John Robb's Weblog

FUTURE SALON

I am going to be giving a global guerrillas presentation at the Future Salon in Palo Alto on Friday night. Thanks to my friend Mark Finnern and SAP for making this happen.

Doc is exactly right

Doc: A thought, while remembering Vietnam: If we still had a draft in the U.S., we'd be out of Iraq by Christmas. In other words: a professional military makes war too easy (only a matter of what you can afford).

France

WP. It was just the scene the French government had been dreading: burning cars seven blocks from the Eiffel Tower, shop windows smashed along one of the capital's toniest streets, and columns of helmeted riot police advancing across the greensward of a prominent tourist venue... "My country is broken," said Ethuin, gazing at the smoldering automobile carcasses a few yards away and the carpet of glass shards, broken dishes and computer pieces covering the sidewalk in the heart of one of the city's most affluent neighborhoods. "I never imagined I would ever see this in Paris."

It looks like France is feeling the effects of globalization early. It may be the canary in the coal mine for many western societies as off-shoring sucks away jobs at an ever increasing rate. See Blinder:

Sometimes a quantitative change is so large that it brings about qualitative changes, as offshoring likely will. We have so far barely seen the tip of the offshoring iceberg, the eventual dimensions of which may be staggering... That said, we should not view the coming wave of offshoring as an impending catastrophe. Nor should we try to stop it. The normal gains from trade mean that the world as a whole cannot lose from increases in productivity, and the United States and other industrial countries have not only weathered but also benefited from comparable changes in the past. But in order to do so again, the governments and societies of the developed world must face up to the massive, complex, and multifaceted challenges that offshoring will bring. National data systems, trade policies, educational systems, social welfare programs, and politics all must adapt to new realities. Unfortunately, none of this is happening now.

Resilience isn't limited to security. It is also tied to economic prosperity. There aren't any answers to this on the national level. The answer is at the grassroots level. It is only at that level that you get the flexibility, innovation, and responsiveness to compete effectively. The first western country that creates a platform for economic interop and at the same time decentralizes power over everything else is going to be a big winner.

A Fish Tank

I spent a little time on myself the other day and bought a fish tank. I used to have fish over a decade ago and really enjoyed running an aquarium. The first thing I noticed is that the equipment is sooo much nicer today than it was back then. Here's some examples. I bought a SeaClear tank. The cool part is that it is built as a single piece from acrylic (rather than glass). This means that it doesn't leak (ever) and is light as a feather. It even came in a cool hexagon shape (they have bowfronts too). Very cool.

Here's some other things that have improved: the tubing for bubblers is soft and pliable (and retains the shape you put it in), the filter system self-primes, the filter media comes in nice packets (instead of the bulk raw form), everything comes with suction cups (to keep it attached to the back of the aquarium), there is a cleaning system that allows you to suck things off of the bottom of the tank with a hose you connect to your faucet, and there is a huge selection of artificial plants available (thank you China). Anyway, it was a blast just setting it up. I'll take a picture once I get some fish to put in it.

American Futures

Harold Meyerson writing for the Wash Post cuts to the skinny:

There follow some back-of-the-envelope calculations as Blinder totes up the number of jobs in tradable and non-tradable sectors. Then comes his (necessarily imprecise) bottom line: "The total number of current U.S. service-sector jobs that will be susceptible to offshoring in the electronic future is two to three times the total number of current manufacturing jobs (which is about 14 million)." As Blinder believes that all those manufacturing jobs are offshorable, too, the grand total of American jobs that could be bound for Bangalore or Bangladesh is somewhere between 42 million and 56 million. That doesn't mean all those jobs are going to be exported. It does mean that the Americans performing them will be in competition with people who will do the same work for a whole lot less. The threat of globalization and the reality of de-unionization have combined to make the raise, for most Americans, a thing of the past. Between 2001 and 2004, median household income inched up by a meager 1.6 percent, even as productivity was expanding at a robust 11.7 percent. The broadly shared prosperity that characterized our economy in the three decades following World War II is now dead as a dodo.

I can tell you that there are next generation economy jobs out there (I am in one now, building a new company that is zooming before we are even ready to take customers). However, these jobs are very entrepreneurial, extremely leveraged (many, many times the productivity of the general economy), and heavily globalized. These jobs are great, but they are very, very scarce.

The Warm Embrace of Legacy Players

As I read this post from Tom Barnett, I get the strong feeling that the guys he was so enthusiastic about meeting are all legacy players, on the cusp of being marginalized. They just don't know it yet (and neither does he).

Lawless Zones

Red Zone. "Is a state court judge going to decide what happens on the battlefield in Fallujah?" asked C. Allen Foster, an attorney for Blackwater Security Consulting, which is being sued by the families of four workers killed in Iraq in 2004 and mutilated in front of television cameras.

Nigerian Blackout

GGs at work: On February 9, this year, militants in the Niger Delta blew up one of the major pipelines that supplies gas to Egbin power station. Subsequently, another pipeline supplying gas to Afam power station was blown up by the militants in the same month.

"For now, the network is very weak and we are working very hard to save it from collapse because there is a level below which if it drops, the system will not hold again, the whole country will be in darkness, we pray we never get to that," said the PHCN boss. According to him, the total generation capacity before the recent attack was between 3000 - 3200MW, stressing that "at that level, people are relatively happy, the shedding is not much and the interruption does not take a long time."

Nigeria's GGs are on the way to collapsing what is left of Nigerian cohesion.

Fukuyama's premise

I am on board with Fukuyama's new premise: In “America at the Crossroads” he claims that the invasion contradicted a basic neoconservative principle: that large social-engineering projects (ie, state-building) often lead to unexpected consequences and undermine their own ends.

Lind

Bill Lind has picked up on the combo of money, smuggling, and increasing use of 4GW guerrilla tactics on the southern border.

Not only have Mexican drug gangs transferred their allegiance away from the state, so have America’s elites. A normal phenomenon at a time of generational change in war is that the new generation gets far more bang for the buck. 9/11 cost al Qaeda about $500,000, while America is spending about $5 billion a month to lose in Iraq and Afghanistan. On our southern border, we see Fourth Generation opponents buying simple, effective equipment on the open market, while the U.S. national security establishment pours hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars into rococo systems and bureaucratic structures.

But in Sheriff Gonzalez’s testimony, we see something more: some of our Fourth Generation enemies are acquiring a lot of money. Money has always been one of the sinews of war, and it always will be. As their financial resources increase, 4GW opponents will be able to leverage their vastly greater procurement efficiency to face us first with parity, then with superiority in technologies and systems that actually matter. The all-pervasive American belief that wars are decided by technology is false to start with, but it remains the basis of American soldiers’ and cops’ faith in themselves. How will they fight when it becomes evident to them that they do not have technological superiority?