Let's Know Things

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 ClancyTranscriptImmediately 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

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 :)TranscriptThere'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 periodSo 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 pr

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 CaseyTranscriptIn 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

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 MiévilleTranscriptThe 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,

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. GhodseeTranscriptThe 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-r

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 ReynoldsTranscriptFor 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 sol

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 ScalziTranscriptWe'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

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 SuarezTranscriptRansomware 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 L

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 CzerskiTranscriptWhat 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,

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 LorenzTranscriptThe 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-pro

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 SuleymanTranscriptThere 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 port

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 RuddTranscriptChimeric 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 amplifier

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 GraeberTranscriptThe 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

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 StrossTranscriptIn 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 i

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-StaceTranscriptNayib 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

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 DarkshireTranscriptIn 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,

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 GoodellTranscriptBy 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 compan

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 RossTranscriptIn 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 o

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 RobsonTranscriptIn 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, i

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 GreenTranscriptDepending 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 o