDS in the US from 1981 through 1992 died within 2 years of their diagnosis; such a diagnosis was a death sentence, basically; it was a really horrible and scary time.

Today, the outlook for folks who contract HIV is substantially better: the life expectancy of someone who contracts the virus and who is able to get treatment is about the same as someone who is not infected; the disease isn't cured, but the level of HIV virus in the blood of a person receiving treatment is so small that it's no longer transmissible, or even detectable.

What I'd like to talk about today is a new therapy that's making those sorts of outcomes possible, how some few people have now been cured of HIV entirely, and what's on the horizon in this space.

—

Antiretroviral therapy, or ART, typically consists of a combination of drugs based on those that were originally combined in this way in 1996 by researchers who announced their findings at the International AIDS Conference in Vancouver—they called their approach highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART, and this combo was based on findings from earlier drugs that addressed one of HIV's seven stages of development—but because they all hit that same, single stage, the virus was rapidly developing an immunity to them, and they were universally pretty toxic, with horrible side-effects.

What's more, this drug cocktail increased patients' life expectancy by about 24 months, on average—which is a lot, about two years, but considering all those side effects, which included severe liver problems and anemia, the extra months of life generally weren't very pleasant extra months.

In 1995, a class of drugs called protease inhibitors were introduced, which prevented HIV from making copies of itself using the body's structural proteins.

That, combined with the effects of other, existing retrovirals, which hindered the virus's ability to hijack the body's cells to make more of itself, turned out to be a substantial improvement over just one or the other approach.

The announcement in 1996 was notable because the researchers involved were able to knock the viral load in their patients down to an undetectable level, and then keep it there, by using three drugs from each of those two antiviral classes, those two different approaches.

So HAART was a major improvement over what came before, but it was still imperfect; deaths tied to HIV plummeted by 50% in the US and Europe in just three years, but the life expectancy of folks using this therapy was still low compared to other people; someone who contracted HIV in their 20s and went on this therapy was still only expected to live till their early 50s; way better than a two-year increase, but still plenty of room for improvement.

In addition to that lifespan duration limitation, the HAART bundle of therapies was just really difficult to maintain.

Some people experienced a dramatic redistribution of body fat, some developed heart arrhythmias or insulin resistance or peripheral neuropathy or lactic acidosis—which is basically a toxic buildup of the acid that results from metabolism, which is usually cleared naturally, but when it doesn't, it's potentially deadly.

Anything less than absolutely perfect adherence to the treatment schedule was also potentially deleterious to the desired outcomes; it wasn't a forgiving regimen, with some of the drugs requiring three capsules be taken every 8 hours, and there was a chance that if a portion of a dose of one drug was missed, or not administered on time, the virus could develop an immunity to it and the whole thing would fall apart.

Consequently, the HAART regimen was generally reserved until things got really bad, and that meant it didn't have a very large effect on the infected population, and those who did benefit from it suffered consequences, alongside those benefits.

The change in terminology from HAART to ART arrived in 2001 when a drug called Viread, the brand name for tenofovir disoproxil, was released and added into the mix, replacing some of the most toxic and cumbersome of the previous therapies with a single pill per day, and one that came with far fewer, and far less extreme, side effects.

In 2005 it was finally demonstrable, with a bunch of data, that beginning this type of therapy early rather than waiting until things get really bad was worth the trade-offs—researchers showed that if folks received access to ART upon diagnosis, severe HIV associated and non HIV associated illnesses were reduced by 61%.

As of 2016 there was still an average life expectancy gap between folks with HIV who received early care and people who were not infected of about 8 years, but that gap has been steadily closing with the introduction of new, easier to use, less side effect prone drugs—drugs that tend to attack the virus at different stages, and which take different approaches to hindering and blocking it—alongside innovations in how the drugs are delivered, like introducing substances that are converted by the body into the desired drug, which massively cuts the requisite dosage, in turn lessening the strain on the body's organs and the potential side effects associated with taking a higher dose of the drug, itself.

We've also seen the advent of fixed-dose combination drugs, which are exactly what they sound like: a single pill containing the entire combination of drugs one must take each day, which makes a combination therapy much easier to administration and stick with, which in turn has substantially reduced the risk of severe side effects, and prevented mutations that might otherwise make a patient's virus more immune to some component of the drug cocktail.

Some newer options just use two drugs, too, compared to the previous three-or-more, and most of these have been shown to be just as effective as the earlier, more bodily stressful combinations, and a recent, 2021 drug is injectable, rather than deliverable in pill-form, and can be administered just once a month—though a version of this drug, sold under the name Cabenuva, has been approved for administration every other month.

So things in this corner of the medical world are looking pretty good, due new approaches and innovations to existing therapy models.

These models remain imperfect, but they're getting better every year, and contracting HIV is no longer a death sentence, nor does it mean you'll always be infectious, or even detectably infected: the amount of HIV virus in one's blood can be kept undetectably low for essentially one's entire life, so long as one is able to get on the right therapy or combination of therapies and stick with it.

That said, the global HIV pandemic is far from over, and access to these drugs–many of which are pricy, if you don't have insurance that will cover them—is not equally distributed.

As of late-2022, the UN's official numbers indicate that about 39 million people, globally, have HIV, about 1.3 million were infected in 2022, and about 630,000 died from AIDS-related illnesses that year.

That said, of those 39 million or so who are infected, nearly 30 million are receiving some kind of antiretroviral therapy, and about 86% of people who are estimated to be infected know their status, so they can seek such therapies, and/or take other precautious to protect themselves and others; though that also means about 5.5 million people, globally, have HIV and don't realize it.

Here's a really remarkable figure, though: among people who are infected and know they are infected, about 93% of them were virally suppressed as of 2022.

That's astonishing; 93% of people who have HIV and are aware of it are on some kind of therapy that has allowed them to suppress the virus so that it's nearly undetectable—the difference between the two, by the way, is that suppressed means 200 copies of the HIV virus per milliliter of blood, while undetectable is generally considered to be less than 50 copies per milliliter.

So huge leaps in a relatively short period of time, and a massive improvement in both duration and quality of life for folks who might otherwise suffer mightily, and then die early, because of this virus and its associated symptoms.

That said, there are some interesting, new approaches to dealing with HIV on the horizon, and some of them might prove to be even more impactful than this current batch of incredibly impactful ART options.

As of September 2023, five people have been confirmed cured of HIV; not suppressed and not with viral loads at undetectable levels: cured.

The first of these cured people, often referred to as the Berlin Patient, received a stem cell transplant from a bone marrow donation database that contained a genetic mutation called CCR5 Delta 32, which makes those who have it essentially immune to HIV infection.

Three months after he received the transplant and stopped taking ART, doctors were unable to find any trace of the virus in his blood.

He died from cancer in 2020, but there didn't seem to be any HIV in his blood from when he received the stem cell transplant, onward, and that happened in the early 2000s, and was formally announced to the medical community in 2008.

At least two other people—two that we know about, anyway—have been cured of HIV using the same method; though at the moment at least, this option is severely limited as it requires that patients have a bone marrow match in donor databases, and that one of those donors have that specific, relatively rare mutation; so with existing science and techniques, at least, this is unlikely to be a widespread solution to this problem—though a 2017 experiment used stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood from a baby with that mutation to treat a woman' leukemia and cure her HIV, so there's a chance other approaches that make use of the same basic concept might be developed, opening this up to more people.

Cancer drugs may also help some people with HIV: a drug that's been approved to treat several cancers called Venetoclax seems to also bind to a protein that helps HIV-infected T cells dodge the body's immune system and survive, and that realization has led to a series of experiments that showed HIV was suppressed in mice receiving this drug—though it bounced back a week later, and two weeks later in mice receiving both this drug and ART.

This is unlikely to be a solution unto itself, then, but there's a chance either an adjusted version of this drug, or this drug in combination with other therapies, might be effective; and there's a clinical trial testing the efficacy of Venetoclax in human HIV patients at the end of this year, and another in 2024, so we may soon know if its safe and desirable to use this drug alongside ART, and that may, in turn, lead to a better understanding of how to amplify the drug's effects, or apply this method of hindering HIV from a different angle.

CRISPR, the gene-editing technology borrowed from bacteria that allows for the cutting and removing and adding of genetic information, has enabled the development of several new potential HIV cures, one of which, called EBT-101, basically enters the body, finds helper T cells, and then cuts out chunks of the HIV virus's DNA, which prevents it from being able to replicate itself or hide away, reemerging later after another treatment has suppressed it.

The benefit of this approach is that it could kill the viral reservoirs that otherwise allow HIV to persist in people who have undergone treatments, and a version of it that targets SIV, which is similar to HIV, but found in non-human primates—performed exactly as they hoped it would, finding and editing the targeted DNA, raising hopes than an HIV-targeting variation may manage similar wonders in human patients.

This would be great if it ends up working, as one injection would theoretically clear all HIV from a person's system in relatively short-order, but the trials done so far have been small and on monkeys, and because of the nature of the research, it's not clear the monkeys were cured of HIV—just that the treatment got where it was supposed to go and made some DNA edits.

A human trial of EBT-101 will finish up in March of 2025, though the researchers plan to follow up with their subjects for up to 15 years following the trial, to assess any long-term effects from their treatment, since CRISPR and this approach to messing with genes is still such a new thing.

So while this may be a solution at some point, there's a good chance it won't be a real-deal, available option for another decade, minimum.

So we've come a long way in a very short period of time with HIV and AIDS treatments, and the future is looking pretty good, with even more options and approaches on the horizon, including some actual cures, alongside high-quality, actually useable treatments.

But there's still room to grow in terms of infection awareness, there are still distribution issues for some of these drugs, and there's still a fair bit of prejudice, the consequence of ignorance and historical misunderstandings and biases, keeping folks and institutions from doing as much as they otherwise could in many parts of the world; so a lot to be proud of, a lot to look forward to, but still plenty of room for improvement across the board.

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This week we talk about China’s standard map, the nine-dash line, and shoals.

We also discuss WWIII, undersea minerals, and realities on the ground.

Recommended Book: Outlive by Peter Attia

Show Notes

• https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202308/28/WS64ec91c2a31035260b81ea5b.html

• https://www.uscc.gov/research/south-china-sea-arbitration-ruling-what-happened-and-whats-next

• https://amti.csis.org/island-tracker/china/

• https://globalvoices.org/2023/09/05/the-chinese-2023-map-has-nothing-new-but-why-are-chinas-neighbours-mad-about-it/

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_China

• https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/philippines-taiwan-malaysia-reject-chinas-latest-south-china-sea-map-2023-08-31/

• https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-nine-dash-line-and-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-the-barbie-movie-209043

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_(1912%E2%80%931949)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line

• https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-nine-dash-line-and-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-the-barbie-movie-209043

• https://hir.harvard.edu/vietnam-and-china-conflicting-neighbors-stuck-in-nationalism-and-memory/

Transcript

In the wake of some stunning defeats to European powers in the 19th century, and its place on the winning side of WWII, the Chinese government saw quite a lot of territory disappear, but then gained a fair bit back, following that global conflict, and this necessitated the redrawing of many maps, most of which were substantially outdated, because of the relative rapidity with which their territory was changing during this period—they lost Vietnam as a supplicant state, for instance, but also added a fair number of former Japanese islands to their collection, including Taiwan, which it took from Japan in 1945, and where the former Chinese government fled following Mao's revolution, which is what led to modern day Taiwan as a separate state, by their reckoning, at least, from that of Mainland China, which doesn't agree.

And as is the case with Taiwan, not everyone in the area agrees about which other islands and bodies of water belong to whom, and the huge number of islands of varying sizes in the South China Sea are especially fraught, in terms of ownership claims, as many of them are worthless for the purpose of building real-deal settlements, but could be useful in terms of military infrastructure, allowing ships to dock and refuel, serving as weapons platforms for missiles and anti-aircraft equipment; that sort of thing.

These island-related controversies have sparked or been components of several recent conflicts in the region, including clashes between the Chinese and Vietnamese militaries in 1974 and 1988, and as an apparent effort to lock-in their claim to some of these territories, the Chinese government, in December of 1947, published a map called the Location Map of South Sea Islands, which showed the South China Sea, along with an eleven-dash line that encompassed a huge, u-shaped portion of the region, with the implication that everything within that line belonged to China, though the Chinese government never outright said "all of this is ours, stay out."

Beginning in the early 1950s, this line used only nine dashes, and had changed shape a bit, no longer including the Gulf of Tonkin as a concession to the now-independent North Vietnamese government.

But the former Chinese government, the one that was now occupying and governing from Taiwan, continued to use an eleven-dash line on their official map, the implication being that they don't recognize the changes to Chinese territory made by the successor Chinese government that usurped them back in the mid-20th century.

However many dashes are used, and whatever the specific expanse of them, though, the significance of this line on what's become known as the Chinese standard maps released at a regular cadence by the government have become the topic of furious debate, as the Chinese government has never really clarified what they're saying when they publish these things, allowing the implication to be that this is their home turf, their islands and ocean, but never taking the next step that would be required to formalize that claim.

The implication of any territorial barrier is the violence required to defend it, so the presumed rationale here is that, like Taiwan's status, which is in an official sort of superposition right now, the Chinese government claiming it as their own, the Taiwanese government claiming independence, and everyone else just kind of making positive or negative noises while seldom taking a firm stance one way or the other, allows everyone involved to be unhappy and to hold their own opinions, but to not feel like they need to go to war over the issue, because no hands have been forced in that regard; a stronger stance and a more formal declaration of independence by Taiwan, supported by other nations, would presumably necessitate military action from China, while the same sort of concrete move by China to retake the island by force would probably trigger action from its opposition, as well.

Leaving things flexible and vague, though, keeps everything nebulous enough that nothing needs to be blown up and no one has to die.

The same seems to be true with this larger pseudo-claim of territory from the Chinese government, these maps showing an area that looks a lot like it belongs to China, but the Chinese government never formally saying "this is ours, and thus, if you want to go to these islands, travel these waters, you'll need our permission, and we'll blast you to kingdom come if you step over the line we've drawn here."

What I'd like to talk about today are the implications of this sort of intentional geographic uncertainty, and the response to a new standard map the Chinese government recently released.

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The 2023 edition of China's standard map, which usually displays its now-famous nine-dash line alongside other information about the country, like its territorial delineations, capitol cities, and the like, has created a moderate uproar throughout the area in part due to the addition of a tenth dash, and in part because it seems to have added to its collection of territory at the expense of many of its neighbors.

Among those who are upset about these new visual claims is the Russian government, which has become increasingly close with the Chinese government following its invasion of Ukraine, which has left it a bit of a pariah, globally, and it's been in many ways propped up and sustained economically by trade with China; but even they made a statement of distaste about this map, which seems to show that an island which was previously divided between Chinese and Russian control, is now just China's.

India is also pissed that highly disputed areas along its border with China have seemingly been folded into its neighbor's official collection of territories with the advent of this new map, and Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and of course, Taiwan, have also spoken out against what this new map implies—the latter of which, Taiwan, perhaps more than most, as that additional tenth dash seems to more firmly embrace it than previous maps, implying that Taiwan is becoming more China's than ever before, which in the current geopolitical context represents a potential military threat.

But those other nations are also pretty peeved, as islands they claim as their own have been looped into this large u-shaped area, portrayed as being China's and China's alone; and although in many cases that's been true of previous versions of the map, as well, the context surrounding this version's release is substantially different than the context in previous years.

So in response to this hubbub of outcries, the Chinese government has said, basically, calm down, this is the same map, what are you all so upset about?

And to some degree that's largely true: most of these claims were on previous maps as well, but that additional dash does seem pretty aggressive in a world in which the Chinese government has made pretty clear that it both intends to retake Taiwan at some point, and that it's willing and able to do so, militarily, and in which the government has been feverishly investing in more guns, ships, jets, and missiles, and rapidly building out its military presence in these contested areas, including military bases high in the mountains along its border with India, in territory both nations claim as their own, and the construction of ship docks and turrets and missile launchers on tiny little islands in the middle of the ocean, which other nations claim, as well, but which China is physically occupying, punctuating their map-based claims with real-world threats toward anyone who challenges them; realities on the ground, to use the defense world parlance for building military assets of this kind in contested territory.

In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that China's nine-dash line didn't have any basis in international law, and that this region is mostly international waters, usable by anyone, anytime, for any reasons, more or less.

China dismissed this ruling and said it would ignore it, basically, so while other nations in the area, like the Philippines, have continued to fish in traditional areas, like the shoals surrounding the Spratly Islands, located between them and Malaysia and Vietnam in the South China Sea, China has been building artificial islands atop coral reefs on this island chain, dredging sand onto the reefs and then pouring concrete over that sand, allowing it to build permanent military structures and install radar systems, missile silos, and aircraft hangers, where it also now bases military aircraft.

This has been a huge investment and a lot of work for the Chinese government, but it's allowing them to convert the soft, vague claims printed on their maps into hard realities in the real-world; the international arbitrators in The Hague would not honor what they considered to be their historic, national territorial claims, so they went out and made them real; the equivalent of putting up fences around land with unclear ownership on a parcel near your home—it might still be legally debatable who owns that land, but it becomes very clear who has control over it and access to it and who can use it after a fence is put up; and that's even more the case when you begin to deny others access and imply that you are willing and able to defend it if someone decides to step into what is now, on a very practical level, your turf.

This carving out of new territory from international waters and in contested regions by the Chinese government has become an even more substantial issue over the past decade or so as the race to claim and develop undersea resources has become more frantic, with governments around the world scrambling to secure the minerals and other raw materials that will inform the next, post-fossil fuel paradigm, and many of these resources, from lithium to nickel to cobalt, are contained in hard-to-reach areas, like, in some cases, underwater continental shelves.

So just as the Arctic has become a hotbed for exploration and infrastructural development, everyone with borders touching the Arctic Ocean doing what they can to build-out their ship-based capacity, military bases, and knowledge of what's underneath all that water, for if and when they can eventually justify stepping in to start building and harvesting those raw materials, the South China Sea is also rich with such assets, and this line on this map, and all this real-world building and hardening of military defenses in the area, is meant to allow China, if and when it wants, to start claiming these resources as its own, as it will have already established clear ownership of the territory surrounding these stockpiles, and the ability to defend these assets if anyone else challenges their claim.

Physical conflict related to such claims has already broken out a few times, mostly related to fishing at the moment—the Chinese Coast Guard shooting high-powered water cannons at vessels owned by Philippines-based companies and Vietnamese fishing boats in order to drive them away and again, implicitly, partition-off these rich areas, over time redefining them as being for exclusive Chinese use.

But the big concern is that at some point these measures might become more serious and deadly, and this type of conflict, if it escalates, could spiral into something truly global.

The disagreement between China and Taiwan about who owns the island and whether the Taiwanese government is legit or not is generally seen as one of the most volatile hot-spots on the planet, in terms of the potential to accidentally set off WWIII, because of who's allied with whom, and what everyone involved has to gain or lose by engaging in such a conflict.

It's possible, though, that something seemingly lower-level, like a scuffle over fishing grounds, or the development of undersea mineral extraction infrastructure could be what sets off such a fight, as China defending international waters as if they are their own, putting up a fence on public property, basically, and then shooting anyone who approaches, becomes a test of the international system, and that could lead to a direct conflict between China and let's say the Philippines, and that could pull other regional entities like Vietnam and Indonesia, and maybe even India into the fight, which in turn would potentially bring the US and EU into the conflict, directly or indirectly, alongside Russia and Iran on China's side, again, directly or indirectly.

All of which could compound into something incredibly devastating, all because China is attempting to expand in a manner that is considered illegal by international bodies, because what we might think of as the Western bloc, the US and EU and India and its allies, are trying to box China in, as a response, which China doesn't like and which is probably amplifying their efforts in this regard, and because all of that is making this area a potential tinderbox for conflict—no one wanting to give ground, everyone aware the world is changing around them, economically, climactically, and so on, and everyone trying to set themselves up to be in the best possible position mid-century or so, doing the math and maybe even deciding a big conflict would be worth it, so long as that would make them a bigwig in the rapidly impending, next-step geopolitical paradigm.

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This week we talk about BRIC, BRICs, and BRICS+.

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This week we talk about ECOWAS, Niger, and proxy conflicts.

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This week we talk about the Inflation Reduction Act, October Surprises, and Hunter Biden's laptop.

We also discuss the 2024 US Presidential election, Trump's legal woes, and inflation.
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This week we talk about LK-99, mercury, and resistance.

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This week we talk about Phoenix, Death Valley, and heat pumps.

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This week we talk about Genesis, the Associated Press, and Glorbo.

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This week we talk about the WGA, SAG-AFTRA, and AI.

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This week we talk about Threads, Meta, and the Fediverse.

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This week we talk about the IMF, the Paris Club, and Pakistan.

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This week we talk about mouse jigglers, bossware, and the WFH revolution.

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This week we talk about AI, Reddit, and scraping.

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This week we talk about wildfires, PM 2.5 particles, and globalization.

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This week we talk about the Tsar Bomba, the Davy Crockett, and hypersonic missiles.

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This week we talk about 10x-ing, blitzscaling, and the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy.

We also discuss Uber, Bird, and savings accounts.

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This week we talk about Putin, NATO, and the international order.

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This week we talk about Otto von Bismark, Medicare, and demographic lopsidedness.

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This week we talk about regulations, the Reagan administration, and market manipulation.

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This week we talk about patent medicine, BMI, and semaglutide.

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This week we talk about gunmakers, blacksmiths, and Lina Khan.

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This week we talk about open standards, custom chips, and China.

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This week we talk about Narcan, Kloxxado, and Fentanyl.

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This week we talk about signs and countersigns, passkeys, and the LastPass hack.

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Folks!

I'm taking a week-ish off at the tail-end of 2022, so there isn't a normal episode today (though LKT patrons and Understandary members will receive this month's bonus episode this Thursday as usual).

We'll be back on the normal schedule next Tuesday (the first week of 2023)—thanks so much for listening, and a happy new year to you and yours from here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA :)

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This week we talk about OpenAI, DALL-E 2, and voice assistants.

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This week we talk about Tesla, EVs, and Chinese brands.

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This week we talk about Alexa, Matter, and the tech industry pullback.

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This week we talk about steel, calcium carbonate, and the construction industry.

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This week we talk about Congress, the Red Ripple, and voter turnout.

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This week we talk about Ye, Parler, and Twitter.

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We also discuss fundamental research, technological know-how, and the 2022 Communist Party Congress.

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This week we talk about TSMC, the Three-Body Problem, and economic warfare.

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This week we talk about Yankee Candles, Long-COVID, and BA.1.1.

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This week we talk about Evergrande, Beanie Babies, and interest rates.

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This week we talk about Evergrande, Beanie Babies, and interest rates.

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This week we talk about moral panics, TikTok challenges, and immobilizers.

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This week we talk about Ukraine, Putin, and political expediency.

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This week we talk about Ukraine, Putin, and political expediency.

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This week we talk about lithium, nodules, and helium-3.

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This week we talk about lithium, nodules, and helium-3.

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This week we talk about OpenAI, AlphaFold, and centaurs.

We also discuss GPT-3, CLIP, and Photoshop.

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This week we talk about Yemen, Syria, and Ethiopia.

We also discuss the Mexican Drug War, Myanmar, and Ukraine.

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This week we talk about Marvel, the Gray Man, and cinematic universes.

We also discuss sequels, remakes, and spin-offs.

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This week we talk about lying flat, letting it rot, and China's Gen Z.

We also discuss replacement rate, the middle class, and baby bonuses.

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This week we talk about LLVs, NGDVs, and electric school buses.

We also discuss hydrogen, delivery vehicles, and Amazon.

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This week we talk about CRISPR/cas9, LDL, and human trials.

We also discuss sickle-cell, the human germline, and super-tomatoes.

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This week we talk about BA.5, smallpox, and "over there" issues.

We also discuss the WHO, evolving health threats, and prairie dogs.

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This week we talk about SPF, UV, and the FDA.

We also discuss oxybenzone, bemotrizinol, and bisoctrizole.

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This week we talk about The Washington Post, Arc XP, and Substack.

We also discuss The New York Times, Axios, and newsletters.

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This week we talk about Ethereum, Bitcoin, and The Merge.

We also discuss gas flares, proof-of-work, and regulation.

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This week we talk about wheat, DUV lasers, and shortages.

We also discuss Russia, supply chains, and microprocessors.

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This week we talk about offshoring, nearshoring, and the TPP.

We also discuss onshoring, China, and supply chains.

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This week we talk about fast fashion, waste, and supply chains.

We also discuss ZZKKOO, SheInside, and Love Island.

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This week we talk about Elon Musk, the Sullivan Principles, and the Friedman Doctrine.

We also discuss Tesla, Exxon, and apartheid.

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This week we talk about TerraUSD, Luna, and stablecoins.

We also discuss tech stocks, Basis, and  uncertainty.

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This week we talk about medical abortions, Roe v. Wade, and minoritarianism.

We also discuss Plan B, mifepristone, and misoprostol.

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This week we talk about curtain walls, elevators, and the International Building Code.

We also discuss concrete, steel, and the Build With Strength Coalition.

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This week we talk about Omicron, the Goose Group, and food shortages.

We also discuss Beijing, Shenzhen, and Xi Jinping.

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This week we talk about Zillow, renting, and HOAs.

We also discuss inflation, mortgages, and NIMBYs.

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This week we talk about the Dominion of Ceylon, Colombo, and foreign reserves.

We also discuss debt defaults, the Portuguese, and the Chola Empire.

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This week we talk about passive solar, the IPCC report, and the potential of panels.

We also discuss the new Ember report on clean energy, practical optimism, and heat.

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This week we talk about the ITU, intergovernmental organizations, and standards.

We also discuss the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine, Russia, and 6G.

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This week we talk about Omicron, the Spanish Flu, and the bubonic plague.

We also discuss waves, political will, and how pandemics end.

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This week we talk about wheat, corn, and breadbaskets.

We also discuss globalization, rice bowls, and incentives.

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This week we talk about misinformation, bias, and Radio Free Europe.

We also discuss the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, and aggression justification.

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This week we talk about Ukraine, sanctions, and the New World Order.

We also discuss nukes, Russia, and Westphalian sovereignty.

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This week we talk about meme stocks, sports betting, and bubbles.

We also discuss addictive apps, the Super Bowl, and speculative hype cycles.

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This week we talk about car ownership per capita, crash fatalities, and pandemic-era traffic.

We also discuss Jevon's Paradox, pedestrians, and Complete Streets.

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This week we talk about smallpox, the flu, and pan-coronavirus vaccines.

We also discuss lockdowns, mask mandates, and pandemic trends.

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This week we talk about tokamaks, inertial confinement fusion, and magnetic fields.

We also discuss the NIF, renewable energy, and ITER.

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This week we talk about Sci-Hub, Public Domain Day, and libraries.

We also discuss science journals, copyright, and incentives.

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This week we talk about NATO, the CSTO, and the Soviet Union.

We also discuss Ukraine, Putin, and the October Revolution.

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This week we talk about Ethereum, Colored Coins, and NFTs.

We also discuss crypto, pump and dump schemes, and speculation.

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This week we talk about the ISS, Axiom, and Orbital Reef

We also discuss Mir, Almaz, and the Tiangong Space Station.

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This week we talk about NSO Group, Mattel, and Poland.

We also discuss vulnerabilities, human rights activists, and Citizen Lab.

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This week we talk about Open Source, Log4j, and vulnerabilities.

We also discuss Apache, hacking, and patches.

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This week we talk about Thwaites, sea level rise, and the news.

We also discuss scientific research, glaciers, and climate change.

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This week we talk about Amazon Live, Alibaba, and the pivot to video.

We also discuss Douyin, TikTok, and influencers.

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This week we talk about tourism, COVID, and Omicron.

We also discuss podcasting cadence, uncertainty, and the travel industry.

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This week we talk about antivirals, mandates, and vaccines for kids.

We also discuss Europe, vaccine hesitancy, and variants.

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This week we talk about monocopters, helicopters, and drone attacks.

We also discuss drone deliveries, Mexican cartels, and power plants.

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This week we talk about Gabon, carbon credits, and the Central African Forest Initiative.

We also discuss Uganda, green investments, and blue bonds.

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This week we talk about Beirut, Hezbollah, and France.

We also discuss proxy conflicts, fossil fuel wealth, and government incompetence.

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This week we talk about military coups, the Kushites, and al-Bashir.

We also discuss Egypt, Nubia, and South Sudan.

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This week we talk about missing workers, employment numbers, and Royal Necropolis employees.

We also discuss the Chartist Petition, slaughterhouses, and unions.

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This week we talk about baby booms, cost internalization, and the climate.

We also discuss externalities, branding, and periods of uncertainty.

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This week we talk about the Pandora Papers, Epik, and Apple.

We also discuss the Facebook whistleblower, tax avoidance, and Anonymous.

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This week we talk about the Public Debt Act, bonds, and debt ceiling crises.

We also discuss The Coin, Reconciliation, and political power struggles.

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This week we talk about Mark Milley, Donald Trump, and China.

We also discuss the Joint Chiefs of Staff, treason, and the chain of command.

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This week we talk about layaway, debt, and BNPL.

We also discuss K-Mart, the Great Depression, and credit.

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This week we talk about ragpickers, vintage fashion, and resale platforms.

We also discuss refurbished, recycled, and used clothing.

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My other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about the AK-47, the Taliban, and Afghanistan.

We also discuss nuclear nonproliferation, arms deals, and the sturmgewehr.

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This week we talk about indulgences, wildfires, and agricultural offsets.

We also discuss cap-and-trade, Tesla, and Microsoft.

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This week we talk about Tencent, the Great Leap Forward, and reforms.

We also discuss the yuan, sanctions, and cultural purity.

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This week we talk about Kriegsppiel, deterrence, and drills.

We also discuss Able Archer 83, simulations, and geopolitical posturing.

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This week we talk about methane, Bunsen burners, and green energy.

We also discuss brine, street lamps, and front companies.

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This week we talk about remote fixes, the James Webb Space Telescope, and balloons.

We also discuss ultraviolet radiation, hardware hardening, and the history of telescopes.

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This week we talk about Pedro Castillo, Keiko Fujimori, and The Shining Path.

We also discuss Peruanismo, Fujishock, and bloodless military coups.

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This week we talk about COVID variants, France, and Freedom Day.

We also discuss the UK, vaccine passports, and insufficient data.

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This week we talk about heat domes, wet-bulb temperatures, and memes.

We also discuss wildfires, humidity, and climate change.

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This week we talk about the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation, octopuses, and sentience.

We also discuss pain, lab-grown meat, and Humphrey Primatt.

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This week we talk about job reports, Chartism, and the eight-hour workday.

We also discuss work from home arrangements, the minimum wage, and quitting.

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This week we talk about smallpox, the FDA, and Aducanumab.

We also discuss Biogen, regulatory capture, and the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

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My daily news summary: onesentencenews.com

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This week we talk about 7-Eleven, Tesla, and direct-current charging.

We also discuss Studebaker Automobile Company, wireless charging, and hydrogen.

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This week we talk about quinine, the R21 vaccine, and Anopheles.

We also discuss mosquitoes, repellents, and the World Health Organization.

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This week we talk about Chen Duxiu, online propaganda, and Wolf Warrior 2.

We also discuss Xi Jinping, colonialism, and Confucius Institutes.

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This week we talk about DarkSide, Colonial Pipeline, and Exit Scams.

We also discuss Khnumhotep II, the Caesar cipher, and Ireland's healthcare system.

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This week we talk about Jair Bolsonaro, the Marajoara, and Lula.

We also discuss the Amazon Rainforest, sugarcane, and Portugal.

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This week we talk about drugs, Nazis, and the Sackler family.

We also discuss oxycodone, OxyContin, and bankruptcy.

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This week we talk about anosmia, scented candles, and post-infection health issues.

We also discuss COVID long-haulers, the second pandemic, and snake oil salesmen.

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This week we talk about the Republic of Chad, Free France, and Idriss Déby.

We also discuss Hissène Habré, Félix Éboué, and FACT.

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This week we talk about confirmshaming, auto opt-ins, and WinRed.

We also discuss campaign contributions, Columbia House, and money bombs.

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My daily news summary: onesentencenews.com

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This week we talk about nuclear proliferation, the Manhattan Project, and Britain's nuclear arsenal.

We also discuss the Decade of Concern, Taiwan as a flashpoint, and the history of nuclear armament.

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My daily news summary: onesentencenews.com

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This week we talk about windmills, windpumps, and wind turbines.

We also discuss Biden's infrastructure proposal, megawatts, and birds.

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My daily news summary: onesentencenews.com

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This week we talk about NFTs, scarcity, and the Diamond-Water Paradox.

We also discuss tokens, Beeple, and Bitcoin.

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Daily news summary: onesentencenews.com

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This week we talk about vaccine diplomacy, immunization passports, and the cost of shutdowns.

We also discuss the Great Plague of London, A Journal of the Plague Year, and Samuel Pepys.

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Daily news summary: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

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Note: Some folks only received the first 7 minutes of last week's episode. If that was the case for you, you can either re-download the episode, or delete the 7-minute version you already have downloaded and then re-download it, to listen to the whole thing. Sorry about that! Technology is weird and unknowable sometimes; like a cat.

This week we talk about Stuxnet, Hafnium, and SolarWinds.

We also discuss espionage, proportionality, and APT 69420.

Support the show: patreon.com/letsknowthings & letsknowthings.com/support

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily news summary: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

My other podcast: brainlenses.com

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Note: I'm not entirely sure why this episode initially cut off after the intro, but I re-uploaded everything and it should be available at its full length shortly. Apologies for that, and thanks to those of you who let me know!

This week we talk about McKinsey, Taylorism, and Purdue Pharma.

We also discuss Fordism, scientific management, and Enron.

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Daily news summary: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

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This week we talk about Pizzanet, Cyberslice, and GrubHub.

We also discuss DoorDash, World Wide Waiter, and food delivery apps.

Support the show: patreon.com/letsknowthings & letsknowthings.com/support

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily news summary: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

My other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about cookies, ATT, and IDFAs.

We also discuss Federated Learning of Cohorts, targeted ads, and Facebook.

Support the show: patreon.com/letsknowthings & letsknowthings.com/support

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily news summary: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

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This week we talk about Dogecoin, GameStop, and the short squeeze.

We also discuss Bitcoin, Greater Fools, and bubbles.

Support the show: patreon.com/letsknowthings & letsknowthings.com/support 

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily news summary: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

My other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Aung San, the Anglo-Burmese Wars, and the 2021 Myanmar military coup.

We also discuss Aung San Suu Kyi, genocide, and the politics of democracy.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily summary of the previous day's news that I curate: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about the Soviet Union, Alexei Navalny, and Vladimir Putin.

We also discuss Russia of the Future, protests, and Putin's Palace.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily summary of the previous day's news that I curate: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about GABA, Driftwell, and functional beverages.

We also discuss L-Theanine, magnesium, and marketing.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily summary of the previous day's news that I curate: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Section 230, Trump’s online bans, and extraterritorial jurisdiction.

We also discuss the Digital Markets Act, liability, and the European Union.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily summary of the previous day's news that I curate: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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I've got something a little different for you today: a bonus episode from my other podcast, Brain Lenses, that I think is particularly relevant to the sorts of things I talk about on Let's Know Things.

I originally recorded this several weeks ago, intending to publish it as soon as things settled down in the news a bit. But then, well, things never did.

I hope you enjoy what you hear, and if you're keen to subscribe to Brain Lenses you can do so wherever you get your podcasts, or at BrainLenses.com.

Happy new year everybody :)

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This week we talk about The Great Stagnation, Robert Solow, and total factor productivity.

We also discuss low-hanging economic fruit, technological innovations, and looms.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily summary of the previous day's news that I curate: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we discuss seisachtheia, Jubilee years, and student debt cancellation.

We also discuss Solon, healthcare, and the cost of higher education in the US.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily summary of the previous day's news that I curate: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Qatar, the FIFA 2022 World Cup, and carbon neutrality.

We also discuss Middle Eastern conflicts, sporting event diplomacy, and human rights.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily summary of the previous day's news that I curate: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about the Chakri dynasty, the Siamese Revolution of 1932, and the 2020 Thai protests.

We also discuss the FFP, the Tai peoples, and German ski resorts.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily summary of the previous day's news that I curate: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about SETI@home, macromolecules, and AlphaFold2.

We also discuss proteins, Foldit, and CASP.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily summary of the previous day's news that I curate: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about the iOS App Store, GeForce Now, and web-based gaming.

We also discuss Android, Fortnite, and browser capabilities.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily summary of the previous day's news that I curate: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Messenger RNA, recombinant vaccines, and COVID.

We also discuss the history of vaccine development, variolation, and efficacy versus effectiveness.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

Daily summary of the previous day's news that I curate: yesterdaysnewsletter.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about RCEP, diplomacy, and the TPP.

We also discuss the CPTPP, trade liberalization, and geopolitical gravity.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about coups, Nigeria, and #EndSARS.

We also discuss the Spacial Anti-Robbery Squad, SWAT, and the Lekki Massacre.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about fuel cells, steam reforming, and electrolyzers.

We also discuss the hydrogen economy, fracking, and the race between the EU and China to claim hydrogen fuel dominance.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons get access to an ad-free version of the show, and a bonus episode each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about the COVID-19 pandemic, thus far, and what might happen next.

We also discuss air circulation, face masks, and secondary consequences.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about economies of scale, Foxconn, and the skateboardification of the electric vehicle world.

We also discuss EV economics, vertical integration, and Tesla.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about lobbying, Coinbase, and stakeholder capitalism.

We also discuss the attempt to be apolitical, neutrality as non-neutrality, and venture capitalists.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about United Nations conventions, cannabis legality, and pardons.

We also discuss the US incarceration rate, the War on Drugs, and hemp.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about UN climate talks, corporate responsibility, and carbon neutrality.

We also discuss China, the Paris Agreement, and the 75th United Nations General Assembly.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Al Capone, money laundering, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

We also discuss document leaks, tax evasion, and suspicious activity reports.

Become a patron: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (monetarily or non-monetarily)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Middle Eastern history, the Six-Day War, and relations between Israel and its neighbors.

We also discuss Palestine, the Yom Kippur War, and the UAE.

Support the show at patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month) or letsknowthings.com/support

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Microsoft Flight Simulator, Niantic, and digital twins.

We also discuss augmented reality, data scraping, and price-tweaking bots.

Support the show via patreon.com/letsknowthings or letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Shinzō Abe, the Meiji Restoration, and the Lost Decade.

We also discuss the Japanese Empire, Edo Society, and the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Support the show via patreon.com/letsknowthings or letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about SMS, Belarus, and Telegram.

We also discuss VK, WhatsApp, and protest communication tools.

Support the show via patreon.com/letsknowthings or letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about the etymology of Europe, economic recovery plans, and reserve currencies.

We also discuss Hamilton, Macron, and Merkel.

Support the show via patreon.com/letsknowthings or letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about sweatpants, Fashion Week, and Laver’s Law.

We also discuss fast fashion, pandemics, and synthetic fibers.

Support the show: patreon.com/letsknowthings / letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Fleming, Marconi, and the hacking of verified social media accounts.

We also discuss Joybubbles, SIM-jacking, and the etymology of the word “hack.”

Support the show: Patreon / letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Tianwen-1, Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion, and Perseverance.

We also discuss the Space Race, orbital periods, and the Emirates Mars Mission.

Support the show: Patreon / letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about super apps, Mukesh Ambani, and Reliance Jio.

We also discuss Alibaba, mobile services, and the Indian tech industry.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about GeoCities, Adobe Flash, and the Digital Dark Age.

We also discuss PenPoint OS, Macromedia, and Kongregate.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about planetary equilibrium temperature, permafrost, and polar amplification.

We also discuss trade winds, record Arctic temperatures, and the three Siberias.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about the Nile River, Ethiopian politics, and dams.

We also discuss the Nile Basic Initiative, the Nile Waters Agreement, and Chinese infrastructural investments.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about TSMC, ARM, and Huawei.

We also discuss Apple, 5 nanometer processes, and the coming chip wars.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about dividends, Hertz, and legal gambling.

We also discuss bankruptcies, day trading, and questionable stock offerings.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about phytoplankton blooms, aerosol injection, and giant space mirrors.

We also discuss enhanced weathering, regenerative agriculture, and large-scale reforestation.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about less-lethal weapons, qualified immunity, and the Blue Wall.

We also discuss police unions, the 1033 program, and the Kerner Commission.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about COINTELPRO, Occupy Wall Street, and the Internet Research Agency.

We also discuss botnets, social media warnings, and antitrust.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about scurvy, Casimir Funk, and the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

We also discuss vitamin D, the supplement industry, and dietary health.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Vladimir Syromyatnikov, space mirrors, and the X-37B.

We also discuss rectennas, space-based solar power, and the Znamya project.

Happy 4th anniversary everybody :)

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about North Korea, Starlink, and Kremlinology.

We also discuss the Kim Dynasty, the 2019 Abqaiq–Khurais attack, and oil shocks.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about limerence, China’s divorce spike, and nuclear families.

We also discuss coronarelationships, amatonormativity, and marriage.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about PET, Celluloid, and biodegradability.

We also discuss polyurethane, fungi, and shellac.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, esports, and pankration.

We also discuss Athens, league cancellations, and Evangelos Zappas.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy my other podcast, brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about dictators, the Patriot Act, and Viktor Orbán.

We also discuss the free press, Benjamin Netanyahu, and rule by decree.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy my other podcast, brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about cuneiform, Controlled Digital Lending, and the Internet Archive.

We also discuss the Authors Guild, the Wayback Machine, and circulation libraries.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy my other podcast, brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about the TAT-8, submarine telecommunications cables, and streaming content.

We also discuss shark attacks, the MAREA, and fiber-optics.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy my other project, brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about OPEC, shale oil, and petroleum price wars.

We also discuss cartels, fracking, and simultaneous supply-demand shock.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy my other project, brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about the novel coronavirus, epidemics, and the Event 201 scenario.

We also discuss canceled sports, canceled conferences, and canceled pretty much everything else.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy my other project, brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about automation, the future of work, and Garry Kasparov.

We also discuss user agents, AlphaGo, and social safety nets.

Support the show: letsknowthings.com/support (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy my other project, brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about colonialism, music streaming, and CDs.

We also discuss redundancy, software as a service, and sustainability.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy my other project, brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about countershading, microphone jamming, and dazzle camouflage.

We also discuss facial recognition, adversarial makeup, and infrared-reflecting sunglasses.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy my other project, brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about griefers, trolls, and Caller ID spoofing.

We also discuss STIR/SHAKEN, doxing, and robocalls.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy my other project, brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about avvisi, local news, and vulture capitalists.

We also discuss Warren Buffett, dibao, and Deadspin.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy my other project, brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Shark Tank, angel investors, and the JOBS Act.

We also discuss Dragon’s Den, the Dotcom Bubble, and private equity.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy a publication I write about the variables that influence the way we see the world: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Wuhan pneumonia, the Spanish Flu, and propaganda.

We also discuss quarantines, coronaviruses, and World War I.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy a publication I write about the variables that influence the way we see the world: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about securities, BlackRock, and the S&P 500.

We also discuss indices, mutual funds, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy a publication I write about the variables that influence the way we see the world: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about Formula One, Vogue Italia, and flight shame.

We also discuss electric cars, carbon neutrality, and the Golden Globes.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy a publication I produce about the variables that influence the way we see the world: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about orders of magnitude, Matrioshka brains, and neuromorphic engineering.

We also discuss FLOPS, petascale capabilities, and supercomputers.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes/transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might also enjoy a publication I produce about the variables that influence the way we see the world: brainlenses.com

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This week we talk about ICANN, IPv4, and .org domain names.

We also discuss telegraphy, the Internet Society, and undecillion.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes and transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

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This week we talk about station wagons, gravity assist maneuvers, and the Chicken Tax.

We also discuss the Voyager program, electric vehicles, and General Motors.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes and transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

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This week we talk about polling, the voting machine industry, and election hacking.

We also discuss oligopolies, confidence intervals, and the Reverse Bradley Effect.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes and transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

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This week we talk about creation myths, the Pleistocene, and slash and burn agricultural methods.

We also discuss serotiny, Prometheus, and the Air Quality Index.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings (patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month)

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes and transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You also might enjoy my weekly news analysis column, Understandary.

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This week we talk about the Chromium, Netscape, and the Mozilla Foundation.

We also discuss the World Wide Web, Adobe Flash, and Internet Explorer.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

Patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month!

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes and transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You also might enjoy my weekly news analysis column, Understandary.

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This week we talk about the Ottoman Empire, the GDPR, and Balkanization.

We also discuss Section 230, Norwegian ebooks, and censorship.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

Patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month!

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes and transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

You might enjoy my weekly news analysis column, Understandary.

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This week we talk about Hellenism, impeachment hearings, and whistleblowers.

We also discuss the Talking Statues of Rome, the Watergate scandal, and A Warning.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

Patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month!

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes and transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

Subscribe to my weekly news analysis column, Understandary.

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This week we talk about last mile logistics, transport layer security, and the Paris Agreement.

We also discuss Amazon Prime, climate pledges, and the Sears mail order catalog.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

Patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month!

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes and transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

Subscribe to my weekly news analysis column, Understandary.

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This week we talk about the Selectric bug, keylogging, and parental monitoring apps.

We also discuss Absher, mSpy, and security updates.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

Patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month!

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes and transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

Want to receive a weekly collection of links to interesting things? Subscribe to Interesting Things at https://letsknowthings.com/newsletter

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This week we talk about the NBA, South Park, and Hong Kong.

We also discuss Tencent, Blizzard, and Apple’s app store.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

Patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month!

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes and transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

Want to receive a weekly collection of links to interesting things? Subscribe to Interesting Things at https://letsknowthings.com/newsletter

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This week we talk about misinformation, disinformation, and the SCL Group.

We also discuss malinformation, propaganda, and Russian PSYOPs.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

Patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month!

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes and transcript, visit letsknowthings.com

Want to receive a weekly collection of links to interesting things? Subscribe to the Interesting Things email at https://letsknowthings.com/newsletter

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This week we talk about Charvaka, Zeno of Citium, and the New Zealand 2018 census.

We also discuss asset poverty, cultural norms, and religiosity in the United States.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

Patrons receive a bonus episode of the show each month!

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This week we talk about molten salt, lithium mining, and pumped-storage hydroelectricity.

We also discuss stacked bricks, wattage, and hydrogen fuel infrastructure.

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This week we talk about tobacco, vaping, and Juul.

We also discuss nicotine, aerosols, and Hon Lik.

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This week we talk about rats, moa, and New Zealand.

We also discuss Macquarie Island, kiwi, and localized species extermination.

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This week we talk about smart doorbells, Gorgon Stare, and wide-area motion imagery.

We also discuss Neighbors, King’s Cross, and facial recognition.

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This week we talk about Symbian, Harmony OS, and the JioPhone.

We also discuss Pocket PC 2000, Nokia, and KaiOS.

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You can find out more about the show, view transcripts and episode notes, and find out how to support it if you enjoy what you hear at letsknowthings.com.

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This week we discuss Little Norway, Arctic diplomacy, and Project Iceworm.

We also discuss Thule Air Base, Henrick Kauffman, and Operation Chrome Dome.

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This week we talk about SoftBank, WeWork, and S-1 filings.

We also discuss Masayoshi Son, Adam Neumann, and initial public offerings.

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This week we talk about Smiling Buddha, the British Raj, and Modi’s power grab.

We also discuss Jammu & Kashmir, Articles 370 & 35A, and populism.

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This week we talk about Douyin, ByteDance, and Generation Z.

We also discuss Huawei, soft power, and Millennials.

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Update: a glitch appeared after I uploaded this week's episode. I've re-uploaded the file and that glitch is gone, but if your episode is getting weird at around 11:34, kindly delete the episode and re-download it to hear the corrected version. Apologies for that!

This week we talk about the business cycle, monetary policy, and the Fed.

We also discuss recessions, interest rates, and subprime lending.

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This week we talk about wells, arcologies, and desalination.

We also discuss climate change, salt water, and Buckminster Fuller.

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This week we talk about virtual assistants, peak podcast, and audiobooks.

We also discuss podfade, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

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This week we talk about chuckwagons, food delivery, and ghost kitchens.

We also discuss proprietary eponyms, food trucks, and real estate optimization.

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This week we talk about nuclear strategy, ridiculously fast missiles, and the new global arms race.

We also discuss ICBMs, cruise missiles, and vengeance weapons.

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This week we talk about Restatements of the Law, EULAs, and contract law.

We also discuss Terms of Service, informed consent, and the Mueller Report.

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This week we talk about cryptocurrency, remittances, and Facebook’s tough year.

We also discuss the unbanked, Tether, and stablecoins.

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This week we talk about panzootics, pigs, and the pork industry.

We also discuss China’s meat market, globalized viruses, and preventative culling.

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This week we talk about isotopes, the Fleischmann-Pons experiment, and pathological science.

We also discuss free energy suppression conspiracy theories, Google’s X Development, and the cold case of cold fusion.

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This week we talk about The Shadow Brokers, patches, and EternalBlue.

We also discuss OTA programming, cyberwar, and the NSA’s TAO.

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This week we talk about augmented reality, street art, and Minecraft Earth.

We also discuss user interfaces, Microsoft, and Pokémon Go.

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This week we talk about coups, Simón Bolívar, and Nicolás Maduro.

We also discuss chavismo, international politics, and the human cost of national conflict.

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This week we talk about mass shootings, the NRA, and fire lances.

We also discuss hand cannons, gun legislation, and amplified violence.

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After we reach 200 patrons, I'll begin producing an additional episode each month which will be available to all patrons at any contribution level.

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This week we talk about Beyond Meat, the Impossible Whopper, and meat analogues.

We also discuss stock listings, dietary ethics, and casual gamers.

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This week we talk about Jumia, the African Union, and free trade areas.

We also discuss global economics, IPOs, and continental ignorance.

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This week we talk about carbon capture and storage, floating cities, and perverse incentives.

We also discuss perpetuating problems, private prisons, and tax software.

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When we reach 200 patrons, I'll produce an additional episode each month which will be available to all patrons at any contribution level.

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This week we talk about Leyden Jars, cascading failures, and MLCCs.

We also discuss dielectrics, batteries, and the global economy.

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This week we talk about ethics, axiology, and the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council.

We also discuss the Heritage Foundation, Google, and value theory.

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This week we talk about Photoshopping, GANs, and Lincoln’s fake body.

We also discuss AI-generated cats, scientific discovery, and creative self-consciousness.

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Announced this episode: If we reach 200 patrons on Patreon, I'll produce an additional episode each month, available to all patrons.

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This week we talk about mafias, Silicon Valley, and the Ivy League.

We also discuss the Traitorous Eight, schadenfreude, and the Matthew Effect.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

My newest project is called Some Thoughts About Living

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This week we talk about labor unions, divide and rule, and identity.

We also discuss US political parties, the Combahee River Collective, and labels.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

My newest project is called Some Thoughts About Living

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This week we talk about stock photography, augmented reality, and online personhood.

We also discuss simultaneous localization and mapping, sharing while a parent, and Mirrorworld.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

My newest project is called Some Thoughts About Living

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This week we talk about Disney, YouTube, and crisis management.

We also discuss algorithms, recommendation spirals, and ad buyers.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

My newest project is called Some Thoughts About Living

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This week we talk about the Red Market, binge-watching, and peak attention.

We also discuss Fortnite, net worth, and corporate shade.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

My newest project is called Some Thoughts About Living

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This week we talk about the Periodic Table, the Large Hadron Collider, and the Higgs boson.

We also discuss extreme chemistry, particle physics, and Dmitri Mendeleev.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

My newest project is called Some Thoughts About Living

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This week we talk about parasitical fungi, the right to repair, and the Game Genie.

We also discuss ROM cartridges, John Deere tractors, and Project Alias.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

My newest project is called Some Thoughts About Living

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This week we talk about the Nimrud lens, non-compound eyes, and EssilorLuxottica.

We also discuss Big Lens, transparent medical pricing, and reading stones.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

My newest project is called Some Thoughts About Living

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This week we talk about exploitation films, the Cannabis plant, and the Shafer Commission.

We also discuss the prison industrial complex, the International Opium Commission, and hashish.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

My newest project is called Some Thoughts About Living

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This week we discuss flexitarianism, Banting, and the global diet industry.

We also discuss population growth, Claude Bernard, and Godzilla-scale problems.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

My newest project is called Some Thoughts About Living

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This week we talk about Sputnik 1, satellite triangulation, and the Guugu Yimithirr.

We also discuss the GLONASS, BeiDou, and Galileo constellations.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about selfies, the Daguerrotype, and smartphone cameras.

We also discuss film, Kodak, and the perception of captured reality.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about internet access milestones, the rural digital disadvantage, and the benefits of broadband access.

We also discuss bandwidth issues in the US, internet non-users, and the mobile internet in Africa.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and China's middle class.

We also discuss GDP, the benefits and downsides of scale, and international tourism.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about busking, deplatforming, and the Tumblr porn ban.

We also discuss megaphones, Patreon, and the friction between creating and funding.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about asexuality, penile measurements, and the mesolimbic pathway.

We also discuss dating apps, pornography, and biological reward systems.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about insulin, genetic engineering, and rogue scientists.

We also discuss CRISPR/Cas9, assisted reproductive technology, and gene editing ethics.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about Cambridge Analytica, Friday news dumps, and the Definers scandal.

We also discuss data breaches, Soros, and Brexit.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about corporate welfare, Amazon's HQ2, and cronyism.

We also discuss helipads, private space companies, and Wisconsin.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about the Razor, scooter economics, and traversing microdistances.

We also discuss Bird, the difference between docked and dock-less transportation, and the scooter-charging gig economy.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about fandom, conventions, and Mr. Skygack, from Mars.

We also discuss subcultures, kawaii, and harassment.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about hurricanes, 1.5˚ Celsius, and the IPCC 2018 special report on climate change.

We also discuss what real climate action looks like, why it probably won’t happen, and things we believe about climate change that probably aren’t accurate.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about the Coventry Blitz Conspiracy, Supermicro, and Fancy Bear.

We also discuss state-sponsored hacking, the CIA, and Pearl Harbor.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about hypochondria, heart monitoring, and medical device classes.

We also discuss postmarketing surveillance, electrocardiograms, and smartwatches.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about surveillance, iPhones, and profit margins.

We also discuss vertical integration, Fan Bingbing, and the Chrome browser.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about the Meghalayan stage, the ICS, and the Law of Superposition.

We also discuss Dr. Guy Middleton, lithostratigraphy, and academic geology shade.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about Richard Stallman, Wikipedia, and GitHub.

We also discuss Common Clause, Amazon Web Services, and Linux.

I'm on tour: BecomingTour.com

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about the Safavids, Djibouti, and debt-book diplomacy.

We also discuss the Belt and Road Initiative, China's structural weaknesses, and the Silk Road.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about Morse & Piper, fake milk, and the Dust Bowl.

We also discuss FDA standards, plant-based protein, and soybean politics.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about the Ford Flivver, the Space Race, and ideas that came too soon.

We also discuss civil rights, the Nucleon, and ideas that came too late.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about Ambien, reputation management, and the Twinkie Defense.

We also discuss GABA, drug enforcement schedules, and moral judgement.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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For more information about this podcast and to view the show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about Captology, Pigovian taxes, and dopamine.

We also discuss adolescent psychology, smoking, and dark patterns.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about shopping malls, Goop, and societal trust.

We also discuss e-commerce, the war on journalism, and confirmation bias.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about life-changing speeds, millimeter waves, and wireless disruption.

We also discuss the 5G rollout, BS telecommunications technologies, and MIMO antenna arrays.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about swiping, otaku, and the gamification of intimacy.

We also discuss dating sims, population stats, and Match Group.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about the US Constitution, the free market, and property law.

We also discuss Canada's international influence, dictatorships, and AI authoritarians.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about the French Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, and municipal socialism.

We also discuss the $15 minimum wage, the benefits of capitalism, and automation.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about multi-level marketing, Dennis Rodman, and BitConnect.

We also discuss the crypto commons, Ripple, and PotCoin.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about neolithic tablets, secondary orality, and speed reading.

We also discuss narrative, the myth of multitasking, and modern distractedness.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

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This week we talk about whale oil, the DEC2 gene variation, and the economic costs of insufficient sleep.

We also discuss LEDs, luminous efficacy, and contemporary sleep science.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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This week we talk about sonic weapons, mass hysteria, and Occam's Razor.

We also discuss Cuba, Guangzhou, and encephalopathy.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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This week we talk eSports, Fortnite, and gaming as a service.

We also discuss Twitch, augmented reality, and Battle Royale.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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This week we talk about Fritz Haber, the Korean Peninsula, and moral gray areas.

We also discuss attribution bias, giving credit where credit is due, and Mother Teresa.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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This week we talk about citizen science, genealogy services, and serial killers.

We also discuss genetic privacy, HR 1313, and DNA analysis.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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This week we talk about androids, drones, and Project Maven.

We also discuss lethal autonomous weapons, the Terminator, and cyberwarfare.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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This week we talk about Robogate, call centers, and phone fraud.

We also discuss the tragedy of the commons, the Do Not Call Registry, and noise.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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This week we talk about art valuation, Morellian analysis, and Duchamp's Fountain.

We also discuss market-demolishing faux Rodins, connoisseurs, and what art actually is.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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This week we talk about Gresham's Law, drop shipping, and Section 230.

We also discuss FOSTA-SESTA, stealing books, and reeded coins.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

Become a patron on Patreon: patreon.com/letsknowthings

You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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This week we talk about rent-seeking, the Shirky Principle, and the tax-preparation industry.

We also discuss the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Zuckerberg's testimony, and the public interest.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

I'm going on tour: BecomingTour.com

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This week we talk about the GDPR, crypto-shredding, and online privacy.

We also discuss deleted files that aren't, Google as journalism, and EU standards.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about Galen, organs-on-chips, and the interstitium.

We also discuss microbiota, Ptolemy I, and commensalism.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about bribery, the Anglo-Irish Trade War, and Bananagate.

We also discuss China, tariffs, and the United Fruit Company.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about the Universal Serial Bus, cuneiform, and 5D optical data storage.

We also discuss chip aging, solid-state drives, and the Arch Mission Foundation.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about fast food, the diet industry, and plastic rice.

We also discuss growth stunting, horse meat, and nutritional deficiencies.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about fashion forecasting, Theosophy, and the Generation formerly known as Y.

We also discuss Boomer, Aryans, and color consultants.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about Starlink, Arthur C. Clarke, and atmospheric satellites.

We also discuss Facebook Aquila, space manufacturing, and the Falcon Heavy.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about Napoleon, Jacob Zuma, and what it takes to become legally untouchable.

We also discuss financial crises, too big to fail, and political deposition.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about thermal bridges, superinsulation, and the Leaky Condo Crisis.

We also discuss zero-energy buildings, standards of living, and quality of life.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about edge cases, WHOIS, and information brokers.

We also discuss China's Social Credit System, the GDPR, and data ownership.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about geolocation, Strava heat maps, and transparency.

We also discuss optimization, Zuckerberg's walls, and social media insider regrets.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about Zappers, board games, and Nintendo Labo.

We also discuss barcades, makerspaces, and unusual consoles.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about contrails, space mirrors, and iron fertilization.

We also discuss stratospheric aerosol injection, meat, and paleoclimatology.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about the HHI Index, the Consolidation Curve, and Disney.

We also discuss tax bills, the Panic of 1893, and rightsizing.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about sensors, inventories, and the quantified self.

We also discuss venture capital, fitness trackers, and PARC.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we discuss virtue signaling, hype cycles, and the Overton Window.

We also talk about pronking, online dating, and the Diffusion of Innovations Theory.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we discuss the Strategic Defense Initiative, the X-37B, and Project Excalibur.

We also talk about space treaties, Patriot missiles, and mutually assured destruction.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about mass incarceration, sketchy Skype-clones, and private prisons.

We also discuss oubliettes, stop-and-frisk, and the War on Drugs.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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You can find a list of the books I've written at Colin.io.

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This week we talk about the Uncanny Valley, the sex toy industry, and porn addiction.

We also discuss pedophilia, sexual aggression, and the age of consent.

Heads up: As you may have guessed from the subject matter, this episode won't be appropriate or easy listening for everyone. Act accordingly.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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My book Becoming Who We Need To Be is available as an audiobook, paperback, and ebook.

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This week we talk about room-sized computers, server farms, and hackers.

We also discuss teleprinters, Amazon Web Services, and fog computing.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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My book Becoming Who We Need To Be is available as an audiobook, paperback, and ebook.

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This week we talk about intelligence, the limits of language, and belief change.

We also discuss useless opinions, subjectivity, and gullibility.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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My book Becoming Who We Need To Be is available as an audiobook, paperback, and ebook.

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This week we talk about Terra Australis, Puerto Rico, and the Free State Project.

We also discuss the Spanish-American War, the European Refugee/Migrant Crisis, and Hurricane Maria.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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My book Becoming Who We Need To Be is available as an audiobook, paperback, and ebook.

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This week we talk about Melvil Dewey, Peppa Pig, and algorithmically generated content.

We also discuss creepy YouTube, hex triplets, and ad-based online infrastructure.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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My book Becoming Who We Need To Be is available as an audiobook, paperback, and ebook.

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This week we talk about George Catlin, porcupine caribou, and the Bogd Khan Mountain.

We also discuss Yosemite, the Department of the Interior, and the Louisiana Purchase.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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My book Becoming Who We Need To Be is available as an audiobook, paperback, and ebook.

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This week we talk about scarcity, nationalization, and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

We also discuss the National Health Service, technological unemployment, and manorialism.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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My book Becoming Who We Need To Be is available as an audiobook, paperback, and ebook.

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This week we talk about sleep debt, extended adolescence, and the psychic cost of everyday things.

We also discuss the Blackberry Pearl, depression, and internet trolls.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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My book Becoming Who We Need To Be is available as an audiobook, paperback, and ebook.

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This week we talk about non-sexual arousal, environmental perception, and chronic stress.

We also discuss the HPA axis, the self-help industry, and mindfulness.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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My book Becoming Who We Need To Be is available as an audiobook, paperback, and ebook.

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This week we talk about IVF, premies, and artificial wombs.

We also discuss rites of passage, Brave New World, and the perceived place of women in society.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

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Sponsors: Everlane & Hostgator

My new book Becoming Who We Need To Be is available as an audiobook, paperback, and ebook.

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This week we talk about cyborgs, the Curse of Knowledge, and Tulip Mania.

We also discuss the Eighty Years' War, distributed knowledge, and storytelling.

For more information about this podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

Become a patron on Patreon.

Sponsors: Audible & Hostgator

My new book Becoming Who We Need To Be is available as an audiobook, paperback, and ebook.

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This week we talk about liquid and illiquid assets, ICOs, and commodities.

We also discuss soft power, tokenization, and state-run cryptocurrencies.

For more information about the podcast and to view the copious show notes, visit letsknowthings.com.

Become a patron on Patreon.

Sponsors: Audible & Everlane

My new book Becoming Who We Need To Be is available as an audiobook, paperback, and ebook.