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| Wednesday, November 8, 2006 |
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The short answer is yes 
Repurposed tech
Whatever floats your gloat
| | Having fun with Dave, getting ready for the President's concession speech. (Teased by news that Donald Rumsfeld is out, which should be good news for everybody.) Hope the rest of ya'll are doing the same. |
Bottom lines
| | I've been thinking about this from a practical perspective lately as I look at our family bugdet and notice that we¹re spending $45 on wastewater and water, $50 on electricity, $150 on various phone services, and $15 on the internet. |
Mourning after
| | The easy analyses will focus on the sports and war of politics. Who won which race. Who knocked whom out of the ring. Who captured the most territory. |
| | But there are other things that matter. For example, 600,000 dead in Iraq since the American military occupation began. The problem here isn't just that we botched the job enormously. It's that there are other jobs we'll botch again no matter who's in charge, if we don't change the way we make war, keep peace and understand who and what our enemies are. On the latter, "Terrorists" doesn't cover it. Here's John Robb, reviewing Fred Ikle's Annihilation from Within: |
| | The global order we enjoy today is unravelling. The reason is simple. Technological change is moving forward faster than social/political change. Eventually, ubiquitous access to rapidly advancing technology will make it possible for small groups to confront status quo political and social structures with weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear, biological, and other unknown new technologies. Since our antiquated nation-states are not constructed to withstand these challenges the results will be devastating: some states will completely collapse, others will turn into police states, and some will be taken over by coups (he lays out a scenario for how these weapons can be used to take control of a state). In short, most of the damage that will be done won't be from the attacks themselves, but from the societal response to the attacks (hence the name: Annihilation from Within). He completes the book by providing us with some ideas on how to mitigate the societal damage -- continuity of leadership, detection, unity, and territorial sovereignty. |
| | What is needed are new simple platforms (my modification of Joseph Tainter's Byzantine strategy), that will continuously produce efficient, flexible, and non-zero sum resiliency from the bottom up. How to build these platforms is THE challenge of this century. |
| | That's just one issue. I'll post more later if I have time. |
discuss
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