A new study released today by America 2050 identifies the high-speed rail corridors with the greatest potential to attract ridership in each of the nation's megaregions. Corridors connecting populous regions with large job centers, rail transit networks, and existing air markets scored best. The study also recommends that the federal government adopt a quantitative approach to evaluating future investment in high-speed rail.
The 56-page study, entitled, “High-Speed Rail in America,” cites ridership potential as the number one factor in determining if a corridor is suitable for investment, identifies the specific conditions that generate ridership demand, and scores each corridor according to strength in those areas. The top performing corridors in each region determined to have the greatest potential demand for high-speed rail ridership include corridors such as: New York-Washington, DC; Chicago-Milwaukee; Los Angeles-San Diego; Tampa (via Orlando) to Miami; Dallas-Houston; Atlanta-Birmingham; Portland-Seattle; and Denver-Pueblo.
NIGHTWATCH Extract China-US: Special comment. International news services broadcast video and translations of Chinese Minister of Defense Liang insulting and hectoring the US, represented by the Secretary of Defense. The Chinese tasked Secretary Gates to defend and to explain to the Chinese why the US sells weapons to Taiwan and conducts naval training in the Yellow Sea. China demanded they stop. Instead of rejecting the Chinese demands and leaving, Gates tried to defend what needs not defense in Asia – US national policy.
A couple of points are worth noting. The tongue lashing Gates endured at a Singapore conference last year by a Chinese general clearly was no accident. That insult focused on the same issues as the latest. Gates should have walked out of the Singapore meeting last year and should have walked out of today's session. It remains unclear what the US hoped to gain that merited humiliation.
China is not ready to be a cooperative partner in international security affairs as some analysts contend; resents and resists the tutelage or guidance that some analysts think the US must offer; and has no intention of becoming more open in response to US requests if only because the US wants it so badly.
Phi Beta Iota: See our Memorandum on Chinese Irregular Warfare. The US Government has hit bottom in terms of lacking legitimacy at home and credibility abroad. Ideology is not a substitute for intelligence, and civility is not a substitute for cultural understanding.
The unscheduled visit by United States Vice President Joe Biden to Islamabad this week underscores Washington's embarrassment and anxiety that it stands excluded from a regional initiative on Afghan peace process that could be about to take off. The rapid sequence of events over the past fortnight has taken Washington by surprise.
DefDog Comment: Most insurgencies last past 10 years it almost always requires a political settlement….thus we are seeing what could have been accomplished at the beginning by understanding the Pashtun and sitting down, Jirga style, and asking for UBL, who was granted sanctuary under the Pasthun Honor Code, Pasthunwali…..no cultural understanding has resulted in a 10 year waste…
Phi Beta Iota: The US Government is suffering from multiple disconnects–from its public, from reality, from strategic analytics, from cultural intelligence–from ANY intelligence relevant to all challenges at all levels–and finally, from integrity. Integrity is what allows well-intentioned people to cope with ambiguity. When they give up their integrity, they yield the field to those with political, ideological, and financial ambitions, and the public interest suffers–as does the welfare of our Armed Forces in harm's way.
The Basel III bank-regulation proposals that G20 leaders will discuss fail to eliminate key structural flaws in the current system. Banks’ high leverage, and the resulting fragility and systemic risk, contributed to the near collapse of the financial system. Basel III is far from sufficient to protect the system from recurring crises. If a much larger fraction, at least 15%, of banks’ total, non-risk-weighted, assets were funded by equity, the social benefits would be substantial. And the social costs would be minimal, if any.
Some claim that requiring more equity lowers the banks’ return on equity and increases their overall funding costs. This claim reflects a basic fallacy. Using more equity changes how risk and reward are divided between equity holders and debt holders, but does not by itself affect funding costs.
Tax codes that provide advantages to debt financing over equity encourage banks to borrow too much. It is paradoxical to subsidize debt that generates systemic risk and then regulate to try to limit debt. Debt and equity should at least compete on even terms.
Proposals to impose a bank tax to pay for guarantees are problematic. High leverage encourages excessive risk taking and any guarantees exacerbate this problem. If banks use significantly more equity funding, there will be less risk taking at the expense of creditors or governments.
Debt that converts to equity, so-called “contingent capital,” is complex to design and tricky to implement. Increasing equity requirements is simpler and more effective.
Phi Beta Iota: Our political, policy, and military leaders simply do not know what they do not know. Assuming–desiring–that they have the best of intentions–the reality is that they are not receiving the intelligence (decision-support) that they require to make intelligent decisions. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, because there was political will, trillions have been wasted on “security” instead of sustenance. Haiti, because there were no political will, was a microcosm–20,000 troops with a huge logistics tail when what was really needed were CAB 21 Peace Jumpers able to call in a Reverse TPFID…. Advanced Cyber/IO starts with imagination & intelligence.
On Need to Know, we do a lot of reporting about the world’s problems. But we’re premiering a new series about people coming up with creative solutions — it’s called “Agents of Change.”
Social entrepreneur challenging conventional wisdom
Samasource–microwork (small digital tasks that can be done on an inexpensive computers).
Building 21st Century assembly line that can break down massive tasks (e.g. updating addresses for Google maps, or translating emergency messages from Creole to English). Won contracts with Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft.
15% premium for socially-conscious companies, AND competitive on cost, quality, and turnaround time.
Small scale digital tasks did not exist before.
Transforming lives, especially women, young men, and refugees. $5 a day is very much better than local norms, and buys an active English-speaking brain with hands able to do quality work.
IMPORTANT: Developing world is out-pacing USA and West generally in extending Internet infrastructure to the poor–centers created, humans come in, also doing viewing (Gorgon Stare, take note!), creating logs of store videos on shopper buying habits, anything that can be noticed and logged by a human–$5 a day.
Phi Beta Iota: We could not, in a million years, have found a better “off-set” to the USAF Gorgon Stare program. This micro-tasking, combining human brains and hands with Internet access, is one of the most profoundly intelligent and socio-economically useful ideas we have seen in our lifetimes (there are 800 of us here). BRAVO.
The American Way of War: If You Can See Everything, Can You Know Anything?
With Air Force's new drone, ‘we can see everything,'in today's Washington Post (attached below) is a good example of how the high-cost addiction to techno war is running amok. One thing ought to be clear in Afghanistan: A tiny adversary armed with the most primitive weapons, and a command and control system made up of prayer rugs and cell phones, has brought the high tech US military to a stalemate … or even worse, the looming specter a grand-strategic defeat, because we are becoming economically and morally exhausted by the futility of this war. It does not matter whether it is President Obama presiding over a vapid strategic review or a low ranking grunt on point in Afghanistan — the central problem facing the United States in Afghanistan is the absence of what the Germans call fingerspitzengefühlor the feeling in the fingerprints needed for an intuitive feel for or connection with one's environment.
As the American strategist Colonel John Boyd (USAF Ret.) showed, fingerspitzengefühl is absolutely essential to the kind of synthetic (as opposed to analytic) thinking that is necessary for quick, relevant, and ultimately successful decision making in war, where quick decisions and sharp actions at all levels must be made and harmonized in an ever-present atmosphere of menace, uncertainty, mistrust, fear, and chaos that impedes decisive action.[1]
Article About Grogon Stare
To paraphrase Clausewitz, these difficulties multiply to produce a kind of friction, and therefore, even though everything in war is simple, the simplest thing is difficult. Clausewitz considered friction is the atmosphere of war. Nevertheless, according to the Post, the Air Force is about to deploy to Afghanistan a “revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.”
Quoting Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force's assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything.” Nirvana. While the Post dutifully reports a smattering of opposing views, it misses the ramifications of the central idea epitomized by General Poss's confident assertion: namely, how the American ideology of techno war assumes it can negate the human need for fingerspitzengefühl on a battlefield.
General Poss's confidence suggests quite clearly he believes seeing everything enables one to know everything. This a stunning theory of knowledge. It is also a classic example of the American military's unquestioned belief that complex technologies coupled to step-by-step analytical procedures can negate the friction of combat to solve any problem in war. Lifting the fog of war is, in fact, a phrase frequently used in contractor brochures touting the efficacy of these technologies. This reflects theory of knowledge — really an unquestioned ideology — that views war as fundamentally a procedural problem of methodical analytical thinking, as opposed to its messy reality of being in large part an art of synthetic thinking.
Phi Beta Iota: This is fascinating and has enormous potential from local to global. It is what Amazon SHOULD have been, a means of harnessing the distributed intelligence of authors, reviewers, and readers. Phi Beta Iota was created to meet this need for one collection, cataloging Robert Steele's reading across 98 categories. We are contacting this group to suggest they create Global to Local Citizen Intelligence, Policy, and Budget Councils.
Working for change: Samasource redefines international aid 
