This is something I posted in the “state of the world” conversation with Bruce Sterling on the WELL…
I give talks on the history and future of media, and on the history, evolution, and history of the Internet. I gave the talk this week to a small group gathered for lunch in a coworking space here in Austin, and after hearing the talk a technologist I know, Gray Abbott, suggested that I say more about the coming balkanization of the network as the most likely scenario. The Internet is a network of networks that depends on cooperative peering agreements – I carry your traffic and you carry mine. The high speed Internet is increasingly dependent on the networks of big providers, the telcos or cable companies like AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Time Warner, and Comcast. They all see the substantial value supported by their networks and want to extract more of it for themselves. They talk about the high cost of bandwidth as a rationale for charging more for services – or metering services – but I think the real issue is value. When you see Google and Facebook and Netflix making bundles of money using your pipes, you want a cut. And if you’ve also tried to get into the business of providing content, it’s bothersome to see your network carrying other competing content services, including guerilla media distribution via BitTorrent.
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.
Did you know that Raleigh, N.C. had the highest rate of population growth in the last decade of any large metropolitan area?
Metropolitan population growth is just one of more than a thousand topics addressed in the U.S. Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2011. The Abstract is perennially the federal government's best-selling reference book. When it was first published in 1878, the nation had only 38 states, people usually got around using a horse and buggy, Miami and Las Vegas did not yet exist, and Franklin D. Roosevelt had yet to be born. The Abstract has been published nearly every year since then.
Contained in the 130th edition are 1,407 tables of social, political and economic facts that collectively describe the state of our nation and the world. Included this year are 65 new tables, covering topics such as insufficient rest or sleep, nursing home occupancy, homeschooling, earthquakes, U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions, organic farmland, honey bee colonies, crashes involving distracted drivers and cities with the highest transit savings.
The statistics come not only from the Census Bureau but also from other governmental agencies and private organizations. The data generally represent the most recent year or period available by summer 2010. Most are national-level data, but some tables present state- and even city- and metropolitan-level data as well.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
+ Thanks to those posting to the ResourceShelf Twitter feed
On January 11 at 9 a.m. EST, Google will host a live event on its brand new Science Fair YouTube Channel. More details about the fair will be announced then; we’re assuming the site will be fleshed out at that time, as well.
The global science competition is being hosted in partnership with CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), LEGO, National Geographic and Scientific American. The goal is “to create a new kind of online science competition that is more global, open and inclusive than ever before.”
Teachers who want to receive classroom materials, including posters, stickers and bookmarks, as well as get registration information, can start signing up now.
Thanks to those posting to Mashable's Twitter feed (source article).
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: The existence of double sets of books is now coming to light. As best we can tell from various public discussions, the operating budgets are deliberately in the red and used to borrow money, at the same time that out-sourced services and “asset rents” are in the black. We honestly do not know what the true situation is, but we do know that the amount of falsehood and fraud in the “system” is deep.
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Overdrawn American cities could face financial collapse in 2011, defaulting on hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowings and derailing the US economic recovery. Nor are European cities safe – Florence, Barcelona, Madrid, Venice: all are in trouble
Elena Moya, guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 December 2010
More than 100 American cities could go bust next year as the debt crisis that has taken down banks and countries threatens next to spark a municipal meltdown, a leading analyst has warned.
“A review of the Pakistani media during October 2010 indicates that there is less talk of imminent political change.” That is the rather pedestrian conclusion of a brief report (pdf) that was prepared last November by “Open Source Works,” a previously unknown initiative of the CIA Directorate of Intelligence.
Open Source Works “was charged by the Director for Intelligence with drawing on language-trained analysts to mine open-source information for new or alternative insights on intelligence issues. Open Source Works' products, based only on open source information, do not represent the coordinated views of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
The recent report on Pakistan seems to be the first Open Source Works document to have reached public hands, though it is more of a digest of recent news and opinion than what would properly be termed an intelligence product. A copy was obtained by Secrecy News. See “Pakistan Leadership Watch: October 2010,” CIA Directorate of Intelligence, November 8, 2010.
Phi Beta Iota: In light of Chuck Spinney's many posts on Pakistan and Afghanistan (using only English-language sources), and the reality that Pakistan is about to explode, the abyssmal limitations of this report merit gloomy note. It's been 18 years since Joe Markowitz first got a DCID on OSINT–and this is what we have to show for it?
