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This week we talk about Huawei, DJI, and ByteDance. We also discuss 5G infrastructure, black-box algorithms, and Congressional bundles. Recommended Book: The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal Note: my new book, How To Turn 39, is now available as an ebook, audiobook, and paperback wherever you get your books :) Transcript In January of 2024, Chinese tech giant Huawei brought an end to its years-long US lobbying effort, meant to help mend fences with western politicians. In mid-2019, then US President Trump had blacklisted the company using an executive order that, in practice, prevented Chinese telecommunications companies from selling specialized equipment in the US, as part of a larger effort to clamp-down on the sale of Chinese 5g and similar infrastructure throughout the US. Around the same time, a Huawei executive was jailed in Canada for allegedly violating sanctions on Iran, and several other western nations were making noises about their own bans, worrying—as Trump's administration said they were worried—that Huawei and similar Chinese tech companies would sell their goods at a loss or at cost, significantly undercutting their foreign competition, and as a consequence would both lock down the burgeoning 5g market, including all the infrastructure that was in the process of being invested in and deployed, while also giving the Chinese government a tool that could allow them to tap all the communications running through this hardware, and potentially even allow them to shut it all down, if they wanted, at some point in the future—if China invaded Taiwan and wanted to keep the West from getting involved, for instance. So while part of this ban on Huawei—for which the President made use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and declared a national emergency—was undoubtedly political (part of the trade war Trump started as part of the "China is the enemy" platform he was running on leading up to the 2020 election), there were also real-deal concern about China insinuating itself into the world's infrastructure, beginning with the rollout of the next phase of communications technologies; making themselves indispensable, disallowing foreign competition, and yes, possibly even creating a bunch of backdoors they could use at some point in the future to tip the scales in their favor during a conflict. This ban also ensured that Huawei's then quite popular line of smartphones wouldn't be available in the US, or many other Western countries. The company sold off its Honor brand of phones in a scramble to try to protect that line of products from these new blocks on its offerings, which among other things disallowed them from accessing the chips necessary to make competitive smartphone products, but the legislation just kept coming after that initial salvo, the US Federal Communications Commission banning the sale or import of anything made by Huawei in late-2022, and a bunch of fundamental US allies, especially those with which the US collaborates on military and intelligence matters, have likewise banned Huawei products on their shelves and in their communications networks; the idea being that even one Huawei transmitter or modem could tap into the whole of these networks—at least in theory—which is considered a big enough security concern to justify that blanket ban. Huawei has managed to survive, though it didn't scale the way its owners seemed to think it would back before all these bans. Now it exists as a primarily regional outfit, still making billions in revenue each year, though down to about half the revenue it was earning before 2019. Another popular Chinese tech company, DJI, is now scrambling to deploy its lobbyists and circle the wagons, as there's word that it's on a shortlist of potential Chinese security threats, in this case because the company makes very popular consumer and professional grade drones, which have successfully outcompeted many western brands of the same, and which have...

This week we talk about STELLARWIND, 9/11, and the NSA. We also discuss warrantless surveillance, intelligence agencies, and FISA. Recommended Book: Period: The Real Story of Menstruation by Kate Clancy Transcript Immediately after the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, then President George W. Bush gave his approval for the National Security Agency, the NSA, to run a portfolio of significant and ever-evolving cross-agency efforts aimed at preventing future attacks of that kind, scale, and scope. The thinking behind this collection of authorizations to various US intelligence agencies, which would operate in tandem with the NSA, was that we somehow didn't see this well-orchestrated, complex plan coming, and though revelations in later years suggested we kind of did, we just didn't act on the intelligence we had, in those early, post-attack days, everyone at the top was scrambling to reassure the country that things would be okay, while also worrying that more attacks from someone, somewhere, might be impending. So the President signed a bunch of go-aheads that typically wouldn't have been signed, and the government gave a lot of power to the NSA to amalgamate the resulting intelligence data in ways that also wouldn't have previously been okay'd, but that, in those unusual circumstances, were considered to be not just acceptable, but desirable and necessary. This jumble of intelligence service activities, approved by the president and delegated to the NSA, became known as the President's Surveillance Program, and they were kept secret, in part because of how unprecedented they were, and in part because those in charge didn't want to risk their opposition—those they knew about, like Al Qaeda, but also those that might be waiting in the wings to attack the US while it was perceptually weakened and vulnerable—they didn't want to risk those entities knowing what they were doing, what they knew about, how they were collecting data, and so on. The info that was gleaned via these programs was compiled and stored in an SCI, which stands for Sensitive Compartment Information, and which refers to a type of document control system, a bit like Top Secret or Classified, in that it allows those running it to set what level of access people must have to view, process, use, or even discuss its contents, and this particular SCI was codenamed STELLARWIND. Among other activities, the programs feeding data into the Stellarwind SCI mined huge databases of email and phone communications, alongside web-browsing and financial activities; all sorts of tracking information that's collected by various components of intelligence, law enforcement, and other government and government-adjacent services were tapped and harvested. All of this data was then funneled into this one program, and though the degree to which this much information is useful up for debate, because having a slew of data doesn't mean that data is organized in useful ways, in 2004 the US Justice Department discovered that the NSA was not just collecting this sort of data when it was connected to foreign entities or entities that have been connected to terrorism, it was also collecting it from sources and people, including just average everyday Americans and small businesses that were doing no terrorism at all, and which had no links to terrorism, and it was doing so on American soil. After this discovery, then-President Bush said, well, the NSA is allowed to do that, that's fine, but they can only look at collected metadata related to terrorism—so they can collect whatever they want, sweep up gobs of information, file-away whatever drifts into their expansive and undifferentiating nets, but they're not allowed to look at and use anything not related to terrorism; and with that clarification to keep the Justice Department from doing anything that might hinder the program, the president reauthorized it that same year, 2004. There was disagreement within the...

This week we talk about diplomatic immunity, Trump’s court cases, and the Supreme Court. We also discuss Nixon, Clinton, and the US Constitution. Recommended Book: My upcoming book, How To Turn 39 (https://books2read.com/htt39), which is available for pre-order today :) Transcript There's a concept in international law—diplomatic immunity—that says, in essence, certain government officials should be immune from the laws of foreign countries, including those within which they're operating. This is a very old concept, based on similar rights that were granted to envoys and messengers back in the oldest documented periods of human civilizations. The idea is that if different cultures, whether organized into tribes or kingdoms or nation states, are going to be able to deal with each other, they need to maintain open and reliable means of communication. Thus, the folks tasked with carrying messages between leaders of these different groups would need to be fairly confident that they wouldn't be hassled or attacked or prosecuted by the people they were bringing those messages to, and whose messages they were bringing back to their own leaders. Such representatives have at times been imprisoned or killed by their hosts, but this is relatively rare, because any governing body that treated ambassadors from other cultures in this way would have trouble dealing with anyone outside their current legal sway, and that would in turn mean less trade, less reliable peace, and less opportunity to generally cross-pollinate with cultures they might benefit from cross-pollinating with. As a general rule, at least in the modern iteration of diplomatic immunity, folks operating under the auspices of this policy can still be punished for their misdeeds, it's just that they'll generally be declared persona non grata, expelled from the country where they did something wrong, rather than punished under that country's laws. In some rare instances a country hosting a misbehaving or criminal ambassador or other diplomat might ask that person's home country to waive their immunity, basically saying, look, this person killed someone or got drunk and drove recklessly through our capitol city's downtown, we'd like to try them in our courts, and it may be that the government running that misbehaving person's home country says, okay, yeah, that's messed up, you go ahead; but usually—even if that person has done something truly reprehensible—they'll instead say, no, sorry, we'll pull them back and they won't be allowed to return to your country or serve as an ambassador anywhere else, because they've shown themselves to be unreliable, and we might even try them in a court here, in their home country, but we can't allow our people, no matter what they do, to fall under the legal jurisdiction of some other nation, because that would set a bad precedent, and it may make people wary of working for us in this capacity in the future—surely you understand. There are tiers of diplomatic immunity, depending on the seniority of the diplomat or other representative in question, and the Congress of Vienna of the early 1800s charted out the basis for how these things work, in much detail, formalizing a lot of what was already in the ether back then, and creating an outline that was then further formalized in 1961's Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which has been almost universally ratified and respected, though of course there's been a lot of grey area in terms of what harassment of a representative, which is a no-no according to this convention, entails, and to what degree it can be proven, and thus punished, if violated. We saw a lot of grey area utility during the height of the Cold War in particular, in part because many diplomats were moonlighting as spies, which is still true today, though it was even more overt and worrisome to their host countries, back then, so harassment, kidnappings, even assassinations of diplomats were more common then, than...

This week we talk about Linux, backdoors, and the Open Source community. We also discuss CPU usage, state-backed hackers, and SSH. Recommended Book: The Underworld by Susan Casey Transcript In the world of computers, a "backdoor" is a means of accessing a device or piece of software via an alternative entry point that allows one to bypass typical security measures and often, though not always, to do so in a subtle, undetected and maybe even undetectable manner. While backdoors can be built into hardware and software systems by the companies that make those devices and apps and bits of internet architecture, and while some governments and agencies, including the Chinese government, and allegedly folks at the NSA, have at times installed backdoors in relevant hardware and software for surveillance purposes, backdoors are generally the domain of tech-oriented criminals of various stripes, most of whom make use of vulnerabilities that are baked into their targets in order to gain access, and then while inside the administration components of a system, they write some code or find some kind of management lever meant to give the company or other entity behind the target access for non-criminal, repair and security purposes, and that then allows them to continue to gain access in the future; like using a rock to prop open a door. Concerns over a backdoor being installed in vital systems is fundamental to why the US and European governments have been so hesitant to allow Chinese-made 5G hardware into their wireless communication systems: there's a chance that, with the aid, or perhaps just at the prodding of the Chinese government, such hardware, or the software it utilizes, could contain a Trojan or other packet of code, hidden from view and hardcoded into the devices in some covert manner; these devices could also harbor even smaller devices, indistinguishable from hardware that's meat to be there, that would allow them to do the same via more tangible means. Though there were almost certainly other economic and technology-dominance reasons for the clampdown on products made by Chinese tech company Huawei beginning in earnest in 2012, and escalating rapidly during the US Trump administration, that process was at least ostensibly tied to worries that a Chinese company, prone to spying and stealing foreign tech, already, might incorporate itself into fundamental global communication infrastructure. It was underpricing everybody else, offering whizbang new high-end 5G technology at a discount, and supposedly, if the accusations are true, at least, doing so as part of a bigger plan to tap into all sorts of vital aspects of these systems, giving them unparalleled access to all communications, basically, but also giving them the ability, supposedly, to shut down those systems with the press of a button in the event that China wants or needs to do so at some point, if they ever decide to invade Taiwan, for instance, and want to distract the Western world until that invasion is complete, or just make rallying a defense a lot more difficult. Other, confirmed and successfully deployed backdoors have been found in all sorts of products, ranging from counterfeit Cisco network products, like routers and modems, some of which were installed in military and government facilities back in 2008 before they were recognized for what they were, to Microsoft software, Wordpress plugins, and a brand of terminals that manage the data sent along fiber-optic cables, mostly for high-speed internet purposes. Again, in some cases, the entities making these products sometimes do install what are literally or essentially backdoors in their hardware and software because it allows them to, for instance, help their customers retrieve lost passwords, fix issues, install security updates, and so on. But backdoors of any shape or size are considered to be major security vulnerabilities, as stealing a password or getting access to a vital terminal could then...

This week we talk about cacao, plantations, and bean-to-bar chocolate. We also discuss black pod disease, swollen shoot virus, and seed pod currency. Recommended Book: The City & The City by China Miéville Transcript The cocoa bean, also called "cacao," is a seed derived from the cocoa tree, which is native to the Amazon Rainforest in South America. More than 5,000 years ago, near present day Ecuador, the Mayo-Chinchipe culture domesticated and cultivated this tree, which then found its way north into Mesoamerica—so parts of Central America, and modern day Mexico—and that's where we actually thought it came from until a handful of years ago, when new research pushed the initial domestication date back by about 1,500 years, tracking its path down into Ecuador by identifying cocoa residue on pottery from that time period down in that region. But way back then, it's thought that the pulp of this seed was used primarily to create an alcoholic beverage that was fermented to about the same alcohol percentage as a consumer-grade, modern day beer—just over 5%—and because of that utility in making this popular beverage, it was used as a currency in some parts of South and Central America. It's worth noting, too, that this tree and its seed would have originally been called kakawa, which was then turned into an Aztec derivative word much later, cacauatl, which then became cacao, when the Spanish colonized the region, and cacao then became cocoa when introduced to English-speaking parts of the world—and that variation of the word took over in the age of post-WWII globalization, due in large part to the popularization of chocolate products from English-speaking countries like the US and the UK, cacao only recently being reintroduced on that scale to differentiate more expensive cocoa products from those that have become mainstream. Also worth noting is that in addition to being used to produce a popular alcoholic beverage way back in the day, the cocoa bean was also turned into a kind of frothy spiced drink by Aztec royalty and other higher-ups in this part of the world, and that drink was enjoyed by high-born members of society for several thousand years, the beverage used in all sorts of rituals. And to make it, cocoa was whipped together with vanilla and other spices and sweeteners to produce something akin to a sort of hot chocolate the modern person would recognize, though leaning a lot more into those spices than most modern chocolates, rather than sugars and fats. This wasn't a widely available thing in most areas, and it probably wasn't the main end-product for most cocoa beans for most of history, as that alcoholic drink and its many derivatives were a lot more broadly available and widely disseminated. That said, different groups, across this region and across time, including the Maya and the Olmecs, had their own variations of this hot cocoa-like drink, and there's even an Aztec story that Quetzalcoatl was outcast by the other gods in their pantheon for sharing chocolate with humans, and some regional experts have speculated that the ritual of extracting the hearts from human sacrifices in the Aztec empire might be connected to the process of extracting the cocoa pulp from the cocoa bean seed pod when producing this beverage; though that's pretty speculative. The Aztecs came later than a lot of the other cultures in this region that partook in chocolate-related rituals and made cocoa-related goods, so that's likely part of why their rituals surrounding this drink were more elaborate than those of their neighbors, contemporary and forebear, but it's likely that the nature of the bean itself, which only grows in a finite region, about 20 degrees north and south of the equator, also had something to do with it. Because of that limited range, the Aztecs couldn't grow cocoa in their territory, and that meant it was always a luxury import for them, which meant—like many luxuries, even today—only the richest members of...

This week we talk about the Rwandan genocide, the First and Second Congo Wars, and M23. We also discuss civil wars, proxy conflicts, and resource curses. Recommended Book: Everyday Utopia by Kristen R. Ghodsee Transcript The Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, was previously known as Zaïre, a name derived from a Portuguese mistranscription of the regional word for "river." It wore that monicker from 1971 until 1997, and this region had a rich history of redesignations before that, having been owned by various local kingdoms, then having been colonized by Europeans, sold to the King of Belgium in 1885, who owned it personally, not as a part of Belgium, which was unusual, until 1908, renaming it for that period the Congo Free State, which was kind of a branding exercise to convince all the Europeans who held territory thereabouts that he was doing philanthropic work, though while he did go to war with local and Arab slavers in the region, he also caused an estimated millions of deaths due to all that conflict, due to starvation and disease and punishments levied against people who failed to produce sufficient volumes of rubber from plantations he built in the region. So all that effort and rebranding also almost bankrupted him, the King of Belgium, because of the difficulties operating in this area, even when you step into it with vast wealth, overwhelming technological and military advantages, and the full backing of a powerful, if distant, nation. After the King's deadly little adventure, the region he held was ceded to the nation of Belgium as a colony, which renamed it the Belgium Congo, and it eventually gained independence from Belgium, alongside many other European colonies around the world, post-WWII, in mid-1960. Almost immediately there was conflict, a bunch of secessionist movements turning into civil wars, and those civil wars were amplified by the meddling of the United States and the Soviet Union, which supported different sides, funding and arming them as they tended to do in proxy conflicts around the world during this portion of the Cold War. This period, which lasted for about 5 years after independence, became known as the Congo Crisis, because government leaders kept being assassinated, different groups kept rising up, being armed, killing off other groups, and then settling in to keep the government from unifying or operating with any sense of security or normalcy. Eventually a man named Mobutu Sese Seko, usually just called Mobutu, launched a real deal coup that succeeded, and he imposed a hardcore military dictatorship on the country—his second coup, actually, but the previous one didn't grant him power, so he tried again a few years later, in 1965, and that one worked—and though he claimed, as many coup-launching military dictators do, that he would stabilize things over the next five years, restoring democracy to the country in the process, that never happened, though claiming he would did earn him the support of the US and other Western governments for the duration, even as he wiped out any government structure that could oppose him, including the position of Prime Minister in 1966, and the institution of Parliament in 1967. In 1971, as I mentioned, he renamed the country Zaïre, nationalized all remaining foreign owned assets in the country, and it took another war, which is now called the First Congo War, to finally unseat him. And this conflict, which began in late-1996, spilled over into neighboring countries, including Sudan and Uganda, and a slew of other nations were involved, including but not limited to Chad, the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Eritrea, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and Tanzania, alongside foreign assistance granted to various sides by France, China, Israel, and covertly, the United States. The conflict kicked off when Rwanda invaded Zaïre, more neighboring states joined in, all of them intending to take out a bunch of rebel...

This week we talk about mergers, acquisitions, and the Shale Oil Revolution. We also discuss liquid natural gas, energy diplomacy, and political hypocrisy. Recommended Book: Eversion by Alastair Reynolds Transcript For the sixth year in a row, the United States is the largest oil producer in the world. As of March 2024, it's producing an average of 12.93 million barrels of oil per day, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and it periodically pops above that average for stretches of time, like in December of last year when it managed to average just over 13.3 million barrels per day. That's an absolutely astonishing volume of oil. For context, while Saudi Arabia remains the holder of the world's most substantial spare oil capacity and was the largest oil exporter in 2023, they set aside plans to increase output to 12 million barrels a day back in January, which leaves them about a million barrels a day shy of the expansion target they set in 2020. In 2023, the US produced about 28% more oil than Russia and about 33% more than Saudi Arabia, on average. The US is becoming a huge player in oil exports, too, but it really shines if you look at not just crude oil, but also natural gas liquids and refined petroleum products. In aggregate, in 2023, the United States exported nearly the same volume of these products that both Saudi Arabia and Russia produced, not exported, which is pretty wild. As is the fact that in December of 2023, the US exported about 400 billion more cubic feet of natural gas than it imported; and it imports a lot, and it only started exporting natural gas a few years ago, so that's the figure for an industry that didn't even exist until 2016, and didn't really grow until the 2020s. The US hasn't always been this kind of force in the global oil market. It's long been a consumer of huge quantities of the stuff, but while it produced a decent amount until the late-90s, competing with Russia and trailing Saudi Arabia, though not by much, US production levels dropped substantially beginning in the early 90s, the US becoming a huge importer of fossil fuels, its production levels dipping down to something closer to those of Iran by the mid-2000s; when 9/11 happened in 2001, one of the big concerns was that the US's fundamental reliance on Middle Eastern oil would complicate its military options and hamstring its economy. That all changed, though, with what became known as the Shale Revolution, when the widespread investment in and deployment of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" technologies, combined with developments that allowed for horizontal drilling, opened up huge swathes of new oil-rich territories in the US and Canada, making what were previously usable, but incredibly expensive to exploit fossil fuel resources less expensive and easier to tap, and southern US states in particular saw a wave of new and expanded drilling, leading to a surge in the US's production output, and ultimately allowing the US to become the top producer in the world beginning in 2018. The degree to which this has changed things, geopolitically, cannot be overstated, in the US and globally. Stateside, petroleum prices became less tethered to the whims and political motivations of mostly Middle Eastern nations and Russia, which, working together via the OPEC+ oil cartel, were long able to threaten and coerce the US government and its allies in various ways. That remained the case for a while, even after this shale oil boom, as production and export figures weren't optimally aligned. But as this new reality has set in, the US government has been more strategic in how it has stockpiled fossil fuels resources and how it's been willing to use those stockpiles to manage price fluctuations, for itself and its allies, when warranted. This has also been important for manufacturing, shipping, and other energy-hungry aspects of the US economy, and it has stoked booms in all sorts of consumer-facing industries,...

This week we talk about foreign aid, brain drain, and long-term economic consequences. We also discuss the Rasputitsa, counteroffensives, and strategic rethinks. Recommended Book: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi Transcript We've done this a few times before, but it's been a while since I've done a real update on Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine—September of last year, I think, was the last one, a bonus episode on the topic—and a fair bit has happened since then, even if a lot of these happenings have been overshadowed by other conflicts, most especially the invasion of Gaza by Israel following the attacks on Israel by Gaza-based Hamas. But before diving into what's been happening, recently, in Ukraine, let's walk through a quick summary of events up till this point. In early 2014, Ukraine's people rose up against their Russia-aligned government in what became known as the Maidan Revolution or Revolution of Dignity. This was a long time coming, by many estimates, because of changes that had been made to the country's constitution and government since a decade previous, most of those changes orienting Ukraine more toward Russia's sphere of influence, authoritarian policies, and various sorts of corruption at the top, and the protests that led to this revolution began in November of 2013 before culminating in February the following year, which led to the toppling of the government, the creation of a new, interim government, the president fleeing to Russia, and new elections that kicked off a period of decoupling from Russian influence. This was not well received in Russia, which has long seen Ukraine as being under its sway, if not belonging to Russia, outright, Ukraine serving as a large, friendly buffer between it and Europe, so Russian forces were send in, the flags and other identifiers on their fatigues removed, to support separatists in the eastern portion of Ukraine. This sparked what became known as the Donbas War, which periodically flared up and sometimes merely simmered, but continued from when it began in February of 2014 all the way up to Russia's more formal invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, following several months of buildup along the countries' shared border. Against the odds and most analysts' assumptions, Ukraine managed to fend off Russia's initial assault, Russia managing to capture some territory, but not the capital city, Kyiv, and thus it wasn't able to decapitate the Ukrainian government and replace it with folks who would be loyal to Russia, as was apparently planned. Russia's stated plans changed several times over the next few years, as their assaults continued to falter in the face of stiffer than expected resistance, and eventually the so-called "special military operation" in Ukraine became a more overt, full-on war, complete with forced conscriptions, massive loss of life, the demolition of infrastructure and entire towns, and a recalibration of the global order, new alliances popping up, others being challenged, and everyone, to some degree at least, being sorted into categories based on who they support, who they don't, and who they are willing to tolerate despite not supporting—that latter category consisting mostly of less-aligned nations like Brazil and India, which have done pretty well for themselves, economically, staying somewhat neutral and aloof from this conflict, and thus continuing to deal with both the Western alliance supporting Ukraine, and the comparably small team of opposing nations, including China, North Korea, and Iran, all of which back Russia to varying degrees. In September of 2023, when I did the last update episode on this conflict, the state of play was largely defined by drone-based harassment of soldiers and infrastructure, like energy sources and bridges, by both sides against the other, Ukraine's flagging counteroffensive against Russia, which started out pretty good, but then ran intro trouble, seemingly due to sturdy...

This week we talk about virtual reality, the Meta Quest, and the Apple Vision Pro. We also discuss augmented reality, Magic Leap, and the iPhone. Recommended Book: Daemon by Daniel Suarez Transcript Ransomware is a sub-type of malware, which is malicious software that prevents its victim from accessing their data. So that might mean keeping them from logging into their cloud storage, but it might also mean encrypting their data so that there's no way to access it, ever again, unless they have the necessary decryptor, which is a piece of software or sometimes just a key that allows for the decryption of that encrypted, that locked-down data. The specifics of all this, though, are often less important than the practical reality of it. If you're attacked by a ransomware gang or hacker, your stuff, maybe your personal files, maybe your business files, all your customer information, your valuable trade secrets, anything that's stored digitally, might be completely inaccessible to you, and possibly even prone to deletion, though that might not even be necessary since strong encryption is essentially the same thing as deletion, for most intents and purposes; but all that data is gone, held hostage until and unless you pay some kind of ransom to the person or group that encrypted it, and which holds the key to its decryption. Most ransomware software is transmitted to its victims' computers via a trojan, which is a kind of malware that seems like real-deal software that you actually want or need to install, and folks are generally tricked into downloading and installing it because of that presumed legitimacy. So maybe you receive what looks like a software update for a tool you use at work, and it turns out the update was faked and what you installed was actually a trojan that installed malware on your computer, and consequently on your network, instead. Or maybe you pirated some software, and alongside the fake copy of Photoshop you installed, a trojan also carried another snippet of code that then, in the background, when your computer was hooked up to the internet, downloaded malware that looked for private data and encrypted it. At some point after ransomware is delivered and installed, your data successfully encrypted and inaccessible, you'll receive the ransom demand. For a while this was kind of an ad hoc thing, in some cases targeting people randomly on early internet usenet groups, in others big companies and other wealthy entities being specifically targeted and then ransomware teams calling or emailing or texting them directly, because they knew who they were hitting. In recent years, this has become a more distributed and mainstream effort, akin to an, organized business, and that mainstreamification was partially enabled by the dawn of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, which allow for relatively anonymous transactions with strangers, and the development of ransomware that is self-contained, in that it can install itself, find the right, valuable files, and then demand a ransom from its victim, providing that victim with the proper bitcoin wallet or other crypto-banking system into which they need to deposit a fixed amount of money in that less-trackable digital currency. The software can then, still autonomously, either decrypt the files once the ransom is paid, or delete the files, killing them off forever, if the ransom isn't paid by an established deadline. Other variations on this theme exist, and some ransomware doesn't use encryption as a motivator to pay, but instead locks down users' machines, displays some kind of demand for money, purporting to be a government agency (or lying about having encrypted or stolen something of value), or it threatens to install illegal pornographic images of minors on the victims' machine if they don't pay the ransom. By far the most popular approach to ransomware, today, though, is encryption-based, and recent evolutions in the business model backing ransomware has...

This week we talk about the Meiji Revolution, shoguns, and the Lost Decade. We also discuss NVIDIA, economic bubbles, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Recommended Book: The Blue Machine by Helen Czerski Transcript What became known as the Meiji Restoration, but which at the time was generally, locally, called the Honorable Restoration, refers to a period of massive and rapid change in Japan following the restoration of practical powers to the country's Emperor. In 1853, the arrival of Commodore Perry and his warships in Japan forced the country to open up trade to the rest of the world, initially with the US but shortly thereafter with other nations, as well. This led to the signing of a series of treaties that were heavily slanted in favor of those other nations, at Japan's expense, and the Meiji Restoration was a consequence of those humiliating treaties, which were essentially forced and enforced by military might, not because Japan wanted anything to do with these foreign entities and their money and goods. So in the 1860s, some reformist political leaders in Japan started to support the Emperor, who had become something of a ceremonial figure in recent generations, during the country's multi-century seclusion from the rest of the world, and this, among other things, led to a decision by those in charge, who now had more power at their disposal, to shift from a feudal society into an industrialized one. There was a fair bit of tumult and internal conflict during this period, but the eventual upside was the re-centralization of the country and its land and other assets under the Emperor, away from the shoguns who had been running their own pseudo-countries within Japan for a long while, alongside an order that the country would do a complete 180, no longer isolating itself and eschewing anything foreign, instead seeking knowledge far and wide, wherever it originates, sending folks around the world to discover whatever they can, and to then bring that understanding back to Japan, to strengthen this new iteration of the nation. By the end of the 19th century, industrialization was the name of the game in Japan, and those in charge had successfully encouraged civilians to bolster the economy by tying its success to the country's military success. Other governments were happy to play into this transition, as it meant enriching themselves, as well, creating a new, modernizing trade partner that they could exploit but also invest in, and this led to a doubling-down on rapid modernization by the the government, including the culling and destruction of traditional practices, landmarks, and social classes, which wasn't popular amongst the nation's many samurai and other previously celebrated and upper-class people, but it did help the government further centralize power and influence, and reorient things toward economic success and away from a more feudal style of distributed military-backed fiefdoms. This allowed Japan to become the first non-Western great power, and it's what allowed them to grow to the point that they could take on half the world in World War II, expanding their control throughout Asia and across the Pacific. Because Japan suffered relatively less from the Great Depression than most Western nations, it was also in a pretty good spot compared to the countries that would become its opponents in WWII leading up to the conflict, and its GDP growth in the 1920s and 30s is part of what allowed it to expand so rapidly across Southeast Asia, grabbing a lot of Chinese territory and turning much of the region, including parts of the Philippines, Burma, Malaya, and Thailand into plantation-like colonies. The war and post-war periods, though, were a lot less great for Japan, as essentially all the economic gains it made during the Meiji Restoration were lost, their manufacturing capacity wiped out, their infrastructure destroyed, their population numbers depleted, and their civilians psychologically scarred by the...

This week we talk about virtual reality, the Meta Quest, and the Apple Vision Pro. We also discuss augmented reality, Magic Leap, and the iPhone. Recommended Book: Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz Transcript The term spacial computing seems to have been coined in the mid-1980s within the field of geographic information systems, or GIS, which focuses on using digital technology to mess with geographic data in a variety of hopefully useful ways. So if you were to import a bunch of maps and GPS coordinates and the locations of buildings and parks and such into a database, and then make that database searchable, plotting its points onto a digital map in an app, making something like Google Maps, that would be a practical utility of GIS research and development. The term spacial computing refers to pulling computer-based engagement into physical spaces, allowing us to plot and use information in the real world, rather than relegating that information to flat screens like computers and smartphones. This could be useful, it was posited, back in the early days of the term, as it would theoretically allow us to map out and see, with deep accuracy and specificity, how a proposed building would look on a particular street corner when finished, and how it would feel to walk through a house we're thinking of building, when all we have available is blueprints. This seemed like it would be a killer application for all sorts of architectural, urban planning, and location intelligence purposes, and that meant it might someday be applicable to everyone from security services to construction workers to doctors and health researchers who are trying to figure out where a pandemic originated. In the 1990s, though, the embryonic field of virtual reality started to become a thing, moving from research labs owned by schools and military contractors out into the real world, increasingly flogged as the next big consumer technology, useful for all sorts of practical, but also entertainment purposes, like watching movies and playing games. During this period, VR began to serve as a stand-in for where technology was headed, and it was dropped into movies and other sorts of speculative fiction to illustrate the evolution of tech, and how the world might evolve as a consequence of that evolution, more of our lives lived within digital versions of the world, rather than in the world itself. As a result of that popularity, especially throughout pop culture, VR overtook spacial computing as the term of art typically used to discuss this type of computational application, though the latter term also encompassed use-cases that weren't generally covered by VR, like the ability to engage with one's environment while using the requisite headsets, and the consequent capacity to use this technology out in the world, rather than exclusively at home or in the office, replicating the real world in that confined space. The term augment reality, or AR, is generally used to refer to that other spacial computing use-case: projecting an overlay, basically, on the real world, generally using a VR-like headset or goggles or glasses to either display information onto lenses the user looks through, or serving the user video footage that is altered to include that data, rather than attempting to project the same over the real thing; the latter case more like virtual reality because users are viewing entirely digital feeds, but like AR in that those feeds include live video from the world around them. A slew of productized spacial computing products have made it to the consumer market over the past few decades, including Microsoft's HoloLens, which is an augmented-reality headset, Google's Glass, which projects information onto a tiny screen in the corner of the the user's eyeline, and Magic Leap's self-named 1 and 2 devices, which are similar to the HoloLens. All three of these products have had trouble making much of a dent in the market, though, and Magic Leap is...

This week we talk about The Messenger, ads, and generative AI. We also discuss search engines, algorithms, and Semafor’s new curation tool. Recommended Book: The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman Transcript There was a piece published on McSweeney's, a humorous, often satirical writing site, recently, entitled "Our Digital Media Platform Will Revolutionize News and Is Also Shutting Down," written by Devin Wallace, that includes gems, ostensibly from an announcement by some kind of new media business, like this one: "Our new digital media platform is changing the way people consume content. We’re a one-stop-shop location for breaking news, long-form journalism, and in-depth art criticism. We’re also currently shutting down without any notice whatsoever." It goes on to say: "Mainstream media will try to shut us down, but they’ll never succeed since we already shut down at 3 a.m. with absolutely no warning to our readers or even our employees." This piece is a completely unveiled criticism of The Messenger, a news-focused digital media company that launched in May of 2023 and was dissolved on January 31, 2024, about 8 months after its founding. It was started by 70-something Jimmy Finkelstein, the former owner of The Hill, a DC-based politics and policy-oriented publication he bought in 2012, which was then acquired by another media company in 2021, who said he wanted to start The Messenger for legacy purposes, and which he raised $50 million to fund, before scooping up the assets of another new online media company, Grid News, and hiring a bunch of well-known writers and journalists from other publications, promising higher-than-usual for the industry wages for the 150 employees it hired for its launch, and that number was doubled to around 300 within a handful of months. The Messenger was then unceremoniously shut down, the company's staff learning about its collapse and their layoffs from other publications reporting on the matter, many of them suspecting a closure, though, when their Slack conversations were suddenly shut down and their connections to the company, company emails, insurance, and the like, all stopped functioning or simply shut them out. Company leadership, including Finkelstein, had bragged that The Messenger would defy the slow-motion collapse the rest of the news media world was experiencing, with few exceptions, because it would expand aggressively and publish constantly, increasing employment to 750 people and earning $100 million in annual revenue on the back of 100 million unique monthly visitors by 2024. That...did not happen. It did achieve 100,000 unique daily visitors shortly after launching, but it was only able to earn about $3 million in total revenue by the waning days of 2023, and it burned through cash faster than its competitors. That $50 million in funding had dropped to around $1.8 million in the bank from May to December of 2023, and the sudden closure seemed to be an effort by company leadership to cut their losses, though the explosion of activity and sum of money invested, followed by such a rapid decline and disappearance has earned The Messenger and those involved in its sudden shut-down the reputation for having invested in one of the most spectacular collapses in online news media history. What I'd like to talk about today is the broader online news media industry, the challenges this industry faces, and how those challenges are shaping what's happening now and what's likely to happen next. — Explanations for The Messenger's rapid and explosive demise are rampant, but some of the most popular orient around Finkelstein's apparently outdated ideas about how to run a news publication, his reportedly bad attitude and horrible relationships with upper-management and other underlings (alongside his reported homophobia and misogyny, which may have amplified those issues), a lack of effort or capability within the ad sales team, which by some indications barely existed, the...

This week we talk about CAR Ts, lupus, and antigen-presenting cells. We also discuss Hashimoto’s, potential cures, and allergies. Recommended Book: The Avoidable War by Kevin Rudd Transcript Chimeric antigen receptors, usually shorthanded as CARs, are a type of protein structure that receives and transmits signals within biological systems. The term "CAR T cell" refers to chimeric antigen receptors that have been altered so that these structures can give T cells, which are a component of the human body's immune system, attacking stuff that our immune systems identify as being foreign or otherwise potentially harmful, it gives these T cells the ability to target specific antigens, rather than responding in a general sense to anything that seems broadly off. So while T cells are generally deployed en masse to tackle all sorts of issues all throughout our bodies all the time, CAR T cells can tell them, hey, see this specific thing? This one thing I'm pointing at? Go kill that thing. And then they do. The potential to use CAR Ts for T cell-aiming purposes started to pop up in scientific literature in the late-1980s and early-1990s, and in the mid-90s there was a clinical trial testing the theory that T cells could be guided in this way to targeted cells throughout the body that are infected with HIV. That clinical trial failed, as did tests using CAR T approaches to sic T cells on solid tumors; there just didn't seem to be enough persistence in the T cells, in their targeting, to do much good in this regard. Second-generation CARs improved upon that original model, and that led to tests with more follow-through, better focus for those guided T cells, basically, and that improved their capacity to clear solid tumors in tests. By the early 2010s, researchers were able to completely clear solid cancers from patients, leading to complete remissions in some of them, though those patients were also treated with more conventional therapies beforehand. These new approaches led to the first two FDA-approved CAR T cell treatments in the US in 2017, for a type of leukemia and a type of lymphoma. As of late-2023, there were six such treatments approved for use by the FDA, most of them leveraged only for cancer patients who didn't respond well to conventional treatments, or who continued to relapse after several rounds of cancer therapy. It's a last line of defense, at this point, in part because it's still relatively new, and in part because the current collection of CAR T therapies seem to work best when the cancers have already been weakened by other sorts of attack. What I'd like to talk about today is another potential use for this same general technology and therapy approach that, until recently, was considered to be a really pie-in-the-sky sort of dream, but which is rapidly becoming more thinkable. — There's a theory that essentially all human beings have some kind of immunodeficiency: something that our immune systems don't do well, don't do at all, or don't do in the expected, baseline way. Any one of those immunodeficiency types can result in issues throughout a person's life, ranging from a higher-than-normal susceptibility to specific infections to a tendency to accidentally target healthy cells or biota, which can then result in all sorts of secondary issues for the host of those cells or biota. One especially pernicious and increasingly common issue in this space is what's called autoimmunity, which refers to the tendency of one's immune system to attack one's own cells and tissues and organs. If these autoimmune attacks are substantial and consistent enough, they can cause a disease in the afflicted body components, and diseases caused in this way are called autoimmune diseases. You've almost certainly heard of some of the more common of these diseases: Lupus, for instance, varies in its specifics, but arises when someone's immune system attacks their skin or muscles or joint tissues or components of their...

This week we talk about robo-Biden, fake Swift images, and ElevenLabs. We also discuss copyright, AI George Carlin, and deepfakes. Recommended Book: Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber Transcript The hosts of a podcast called Dudesy are facing a lawsuit after they made a video that seems to show the late comedian George Carlin performing a new routine. The duo claimed they created the video using AI tools, training an algorithm on five decades-worth of Carlin's material in order to generate a likeness of his face and body and voice, and his jokes; they claimed everything in this video, which they called "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead," was the product of AI tools. The lawsuit was filed by Carlin's estate, which alleges these hosts infringed on the copyright they have on Carlin's works, and that the hosts illegally made use of and profited from his name and likeness. They asked that the judge force the Dudesy hosts to pull and destroy the video and its associated audio, and to prevent them from using Carlin's works and likeness and name in the future. After the lawsuit was announced, a spokesperson for Dudesy backtracked on prior claims, saying that the writing in the faux-Carlin routine wasn't written by AI, it was written by one of the human hosts, and thus the claim of copyright violation wasn't legit, because while the jokes may have been inspired by Carlin's work, they weren't generated by software that used his work as raw training materials, as they originally claimed—which arguably could have represented an act of copyright violation. This is an interesting case in part because if the podcasters who created this fake Carlin and fake Carlin routine were to be successfully sued for the use of Carlin's likeness and name, but not for copyright issues related to his work, that would suggest that the main danger faced by AI companies that are gobbling up intellectual property left and right, scraping books and the web and all sorts of video and audio services for raw training materials, is the way in which they're acquiring and using this media, not the use of the media itself. If they could somehow claim their models are inspired by these existing writings and recordings and such, they could then lean on the same argument that their work is basically the same as an author reading a bunch of other author's book, and then writing their own book—which is inspired by those other works, but not, typically anyway, infringing in any legal sense. The caveat offered by the AI used to impersonate Carlin at the beginning of the show is interesting, too, as it said, outright, that it's not Carlin and that it's merely impersonating him like a human comedian doing their best impression of Carlin. In practice, that means listening to all of Carlin's material and mimicking his voice and cadence and inflections and the way he tells stories and builds up to punchlines and everything else; if a human performer were doing an impression of Carlin, they would basically do the same thing, they just probably wouldn't do it as seamlessly as a modern AI system capable of producing jokes and generating images and videos and audio can manage. This raises the question, then, of whether there would be an issue if this AI comedy set wasn't claiming to feature George Carlin: what if they had said it was a show featuring Porge Narlin, instead? Or Fred Robertson? Where is the line drawn, and to what degree does the legal concept of Fair Use, in the US at least, come into play here? What I'd like to talk about today are a few other examples of AI-based imitation that have been in the news lately, and the implications they may have, legally and culturally, and in some cases psychologically, as well. — There's a tech startup called ElevenLabs that's generally considered to be one of the bigger players in the world of AI-based text-to-voice capabilities, including the capacity to mimic a real person's voice. What that means in...

This week we talk about Operation Iron Swords, October 7, and the International Court of Justice. We also discuss human rights abuses, the Red Sea, and Iran’s influence. Recommended Book: Empire Games by Charles Stross Transcript In the early morning of October 7, 2023, the militant wing of Hamas—which is also a political organization that has governed the Gaza Strip territory since 2007, a few years after Israel withdrew from the area and then blockaded it, leading to accusations from international human rights organizations that Israel still occupies the area, even if not officially—but the militant wing of this Sunni Islamist group, Hamas, launched a sneak-attack, in coordination with other islamist groups (a term that in this context usually but not always refers to groups that want to claim territory they can govern in accordance with what they consider to be proper Islamic fashion, usually defined by a fairly extreme interpretation of the religion). This sneak-attack was successful in the sense that it caught seemingly everyone off guard, despite the Israeli military's foreknowledge of this possibility; that foreknowledge only becoming public months after the attack, and the possibility of such an attack dismissed by those who could have prepared for it because it seemed to them to be a sort of pie-in-the-sky aspiration on the part of a group that was disempowered and incapable of putting up any kind of fight beyond periodically launching unsophisticated rockets that could be easily taken out by Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile defense system. So for more than a year the Israeli government had information indicating Hamas was planning some kind of incursion into Israel, but they dismissed it, and by some accounts they had every reason to do so, as Hamas had seemed to be more chill than usual, pulling back on the overt military activity and lacking sufficient support from the Gaza population to attempt even a tenth of what they had blueprinted. Three months before the attack an Israeli signals intelligence analyst raised a red flag on this issue, indicating that Hamas was conducting intense training exercises that seemed to be in line with those pie-in-the-sky plans, but this flag was ignored by those higher up the chain of command, once again. Consequently, when Hamas launched a huge flurry of rockets, around 3,000 by most estimates, sent drones to take out automated machine guns and cameras placed along the border fences between Israel and Gaza, and sent militants through holes in the fence, in on motorcycles, and over barriers using paragliders, Israeli defense forces were caught flat-footed, taking a surprisingly long time to respond to the incursion and failing to protect a military base that housed the defense division responsible for security in Gaza, alongside several other bases, and the around 1,200 people who were killed and around 250 who were taken hostage. Dozens of nations immediately decried Hamas's attack as a terrorist act, many of Israel's neighbors made noises about not liking it, but then blamed Israel's long-standing alleged occupation of Gaza and the West Bank for the attack, and attempts to shore-up defenses, clear out lingering Hamas fighters, and tally the dead and missing began; the numbers and the experiences of those involved were all pretty horrifying. Israel's response, a plan that was designated Operation Iron Swords, arrived alongside a state of emergency for the portions of Israel within about 50 miles or 80 km of its border with Gaza, and the country's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the country was at war with Hamas and would destroy them and anyone else who dared to join them. The nation's defense forces were also ordered to shore up its other borders to prevent anyone else from joining on in attacking Israel at a moment in which it might be seen as weak. In the just over 100 days—108 as of the day this episode goes live—everything has changed or been...

This week we talk about Bukele, Naboa, and the war on gangs. We also discuss emergency powers, authoritarianism, and the cocaine trade. Recommended Book: Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace Transcript Nayib Bukele is the 43rd president of El Salvador, and he's an unusual leader for the country in that he's young—born in 1981, so just 42 years old, as of the day I'm recording this—and in that he's incredibly popular, having maintained an approval rating of around 90% essentially since he stepped into the presidency back in 2019. He's also unusual, though, for his policies. He has, for instance, made the crypto-asset Bitcoin legal tender in the country, buying up a bunch of them using government funds, developing a crypto wallet for citizens to use for storing and paying for things with their own digital assets, and he even announced the construction of what he called a bitcoin city, which would be built at the base of a volcano and would use geothermal energy to mine bitcoin, which basically means powering a bunch of powerful computers using the energy produced by the geothermal activity in that region. That gamble hasn't turned out as planned—Bitcoin has experienced a resurgence in recent months as some governments have passed somewhat favorable policies, including the SEC's recent decision to allow the sale of Bitcoin ETFs to everyday investors in the US—but he bought into the asset when the prices were high and lost a lot of the government's money on the gamble; it was estimated in late 2023 that El Salvador has lost something like 37% of the money it invested in this way, equivalent to around $45 million; though that's based on external estimates as the country doesn't provide transparent figures on this matter, so it could be more or less than that. Bukele has also caused a stir with his freewheeling approach to politics, which some local and international organizations have labeled authoritarian, as he's shown no compunction about trampling democratic norms in order to get things he wants done, done, and that has included sending soldiers into the Legislative Assembly to pressure them into approving a loan necessary to militarize the National Civil Police force, he and his party booted the Supreme Court's justices and the country's attorney general in an act that has been described as an autogolpe, or self-coup, a move by which the president takes full authoritarian control of his country while in power, he instigated widespread arrests and allowed all sorts of police abuses during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, and he and his party have been accused of all manners of corruption—though the attorney general who was investigating twenty such instances of corruption was fired, as I mentioned, so there's no longer any watchdog in the country keeping tabs on him and his cronies as they seemingly grab what they can— and that's led to a shift in the country's corruption perception index ranking, dropping it to 116 out of 180 ranked countries in 2022, with a score of 33 out of 100, higher being better on that latter figure; for comparison, that puts it on equal footing, according to this index's metrics, with Algeria, Angola, Mongolia, the Philippines, Ukraine, and Zambia. All of which is to say, after taking control of El Salvador, Bukele has rapidly reinforced his position, grabbing more of the reins of power for himself and firing or disempowering anyone who might be in the position to challenge the increasingly absolute power he wields. Despite all this, as I mentioned, though, he is incredibly popular, and the primary reason for this popularity seems to be that he has aggressively gone after gangs, and that has apparently dropped the homicide rate in the country precipitously, from around 103 murders per 100,000 people in 2015 down to just 17.6 per 100,000 in 2021; and the government has said it fell still further, down to half that 2021 that number, in 2022. So while there's reason to question the accuracy of some...

This week we talk about the raising of Chicago, Jakarta, and sea level rise. We also discuss groundwater, flooding, and insurance. Recommended Book: Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire Transcript In the mid-19th century, the city of Chicago, its many sidewalks and buildings and other infrastructure, were hoisted using jackscrews, which are kind of like heavy-duty versions of the jacks you might use to lift your car to replace a tire. The impetus for this undertaking, which was substantial and paid for with a combination of city and private funds, was Chicago's persistent drainage issues: the city was located at about the same altitude as neighboring Lake Michigan, and the ground upon which it was constructed was consequently pretty swampy to begin with, but became even more so as all those sidewalks and buildings and other human-made environmental objects were installed, putting downward pressure on that swampy soil, which led to widespread and persistent pools of standing water throughout the city. All this standing water led to the spread of diseases like dysentery and typhoid fever—the sorts of issues that tend to arise when there's opportunity for pathogenic beasties to hang out and spread and come into contact with drinking water sources, not to mention essentially every surface in a city, and in 1854 there was an outbreak of cholera—which is also caused by bacteria getting into peoples' bodies, usually from infected water sources—that killed about 6% of Chicago's total population. So this was an area that was already prone to what's called subsidence—the sinking of land that can be both natural and sparked or amplified by human activity in various ways—and Chicago's development into a city sped up that process, causing it to sink even further, quite rapidly, and that led to a collection of mostly but not exclusively water-related issues, which at this moment in history, the mid-19th century, meant a lot of disease-spread due to insufficient water sanitation efforts and infrastructure, and a very hit-or-miss understanding of the mechanisms of the diseases that were carried by that insufficiently treated water. The first brick building to be hoisted in this way was elevated in January of 1858 and required about 200 jackscrews to lift it six feet and 2 inches higher than its previous altitude, and that kicked-off a period of remarkably rapid and successful elevations throughout the city, including all sorts of huge, heavy, at times quite wide and cumbersome buildings of all heights and material composition, installing elements of the city's new sewage systems around the existing buildings, then covering all that up with soil, pouring or reinstalling roads and sidewalks atop that soil at the new height, and then raising all the buildings, filling the space beneath them with soil as they were slowly cranked up to that new baseline. This wasn't a straightforward effort, and there were several false-starts, initial problems that had to be solved, and quite a few pieces of the old city that either couldn't be elevated, and thus had to be buried and rebuilt, or that were moved to new locations, placed on rollers and shifted to areas, mostly on the outskirts of the city, which kept them aloft without having to raise them using the jackscrew method. Interestingly, some of the elevated buildings, like the Tremont House hotel, continued to function even as they were raised; guests continued to frequent the hotel, and some of them apparently didn't even realize it was in the process of being elevated while they were staying there. This process was largely completed in the 1960s, and much of the city, as it existed at the time, was raised by 4 and 14 feet—and that provided space for the new sewage system that would help with all those water and water-borne illness issues, while also establishing a new baseline altitude for future developments, which would be able to use that same sewer system while also being lifted up...

This week we talk about Indonesia, South Africa, and geopolitical risks. We also discuss the South China Sea, the US Presidential election, and Potemkin democracy. Recommended Book: The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell Transcript By many metrics, 2023 was a tumultuous year. In the latter-quarter, in early October, the paramilitary group Hamas launched a sneak-attack on Israel which kicked off a new round of turmoil directly, on the ground, in the Gaza Strip, where Israel launched a hastily organized counterattack, and that's led to a fresh humanitarian crisis in the Strip, as resident Palestinians have been killed in the tens of thousands, as the Israeli military has sought out and tried to get revenge against Hamas fighters and leaders, but it's also upended the region as Egypt has tried to position itself as peacemaker, while also trying to stave-off the possibility of hundreds of thousands of Gazans being pushed across the border into the Sinai Peninsula, and further north Hezbola militants have engaged in an, at this point anyway, relatively low-key shootout with Israel across the Lebanese border, increasing the perceptual likelihood, at least, of a conflict that increases in scope, encapsulating more of Iran's allies and subsidiary groups, and possible even Iran itself. That component of the conflict has also started to impact global trade as the Red Sea—a channel connecting Asia with Europe through the Suez Canal—has been plagued by gunman and drone and missile attacks by Houthi groups in Yemen, which are also supported by Iran and ostensibly launching these attacks in solidarity with those under-siege Palestinians in Gaza. Further north, across the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, which kicked-off in earnest when the latter invaded the former in late-February of 2022, continues apace, though the frontlines in the conflict have remained fairly static for the better part of a year, and the two sides have doubled-down on launching missiles and drones at each other, reorienting toward asymmetric attacks on stockpiles and supply chains, alongside attacks on civilian centers meant to psychologically damage the other side, rather than fixating entirely on ground assaults meant to formally claim or reclaim territory. This conflict continues to shape global alliances and eat up gobs of monetary and military resources, as Russia imports weapons and supplies from allies like Iran and China, and Ukraine receives funding from mostly Western nations, though that support could diminish or even largely dry up, soon, depending on the political meanderings of its allies in those countries in the coming months. The drumbeat toward potential conflict in the South China Sea also continues to increase in tempo as the Chinese military upgrades and reorganizes its infrastructure and leadership, and forced accidents between ships in the area—especially but not exclusively between Chinese and Filipino assets—have become more common as both sides have decided to draw a line in the sand, China wanting to maintain a sense of invincibility and inevitability for its expansionary efforts, and the Philippines becoming more confident in its regional alliances, which are solidifying around efforts to prevent growth and influence-expansion on the part of China's military—including its stated intention to bring Taiwan under its control, by force if necessary, sometime in the next handful of years. There's also heightened concern about conflicts and potential conflicts in the Sahel region in northwestern Africa. A series of recent military coups against elected governments have lent this strip of land the nickname "the coup belt," and a handful of military dictatorships that have emerged from these coups have gestured at creating a sort of rough alliance meant to deter opposition from local democracies—many of which are themselves wary of coups within their own borders, and suffering from many of the...

Note: I’m taking next week off for the new year and to work on my next book—this month’s More Things bonus episodes has thus been moved to this upcoming Thursday, and you’ll see the next LKT episode on January 2! This week we talk about Venezuelan, Guyana, and the British. We also discuss oil deposits, gold, and the Geneva Agreement. Recommended Book: Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross Transcript In 1581, Dutch colonists arrived in South America, setting up a colony along the northern coast—but that embryonic settlement, called Pomeroon, was wiped out about a decade and a half later by the British; and survivors from Pomeroon then founded a new settlement on the back of an existing but abondoned Portuguese fort, located on an island in the middle of a river, that was an offshoot of the major regional waterway, the Essequibo River—they took over this fort, and then eventually retook Pomeroon from the British, with the help of their allies, the French. The specifics of all this conquering and reconquering aren't terribly important, though: what's important to know is that this settlement was located in a strategic area, globally, because it allowed Europeans to grow incredibly valuable crops, like sugarcane, in an region that was accessible to ocean-traversing vessels, and in a location that was an established crossroads for local trade, which made acquiring local resources a lot easier, and getting workers for these plantations at lot simpler, as well. All of which has meant this region—like many other scattered throughout the world, but especially those with natural ports and located somewhere near the equator—was a somewhat tumultuous, violent place for a long while, in large part because all these Europeans kept popping in to kill and take and build and destroy existing buildings and to fight with each other, while also leaving a lot of dead locals and destroyed local infrastructure and ecosystems in their wake. Following that initial period of back and forth, though, things calmed down a bit, and the Dutch fleshed out their holdings, vastly expanding the scope of their plantations, even to the point—and this was fairly controversial at the time—that they allowed English planters to join them from 1740, onward, which increased the scope of the plantations thereabouts still-further. In February of 1781, some British privateers showed up, captured the main settlements, and then left, and in March of that same year two Royal Navy sloops arrived and did the same, conquering the area for the British Crown until the French showed up, beat the local British forces, and occupied the colony; though a peace deal back in Europe resulted in this colony being handed back to the Dutch in 1783. In 1796 it was reoccupied by the British, the Dutch retook it, holding it from 1802 until 1803, then the British took it again during the Napoleonic Wars, and it became an official British territory in mid-1814. That was the end of that second period of conflicts, as the big, violent rush to claim as much area as possible during the Age of Discovery was beginning to wane, there was a sort of peace, in some aspects of the word, at least, emerging between European powers, and many of these entities were finding they made more money by trading than by fighting with each other all the time. That said, a more fundamental conflict remained in this area, as the Spanish held a neighboring territory, the border between that territory and this one held by the British typically delineated by the Essequibo river. So the Spanish were busy with a series of colonial independence movements when the British rolled up this collection of plantations and habitations on the east side of the Essequibo river, and thus the Spanish didn't really have anything to say on the matter, despite at times having claimed portions of the territory the British were now claiming as their own. And maybe partially because of that...

This week we talk about stainless steel, DARPA, and GNoME. We also discuss ceramics, DeepMind, and self-driving labs. Recommended Book: Drunk On All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson Transcript In a recent episode, I talked a bit about the bronze and copper ages, and how reaching the level of technological know-how so that it's possible to heat metals so you can blend them with other metals, forge them into useful things, and generally work with them in a more fundamental way than is possible if you're simply chipping away at them, bending them with brute strength, and so on, grants you all sorts of additional powers that those cruder methods do not offer. Copper's a pretty basic material to work with, as metals go, in part because of its elemental properties, and in part because it appears in nature, on Earth, in its pure form, so it's not something our ancestors would have had to imagine from whole cloth—they could see it, work with it, and thus, had a pretty good sense of what it was and what it was capable of. Bronze, an alloy of copper—with some amount of tin mixed into the copper to make it more resilient and strong, and thus, useful for many things—was different in that it's not natural and doesn't occur unless we synthetically produce it. Iron is similar to copper in that it's natural, though it's also a lot stronger and thus harder to work with, lacking the metallurgical capacity to melt it down and reshape it in a liquified form, and steel is in this way a bit like bronze in that it's an alloy of iron—iron mixed with carbon—and variations on the theme, like stainless steels, have some amount of chromium blended in with the iron and carbon, alongside nickel, in some cases, which makes it even more complex, and thus essentially impossible to imagine if you're limited to what nature provides you, in terms of practicality, and thus, often at least, your conception of materials-related possibilities. So part of the challenge in attaining mastery over difference materials, including but not limited to metals, is discovering them and having access to the requisite natural resources, like iron and copper, in the first place, but then also, over time, learning that you can manipulate them in various ways, and then over time—often long, long stretches of time, generationally long periods of time in some cases—refining those methods of manipulation until it's possible to do so economically, but also, typically, at some kind of productive scale: allowing you to make enough of the material so you can churn out, for instance, armor and swords made out of it, or if we're talking about ceramic goods, stuff made of clay and silica and carbon, among other substances, scaling-up the process so you can produce more jugs and pots and urns, more food-preservation technologies and clay tablets for writing and bricks for building homes and other structures; and that's alongside the parallel process of simply learning how to capably work with these materials, once a sufficient volume of them becomes available. So while metal and clay are different sorts of substances, they're both materials that we use to make objects—we take basic, earth-derived stuff and reshape it into things that are useful to us in some way, whether that means as a weapon or means of manufacturing things, or as clothing, homes, or objects of beauty—artworks and such. Materials science is a field focused on the many facets of these types of resources, with some practitioners working with existing materials in order to better understand them, others sussing out various means of scaling-up production or iterating upon existing modes of production to make them more economical or sustainable, while still others aim to produce new materials of this kind: in some cases discovering existing-but-rare new materials, in the sense that we haven't discovered them, at least in the scientific sense, before, but often production, in this context, means combining...