Episodes

  • TikTok Ban

    TikTok Ban
    Apr 30 2024
    This week we talk about Huawei, DJI, and ByteDance.We also discuss 5G infrastructure, black-box algorithms, and Congressional bundles.Recommended Book: The Spare Man by Mary Robinette KowalNote: my new book, How To Turn 39, is now available as an ebook, audiobook, and paperback wherever you get your books :)TranscriptIn January of 2024, Chinese tech giant Huawei brought an end to its years-long US lobbying effort, meant to help mend fences with western politicians.In mid-2019, then US President Trump had blacklisted the company using an executive order that, in practice, prevented Chinese telecommunications companies from selling specialized equipment in the US, as part of a larger effort to clamp-down on the sale of Chinese 5g and similar infrastructure throughout the US.Around the same time, a Huawei executive was jailed in Canada for allegedly violating sanctions on Iran, and several other western nations were making noises about their own bans, worrying—as Trump's administration said they were worried—that Huawei and similar Chinese tech companies would sell their goods at a loss or at cost, significantly undercutting their foreign competition, and as a consequence would both lock down the burgeoning 5g market, including all the infrastructure that was in the process of being invested in and deployed, while also giving the Chinese government a tool that could allow them to tap all the communications running through this hardware, and potentially even allow them to shut it all down, if they wanted, at some point in the future—if China invaded Taiwan and wanted to keep the West from getting involved, for instance.So while part of this ban on Huawei—for which the President made use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and declared a national emergency—was undoubtedly political (part of the trade war Trump started as part of the "China is the enemy" platform he was running on leading up to the 2020 election), there were also real-deal concern about China insinuating itself into the world's infrastructure, beginning with the rollout of the next phase of communications technologies; making themselves indispensable, disallowing foreign competition, and yes, possibly even creating a bunch of backdoors they could use at some point in the future to tip the scales in their favor during a conflict.This ban also ensured that Huawei's then quite popular line of smartphones wouldn't be available in the US, or many other Western countries. The company sold off its Honor brand of phones in a scramble to try to protect that line of products from these new blocks on its offerings, which among other things disallowed them from accessing the chips necessary to make competitive smartphone products, but the legislation just kept coming after that initial salvo, the US Federal Communications Commission banning the sale or import of anything made by Huawei in late-2022, and a bunch of fundamental US allies, especially those with which the US collaborates on military and intelligence matters, have likewise banned Huawei products on their shelves and in their communications networks; the idea being that even one Huawei transmitter or modem could tap into the whole of these networks—at least in theory—which is considered a big enough security concern to justify that blanket ban.Huawei has managed to survive, though it didn't scale the way its owners seemed to think it would back before all these bans.Now it exists as a primarily regional outfit, still making billions in revenue each year, though down to about half the revenue it was earning before 2019.Another popular Chinese tech company, DJI, is now scrambling to deploy its lobbyists and circle the wagons, as there's word that it's on a shortlist of potential Chinese security threats, in this case because the company makes very popular consumer and professional grade drones, which have successfully outcompeted many western brands of the same, and which have thus started to dominate aspects of the drone market.These drones tend to be of the six or eight mini-propeller variety, the kind that people fly for fun, or use to shoot aerial photos, but the success of drones, even of this kind of drone, in Ukraine, reworked to spy on enemy fortifications or to carry explosives, has had the US Defense Department thinking it might not be the best idea to allow a Chinese company to own a substantial chunk of the US and international drone market—for many of the same reasons that Huawei was considered to be a threat; because that would allow China to continue to take out international rivals, allegedly by stealing their competitor's tech back in the day, and by continuing to back their companies with government support and funding, which makes fair and level competition a bit of an impossibility.These companies are doing well for many reasons, then, and some of those reasons are not replicable outside the tight relationship the Chinese government has with ...
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    25 mins
  • Section 702

    Section 702
    Apr 23 2024
    This week we talk about STELLARWIND, 9/11, and the NSA.We also discuss warrantless surveillance, intelligence agencies, and FISA.Recommended Book: Period: The Real Story of Menstruation by Kate ClancyTranscriptImmediately after the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, then President George W. Bush gave his approval for the National Security Agency, the NSA, to run a portfolio of significant and ever-evolving cross-agency efforts aimed at preventing future attacks of that kind, scale, and scope.The thinking behind this collection of authorizations to various US intelligence agencies, which would operate in tandem with the NSA, was that we somehow didn't see this well-orchestrated, complex plan coming, and though revelations in later years suggested we kind of did, we just didn't act on the intelligence we had, in those early, post-attack days, everyone at the top was scrambling to reassure the country that things would be okay, while also worrying that more attacks from someone, somewhere, might be impending.So the President signed a bunch of go-aheads that typically wouldn't have been signed, and the government gave a lot of power to the NSA to amalgamate the resulting intelligence data in ways that also wouldn't have previously been okay'd, but that, in those unusual circumstances, were considered to be not just acceptable, but desirable and necessary.This jumble of intelligence service activities, approved by the president and delegated to the NSA, became known as the President's Surveillance Program, and they were kept secret, in part because of how unprecedented they were, and in part because those in charge didn't want to risk their opposition—those they knew about, like Al Qaeda, but also those that might be waiting in the wings to attack the US while it was perceptually weakened and vulnerable—they didn't want to risk those entities knowing what they were doing, what they knew about, how they were collecting data, and so on.The info that was gleaned via these programs was compiled and stored in an SCI, which stands for Sensitive Compartment Information, and which refers to a type of document control system, a bit like Top Secret or Classified, in that it allows those running it to set what level of access people must have to view, process, use, or even discuss its contents, and this particular SCI was codenamed STELLARWIND.Among other activities, the programs feeding data into the Stellarwind SCI mined huge databases of email and phone communications, alongside web-browsing and financial activities; all sorts of tracking information that's collected by various components of intelligence, law enforcement, and other government and government-adjacent services were tapped and harvested.All of this data was then funneled into this one program, and though the degree to which this much information is useful up for debate, because having a slew of data doesn't mean that data is organized in useful ways, in 2004 the US Justice Department discovered that the NSA was not just collecting this sort of data when it was connected to foreign entities or entities that have been connected to terrorism, it was also collecting it from sources and people, including just average everyday Americans and small businesses that were doing no terrorism at all, and which had no links to terrorism, and it was doing so on American soil.After this discovery, then-President Bush said, well, the NSA is allowed to do that, that's fine, but they can only look at collected metadata related to terrorism—so they can collect whatever they want, sweep up gobs of information, file-away whatever drifts into their expansive and undifferentiating nets, but they're not allowed to look at and use anything not related to terrorism; and with that clarification to keep the Justice Department from doing anything that might hinder the program, the president reauthorized it that same year, 2004.There was disagreement within the government about the legality of all this, some entities saying that warrantless wiretapping of American citizens was illegal, even if the collected data was supposedly unusable unless some kind of terrorism connection could be ginned up to justify it. But those in charge ultimately decided that it would be irresponsible not to use these wiretapping powers the NSA wielded to protect American lives, and even said that Congress had no power to stop them from doing so, because it fell within their wheelhouse, that of defense against potential future foreign attack.All of the President's Surveillance Programs officially expired on February 1 of 2007, but new legislation that same year, and more in 2008, extended some of these activities, all with the justification of protecting the US from future terrorist attacks, and in 2009, a report published by the Inspectors General of the country's intelligence agencies found, in essence, that the now-retired President's Surveillance Program went way beyond what was ...
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    17 mins
  • Presidential Immunity

    Presidential Immunity
    Apr 16 2024
    This week we talk about diplomatic immunity, Trump’s court cases, and the Supreme Court.We also discuss Nixon, Clinton, and the US Constitution.Recommended Book: My upcoming book, How To Turn 39 (https://books2read.com/htt39), which is available for pre-order today :)TranscriptThere's a concept in international law—diplomatic immunity—that says, in essence, certain government officials should be immune from the laws of foreign countries, including those within which they're operating.This is a very old concept, based on similar rights that were granted to envoys and messengers back in the oldest documented periods of human civilizations.The idea is that if different cultures, whether organized into tribes or kingdoms or nation states, are going to be able to deal with each other, they need to maintain open and reliable means of communication. Thus, the folks tasked with carrying messages between leaders of these different groups would need to be fairly confident that they wouldn't be hassled or attacked or prosecuted by the people they were bringing those messages to, and whose messages they were bringing back to their own leaders.Such representatives have at times been imprisoned or killed by their hosts, but this is relatively rare, because any governing body that treated ambassadors from other cultures in this way would have trouble dealing with anyone outside their current legal sway, and that would in turn mean less trade, less reliable peace, and less opportunity to generally cross-pollinate with cultures they might benefit from cross-pollinating with.As a general rule, at least in the modern iteration of diplomatic immunity, folks operating under the auspices of this policy can still be punished for their misdeeds, it's just that they'll generally be declared persona non grata, expelled from the country where they did something wrong, rather than punished under that country's laws.In some rare instances a country hosting a misbehaving or criminal ambassador or other diplomat might ask that person's home country to waive their immunity, basically saying, look, this person killed someone or got drunk and drove recklessly through our capitol city's downtown, we'd like to try them in our courts, and it may be that the government running that misbehaving person's home country says, okay, yeah, that's messed up, you go ahead; but usually—even if that person has done something truly reprehensible—they'll instead say, no, sorry, we'll pull them back and they won't be allowed to return to your country or serve as an ambassador anywhere else, because they've shown themselves to be unreliable, and we might even try them in a court here, in their home country, but we can't allow our people, no matter what they do, to fall under the legal jurisdiction of some other nation, because that would set a bad precedent, and it may make people wary of working for us in this capacity in the future—surely you understand.There are tiers of diplomatic immunity, depending on the seniority of the diplomat or other representative in question, and the Congress of Vienna of the early 1800s charted out the basis for how these things work, in much detail, formalizing a lot of what was already in the ether back then, and creating an outline that was then further formalized in 1961's Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which has been almost universally ratified and respected, though of course there's been a lot of grey area in terms of what harassment of a representative, which is a no-no according to this convention, entails, and to what degree it can be proven, and thus punished, if violated.We saw a lot of grey area utility during the height of the Cold War in particular, in part because many diplomats were moonlighting as spies, which is still true today, though it was even more overt and worrisome to their host countries, back then, so harassment, kidnappings, even assassinations of diplomats were more common then, than today, though they were still almost universally done covertly so that no one seemed to be violating these nearly universally accepted terms.What I'd like to talk about today is another type of legal immunity—in this case, Presidential Immunity in the US—and why this type of immunity is at the center of former US President Trump's ongoing legal cases.—In the United States, many politicians and high-level appointees enjoy some of the immunity-related privileges in their own country that diplomats of various stripes have traditionally enjoyed elsewhere.Most of these figures are only protected by this immunity under very specific circumstances, though, not universally.Judges, while doing court-related, judge-work, for instance, have absolute civil immunity—so a judge who falls afoul of the law in the course of their duty as a judge, doing judge-things, will tend to get away with whatever it is they did wrong, though this won't generally apply to non-judge things they do during that ...
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    20 mins
  • XZ Utils Hack

    XZ Utils Hack
    Apr 9 2024
    This week we talk about Linux, backdoors, and the Open Source community.We also discuss CPU usage, state-backed hackers, and SSH.Recommended Book: The Underworld by Susan CaseyTranscriptIn the world of computers, a "backdoor" is a means of accessing a device or piece of software via an alternative entry point that allows one to bypass typical security measures and often, though not always, to do so in a subtle, undetected and maybe even undetectable manner.While backdoors can be built into hardware and software systems by the companies that make those devices and apps and bits of internet architecture, and while some governments and agencies, including the Chinese government, and allegedly folks at the NSA, have at times installed backdoors in relevant hardware and software for surveillance purposes, backdoors are generally the domain of tech-oriented criminals of various stripes, most of whom make use of vulnerabilities that are baked into their targets in order to gain access, and then while inside the administration components of a system, they write some code or find some kind of management lever meant to give the company or other entity behind the target access for non-criminal, repair and security purposes, and that then allows them to continue to gain access in the future; like using a rock to prop open a door.Concerns over a backdoor being installed in vital systems is fundamental to why the US and European governments have been so hesitant to allow Chinese-made 5G hardware into their wireless communication systems: there's a chance that, with the aid, or perhaps just at the prodding of the Chinese government, such hardware, or the software it utilizes, could contain a Trojan or other packet of code, hidden from view and hardcoded into the devices in some covert manner; these devices could also harbor even smaller devices, indistinguishable from hardware that's meat to be there, that would allow them to do the same via more tangible means.Though there were almost certainly other economic and technology-dominance reasons for the clampdown on products made by Chinese tech company Huawei beginning in earnest in 2012, and escalating rapidly during the US Trump administration, that process was at least ostensibly tied to worries that a Chinese company, prone to spying and stealing foreign tech, already, might incorporate itself into fundamental global communication infrastructure.It was underpricing everybody else, offering whizbang new high-end 5G technology at a discount, and supposedly, if the accusations are true, at least, doing so as part of a bigger plan to tap into all sorts of vital aspects of these systems, giving them unparalleled access to all communications, basically, but also giving them the ability, supposedly, to shut down those systems with the press of a button in the event that China wants or needs to do so at some point, if they ever decide to invade Taiwan, for instance, and want to distract the Western world until that invasion is complete, or just make rallying a defense a lot more difficult.Other, confirmed and successfully deployed backdoors have been found in all sorts of products, ranging from counterfeit Cisco network products, like routers and modems, some of which were installed in military and government facilities back in 2008 before they were recognized for what they were, to Microsoft software, Wordpress plugins, and a brand of terminals that manage the data sent along fiber-optic cables, mostly for high-speed internet purposes.Again, in some cases, the entities making these products sometimes do install what are literally or essentially backdoors in their hardware and software because it allows them to, for instance, help their customers retrieve lost passwords, fix issues, install security updates, and so on.But backdoors of any shape or size are considered to be major security vulnerabilities, as stealing a password or getting access to a vital terminal could then grant someone with bad intentions access to absolutely everything, giving them god-like control over all aspects of a customer's information and operations, or maybe all of the company's customer's information and operations, and that creates a single point of failure that most companies want to avoid, because at a certain point there's no real way to prevent a truly determined and well-funded foe if they know the payout for investing in accessing that terminal or getting that password would be that substantial.What I'd like to talk about today is a long-term effort to do exactly that, the target, in this case, being small, but the potential payoff of backdooring it being pretty much as big as you can imagine.—XZ Utils is the name of an Open Source data compression utility, which means that it squishes data in such a way that no information is lost, but so that big files and other packets of information become smaller, and that makes it faster and easier and cheaper to send that data from place to ...
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    19 mins
  • Cocoa Shortage

    Cocoa Shortage
    Apr 2 2024
    This week we talk about cacao, plantations, and bean-to-bar chocolate.We also discuss black pod disease, swollen shoot virus, and seed pod currency.Recommended Book: The City & The City by China MiévilleTranscriptThe cocoa bean, also called "cacao," is a seed derived from the cocoa tree, which is native to the Amazon Rainforest in South America.More than 5,000 years ago, near present day Ecuador, the Mayo-Chinchipe culture domesticated and cultivated this tree, which then found its way north into Mesoamerica—so parts of Central America, and modern day Mexico—and that's where we actually thought it came from until a handful of years ago, when new research pushed the initial domestication date back by about 1,500 years, tracking its path down into Ecuador by identifying cocoa residue on pottery from that time period down in that region.But way back then, it's thought that the pulp of this seed was used primarily to create an alcoholic beverage that was fermented to about the same alcohol percentage as a consumer-grade, modern day beer—just over 5%—and because of that utility in making this popular beverage, it was used as a currency in some parts of South and Central America.It's worth noting, too, that this tree and its seed would have originally been called kakawa, which was then turned into an Aztec derivative word much later, cacauatl, which then became cacao, when the Spanish colonized the region, and cacao then became cocoa when introduced to English-speaking parts of the world—and that variation of the word took over in the age of post-WWII globalization, due in large part to the popularization of chocolate products from English-speaking countries like the US and the UK, cacao only recently being reintroduced on that scale to differentiate more expensive cocoa products from those that have become mainstream.Also worth noting is that in addition to being used to produce a popular alcoholic beverage way back in the day, the cocoa bean was also turned into a kind of frothy spiced drink by Aztec royalty and other higher-ups in this part of the world, and that drink was enjoyed by high-born members of society for several thousand years, the beverage used in all sorts of rituals.And to make it, cocoa was whipped together with vanilla and other spices and sweeteners to produce something akin to a sort of hot chocolate the modern person would recognize, though leaning a lot more into those spices than most modern chocolates, rather than sugars and fats.This wasn't a widely available thing in most areas, and it probably wasn't the main end-product for most cocoa beans for most of history, as that alcoholic drink and its many derivatives were a lot more broadly available and widely disseminated.That said, different groups, across this region and across time, including the Maya and the Olmecs, had their own variations of this hot cocoa-like drink, and there's even an Aztec story that Quetzalcoatl was outcast by the other gods in their pantheon for sharing chocolate with humans, and some regional experts have speculated that the ritual of extracting the hearts from human sacrifices in the Aztec empire might be connected to the process of extracting the cocoa pulp from the cocoa bean seed pod when producing this beverage; though that's pretty speculative.The Aztecs came later than a lot of the other cultures in this region that partook in chocolate-related rituals and made cocoa-related goods, so that's likely part of why their rituals surrounding this drink were more elaborate than those of their neighbors, contemporary and forebear, but it's likely that the nature of the bean itself, which only grows in a finite region, about 20 degrees north and south of the equator, also had something to do with it.Because of that limited range, the Aztecs couldn't grow cocoa in their territory, and that meant it was always a luxury import for them, which meant—like many luxuries, even today—only the richest members of society could afford it, and that helped them differentiate themselves from the chocolate-less plebeians.This changed somewhat following the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas, when the Spaniards, who were maybe originally introduced to the drink by Montezuma or one of his underlings, brought the drink back home with them, eventually creating a new market for producers, though Europeans were not initially a fan of it, and mostly seemed to indulge because it seemed exotic, but early on they realized that because this bean already served as a unit of currency in many of the areas they were exploring and exploiting, it allowed them to deal with locals in a familiar way: this many cocoa beans for one thing, this many for another—it made negotiations and payment a lot cleaner and clearer, and cocoa beans could be easily transported for trade while also being useful, in a pinch, as a stable source of food while in transit, which compared favorably to other food goods they were bringing back...
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    24 mins
  • DRC Conflict

    DRC Conflict
    Mar 26 2024
    This week we talk about the Rwandan genocide, the First and Second Congo Wars, and M23.We also discuss civil wars, proxy conflicts, and resource curses.Recommended Book: Everyday Utopia by Kristen R. GhodseeTranscriptThe Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, was previously known as Zaïre, a name derived from a Portuguese mistranscription of the regional word for "river."It wore that monicker from 1971 until 1997, and this region had a rich history of redesignations before that, having been owned by various local kingdoms, then having been colonized by Europeans, sold to the King of Belgium in 1885, who owned it personally, not as a part of Belgium, which was unusual, until 1908, renaming it for that period the Congo Free State, which was kind of a branding exercise to convince all the Europeans who held territory thereabouts that he was doing philanthropic work, though while he did go to war with local and Arab slavers in the region, he also caused an estimated millions of deaths due to all that conflict, due to starvation and disease and punishments levied against people who failed to produce sufficient volumes of rubber from plantations he built in the region.So all that effort and rebranding also almost bankrupted him, the King of Belgium, because of the difficulties operating in this area, even when you step into it with vast wealth, overwhelming technological and military advantages, and the full backing of a powerful, if distant, nation.After the King's deadly little adventure, the region he held was ceded to the nation of Belgium as a colony, which renamed it the Belgium Congo, and it eventually gained independence from Belgium, alongside many other European colonies around the world, post-WWII, in mid-1960.Almost immediately there was conflict, a bunch of secessionist movements turning into civil wars, and those civil wars were amplified by the meddling of the United States and the Soviet Union, which supported different sides, funding and arming them as they tended to do in proxy conflicts around the world during this portion of the Cold War.This period, which lasted for about 5 years after independence, became known as the Congo Crisis, because government leaders kept being assassinated, different groups kept rising up, being armed, killing off other groups, and then settling in to keep the government from unifying or operating with any sense of security or normalcy.Eventually a man named Mobutu Sese Seko, usually just called Mobutu, launched a real deal coup that succeeded, and he imposed a hardcore military dictatorship on the country—his second coup, actually, but the previous one didn't grant him power, so he tried again a few years later, in 1965, and that one worked—and though he claimed, as many coup-launching military dictators do, that he would stabilize things over the next five years, restoring democracy to the country in the process, that never happened, though claiming he would did earn him the support of the US and other Western governments for the duration, even as he wiped out any government structure that could oppose him, including the position of Prime Minister in 1966, and the institution of Parliament in 1967.In 1971, as I mentioned, he renamed the country Zaïre, nationalized all remaining foreign owned assets in the country, and it took another war, which is now called the First Congo War, to finally unseat him. And this conflict, which began in late-1996, spilled over into neighboring countries, including Sudan and Uganda, and a slew of other nations were involved, including but not limited to Chad, the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Eritrea, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and Tanzania, alongside foreign assistance granted to various sides by France, China, Israel, and covertly, the United States.The conflict kicked off when Rwanda invaded Zaïre, more neighboring states joined in, all of them intending to take out a bunch of rebel groups that the Mobutu government was no longer keeping in line: Mobutu himself having long since fallen ill, and thus lacking the control he once had, but still profiting mightily from outside influences that kept him as a friendly toehold in the region.So these other nations sent military forces into Zaïre to handle these groups, which were causing untold troubles throughout the region, and the long and short of this conflict is that it only lasted a few months, from October 1996 to May 1997, but the destruction and carnage was vast, everyone on both sides partnering up to take out rebels, or in the case of those rebels, to join up against these government militaries, and all of them using the opportunity to also engage in violence against ethnic enemies with whom they had long-simmering beefs.This led to the collapse of Mobutu's government, the country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo when a new government was installed, but very little changed in terms of the reality of how that ...
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    22 mins
  • Bigger Oil

    Bigger Oil
    Mar 19 2024
    This week we talk about mergers, acquisitions, and the Shale Oil Revolution.We also discuss liquid natural gas, energy diplomacy, and political hypocrisy.Recommended Book: Eversion by Alastair ReynoldsTranscriptFor the sixth year in a row, the United States is the largest oil producer in the world.As of March 2024, it's producing an average of 12.93 million barrels of oil per day, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and it periodically pops above that average for stretches of time, like in December of last year when it managed to average just over 13.3 million barrels per day.That's an absolutely astonishing volume of oil.For context, while Saudi Arabia remains the holder of the world's most substantial spare oil capacity and was the largest oil exporter in 2023, they set aside plans to increase output to 12 million barrels a day back in January, which leaves them about a million barrels a day shy of the expansion target they set in 2020.In 2023, the US produced about 28% more oil than Russia and about 33% more than Saudi Arabia, on average.The US is becoming a huge player in oil exports, too, but it really shines if you look at not just crude oil, but also natural gas liquids and refined petroleum products. In aggregate, in 2023, the United States exported nearly the same volume of these products that both Saudi Arabia and Russia produced, not exported, which is pretty wild.As is the fact that in December of 2023, the US exported about 400 billion more cubic feet of natural gas than it imported; and it imports a lot, and it only started exporting natural gas a few years ago, so that's the figure for an industry that didn't even exist until 2016, and didn't really grow until the 2020s.The US hasn't always been this kind of force in the global oil market. It's long been a consumer of huge quantities of the stuff, but while it produced a decent amount until the late-90s, competing with Russia and trailing Saudi Arabia, though not by much, US production levels dropped substantially beginning in the early 90s, the US becoming a huge importer of fossil fuels, its production levels dipping down to something closer to those of Iran by the mid-2000s; when 9/11 happened in 2001, one of the big concerns was that the US's fundamental reliance on Middle Eastern oil would complicate its military options and hamstring its economy.That all changed, though, with what became known as the Shale Revolution, when the widespread investment in and deployment of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" technologies, combined with developments that allowed for horizontal drilling, opened up huge swathes of new oil-rich territories in the US and Canada, making what were previously usable, but incredibly expensive to exploit fossil fuel resources less expensive and easier to tap, and southern US states in particular saw a wave of new and expanded drilling, leading to a surge in the US's production output, and ultimately allowing the US to become the top producer in the world beginning in 2018.The degree to which this has changed things, geopolitically, cannot be overstated, in the US and globally.Stateside, petroleum prices became less tethered to the whims and political motivations of mostly Middle Eastern nations and Russia, which, working together via the OPEC+ oil cartel, were long able to threaten and coerce the US government and its allies in various ways.That remained the case for a while, even after this shale oil boom, as production and export figures weren't optimally aligned. But as this new reality has set in, the US government has been more strategic in how it has stockpiled fossil fuels resources and how it's been willing to use those stockpiles to manage price fluctuations, for itself and its allies, when warranted.This has also been important for manufacturing, shipping, and other energy-hungry aspects of the US economy, and it has stoked booms in all sorts of consumer-facing industries, alongside the deployment of power-hungry infrastructure like new power plants and data centers.Globally, this increased production has allowed the US to become a player in energy diplomacy, exporting fuel to allies that needed it because of disasters or foreign meddling, and recently, the US has taken this up a notch by bolstering Europe's energy supplies in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine—an invasion that led to sanctions from the EU against Russia, those sanctions arriving more slowly than they might have otherwise arrived because of concerns that Russia's stranglehold on much of the bloc's energy resources might turn into a chokehold, hobbling their economies, military preparedness, and civilian support for the sanctions, because people would be paying extreme prices for ever-shrinking volumes of energy.In the decades leading up to that invasion, many European nations, especially Germany, completely recalibrated their economies so they could profit from Russian fuel, so the fear that those fuel ...
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    24 mins
  • Ukraine War Update (Early 2024)

    Ukraine War Update (Early 2024)
    Mar 12 2024
    This week we talk about foreign aid, brain drain, and long-term economic consequences.We also discuss the Rasputitsa, counteroffensives, and strategic rethinks.Recommended Book: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John ScalziTranscriptWe've done this a few times before, but it's been a while since I've done a real update on Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine—September of last year, I think, was the last one, a bonus episode on the topic—and a fair bit has happened since then, even if a lot of these happenings have been overshadowed by other conflicts, most especially the invasion of Gaza by Israel following the attacks on Israel by Gaza-based Hamas.But before diving into what's been happening, recently, in Ukraine, let's walk through a quick summary of events up till this point.In early 2014, Ukraine's people rose up against their Russia-aligned government in what became known as the Maidan Revolution or Revolution of Dignity.This was a long time coming, by many estimates, because of changes that had been made to the country's constitution and government since a decade previous, most of those changes orienting Ukraine more toward Russia's sphere of influence, authoritarian policies, and various sorts of corruption at the top, and the protests that led to this revolution began in November of 2013 before culminating in February the following year, which led to the toppling of the government, the creation of a new, interim government, the president fleeing to Russia, and new elections that kicked off a period of decoupling from Russian influence.This was not well received in Russia, which has long seen Ukraine as being under its sway, if not belonging to Russia, outright, Ukraine serving as a large, friendly buffer between it and Europe, so Russian forces were send in, the flags and other identifiers on their fatigues removed, to support separatists in the eastern portion of Ukraine.This sparked what became known as the Donbas War, which periodically flared up and sometimes merely simmered, but continued from when it began in February of 2014 all the way up to Russia's more formal invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, following several months of buildup along the countries' shared border.Against the odds and most analysts' assumptions, Ukraine managed to fend off Russia's initial assault, Russia managing to capture some territory, but not the capital city, Kyiv, and thus it wasn't able to decapitate the Ukrainian government and replace it with folks who would be loyal to Russia, as was apparently planned.Russia's stated plans changed several times over the next few years, as their assaults continued to falter in the face of stiffer than expected resistance, and eventually the so-called "special military operation" in Ukraine became a more overt, full-on war, complete with forced conscriptions, massive loss of life, the demolition of infrastructure and entire towns, and a recalibration of the global order, new alliances popping up, others being challenged, and everyone, to some degree at least, being sorted into categories based on who they support, who they don't, and who they are willing to tolerate despite not supporting—that latter category consisting mostly of less-aligned nations like Brazil and India, which have done pretty well for themselves, economically, staying somewhat neutral and aloof from this conflict, and thus continuing to deal with both the Western alliance supporting Ukraine, and the comparably small team of opposing nations, including China, North Korea, and Iran, all of which back Russia to varying degrees.In September of 2023, when I did the last update episode on this conflict, the state of play was largely defined by drone-based harassment of soldiers and infrastructure, like energy sources and bridges, by both sides against the other, Ukraine's flagging counteroffensive against Russia, which started out pretty good, but then ran intro trouble, seemingly due to sturdy Russian defenses that had been built around the portion of Ukraine they'd captured, the arrival of the "Rasputitsa" muddy season, which makes movement difficult in the region, and discussions about whether the US would provide longer-range artillery to Ukrainian forces, as Russia was comfortably settled-in, lobbing endless missiles and drones at Ukrainian forces and civilians, so longer-range munitions would help Ukraine counter that advantage, but there were concerns that this could lead to more attacks by Ukraine against Russian targets within Russia, which—because they would be using US weaponry—could help Russia justify expanding the war, which could, in turn, lead to WWIII, nuclear deployments, and the end of the world.There was also discussion about whether the US should keep sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine, with Republicans mostly saying it wasn't okay, and some European leaders, especially those in Hungary, saying the same, while essentially everyone else said we need to keep ...
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