This week we talk about virtual reality, the Meta Quest, and the Apple Vision Pro.We also discuss augmented reality, Magic Leap, and the iPhone.Recommended Book: Daemon by Daniel SuarezTranscriptRansomware is a sub-type of malware, which is malicious software that prevents its victim from accessing their data.So that might mean keeping them from logging into their cloud storage, but it might also mean encrypting their data so that there&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39; 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&#39;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,

LockBit

This week we talk about the Meiji Revolution, shoguns, and the Lost Decade.We also discuss NVIDIA, economic bubbles, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange.Recommended Book: The Blue Machine by Helen CzerskiTranscriptWhat became known as the Meiji Restoration, but which at the time was generally, locally, called the Honorable Restoration, refers to a period of massive and rapid change in Japan following the restoration of practical powers to the country&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t popular amongst the nation&#39;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 n

Japan's Economy

This week we talk about virtual reality, the Meta Quest, and the Apple Vision Pro.We also discuss augmented reality, Magic Leap, and the iPhone.Recommended Book: Extremely Online by Taylor LorenzTranscriptThe term spacial computing seems to have been coined in the mid-1980s within the field of geographic information systems, or GIS, which focuses on using digital technology to mess with geographic data in a variety of hopefully useful ways.So if you were to import a bunch of maps and GPS coordinates and the locations of buildings and parks and such into a database, and then make that database searchable, plotting its points onto a digital map in an app, making something like Google Maps, that would be a practical utility of GIS research and development.The term spacial computing refers to pulling computer-based engagement into physical spaces, allowing us to plot and use information in the real world, rather than relegating that information to flat screens like computers and smartphones.This could be useful, it was posited, back in the early days of the term, as it would theoretically allow us to map out and see, with deep accuracy and specificity, how a proposed building would look on a particular street corner when finished, and how it would feel to walk through a house we&#39;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&#39;t generally covered by VR, like the ability to engage with one&#39;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 othe

Spacial Computing

This week we talk about The Messenger, ads, and generative AI.We also discuss search engines, algorithms, and Semafor’s new curation tool.Recommended Book: The Coming Wave by Mustafa SuleymanTranscriptThere was a piece published on McSweeney&#39;s, a humorous, often satirical writing site, recently, entitled &quot;Our Digital Media Platform Will Revolutionize News and Is Also Shutting Down,&quot; written by Devin Wallace, that includes gems, ostensibly from an announcement by some kind of new media business, like this one:&quot;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.&quot;It goes on to say:&quot;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.&quot;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&#39;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 c

News Media Collapse

This week we talk about CAR Ts, lupus, and antigen-presenting cells.We also discuss Hashimoto’s, potential cures, and allergies.Recommended Book: The Avoidable War by Kevin RuddTranscriptChimeric antigen receptors, usually shorthanded as CARs, are a type of protein structure that receives and transmits signals within biological systems.The term &quot;CAR T cell&quot; 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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t respond well to conventional treatments, or who continued to relapse after several rounds of cancer therapy. It&#39;s a last line of defense, at this point, in part because it&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s a theory that essentially all human beings have some kind of immunodeficiency: something that our immune systems don&#39;

Autoimmune Disease Therapies

This week we talk about robo-Biden, fake Swift images, and ElevenLabs.We also discuss copyright, AI George Carlin, and deepfakes.Recommended Book: Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David GraeberTranscriptThe hosts of a podcast called Dudesy are facing a lawsuit after they made a video that seems to show the late comedian George Carlin performing a new routine.The duo claimed they created the video using AI tools, training an algorithm on five decades-worth of Carlin&#39;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 &quot;George Carlin: I&#39;m Glad I&#39;m Dead,&quot; was the product of AI tools.The lawsuit was filed by Carlin&#39;s estate, which alleges these hosts infringed on the copyright they have on Carlin&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t written by AI, it was written by one of the human hosts, and thus the claim of copyright violation wasn&#39;t legit, because while the jokes may have been inspired by Carlin&#39;s work, they weren&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s not Carlin and that it&#39;s merely impersonating him like a human comedian doing their best impression of Carlin.In practice, that means listening to all of Carlin&#39;s material and mimicking his voice and cadence and inflections and the way he tells stories and builds up to punchlines and everything el

AI Impersonation

This week we talk about Operation Iron Swords, October 7, and the International Court of Justice.We also discuss human rights abuses, the Red Sea, and Iran’s influence.Recommended Book: Empire Games by Charles StrossTranscriptIn the early morning of October 7, 2023, the militant wing of Hamas—which is also a political organization that has governed the Gaza Strip territory since 2007, a few years after Israel withdrew from the area and then blockaded it, leading to accusations from international human rights organizations that Israel still occupies the area, even if not officially—but the militant wing of this Sunni Islamist group, Hamas, launched a sneak-attack, in coordination with other islamist groups (a term that in this context usually but not always refers to groups that want to claim territory they can govern in accordance with what they consider to be proper Islamic fashion, usually defined by a fairly extreme interpretation of the religion).This sneak-attack was successful in the sense that it caught seemingly everyone off guard, despite the Israeli military&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s attack as a terror

Middle East Conflicts

This week we talk about Bukele, Naboa, and the war on gangs.We also discuss emergency powers, authoritarianism, and the cocaine trade.Recommended Book: Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-StaceTranscriptNayib Bukele is the 43rd president of El Salvador, and he&#39;s an unusual leader for the country in that he&#39;s young—born in 1981, so just 42 years old, as of the day I&#39;m recording this—and in that he&#39;s incredibly popular, having maintained an approval rating of around 90% essentially since he stepped into the presidency back in 2019.He&#39;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&#39;t turned out as planned—Bitcoin has experienced a resurgence in recent months as some governments have passed somewhat favorable policies, including the SEC&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s based on external estimates as the country doesn&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s justices and the country&#39;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&#39;s no longer any watchdog in the country keeping tabs on him and his cronies as they seemingly grab what they can— and that&#39;s led to a shift in the country&#39;s corruption perception in

Ecuador State of Emergency

This week we talk about the raising of Chicago, Jakarta, and sea level rise.We also discuss groundwater, flooding, and insurance.Recommended Book: Once Upon a Tome by Oliver DarkshireTranscriptIn the mid-19th century, the city of Chicago, its many sidewalks and buildings and other infrastructure, were hoisted using jackscrews, which are kind of like heavy-duty versions of the jacks you might use to lift your car to replace a tire.The impetus for this undertaking, which was substantial and paid for with a combination of city and private funds, was Chicago&#39;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&#39;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&#39; bodies, usually from infected water sources—that killed about 6% of Chicago&#39;s total population.So this was an area that was already prone to what&#39;s called subsidence—the sinking of land that can be both natural and sparked or amplified by human activity in various ways—and Chicago&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t a straightforward effort, and there were several false-starts, initia

Subsidence

This week we talk about Indonesia, South Africa, and geopolitical risks.We also discuss the South China Sea, the US Presidential election, and Potemkin democracy.Recommended Book: The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff GoodellTranscriptBy many metrics, 2023 was a tumultuous year.In the latter-quarter, in early October, the paramilitary group Hamas launched a sneak-attack on Israel which kicked off a new round of turmoil directly, on the ground, in the Gaza Strip, where Israel launched a hastily organized counterattack, and that&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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—

2024 Elections

Note: I’m taking next week off for the new year and to work on my next book—this month’s More Things bonus episodes has thus been moved to this upcoming Thursday, and you’ll see the next LKT episode on January 2!This week we talk about Venezuelan, Guyana, and the British.We also discuss oil deposits, gold, and the Geneva Agreement.Recommended Book: Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy RossTranscriptIn 1581, Dutch colonists arrived in South America, setting up a colony along the northern coast—but that embryonic settlement, called Pomeroon, was wiped out about a decade and a half later by the British; and survivors from Pomeroon then founded a new settlement on the back of an existing but abondoned Portuguese fort, located on an island in the middle of a river, that was an offshoot of the major regional waterway, the Essequibo River—they took over this fort, and then eventually retook Pomeroon from the British, with the help of their allies, the French.The specifics of all this conquering and reconquering aren&#39;t terribly important, though: what&#39;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

Essequibo

This week we talk about stainless steel, DARPA, and GNoME.We also discuss ceramics, DeepMind, and self-driving labs.Recommended Book: Drunk On All Your Strange New Words by Eddie RobsonTranscriptIn a recent episode, I talked a bit about the bronze and copper ages, and how reaching the level of technological know-how so that it&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s not natural and doesn&#39;t occur unless we synthetically produce it.Iron is similar to copper in that it&#39;s natural, though it&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s alongside the parallel process

Materials Science

This week we talk about renewables, open-pit mines, and the Bronze Age.We also discuss the Cobre mine, First Quantum, and environmentalism.Recommended Book: The Possibility of Life by Jaime GreenTranscriptDepending on whose numbers you use, and where you choose to place your chronological brackets, the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, began around 5,000 BCE, around 7,000 years ago, with the smelting of copper at high temperatures.The oldest confirmed and dated site relevant to the beginning of this age is in Serbia, though this capability seems to have been developed, independently, at various places around the world within a few thousand years of each other, including China, North America, in the Great Lakes region, and in what is today Pakistan, as well, among other locations.The process of smelting copper that was practiced in Eurasia, in what we might today call Central or Eastern Europe and Western Asia, slowly moved the continent out of the Neolithic period, which was largely defined by humanity&#39;s construction of organized settlements, widespread adoption of agriculture and animal domestication, and large-scale pivot away from nomadic, hunter-gatherer-style ways of living.Folks at that time were also getting a lot of mileage out of early ceramics and stone tools, alongside all sorts of ornaments and artworks made of these and other materials that required skill and some level of technology to use, but which didn&#39;t require metallurgy.Humans were still using a lot of stone tools during this period, then, but started to include heat-worked copper elements into their tools, as well.So the Copper Age saw the development of very basic metallurgy by many interconnected groups throughout this part of the world, and though some early writers on the subject grouped the use of copper and bronze together, defining a much larger period as the Bronze Age in an undifferentiated way, modern scholarship on the matter, beginning in the late 19th-century, breaks them apart into the earlier Copper and subsequent Bronze Ages because the manipulation and use, and often then the heavy reliance on copper tended to segue a society, eventually, toward bronze, the latter being more difficult to wield, and the former generally serving as a transitional sort of technology.And that&#39;s because copper is one of the rare metals that naturally occurs in a usable form in the Earth: so folks were using copper for a variety of purposes as far back as 8,000 BCE-ish, but we tend to use the smelting of copper as a delineation for the eponymous age, because that&#39;s when humans started to really work it, having become capable of building the technologies required to reach the requisite heat levels, and to control the metal and shape it, rather than simply finding it in its raw form and using chunks or slivers of it for decoration or weaponry-related purposes.Bronze is an alloy consisting of copper and tin, and the proper melding of these two metals makes the resulting sub

Panama's Copper

This week we talk about weeds, lawn mowers, and California’s Air Resources Board.We also discuss ornamental lawns, leaf blowers, and two-stroke engines.Recommended Book: The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel DurantTranscriptThe concept of the modern lawn—a term that originally referred to a somewhat ecologically varied, short-cropped green space that was used for livestock, in contrast to fields that were used for growing agricultural plants—is derived from a variation of the lawns built and maintained by European aristocracy, especially British aristocracy, in the mid- to late-teens centuries, BC.The concept evolved from a sort of posturing that only wealthy people could manage, back then, before the advent of grass-trimming machinery.And the flex here was two-fold:First, here is an expanse of land, which typically would have been put to use, in this case for livestock, but which I, because I&#39;m wealthy, can leave unproductive, untarnished by beasts, and thus for purely beautification and recreational purposes; I can impress people with my sweeping plots of greenery, I can make it uniform and, thus, interesting, in an age in which nature is still being wrestled with and perfection by any standard is rare, and I have enough people working for me that all this maintenance, despite its incredible weight, all that grass in some cases being hand-scythed and sheered by human beings toiling all day long—I can afford to do that. So, look upon my fields, my vast tracts of ornamental land, and be amazed.So simply setting aside land for this aesthetic-focused purpose was big, but so was maintaining such a thing in a period in which that maintenance was the consequence of long, hard, expensive human labor.That ornamentality became more accessible to more people with the advent of early mowing machines, the first of which was unpowered, made from wrought-iron, and used a cylinder of blades that would spin when you pushed it.That was invented in 1830 in England, and from there these Budding Machines, named after the inventor, Edward Budding, were sold to entities with large expanses of land, like the Oxford colleges and Regents Park Zoological Gardens, which in turn helped Budding, mostly financially, evolve his machine, which was then manufactured at a larger scale and licensed to other companies that wanted to make their own version of the same.Within a decade, these mowing devices had been augmented so they could be pulled by horses, donkeys, and other beasts of burden.Just over sixty years after that first model was built by Budding, the first steam-powered mower, still pulled by animals, usually, but much more powerful, was patented, and then eventually built and sold, and by 1900 a popular model of steam-powered mower, the Ransomes&#39; Automaton, which is just a wonderful and steampunk name for anything, was dominant in the English market, and the first riding lawn mowers arose around the same time, as seats for operators were added on to

Electric Lawn Care

This week we talk about methane, the UAE, and organizational capture.We also discuss climate change, broken governmental promises, and Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber.Recommended Book: Raw Dog by Jamie LoftusTranscriptThe United Nations Climate Change Conferences, often referred to as COP meetings, short for &quot;Conference of the Parties,&quot; are formal, annual meetings where issues related to climate change are discussed by attendees.These meetings have been occurring at their yearly cadence since 1995—though the November 2020 meeting was put off till November 2021, because of the COVID pandemic that almost entirely dominated international attention and governmental efforts, that year.COP meetings are held in different locations around the world, with host countries chosen from among those that offer to provide the requisite facilities and services for all attendees, which can represent a who&#39;s who of governments and businesses; so this isn&#39;t quite an Olympics level of commitment and expense, but it is quite an undertaking, as those host countries need to provide security for all those leaders, translation services for six different working languages, and they also need to help engage stakeholders, ranging from diplomats to the CEOs of the world&#39;s biggest companies, flogging support for the meetings themselves, but also the core themes of each meeting, which vary from year to year.These themes are important, as they&#39;ve historically led to some of the most vital agreements we&#39;ve seen between nations and other stakeholders, including the Kyoto Protocol, which was an early, 1990s-era emissions-reduction agreement between wealthy nations, and the Paris Agreement, which expounded upon that same general concept, though with much more aggressive targets and a wider scope of things the signatories had to take into consideration.On November 30 through December 12 of 2023, signatory nations and other entities will meet for the COP28 meeting, this time hosted in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.This is interesting for several reasons, but the most prominent—and the reason this choice was controversial—is that the UAE, like many other nations in the region, is a huge fossil fuel producer, about 30% of its total economy reliant on oil and gas exports.What&#39;s more, the President-Designate for COP28—the person who was put in charge of running things, but also getting those aforementioned stakeholders in line, making commitments, showing support, doing all the things they need to do to make this a successful COP meeting with something to show for their efforts—is Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber: the Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology for the UAE, the chairman of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, also called Masdar, and the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company—the first CEO to serve as a COP President, and, well, definitely the first oil company CEO to head up a meeting meant to help the world deal with climate cha

COP28

This week we talk about Rubinomics, government spending, and US federal debt.We also discuss the Government-Household analogy, the House of Representatives, and the looming government shutdown.Recommended Book: Quantum Supremacy by Michio KakuTranscriptEarly in November 2023, the credit firm Moody&#39;s lowered its outlook on the US government&#39;s credit rating from &quot;stable&quot; to &quot;negative,&quot; pointing at a huge decline in debt affordability—the government&#39;s ability to borrow money cheaply, basically—and an ever-increasing, already gargantuan deficit as its primary justifications for that change.And those issues are on top of another standoff in the House of Representatives over funding the government, which, if something isn&#39;t done, will come to a head on November 17.A previous agreement struck by the previous House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, expires on that day, and if a new collection of 12 funding bills, which are what allows the government to pay for things, are not passed by then, the government could be shut down, possibly further diminishing the government&#39;s rating, on top of the many other consequences of not providing funding for things like national defense, energy and water development, and the Justice Department.This new reduction in outlook by Moody&#39;s follows a recent downgrade by Fitch back in August, when that ratings firm dropped the US government&#39;s rating from AAA to AA+, largely because of all the down-to-the-wire negotiations about funding the government that have roiled Congress over the past few years, and what that kind of tumult does to a government&#39;s ability to say for 100% certain that they&#39;ll pay their debts and never default; the US has never defaulted on its debt, but the possibility becomes more realistic-seeming each time these politicians fail to provide funding for essential government functions, including, debt-paying.Fitch also, like Moody&#39;s, cited the general diminishment in fiscal circumstances across the government, though, referring to a collection of variables that have been weighing down the state&#39;s capacity to acquire cheap debt.Ratings are one such variable, as each decrease in a nation&#39;s credit rating makes debt more expensive, folks and other states buying bonds and treasuries and the like demanding more interest for the same amount of loaned money—which is what those sorts of financial instruments are, at the end of the day.But beyond reputation, there are also factors like high interest rates, hiked by the Fed in order to tamp-down on inflation, and the accumulated interest payments that must be paid on previous debt taken out by the government to pay its bills.So in addition to the government suddenly having to pay more interest on all its new debt, it also has to pay more and more interest on its existing debt, and that latter figure is compounding to the point that a lot of folks who are otherwise generally unconcerned about such things

The US Deficit

This week we talk about regulatory capture, Open AI, and Biden’s executive order.We also discuss the UK’s AI safety summit, open source AI models, and flogging fear. Recommended Book: The Resisters by Gish JenTranscriptRegulatory capture refers to the corruption of a regulatory body by entities to which the regulations that body creates and enforces, apply.So an organization that wants to see less funding for public schools and more for private and home schooling options getting one of their people into a position at the Department of Education, or someone from Goldman Sachs or another, similar financial institution getting shoehorned into a position at the Federal Reserve, could—through some lenses at least, and depending on how many connections those people in those positions have to those other, affiliated, ideological and commercial institutions—could be construed as engaging in regulatory capture, because they&#39;re now able to control the levers of regulation that apply to their own business or industry, or their peers, the folks they previously worked with and people to whom they maybe owe favors, or vice versa, and that could lead to regulations that are more favorable to them and their preferred causes, and those of their fellow travelers.This is in contrast to regulatory bodies that apply limits to such businesses and organizations, figuring out where they might overstep or lock in their own power at the expense of the industry in which they operate, and slowly, over time, plugging loopholes, finding instances of not-quite-illegal misdeeds that nonetheless lead to negative outcomes, and generally being the entity in charge in spaces that might otherwise be dominated by just one or two businesses that can kill off all their competition and make things worse for consumers and workers.Often, rather than regulatory capture being a matter of one person from a group insinuating themselves into the relevant regulatory body, the regulatory body, itself, will ask representatives from the industry they regulate to help them make law, because, ostensibly at least, those regulatees should know the business better than anyone else, and in helping to create their own constraints—again, ostensibly—they should be more willing to play by the rules, because they helped develop the rules to which they&#39;re meant to abide, and probably helped develop rules that they can live with and thrive under; because most regulators aren&#39;t trying to kill ambition or innovation or profit, they&#39;re just trying to prevent abuses and monopolistic hoarding.This sort of capture has taken many shapes over the years, and occurred at many scales.In the late-19th century, for instance, railroad tycoons petitioned the US government for regulation to help them bypass a clutter of state-level regulations that were making it difficult and expensive for them to do business, and in doing so—in asking to be regulated and helping the federal government develop t

Regulating AI

This week we talk about Peronists, Milei, and Argentina’s inflation rate.We also discuss Justicialism, Bullrich, and military coups.Recommended Book: Future Starts Here by John HiggsTranscriptPeronism, sometimes called Justicialism, after the Justicialist party, whose name is derived from the concept of social justice, and which is the main Peronist party in Argentina, has been the dominant political force in the country since the mid-20th century.The word Peronism comes from the labor secretary-turned-president of Argentina, Juan Perón, who&#39;s wife, Eva Perón you might have heard of, but Juan came into that labor secretary position after playing a role in a military coup in 1943, and was then elected president in 1946.	His platform was broadly predicated on new social programs, support for unions, and supporting his wife&#39;s efforts to attain rights for migrant workers, among other, adjacent efforts.In 1955, though, under the Peróns&#39; leadership, the country was experiencing high levels of inflation and other economic issues, alongside political repression from the Peronists—making it difficult for anyone else to step in and take any of their power, basically, despite being ostensibly democratic—so the military overthrew them in 1955, and the party was banned until 1973 when open, non-military-controlled elections were held again; and Perón won that election, returning to the presidency after nearly two decades.	Juan died a year after returning to office, and his widow, his third-wife Isabel, who was also his vice president before he died, stepped in to run the country, but she was overthrown by the military in another coup in 1976.Argentina was then run by a military dictatorship until 1983, when democracy returned, political parties were able to function again, and from that point forward, Peronist parties have dominated Argentine politics, their candidates holding the presidency for 28 of the 40 years between then and today, despite the very mixed record of Perón and others who have run as Peronists.And fundamental to that mixed record is the Peronist party&#39;s seeming inability to manage Argentina&#39;s economy.	The Peronists have always promised a great deal to Argentinian voters, including social benefits, allowing workers to negotiate as unions with their employers, and offering legal protections and the other benefits of citizenship to people and groups that have traditionally been disenfranchised—all of which was has earned them accolades over the years from groups across the political spectrum.	That said, the party and all its offshoots have also been accused of being authoritarian, coasting to power on populist messages and demagoguery, stripping would-be political opponents of their rights and sicing their supporters on them, initiating violence against them, in some cases, and in general creating an ideology that sounds great on paper, but which, when put into practice, is often tainted by the power-hoarding e

Argentine Election

This week we talk about fuel efficiency, the California EPA, and Scope 3.We also discuss the EU’s emission reporting efforts, regulations, and business incentives.Recommended Book: Undue Hate by Daniel F. StoneTranscriptThe California Air Resources Board, or CARB, is a California government agency that resulted from the 1967 merging of the state&#39;s Bureau of Air Sanitation and its Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board. It&#39;s part of California&#39;s larger Environmental Protection Agency, and its purpose is to make the air cleaner, healthier, and as free of toxins as possible.Falling under that remit is the setting of vehicle emissions standards: the minimum miles-per-gallon of fuel efficiency vehicles must offer in order to be sold in the state.	And California is the only state that&#39;s allowed to set such standards, as the federal US government is generally the setter of such things—but the Clean Air Act of 1967 allows the state to get permission to set its own standards from the US government, and then as long as the EPA doesn&#39;t find their standards arbitrary or broadly inconsistent with the goals of the US&#39;s ambitions, and as long as they&#39;re more ambitious than the US&#39;s standards for such things, they must grant that permission.The CARB only has 16 total members, two of whom are there just for oversight purposes, so they don&#39;t have voting powers, and 12 of the remaining 14 are appointed by the governor of California, and are then confirmed by the state senate.	Each of these members are different sorts of air and pollution experts from different regions across the state, except for two members of the public and one person who serves as the Chair of the group.This group, though small and relatively humble in terms of the powers granted to them, and resources allotted, has an out of proportion influence because other states can choose to adopt the vehicle fuel standards they set, instead of those set by the US government.	And that&#39;s important, because California&#39;s fuel standards, since 2009, at least, when they won a court case that confirmed their ability to do this, tend to be more ambitious than those set by the federal EPA; the states that choose to use California&#39;s standards are often referred to as CARB states, and there are 16 of them, inclusive of California, as of the 2025 regulatory year.This capability was temporarily truncated in 2019, when then-President Trump decided to take away California&#39;s right to set such standards, and the right to set up other popular—in California and other CARB states—programs, like the ZEV mandate, standing for Zero-Emissions Vehicle mandate, which basically said a certain percentage of fleet vehicles had to be zero-emissions vehicles, the percentage increasing each year—he wanted to take the right to set such things away, saying, in essence, a state government shouldn&#39;t be able to do so.	This rule was reverse in mid-2021, which gave California bac

SB 253

This week we talk about the Gaza Strip, the Yom Kippur War, and Egypt.We also discuss 9/11, charged topics, and sneak-attacks.Recommended Book: Pinpoint by Greg MilnerTranscriptIn 1972, the Egyptian military started building up its offense-capable forces, buying things like MiG fighter jets and T-62 tanks from the Soviet Union, while also gutting its swathe of generals—many of whom attained the rank for political, not experiential reasons—replacing them with more capable versions of the same.This buildup and swap-out of leadership was being conducted in the lead-up to an invasion of Israel, with the intention of reclaiming territory that Egypt lost during the Six-Day War in 1967: a conflict that saw Egypt, Syria, and Jordan all going to war with Israel, mostly because of the simmering bad relations Israel had had with all its Arab neighbors since the First Arab-Israeli War, which ended in 1949, but the catalyst for that conflict was Egypt threatening to close the Suez Canal and Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping; something that would be devastating to Israel&#39;s economy, and which the Israeli government had previously said would serve as a casus belli—a justification for war—and which was already the casus belli for the aforementioned First Arab-Israeli War.So the same general ingredients that led to the First Arab-Israeli War in the mid-20th century were in place again in the late-60s: strained relations between Israel and its neighbors, one of those neighbors threatening to clobber the Israeli economy by denying them the use of the Suez Canal and Straits of Tiran for shipping exports, and though the second time around the Egyptian military was pulled back into a defensive position after announcing that ban on Israeli shipping using these water channels, the Israeli military preemptively struck Egyptian forces and launched a ground offensive into Egypt that ended less than a week later.	This conflict left tens of thousands of Arab soldiers from these three countries dead, while Israel only suffered about a thousand fatalities.	The Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian governments gave up territory to Israel as part of the ceasefire following this relatively brief war, and the territory Egypt gave up—the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, which it had been occupying, directly informed that 1972 buildup of Egyptian forces and recalibration of their military leadership.Throughout that buildup and booting of generals, though, the Egyptian government tried to get Israel to accept a deal that would involve them giving the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt in exchange for the Egyptian government formally recognizing Israel&#39;s rights as an independent state—something none of its Arab neighbors were willing to do, which perhaps understandably had been an ongoing source of tension in the region.Everyone, including Israel&#39;s most powerful ally, the US, were keen on this agreement, but the Israeli government said no, as the deal wouldn&#39;t gu

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