Let's Know Things

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. Stone

Transcript

The California Air Resources Board, or CARB, is a California government agency that resulted from the 1967 merging of the state's Bureau of Air Sanitation and its Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board. It's part of California'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'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't find their standards arbitrary or broadly inconsistent with the goals of the US's ambitions, and as long as they're more ambitious than the US'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'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's important, because California'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'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'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't be able to do so.

This rule was reverse in mid-2021, which gave California back that power to set standards, and though many carmakers, including Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, and BMW stuck with California's earlier standards, even after they were no longer legally required to do so, because of Trump's actions, seventeen states sued the EPA in 2022, saying, basically, that because California's standards have such a huge impact on how vehicles are developed and sold, car companies adhering to them even when not legally required to do so, because they want to keep selling their cars in California, it unfairly gives them power over the industry that other states don't enjoy.

That lawsuit, Ohio v. EPA, is ongoing, but California's influence in this and many other industries—especially in climate-related spaces—continues for the time being.

What I'd like to talk about today is a recent piece of legislation passed by the California government that could have even bigger and broader implications for corporations across the United States, and around the world.

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California's Senate Bill 253, also called SB 253, also called the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in early October, and its essential function is requiring that large California businesses track, calculate, and disclose their direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions.

In practice, that means companies that fit the criteria of making more than $1 billion a year will need to report their emissions.

The compulsory reporting of emissions for big businesses is already a pretty big deal, especially in the United States, but this is broadly the case in most countries around the world, too; some few require it, most don't.

And this law will likely affect more than 5,300 companies, which means it will almost immediately have a profound impact on our capacity to understand who's emitting what, in part by goosing the fortunes of companies doing such tracking and computing and reporting, and that, in turn, means we'll have an easier and less-expensive time, in the near-future, getting this sort of information for other purposes, as well—there's not enough business to keep a bunch of emissions-tracking companies in the black right now, but soon, with all these big California businesses needing their services, that will change dramatically.

It won't be tomorrow, though; under this law, the California Air Resources Board has to adopt reporting regulations by January 1, 2025, the impacted companies must started disclosing their Scope 1 and 2 emissions, publicly, in 2026, and in 2027, they must report their Scope 3 emissions, as well.

Scope 1 emissions are those that a company—let's say Apple—emits directly.

So any emissions created by vehicles the company's staff uses while doing business are Scope 1 emissions.

Scope 2 emissions expand the radius of what we're looking at to include the energy produced to power the things they do—for instance, any emissions produced while generating the energy that keeps the lights on at their offices would be Scope 2 emissions; so that's relatively few or zero emissions if they're using solar panels, but substantially more if they're using electricity produced by a gas or coal plant.

Scope 3 emissions are even broader, encompassing not just in-company, direct activity and the production of the energy that fuels that activity, but also the activities conducted by others on their behalf, all the way up and down the supply chain.

So while Apple doesn't directly control the factories where iPhones are made, the emissions from these factories are within their Scope 3 responsibility, wherever those factories happen to be located and who controls them, as is the fuel burned to ship those iPhones from China to their final destinations.

Some of these emissions are relatively easy to track or estimate, others substantially less so.

It becomes a huge undertaking to keep tabs on the shipping fleet activities of other companies that you hire, though, just as it can be tricky to get accurate numbers from entities run by governments where such reporting isn't required, and where the tracking and reporting of such things is consequently uncommon.

Part of why these companies are being given several years of lead-time, then, is to make sure all the California government's i's are dotted and t's are crossed, but it's also to give them the opportunity to figure out how to track and calculate these things, and to give them the ability to do a decent job of it, despite there not being convenient or reliable ways of accomplishing this in many industries and parts of the world, right now.

Much of this is new territory, and this law, among other things, will stimulate the creation of new tracking and calculating and reporting systems and methods.

Many companies, like Apple and Microsoft and Adobe and other tech giants, in particular, already track their emissions, mostly Scope 1 and 2, with a bare few also attempting to keep tabs on their Scope 3 responsibilities, either for ideological reasons or because they want to get ahead of the ball, seeing the writing on the wall about where this is all going and not wanting to be caught flat-footed if and when new laws arrive that require the tracking of such things, with heavy penalties for the failure to do so.

This law levies a penalty of a half-million dollars on companies that fail to report their emissions, but there are no penalties for the volume of the emissions, themselves.

The idea, then, is that this is a first step toward emissions-related fines, but since we can't really fine companies for hardcore emissions when we can't prove they've got them, first we have to make sure there's reliable, accurate tracking practices in place, and all that tracking must be verified by third-party inspectors, which is something this law does require.

But for the time being, this is mostly an exercise in getting everyone used to this new way of doing things, and ensuring the infrastructure for future tracking-related legislation has been installed.

While this is still a pretty new undertaking, in the US and globally, California is not the first entity to pass this sort of legislation.

The European Union has a new law that requires, beginning as soon as January 2024, that large international companies that raise money on European stock exchanges will need to provide data about their emissions, alongside information about their climate risk exposure and their strategies for addressing those emissions and risks.

It's expected that relatively few companies will fall under the auspices of this EU law in 2024, but that by 2025 more than 3,000 US companies will have to follow these guidelines, and more than 50,000 companies, globally, resulting in an expansion of those aforementioned emissions-tracking and assessment businesses, and a lot more companies, globally, taking these sorts of things into consideration, working these sorts of standards into their business models by necessity, and slowly but surely changing their industries and expectations as a consequence.

EU laws have been incredibly influential across a variety of spaces over the past decade or so—their regulations on internet privacy have forced a slew of standards on many global companies, for instance, as it's tricky to differentiate between customers in different parts of the world, online, and it's often just easier to apply the most stringent rules to everyone, rather than trying to splinter the web into EU users and everyone else.

The EU's emissions rules will likely have a similar impact, as businesses don't want to be cut out of the EU market, and in many cases they'll do the math and realize that it's probably worth the investment to just get their emissions reporting systems set up, now, so they don't have to worry about it later when more penalties for this sort of thing are passed in various countries, and so they're not outcompeted by competitors that did make those investments, earlier on.

And California's new standard is likely to be similarly, if not even more impactful, in part because California is a huge economy—it would be one of the top five biggest economies in the world by GDP, if it were a country—and no one wants to be cut out of that market.

In other words: car companies are willing to play ball with California because they want to sell their cars in California without penalty or obstruction, and corporations are likely to play ball with these hefty emissions standards for the same reason: because they want to do business in California, and the investment, though not nothing, is also not as big a deal as having to move elsewhere, or being otherwise hindered in-state in the future; and having similar rules in both California and the EU doubles the incentive for corporations to get their ducks in a row, emissions-tracking-wise.

Worth noting is that both pieces of legislation, in California and the EU, were watered-down a bit before they became law.

California had a similar bill up for debate in 2022, and that one failed to become law, and there was a last-minute effort in the EU by mostly conservative lawmakers to kill off their law before it could be made real; and both pieces of legislation had to be reduced in impact a bit before arrival, to get enough support and avoid the hazards all that opposition represented.

That said, they're both still stronger than anything else that's ever been passed on this subject in a major economy, and they apply to slightly different types of companies, with the EU hitting more and a wider variety of businesses, while California's law encompasses fewer, larger companies.

Also notable is that the US government is attempting to get a similar sort of bill passed, though its version, like its fuel efficiency requirements, will almost certainly be less aggressive than California's version of the same, and while there are efforts to get Scope 3 emissions in there, at least a little, Republicans are threatening to kill the whole thing, even saying they'll subpoena folks from the EPA if they go for anything too strong, by suggesting that the agency is basically collaborating with EU regulators on climate regulations in an illegal fashion.

The leaders of some major US companies, those that aren't impacted by either of these laws, have said they're keen just to get clarity on all this, and would be fine with more regulation, as long as it's consistent and understandable, and doesn't break the bank; they know it's coming, and they'd like to clear the fog of war that's making things complicated for them, right now.

Others have said that any such requirements are nonsense and that the entire exercise is pointless, and that they will thus fight any such regulation to the bitter end.

That latter group is spending more money on lobbyists and such to influence things, so there's a chance the federal US version of this law will be either delayed for a very long time, or will arrive as a wisp of a hint of its former self—but there's also a decent chance these first two, and other, subsequent versions of this type of law passed in other countries, fill in the gaps for a huge number of corporate entities, resulting in similar outcomes to a US federal law, even if that sort of law isn't passed or is so weak that it doesn't really matter, because they, as a pair, force so many companies to make changes if they want to remain competitive, keep their market valuations stable as investors start to take these sort of calculations into consideration, and to ensure they're able to get insurance and maintain decent ratings, as those systems start to adjust to this new reality, as well.

Show Notes

* https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/what-are-scope-1-2-3-carbon-emissions

* https://archive.ph/exK7V

* https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB253

* https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/california/story/2023-10-07/california-gov-gavin-newsom-signs-law-requiring-big-businesses-to-disclose-emissions

* https://archive.ph/DkXTh

* https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/california-governor-gavin-newsom-signs-landmark-corporate-climate-disclosure-bills/

* https://apnews.com/article/california-climate-change-emissions-disclosure-reporting-companies-123fe15c840b82f960384cbe04f3d955?taid=64ffc13479887800015d66a4

* https://www.ifixit.com/News/81914/california-just-became-the-third-state-to-pass-electronics-right-to-repair

* Mandatory emissions disclosures arrive

* Wins, losses, disasters

* https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-carbon-corporations-damage-pollution-9cb9e7c9feb2a68cb6dc0ae99c5e943a

* https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sec-chief-says-new-california-law-could-change-baseline-coming-sec-climate-rule-2023-09-27/?stream=top

* https://9to5mac.com/2023/10/11/california-privacy-law/

* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/gov-newsom-signs-new-law-requiring-big-companies-in-california-to-disclose-emissions

* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/analysis-the-potential-global-impact-of-californias-new-corporate-climate-disclosure-laws

* https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engines/california-greenhouse-gas-waiver-request

* https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/3487755-seventeen-states-sue-epa-for-letting-california-set-vehicle-standards/

* https://climatecasechart.com/case/ohio-v-epa/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Air_Resources_Board

* https://www.epa.gov/state-and-local-transportation/vehicle-emissions-california-waivers-and-authorizations

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 Milner

Transcript

In 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'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'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's most powerful ally, the US, were keen on this agreement, but the Israeli government said no, as the deal wouldn't guarantee their protection from Egypt in the future.

This pissed off a lot of those allies, and the Egyptian government continued to float the idea right up to the moment they attacked Israel in 1973—an attack that was anticipated by essentially everyone, including the Israeli government, because it had become well-understood that the Egyptian government, for reasons both economic and governmental, wouldn't really be able to survive as an independent state without the Sinai territory that was now under Israel's control.

Egypt conducted a bunch of military exercises between May and August of that year, which is why similar exercises, right next to the Suez Canal in late September, were ignored by many in the Israeli establishment as just more exercises, nothing to worry about.

And tens of thousands of the soldiers participating in those exercises were given permission to make their pilgrimage to Mecca a few days before the attack, which reinforced the idea that this was just more posturing on the part of Egypt—and that proved convincing, even though the Israelis received eleven warnings of an impending attack from well-placed sources.

The Israeli government finally scrambled to call up reservists a handful of hours before Egypt moved in, though, and despite being in the position to make a preemptive strike, they were dissuaded from doing so by US leadership, which told them they should do everything they could to avoid being the one to start a new war in the Middle East, also saying that if they did start something, they wouldn't receive any support from the US; the Soviet Union, for their part, made similar efforts to dissuade the Egyptians from starting a new conflict, but to no avail.

What became known, in Israel at least, as the Yom Kippur War, because it began on that holy Jewish holiday, ultimately lasted just shy of three weeks; it saw successful Israeli counterattacks into Syria and Egypt, eventually led to the beginnings of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and importantly, led to the 1978 return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt as a consequence of the Camp David Accords, which also led to the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty—which included Egypt's acknowledgment of Israel as a legitimate nation that should be allowed to exist.

One defining trait of the Yom Kippur War, though, which has remained locked into the collective psyche of the Israeli military establishment in the decades since, was the surprise-attack nature of the conflict, and how Egypt, alongside Syria and Jordan, all hit Israel at a moment in which they weren't fully prepared, and when they had many reasons to believe an attack wouldn't be forthcoming.

What I'd like to talk about today is a more recent attack on Israel that many are comparing to the outset of Yom Kippur war, what we know so far about the conflict and the intentions of those involved, and what might happen next.

—

This is an incredibly fast-moving and emotion-evoking story, so there's a very good chance some component of what I'm about to tell you will have changed before this episode goes live, and that a lot of conversation about it, in personal and broadcast contexts, will be fraught.

But that said, what we seem to know at the moment is this:

Early on the morning of October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a sneak-attack against Israel.

Hamas, which is more formally called the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas is an acronym for that name in Arabic, is an organization that governs the Gaza Strip, and has since 2007, when they took control of the region, capturing it, basically, following a five-day conflict with the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, or Fatah—there were elections in the area before that, but since then it's mostly just been Hamas running things, and they have influence in the West Bank—another area within Israel designated for Palestinians, though separated from Gaza by Israeli cities and security infrastructure—as well.

This sneak-attack was, by all indications, almost entirely unexpected and came as a surprise to Israel's military complex, alongside that of allied nations, like the US and European countries; there have been murmurings, as tends to be the case after these sorts of attacks, that some people did know or suspect what was about to happen, it's just that those suspicions were't taken as seriously as they could have, and in retrospect, should have, been.

But this attack caught the Israeli government more or less completely unprepared, and it was fairly complex, involving attacks from the land, the sea, and the air, the latter accomplished using thousands of rockets fired within hours of each other, but also motorized paraglider that allowed fighters to quickly get behind defensive lines, allowing them to secure bases and checkpoints, which in turn allowed more heavily armed commando units to break through the usually well-defended walls and fences guarded by Israeli soldiers, and to then sweep through neighboring areas, killing and capturing as they went.

The killing and capturing was quite brutal: this wasn't a firefight between soldiers, it was largely a wave of well-prepared Hamas fighters rolling through a relatively small number of soldiers, and then butchering, torturing, raping, and kidnapping civilians of all ages.

Current estimates suggest that Hamas militants have killed more than 1,300 people, so far, including people of many different nationalities, but mostly Israeli citizens, and they've wounded several thousand more—primarily during this initial, stealthy attack, which some Israeli higher-ups have called their country's 9/11, because of how out of nowhere it seemed, and how many civilian lives were claimed.

Israel's government officially declared war on Hamas the following day, and have since killed nearly 3,000 people, and wounded at least 9,600 more, according to the Gaza Health Ministry—most of those deaths and injuries the consequence of Israeli counterstrikes, which have until now mostly been in the shape of missiles fired into Gaza.

That "until now" caveat is important, as, as of the day I'm recording this, the day before this episode goes live, the Israeli government has indicated it intends to invade Gaza, beginning in the more-populated northern portion of the Strip, and it reinforced this intention by telling Palestinians in Gaza, via the UN, that they had 24 hours to evacuate to the southern portion of the Strip.

Such an evacuation is easier said than done, though, as more than 1.1 million people live in the area the Israelis were suggesting people should leave, or else, so the Israeli government has gotten pushback from international organizations, as there's no way that many people can safely move that far in that short a period of time, which means Israel risks losing the moral high ground, seeming not to care what happens to everyday Palestinian civilians, despite gesturing at giving them the option of getting out of harm's way before the hammer comes down, Israeli soldiers flooding into the area intent on hunting down Hamas' leadership and collapsing every last bit of their military infrastructure.

And that dynamic, of Israel being just incredibly overpowered compared to Hamas, and using that power against everyday Palestinian civilians, is part of why some outside analysts have suggested the 9/11 comparison is apt; not just because of how the attack happened and who the primary victims were, but because Israel's response, so far at least, has been similar to that of the United States following 9/11: namely, a lot of international support wavers because, back in the day, the US government scrambled to find someone to blame and ended up hurting a lot of innocent people alongside those who were substantially less innocent, and because now, Israel might be readying itself to do the same, everyone feeling really bad for them and what they have suffered, but increasingly wondering if the victim might be setting themselves up to become an even greater victimizer—lashing out as a result of that pain and horror and desperate need to feel some semblance of security and safety again.

As was the case back in 2001, there are many valid perspectives on this, and folks around the world have responded to what's happening in Israel and Gaza in a variety of ways.

Some people, those on what we might call the pro-Israeli side, have argued that Israel was attacked, out of nowhere, a huge number of civilians were killed, other civilians—something like 200 of them—were taken hostage, and this is very not okay, and Israel is well within its rights to hit back at those who hit them first, and to do what they need to do to ensure those who did the initial hitting are not in a position to do so again in the future, even if that means some innocent people are caught in the crossfire.

Others, those on what we might call the pro-Palestine side, have argued that millions of Palestinians have been essentially kept in an open-air prison for almost two decades, and thus it's understandable that they might do whatever they can—or support organizations that will do whatever they can—to hit back at the force, the Israeli government, that came in and took their land, locked them up, and who have trampled their human rights in all sorts of internationally acknowledged ways.

It's also worth noting here that there are plenty of Palestinians who don't like Hamas, and/or who don't agree with what they did in this instance, or with other attacks they've made against other Palestinian groups and Israelis over the years; there are likewise plenty of Israelis who don't agree with the militarization that has occurred under the current, and other recent Israeli administrations.

And it's possible, I think, to acknowledge that it's civilians on both sides that are suffering the most from these attacks, recent and historical, while those at the top often use them as an excuse to continue inciting and justifying violence of all sorts, while reinforcing their own hold and garnering more power for themselves—and can be true of attacks that look a lot like terrorism, and those that are easier to justify in the eyes of the international community.

So there are people on all sides of this, there are uncomfortable discussions happening all around the world, centering on this subject, but the concrete reality on the ground is that Hamas scored a brutal military strike against the much larger and more powerful Israel, Israel is now leveraging that power to hit the residents of the Gaza Strip, including Hamas, hard, and we're all waiting to see how far this will go, and what the broader consequences will be.

Because as horrible as that initial attack was, and as horrible as Israel's counterattack has been, the real fear for many is that this conflict will expand to encompass more players, regional and international.

The most likely entrants would be those that have been involved in previous attacks against Israel, like Egypt and Lebanon and Syria, and while Egypt seems not keen on the idea right now, mostly trying to play peacemaker and trying to keep a flood of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from fleeing Gaza into their territory, Lebanon has been a bit more fuzzy on the matter: there have been reports of mortar attacks across the border, and some reporters have suggested that the level of attacks are higher than usual, maybe indicating that Hezbollah, which is a major political and military force in Lebanon, could get directly involved in the conflict, seeing it as an opportunity to hit Israel when they're wounded and when their forces and attentions are divided—though it could also be a matter of Hezbollah wanting to pull some of Israel's resources north, which would make their work in Gaza a lot more cumbersome.

That would potentially be doubly-bad, too, because Hezbollah is backed by Iran, which has made no secret of its desire to see Israel wiped off the map, and which is the major force many people on the Israeli side, and on the side of simply not wanting to see the war expand, are worried might decide to get involved, as that would mean a whole nationstate getting its country-scale military involved in the fight, which would substantially complicate things, not to mention seriously raising the potential of a huge body count and a spiral into WWIII.

The Iranian government has said it won't engage militarily with Israel unless Israelis attack them, so that concern would seem to be less pressing at the moment, though it's hard to predict, early on in a conflict, how such statements will age as realities on the ground change, and Iranian officials have made other statements that suggest they're keeping their options open.

There are more distant concerns that the US or Russia or China might get involved, and it seems unlikely that any of those bigger, global players would step in directly at this point, though a huge number of countries have announced military and humanitarian support for Israel, and a few have done the same for the Palestinians, as well; so that's better in some ways, as it reduces the chances of those bigger players coming into direct conflict with each other, but less-good in the sense that it raises the possibility of this turning into a proxy conflict, which could then spin-up into something pretty big, for better and for worse, if things at some point escalate.

Looking further afield, there are concerns within Ukraine that this conflict could pull attention and resources away from Kyiv, redistributing them to Israel, or maybe even just wearing people out on the idea of throwing resources at international conflicts—democratic support for such aid drying up as people start to wonder how much money will be spent and how many of these things we'll see popping up in the coming years.

We're not far enough along to know if that's likely to be the case or not, but it's enough of a concern that Ukrainian President Zelensky has been going out of his way to announce support for Israel, even asking to visit the country, personally, in order to stay front of mind and possibly to build a connection in the eyes of the world between the two conflicts.

One other big development is a pause on efforts by the Israeli and Saudi governments to normalize their relations with each other; this has been a huge, long-term diplomatic effort that could help the Middle East stabilize a bit, and could help the region better interconnect economically and diplomatically, but the Saudi government said they were back-burnering the agreement while Israel is attacking Gaza, and it's anyone's guess as to whether they'll start that back up, and if so, when.

Something else we don't know is Hamas's motive for this attack.

Some speculate that it might be as simple as wanting to hurt a longtime enemy, while others have suggested it might be the lead-in to some other kind of attack: an attritional, weakening blow meant to soften Israel up for an invasion from the north, or an attack from Iran.

Still others contend that it was probably a means of derailing the aforementioned normalizing of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia—something Hamas would be keen to prevent, and which they may have predicted this sort of attack and Israel's inevitable response to it, would hamstring.

Wilder speculations, for which there's no evidence, as far as I'm aware, suggests that this might be a five-dimensional chess ploy by Russian President Putin, since Putin met with Hamas leaders who traveled to Moscow for the visit in March of 2023, and the group's politburo leader visited Moscow again in early September.

The theory is that Putin wanted to pull international attention and support away from Ukraine, while also punishing Israel for supporting Ukraine, and he did so by either supporting Hamas directly, or via Russia's ally, Iran—and while it has been confirmed that Iran helped Hamas prepare for this attack, there's no confirmation that Russia had anything to do with it; this, and several other pieces of evidence pointing in this direction, so far at least, are all circumstantial.

This gestures at the broader problem right now, though, of trying to understand and contextualize something so horrific, because lacking that deeper understanding, it's difficult to know what will help, what will make things better in a region in which all the variables seem to be set up in such a way that things just get worse and more volatile over time, rather than the opposite, and what will be the consequences of the, as of the day I'm recording this, ongoing counterattack by Israel, and the exploding humanitarian situation that's arising in Gaza as a consequence of that counterattack.

Show Notes

* https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-was-duped-hamas-planned-devastating-assault-2023-10-08/

* https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1711027540536471994

* https://www.vox.com/world-politics/23910641/israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestine-explainer

* Depressing Take on the Conflict

* Conflict update

* https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/israel-hamas-gaza

* https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/israel-hamas-war-gaza-strip/

* https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-was-duped-hamas-planned-devastating-assault-2023-10-08/

* https://www.axios.com/2023/10/11/zelensky-israel-hamas-war-gaza-visit-netanyahu

* https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/10/13/palestinians-flee-their-homes-towards-southern-gaza-after-israeli-order

* https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-hamas-war-refugees-6cf0ff04e513ecec12cf9152656ac1b6

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Bank

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_enclaves

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_National_Authority

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_conflict

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas

This week we talk about AMD, graphics processing units, and AI.

We also discuss crypto mining, video games, and parallel processing.

Recommended Book: The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel

Transcript

Founded in 1993 by an engineer who previously designed microprocessors for semiconductor company AMD, an engineer from Sun Microsystems, and a graphics chip designer and senior engineer from Sun and IBM, NVIDIA was focused on producing graphics-optimized hardware because of a theory held by those founders that this sort of engineering would allow computers to tackle new sorts of problems that conventional computing architecture wasn't very good at.

They also suspected that the video game industry, which was still pretty nascent, but rapidly growing, this being the early 90s, would become a big deal, and the industry was already running up against hardware problems, computing-wise, both in terms of development, and in terms of allowing users to play games that were graphically complex and immersive.

So they scrounged about $40k between them, started the company, and then fairly quickly were able to attract serious funding from Silicon Valley VCs, initially to the tune of $20 million.

It took them a little while, about half a decade, to get their first real-deal product out the door, but a graphics accelerator chip they release in 1998 did pretty well, and their subsequent product, the GeForce 256, which empowered consumer-grade hardware to do impressive new things, graphically, made their company, and their GeForce line of graphics cards, into an industry standard piece of hardware for gaming purposes.

Graphics cards, those of the dedicated or discrete variety, which basically means it's a separate piece of hardware from the motherboard, the main computer hardware, gives a computer or other device enhanced graphics powers, lending it the ability to process graphical stuff separately, with tech optimized for that purpose, which in turn means you can play games or videos or whatnot that would otherwise be sluggish or low-quality, or in some cases, it allows you to play games and videos that your core system simply wouldn't be capable of handling.

These cards are circuit boards that are installed into a computer's expansion slot, or in some cases attached using a high-speed connection cable.

Many modern video games require dedicated graphics processors of this kind in order to function, or in order to function at a playable speed and resolution; lower-key, simpler games work decently well with the graphics capabilities included in the core hardware, but the AAA-grade, high-end, visually realistic stuff almost always needs this kind of add-on to work, or to work as intended.

And these sorts of add-ons have been around since personal computers have been around, but they really took off on the consumer market in the 1980s, as PCs started to become more visual—the advent of Windows and the Mac made what was previously a green-screen, number and character-heavy interface a lot more colorful and interactive and intuitive for non-programmer users, and as those visual experiences became more complex, the hardware architecture had to evolve to account for that, and often this meant including graphics cards alongside the more standard components.

A huge variety of companies make these sorts of cards, these days, but the majority of modern graphics cards are designed by one of two companies: AMD or Nvidia.

What I'd like to talk about today is the latter, Nvidia, a company that seems to have found itself in the right place at the right time, with the right investments and infrastructure, to take advantage of a new wave of companies and applications that desperately need what it has to offer.

—

Like most tech companies, Nvidia has been slowly but surely expanding its capabilities and competing with other entities in this space by snapping up other businesses that do things it would like to be able to do.

It bought-out the intellectual assets of 3dfx, a fellow graphics card-maker, in late-2000, grabbed several hardware designers in the early 2000s, and then it went about scooping-up a slew of graphics-related software-makers, to the point where the US Justice Department started to get anxious that Nvidia and its main rival, AMD, might be building monopolies for themselves in this still-burgeoning, but increasingly important to the computing and gaming industry, space.

Nvidia was hit hard by lawsuits related to defects in its products in the late 20-aughts, and it invested heavily in producing mobile-focused systems on a chip—holistic, small form-factor microchips that ostensibly include everything device-makers might need to build smartphones or gaming hardware—and even released its own gaming pseudo-console, the Nvidia shield, in the early 20-teens.

The company continued to expand its reach in the gaming space in the mid-to-late-20-teens, while also expanding into the automobile media center industry—a segment of the auto-industry that was becoming increasingly digitized and connected, removing buttons and switches and opting for touchscreen interfaces—and it also expanded into the broader mobile device market, allowing it to build chips for smartphones and tablets.

What they were starting to realize during this period, though—and this is something they began looking into and investing in, in earnest, back in 2007 or so, through the early 20-teens—is that the same approach they used to build graphics cards, basically lashing a bunch of smaller chip cores together, so they all worked in parallel, which allowed them to do a bunch of different stuff, simultaneously, also allowed them to do other things that require a whole lot of parallel functionality—and that's in contrast to building chips with brute strength, but which aren't necessarily capable of doing a bunch of smaller tasks in parallel to each other.

So in addition to being able to show a bunch of complex, resource-intensive graphics on screen, these parallel-processing chip setups could also allow them to, for instance, do complex math, as is required for physics simulations and heavy-duty engineering projects, they could simulate chemical interactions, like pharmaceutical companies need to do, or—and this turned out to be a big, important use-case—they could run the sorts of massive data centers tech giants like Google and Apple and Microsoft were beginning to build all around the world, to crunch all the data being produced and shuffled here and there for their cloud storage and cloud computing architectures.

In the years since, that latter use-case has far surpassed the revenue Nvidia pulls in from its video game-optimized graphics processing units.

And another use-case for these types of chip architectures, that of running AI systems, looks primed to take the revenue crown from even those cloud computing setups.

Nvidia's most recent quarterly report showed that its revenue tied to its data-center offerings more than doubled over the course of just three months, and it's generally expected that this revenue will more than quadruple, year-over-year, and all of this despite a hardware crunch caused by a run on its highest-end products by tech companies wanting to flesh-out their AI-related, number-crunching setups; it hasn't been able to meet the huge surge in demand that has arisen over the past few years, but it's still making major bank.

Part of why Nvidia's hardware is so in demand for these use-cases is that, back in 2006, it released the Compute Unified Device Architecture, or CUDA, which is a programming language that allows users to write applications for GPUs, graphics processing units, rather than conventional computing setups.

This is what allows folks to treat these gobs of parallel-linked graphics processing units like highly capable computers, and it's what allows them to use gaming-optimized hardware for simulating atoms or managing cloud storage systems or mining Bitcoin.

CUDA now has 250 software libraries, which is huge compared to its competitors, and that allows AI developers—a category of people who are enjoying the majority of major tech investment resources at the moment—to perch their software on hardware that can handle the huge processing overhead necessary for these applications to function.

Other companies in this space are making investments in their software offerings, and the aforementioned AMD, which is launching AI-focused hardware, as well, uses open source software for its tech, which has some benefits over Nvidia's largely proprietary libraries.

Individual companies, too, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, are all investing in their own, homegrown, alternative hardware and software, in part so they can be less dependent on companies like Nvidia, which has been charging them an arm-and-a-leg for their high-end products, and which, again, has been suffering from supply shortages because of all this new demand.

So these big tech companies don't want to be reliant on Nvidia for their well-being in this space, but they also want to optimize their chips for their individual use-cases they're throwing tons of money at this problem, hoping to liberate themselves from future shortages and dependency issues, and to maybe even build themselves a moat in the AI space in the future, if they can develop hardware and software for their own use that their competition won't be able to match.

And for context, a single system with eight of Nvidia's newest, high-end GPUs for cloud data center purposes can cost upward of $200,000, which is about 40-times the cost of buying a generic server optimized for the same purposes; so this is not a small amount of money, considering how many of those systems these companies require just to function at a base level, but these companies are still willing to pay those prices, and are in fact scrambling to do so, hoping to get their hands on more of these scarce resources, which further underlines why they're hoping to make their own, viable alternatives to these Nvidia offerings, sooner rather than later.

Despite those pressures to move away to another option, though, Nvidia enjoys a substantial advantage in this market, right now, because of the combination of its powerful hardware and the CUDA language library.

That's allow it to rapidly climb the ranks of highest-value global tech companies, recently becoming the first semiconductor company to hit the $1 trillion valuation mark, bypassing Tesla and Meta and Berkshire Hathaway, among many other companies along the way, and something like 92% of AI models are currently written in PyTorch—a machine learning framework that uses the Torch library, and which is currently optimized for use on Nvidia chips because of its cross-compatibility with CUDA; so this advantage is baked-into the industry for the time-being.

That may change at some point, as the folks behind PyTorch are in the process of evolving it to support other GPU platforms, like those run by AMD and Apple.

But at the moment, Nvidia is the simplest default system to work with for the majority of folks working in AI; so they have a bit of a head start, and that head start was in many ways enabled and funded by their success in the video game industry, and then the few years during which they were heavily funded by the crypto-mining industry, all of which provided them the resources they needed to reinforce that moat and build-out their hardware and software so they were able to become the obvious, default choice for AI purposes, as well.

So Nvidia is absolutely killing it right now, their stock having jumped from about $115 a share a year ago to around $460 a share, today, and they're queued up to continue selling out every product they make as fast as they can make them.

But we're entering a period, over the next year or two, during which that dominance will start to be challenged, more AI code transferable to other software and hardware made by other companies, and more of their customers building their own alternatives; so a lot of what's fueling their current success may start to sputter if they aren't able to build some new competitive advantages in this space, sometime very soon, despite their impressive, high-flying, stock-surging, valuation-ballooning performance over these past few years.

Show Notes

* https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304019404577418243311260010

* https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121358204084776309

* https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-nvidia-got-hugeand-almost-invincible-da74cae1

* https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-owner-openai-is-exploring-making-its-own-ai-chips-sources-2023-10-06/

* https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-to-debut-ai-chip-next-month-that-could-cut-nvidia-gpu-costs

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyTorch

* https://innovationorigins.com/en/amd-gears-up-to-challenge-nvidias-ai-supremacy/

* https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/07/how-nvidia-became-a-major-player-in-robotics/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_card

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia

This week we talk about natural gas, plumes, and satellites.

We also discuss firedamp, AI detection, and emission numbers.

Recommended Book: Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly

Transcript

Methane, the name for a chemical made up of one part carbon, four parts hydrogen, is incredibly abundant on earth as it's formed by both geological and biological processes—the former when organic materials are heated up and have massive amounts of pressure applied to them, underground, and the latter through a process called methanogenesis, which basically means certain types of Archaea, a type of life, exhaling methane.

That sort of respiration mostly occurs in organic-breakdown situations, where these microscopic organisms live: so landfills and in the bottom of lakes, where dead stuff falls and is torn apart at a microscopic level by these tiny creatures, but also in the guts of cows and termites and similar beasties, which rely upon their symbiosis with these archaea to help them process the stuff they eat—which they otherwise wouldn't be able to break up and use on their own.

Methane was originally discovered, in the sense that it was noted and quantified, back in the late-18th century, when the Italian physicist and chemist, Alessandro Volta—who among other things also lent his name to an electrical measurement and who is credited with inventing the battery—who was studying marsh gas, marshes being a huge natural source of methane, as it's filled with the sorts of critters that break apart biological materials and release methane as a byproduct.

We've known about this gas for a while, then, and history is filled with examples of different cultures making use of it in relatively simple ways, as an energy source.

And on that note, methane is the primary constituent of what we today call natural gas, though the name methane was only coined by 1866 by a German chemist, August Wilhelm von Hoffman, who derived the term from methanol, which is the flammable, colorless liquid often called wood alcohol which is from whence the gas was first detected and isolated, and before that different cultures referred to it only adjacently, usually because it caused issues they couldn't quite quantify, like, for instance, causing deaths in coal mines—the deathly, gas-pocket-laden air, until methane became an official thing, sometimes referred to as firedamp, which was scary because it could suffocate everyone, or it could explode.

Today, methane, mostly as a constituent of natural gas, is harvested and shuttled all over the world to be burned as a fossil fuel; and similar to other fossil fuels, like oil and coal, that burning releases energy, producing heat, which is used to spin a turbine or heat water in a steam generator.

Natural gas is, in the modern world, generally considered to be superior to other fossil fuel options because it burns relatively cleanly, in terms of pollution, compared to other options, which is nice for folks in the areas where this burning is taking place, but it also releases relatively less CO2 into the atmosphere per unit of heat it produces when it's used for energy, so although it's still very much a fossil fuel and emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it's the best of bad options in many ways, and can be stored and transported in forms that make it quite versatile and even more energy-dense—it can be refined and pressurized into a liquid, for instance, which makes transport substantially easier and each unit of natural gas more useful, but that also allows it to be used as rocket fuel and for similar high-intensity utilities, which is not something that can be said of otherwise comparable options.

What I'd like to talk about today is the role of methane in a world that's shifting toward renewable energy, and why this fossil fuel, which is generally superior to other fossil fuel options, is associated with some unique problems that we're scrambling to solve.

—

Back in June of 2023, scientists announced that they had discovered evidence of a massive methane plume in Kazakhstan.

This plume—the consequence of a leak at a methane prospecting site in this methane-rich country—was later confirmed to be the result of an accident at one of a local energy company's wells at a gas field on June 9, and the company said they were doing what they could to address the issue, and that the purported gas plume was actually just hot clouds of vapor containing minimal amounts of methane; a misidentification, in other words.

The scientists who flagged the plume, though, said this wasn't the case: the satellites they used to identify it contain high spectral resolution imaging hardware, and they don't tend to mistake water vapor for methane—that may have been possible with previous technologies, but these new ones aren't prone to that type of false-positive.

The satellites noted at least nine individual instances of methane plumes erupting from this single site in the month leading up to July 23, alone, and those findings were then confirmed by scientists using similar technologies with the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research—and that's alongside the original group's use of two different satellites, the EU's Sentinel-5P and the Italian Space Agency's Prism satellite, the former of which used a spectrometer that was designed specifically to detect methane in this way.

These researchers, using these findings, were able to estimate an emission-rate of somewhere between 35 and 107 metric tons of methane, per hour, into the atmosphere, from this one leak, alone, which has thus caused the same amount of short-term climate damage, in terms of heat amplifying greenhouse effects, as the annual emissions of somewhere between 814,000 and nearly 2.5 million US cars, making it the worst confirmed methane leak from a single source in all of 2023—so far, at least.

And "so far" is doing a lot of work, there, as these sorts of satellites have become increasingly effective tools in researchers' toolkits for identifying these types of leaks, and the software they use to crunch the raw data provided by these increasingly sophisticated detection tools has led to a small revolution in the ability to both notice and pinpoint the source of methane plumes, globally, even in areas where such plumes would have previously gone un-noted, and thus, unaddressed.

And this is important, if you're the sort of person who cares about the amplifying effects of human industry and other endeavors on climate change, because methane, in addition to its explosive volatility and capacity to degrade air quality and mess with ecosystems at ground-level, methane is thought to be responsible for about 30% of the total greenhouse effects we're seeing, today, because—despite only sticking around in the atmosphere for about 7 to 12 years, compared to potentially hundreds of years for CO2—methane is also about 80-times more potent than CO2, in this regard.

So in the short-term, which in this case means the around a decade a given methane particle persists in the atmosphere, it's way, way worse in terms of heat-trapping, compared to CO2.

And though that effect will subside faster than CO2, which can stick around for many generations, rather than a decade or so, we're still churning a lot of methane up there, so this isn't a one-off, temporary thing, it's persistent, the methane that goes away being replaced by more of the same, and those temporary impacts can have long-term repercussions, like melting ice caps, contributing to droughts and floods and extreme storms, and drying up areas that would periodically see irregular wildfires, causing much larger and more potent versions of the same, which in turn churns all the CO2 contained in those trees or peatlands or whatever else that are now burning, into the atmosphere.

So temporary boosts of this magnitude in greenhouse gas effects are not temporary—they can last far past the period in which the gases are actually up there, because of how substantially, and in practical terms, permanently, they change the circumstances on the earth, below.

All of which has led to waves of investment in being able to detect methane leaks, because while many energy companies are incentivized to cap leaky wells, in part because doing so potentially gives them a source of natural gas they can then turn around and sell as fuel, some such entities are more than happy to allow these leaks to just keep leaking, because the cost of identifying and handling leaks is higher than what they can expect to get from capturing and selling that gas, or in some cases because the entities in question are beyond strict regulations that would necessitate they care or act to begin with; there are no consequences for such atmospheric pollution in many parts of the world.

The same is generally true even in more dense and ostensibly regulatorily rich areas like Russia, which is expected to churn by far more CO2-equivalents worth of methane into the atmosphere from leaks and gas burning than any other country—though the US comes in second, followed by Qatar, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China at a distance sixth.

This is an issue in fairly remote and rural places like Kazakhstan, then, where there's a lot of energy and mining infrastructure, but not so many people, or regulatory bodies with teeth, but also in places like the US, where methane gas leaks are estimated to pump something like 6.5 million metric tons of this gas into the atmosphere every single year, which is roughly the equivalent of the yearly emissions of about 2.5 million US passenger vehicles.

There are means of addressing this issue, and they're generally referred to as "methane abatements," a term that encompasses everything from plugging or tapping those leaks to what cattle are fed—cows emitting a lot of methane because of how they're bred, kept, and fed, and how their microbiota processes that feed.

Fundamental to these abatement options, though, is figuring out where and how to apply them in the first place.

Governments around the world are thus beginning to aggregate the data they have, providing local governance and businesses with the resources they need to start addressing this issue, but the rollout has been slow, in part because the resolution of our view has been quite low, until just recently.

A trio of satellites, including the aforementioned Sentinel 5P, alongside the Sentinel-3 and Sentinel-2, the data they collectively generate paired with machine learning—a type of what we broadly might call artificial intelligence software—has allowed researchers to produce a wealth of automatically produced data on this subject, at a far more granular level than has been possible until now, which in turn has allowed governing bodies to parse that data and identify super-emitters, the worst of the worst in terms of these leaks, while also providing more specific, down to the individual well in an oil facility or in some cases the specific location on a pipeline, where these leaks are occurring; these satellites can also provide estimates as to how much methane is being leaked at a given location, which in turn can help nations, organizations, and corporations prioritize their abatement efforts, accordingly.

We're still in the frontier-stage of this sort of detection and amelioration, but there's more on the way, with satellites optimized for methane detection of this kind launching in the coming years—one of them, the $90 million MethaneSAT, is meant to help global regulators pinpoint hotspots and identify potential underreporting by various entities, which in turn should help put more pressure on those that are intentionally concealing their leaks: something that'll be especially important for holding companies like those in Russia, which are supported in this concealing by their government, to account for their chronically underreported emissions.

These satellites and similar detection tools, though, aren't of much use without efforts to act upon their findings at ground level, just as all the good intentions in the world wouldn't be enough to staunch the upward flow of this gas into the atmosphere, lacking the data required to tell us where to look and what needs to be done.

What we're really looking at, then, is a moment in time, beginning in 2023, but really kicking into high gear in 2024 through 2030, which is when many countries' first-step, big-deal climate commitments come due, a moment in which a confluence of detection and remediation efforts and techniques is finally emerging, and this confluence could allow us to significantly reduce this category of greenhouse gas emissions, which is great, because up to 75% of methane emissions are thought to be solvable in this way.

Such efforts, in turn, could reduce the rise in global temperatures from greenhouse gases by something like 25%, all unto itself; an incredible win, if we can keep the momentum going and incentives aligned as these new resources begin to spin-up and interoperate and give the folks trying to solve this particular problem the tools they need to do so. 

Show Notes

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane

* https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane

* https://archive.ph/ODvEK

* https://www.iea.org/energy-system/fossil-fuels/methane-abatement

* https://www.iea.org/fuels-and-technologies/methane-abatement

* https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-5P/Tropomi

* https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66811312

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425723002675

* https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/23/9071/2023/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_emissions

* https://www.edf.org/climate/methane-crucial-opportunity-climate-fight

* https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-does-natural-gas-contribute-climate-change-through-co2-emissions-when-fuel-burned

* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/06/revealed-1000-super-emitting-methane-leaks-risk-triggering-climate-tipping-points

* https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/methane/

* https://www.state.gov/publication-of-u-s-government-funded-methane-abatement-handbook-for-policymakers/

* https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Trio_of_Sentinel_satellites_map_methane_super-emitters

* https://www.cpr.org/2023/08/17/methane-satellite-ball-aerospace-boulder/

This week we talk about Unity, Unreal, and Godot.

We also discuss fee structures, user revolts, and indie game-makers.

Recommended Book: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner

Show Notes

* https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/digital-media/video-games/worldwide

* https://www.billboard.com/pro/ifpi-global-report-2023-music-business-revenue-market-share/

* https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/07/video-game-industry-not-recession-proof-sales-set-to-fall-in-2022.html

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/22/are-video-games-recession-proof-sort-experts-say/

* https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/unity-s-pricing-changes-are-trying-to-solve-too-many-problems-at-once

* https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/unity-apologizes-to-devs-reveals-updated-runtime-fee-policy

* https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/22/23882768/unity-new-pricing-model-update

* https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/15/23875396/unity-mobile-developers-ad-monetization-tos-changes

* https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/12/23870547/unit-price-change-game-development

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/22/are-video-games-recession-proof-sort-experts-say/

* https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/022216/how-microtransactions-are-evolving-economics-gaming.asp

* https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog/902/

* https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/053115/how-video-game-industry-changing.asp

* https://finmodelslab.com/blogs/operating-costs/video-game-company-operating-costs

* https://www.makeuseof.com/ways-the-rising-costs-of-games-affect-the-industry/

* https://codeswholesale.com/blog/5-ways-to-make-money-in-the-gaming-industry/

* https://gamemaker.io/en/blog/cost-of-making-a-game

* https://www.gamedesigning.org/learn/video-game-cost/

* https://www.reuters.com/technology/video-gaming-revenue-grow-26-2023-console-sales-strength-report-2023-08-08/

* https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/digital-media/video-games/worldwide

Transcript

Depending on how inclusive you are with your measurements and the specific numbers you're tallying, the global video game market is expected to pull in somewhere between $187.7 and $334 billion in revenue in 2023.

That's somewhere between 2.6% and 13.4% above 2022 numbers—and again, those figures are pretty far apart because different entities keeping tabs on this industry measure different things, some only looking at direct sales of video games and in-game items, while others look at connected sub-industries, like e-gaming events and service jobs that do customer support for game companies.

Whichever end of that spectrum you look at, though, the global video game industry is a behemoth that's growing every year, and its income surpassed that of the music and film industries, combined, years ago, the global film industry expected to bring in around $92.5 billion in 2023, while the global music industry pulls a paltry $26.2 billion.

The video game market is continuing to grow at a fairly stellar pace, compared to other entertainment categories, as well. And while it was shown not to be entirely recession proof, as had been claimed since the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, when it remained one of the few industries still growing steadily, that growth balking a bit in 2022, when the industry contracted by 1.2%, it grew substantially at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has largely maintained that growth since, which has allowed entities operating in this space to claim more and more entertainment-related marketshare, which in turn has shifted the center of gravity in the media world toward video games and away from other leisure options, including things like travel, vacations, and other things you wouldn't typically think of as being competitors of the video game market.

Since video games really took off, hitting the mainstream in the 1980s, and becoming a big deal in the 1990s with the emergence of user-friendly consoles and 3D graphics, the economics of video games have changed substantially.

Once, video game companies sold games that would play on a user's computer, then consoles—which are basically gaming-focused mini-computers that plug into a customer's TV, or can be carried around in their pockets—those quickly became the new default for many gamers, creating a more optimized gaming experience, though also introducing a new cost for game-makers, as they typically need to pay something to the console-maker to use their tech and have their products work on these platforms.

Retail stores became increasingly important to the gaming industry's budgetary concerns around this time, as they would need to take a cut of the sale price of everything they sold, but also have the flexibility to offer deals to their customers, to incentivize purchases and lure them away from other game stores.

And further toward the base of the development stack, as games became more sophisticated and refined, game-makers had to spend more money on high-end hardware, but also higher-end software tools that would allow them to develop the games, polish them so they could compete with other offerings, and in some cases use what's often called "middleware" to serve as a scaffolding for their game projects—software tools that are sometimes referred to as game engines.

All of which has made the process of producing video games a lot more complex and expensive, and as the industry has become more popular, roping-in more and more customers, more and more entities have popped up, intent on making their own games; and that's fed a spiral toward higher-costs and more complex game-making processes, leading to a lot of enrichment in some cases, and quite a few new business models optimized for different platforms and styles of game, but also quite a few bankruptcies and hostile takeovers, even seemingly successful video game companies sometimes falling short or investing too much in a game that flops, leaving them with insufficient resources to keep the lights on or produce their next product.

What I'd like to talk about today is a recent scandal in the video game industry related to one of those middleware, game engine-making companies, and how they're scrambling to make things right after seemingly losing much of their goodwill and credibility essentially overnight.

—

In early September, 2023, a game engine company called Unity announced that it would be changing its pricing structure, effective Jan 1, 2024, and that set off a wave of outrage and anger from its users, most of which are individual game-makers and game-making companies.

To understand why this response was so widespread and vehement, it's helpful to understand a bit about how game engines work and their role in the modern video game industry.

Fundamentally, a game engine is a piece of software that serves as a framework for making video games.

So while it's not a simple "click a button, get a game" sort of setup, it does dramatically reduce the amount of time and effort required to produce a finished game product, giving users—game-developers of all shapes and sizes—level-editors, physics engines, rendering engines that help them more easily produce and edit 2D and 3D graphics, collision detection tools, which basically track and control how things bump up against each other in the game and what happens when they do, alongside more basic media tools like those that allow for the creation and editing of audio, animations, video content, text, and the like.

Modern game engines also help developers keep the size of their games moderated without losing too much quality, they help with memory management on the developers' computers, they can provide artificial intelligence tools and software that helps them build-out multiplayer functionality—it's a really big and powerful toolkit, so the engine that game-makers choose to use is important, and it shapes every other decision they make, and in some ways the final product, too, because of how easy or difficult things are to do within their specific scaffolding.

Unity makes a very popular game engine that was originally released in 2005 as a Mac-specific product, but it has since become multiplatform, allowing developers to make games for all sorts of computers, consoles, mobile devices, and virtual reality interfaces.

It's perhaps most popular in the mobile gaming space, as it's relatively easy to learn compared to other engines, and is fairly lightweight; and because the mobile gaming space has been growing so rapidly, that's meant Unity has become increasing popular and widespread as a tool, which in turn has had the spillover effect of making it more popular on other platforms, as well—because folks making a mobile game might go on to make a Playstation game next, and may decide to stick with the engine they know, or a gaming company might decide to perch all their games upon the same game engine because that's just a lot easier, both in terms of keeping things simple for developers, and in terms of the costs associated with using a bunch of different engine.

The pricing models used by these game engines vary quite a bit from company to company, but typically they make money by selling licenses to use their products; there's generally a free tier for folks learning to use their tools and who make games below a certain threshold of popularity and profit, but at a certain point they'll need to buy the right to use the engine, which generally also comes with a few bonus perks, like better analytics and error reporting options.

This system has worked for everyone for a long time now, and though some developers have balked at the idea of paying Unity and similar companies for their engines, opting for free and open source options like Godot, instead, the larger gaming industry has generally oriented itself around just a few primary, paid options, including the Unreal Engine owned by Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, among many other offerings, and Unity, which since its release has been used to make more than 750,000 games, alongside non-game offerings, like augmented reality experiences in Microsoft's HoloLens headset, about 90% of Samsung Gear VR content, machine learning programs like Google's TensorFlow, and even film content, like the backgrounds for the 2019 real-life version of The Lion King and engineering blueprints, like those for cars and buildings.

All of which partially explains why so many people were up in arms about the changes Unity announced, seemingly out of nowhere, to their fee structure in early September.

The old Unity model, again, included a free version of Unity for folks operating below a certain threshold—that threshold has been $200,000 for a while now—and after that folks would pay a monthly fee to use the engine, and that fee would typically cost about $400 per year per game, though it varied quite a bit as folks paid per seat—that is, per developer using the engine—and based on the size of the studio and game they're working on.

Unity's newly announced pricing model, in contrast, would keep a free tier, but would remove some of the cheaper payment options, nudging people up to higher yearly rates, while, importantly, also tacking-on a small fee, somewhere between a cent and twenty cents, for each installation of a game that uses the Unity engine, after a threshold has been crossed.

The announcement also said that Unity would use a secret, internal method of determining download numbers, and folks would be on the hook, in some cases, for something closer to $2,000 a year per game, rather than $400-ish, though that number would also vary wildly based on a game's popularity and reach.

This sparked all kinds of concerns, as it was an additional fee on top of existing fees, costing game-makers more over time, and without providing any new value in exchange, and because it was retroactive, so everyone who had ever used Unity for any game would be on the hook for this new payment structure—meaning, all those 750,000 games or so would potentially be new sources of revenue for Unity, but would be burdened with new expenses for the folks who made them.

All sorts of immediate concerns bubbled to the surface of the gaming community, ranging from worries that small, indie devs would be priced out of the market—folks without big bank accounts to draw upon, and who aren't making games that bring in tons of revenue—to concerns related to the concept of putting a price-tag on downloads: would trolls be able to aim hefty fees on developers they don't like by repeatedly installing and uninstalling their games? Would Unity's tracking software be legit? Would it differentiate new downloads from redownloads, or would someone who buys a game, paying for it once, conceivably be a drain on the developer's bank account forever into the future, because they might install it over and over again, over time, on multiple devices?

This outcry was also laden with a heavy sense of betrayal because it seemed to violate Unity's terms of service, and that outcry grew even louder and more betrayal-laden when it became clear, as folks went back to check the end-user license agreement they'd signed, that Unity had quietly, in the preceding months, gone through and edited its EULA to basically allow themselves to do what they had done, even though previous versions said they would never do such a thing.

The first week after this announcement, as the gaming world unified against Unity, the company's stock tumbled around 16.5% from where it was before the announced change, which is the opposite of what the company had hoped to accomplish—industry analysis suggests that the company is trying to shore-up its numbers, never having been profitable, but finding itself especially pressed for cash right now, and hoping to avoid being in the same situation in the future.

What seems to have happened is they tried to do too much at once, essentially grabbing at immediate cash as much as possible, while also trying to scale-up their future prospects by giving themselves a means of benefitting from the success of the games that use their engine; this isn't an entirely novel concept, as their competitor, Unreal, charges a 5% revenue share from game-makers using their engine, but because this was new, out of nowhere, seemed to come about without the folks running Unity checking-in with anyone in the gaming industry to see if it would be alright, and if so to see what sorts of numbers would be tenable for their business models, and because it was retroactively applied using a seemingly pretty skeezy, secretive method of basically giving themselves permission, on the down-low, after swearing up and down they would never do exactly this—all of it went over quite badly, the gaming world revolted against them, near-universally, and this has led to a huge exodus from Unity to other platforms, including the free and open source Godot, which has quite suddenly received a wave of funds from some of the more successful indie game studios out there, and newfound attention from folks who are learning they can relatively simply port their games from Unity to Godot, saving them the future hassle and expense of dealing with the former.

The alternative floated by some gaming studios and individual makers was to simply pull their games from shelves, and this was also threatened, especially in cases where the games are free to play, and thus tend to garner huge numbers of downloads, but don't make money on all the people who install their game—which means their work would become huge weights around their ledgers, losing them money each year, rather than earning them money.

It took more than a week, but the higher-ups at Unity eventually made some noises about having heard the game-making world and feeling bad about releasing this new model without first seeking their input, and they said they would take another stab at things and get back to them.

They then released a new plan, a new pricing model, that seems to have infuriated people substantially less—a revamp that still includes changes, but apparently less catastrophic ones.

The new plan says they'll rely on game-maker-reported numbers to tally downloads, and they've raised the revenue cap at which folks need to upgrade to $200,000, so below that and you can keep the low-tier Unity Personal plan, which is excluded from this new pricing model, and that roughly lines up with where things were before—and any game that makes less than $1 million in 12 months will also be exempt from the additional, per-install fee.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Unity is now saying games made with previous versions of their engine won't be beholden to this new pricing model, nor would they need to abide by the new terms of service, which among other things says their games need to include a big, Made by Unity splash screen at the beginning, and only those that use the new version being released in 2024 would be required to pay based on downloads, though developers can choose to pay a 2.5% revenue share rather than using the per-installation model—and there's some indication that if they report install numbers, the company will choose whichever is the lowest fee for them, automatically, and charge them that.

All of which seems to have cooled things down quite a lot, though a fair bit of damage has already been done to the company's reputation in the industry; many game-makers are still saying they're intending to port their games away as soon as they're able, and that they won't use Unity in the future, because the people in charge of the company have shown their true colors, have shown that they're willing to renege on previous commitments and promises, and burn the goodwill they've earned over the years, in order to pull in more money, to fill the gaps in their balance sheets.

The company is investing in a big PR push to try to win people back and polish their now-tarnished brand, but it could be a while before they manage to do so, if indeed they do manage to do so.

In the meantime, industry alternatives have seen a big boost in attention and use, and there's a chance we could see more entrants in this space, popping up to take advantage of the hole left by Unity's flub, and introducing entirely new business models that may further innovate on what we've already seen, and allow entirely new game-world business models to arise and flourish.

This week we talk about HIV, AIDS, and ART.

We also discuss HAART, the Berlin Patient, and potential future cures.

Recommended Book: Allergic by Theresa MacPhail

Show Notes

* https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet

* https://hivinfo.nih.gov/understanding-hiv/fact-sheets/hiv-treatment-basics

* https://clinicalinfo.hiv.gov/en/glossary/antiretroviral-therapy-art

* https://www.paho.org/en/topics/antiretroviral-therapy

* https://journals.lww.com/jaids/fulltext/2010/01010/declines_in_mortality_rates_and_changes_in_causes.13.aspx

* https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13181-013-0325-8

* https://academic.oup.com/jac/article/73/11/3148/5055837?login=false

* https://journals.lww.com/jaids/fulltext/2016/09010/narrowing_the_gap_in_life_expectancy_between.6.aspx

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenofovir_disoproxil

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_of_HIV/AIDS

* https://www.verywellhealth.com/cart-hiv-combination-antiretroviral-therapy-48921

* https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/art/index.html

* https://www.freethink.com/health/cured-of-hiv

* https://www.jstor.org/stable/3397566?origin=crossref

* https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/11/science/new-homosexual-disorder-worries-health-officials.html

* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23444290/

* https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/4251-hiv-aids

* https://web.archive.org/web/20080527201701/http://data.unaids.org/pub/EPISlides/2007/2007_epiupdate_en.pdf

* https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhiv/article/PIIS2352-3018(23)00028-0/fulltext

Transcript

In mid-May of 1981, the queer community-focused newspaper, the New York Native, published what would become the first-ever article on a strange disease that seemed to be afflicting community members in the city.

What eventually became known as AIDS, but which was at the time discussed by medical professionals primarily in terms of its associated diseases, was clinically reported upon for the first time less than a month later, five official cases having been documented in an interconnected group of gay men and users of injectable drugs, who came to the attention of doctors for not being inherently immunocompromised, but still somehow contracting a rare type of pneumonia that only really impacted folks with severely impaired immune systems.

In subsequent years, doctors started using a range of different terms for HIV and AIDS, calling them at different times and in different contexts the lymphotophic retrovirus, Kaposi's sarcoma and opportunistic infections, and the 4H disease, referring to heroine users, hemophiliacs, homosexuals, and Haitians, the four groups that seemed to make up almost all of the confirmed afflicted patients.

The acronym GRID, for gay-related immune deficiency was also used for a time, but that one was fairly rapidly phased out when it became clear that this condition wasn't limited to the gay community—though those earlier assumptions and the terminology associated with them did manage to lock that bias into mainstream conversation and understanding of AIDS and HIV for a long time, and in some cases and in some locations, to this day.

By the mid-80s, two research groups had identified different viruses that seemed to be associated with or responsible for cases of this mysterious condition, and it was eventually determined (in 1986) that they were actually the same virus, and that virus was designated HIV.

HIV, short for Human Immunodeficiency Virus, is a retrovirus that, if left untreated, leads to Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, in about 50% of patients within ten years of infection.

So HIV is the virus, AIDS is a condition someone with HIV can develop after their immune system is severely damaged by the infection, and there are a bunch of diagnostic differentiations that determine when someone has transitioned from one category to the other, but in general folks with HIV will experience moderate flu- or mono-like symptoms, alongside swollen lymph nodes and rashes and throat problems and sores across their bodies in the early stages of infection, and as things progress, they develop opportunistic infections of the kind that can only really latch onto a human when their immune system is weakened or shut down. While AIDS, arriving after the immune system is well and truly damaged, brings with it a slew of opportunistic infections and associated issues, the afflicted person potentially developing all sorts of cancers, sarcomas, persistent infections, and extreme versions of the flu-like, mono-like symptoms they may have suffered earlier on.

We don't know for certain how and where HIV originated—and that's true of both kinds, as there's an HIV-1 and HIV-2 virus, the former of which accounts for most infections, the latter of which is less common, and less overall infectious—but both HIV types seem to have been transmitted to humans from non-human primates somewhere in West-central Africa in the early 20th century, possibly from chimpanzees in southern Cameroon, but that's pretty speculative, and there's some evidence that these diseases may have made the leap several times; so while there's a pretty good chance, based on what we know now, that the disease made it into humans and mutated approximately somewhere in that vicinity, sometime in the early 20th century, possibly via chimps hunted and eaten by locals as bushmeat, we really don't know for certain.

There are reports of what were probably HIV as far back as 1959 in the Belgian Congo, but that's a bit speculative, too, and based on imperfect notes from the time.

Back then, though, and through the 1980s, folks who contracted HIV and who were not treated would typically die within 11 years of being infected, and more than half of those diagnosed with AIDS in the US from 1981 through 1992 died within 2 years of their diagnosis; such a diagnosis was a death sentence, basically; it was a really horrible and scary time.

Today, the outlook for folks who contract HIV is substantially better: the life expectancy of someone who contracts the virus and who is able to get treatment is about the same as someone who is not infected; the disease isn't cured, but the level of HIV virus in the blood of a person receiving treatment is so small that it's no longer transmissible, or even detectable.

What I'd like to talk about today is a new therapy that's making those sorts of outcomes possible, how some few people have now been cured of HIV entirely, and what's on the horizon in this space.

—

Antiretroviral therapy, or ART, typically consists of a combination of drugs based on those that were originally combined in this way in 1996 by researchers who announced their findings at the International AIDS Conference in Vancouver—they called their approach highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART, and this combo was based on findings from earlier drugs that addressed one of HIV's seven stages of development—but because they all hit that same, single stage, the virus was rapidly developing an immunity to them, and they were universally pretty toxic, with horrible side-effects.

What's more, this drug cocktail increased patients' life expectancy by about 24 months, on average—which is a lot, about two years, but considering all those side effects, which included severe liver problems and anemia, the extra months of life generally weren't very pleasant extra months.

In 1995, a class of drugs called protease inhibitors were introduced, which prevented HIV from making copies of itself using the body's structural proteins.

That, combined with the effects of other, existing retrovirals, which hindered the virus's ability to hijack the body's cells to make more of itself, turned out to be a substantial improvement over just one or the other approach.

The announcement in 1996 was notable because the researchers involved were able to knock the viral load in their patients down to an undetectable level, and then keep it there, by using three drugs from each of those two antiviral classes, those two different approaches.

So HAART was a major improvement over what came before, but it was still imperfect; deaths tied to HIV plummeted by 50% in the US and Europe in just three years, but the life expectancy of folks using this therapy was still low compared to other people; someone who contracted HIV in their 20s and went on this therapy was still only expected to live till their early 50s; way better than a two-year increase, but still plenty of room for improvement.

In addition to that lifespan duration limitation, the HAART bundle of therapies was just really difficult to maintain.

Some people experienced a dramatic redistribution of body fat, some developed heart arrhythmias or insulin resistance or peripheral neuropathy or lactic acidosis—which is basically a toxic buildup of the acid that results from metabolism, which is usually cleared naturally, but when it doesn't, it's potentially deadly.

Anything less than absolutely perfect adherence to the treatment schedule was also potentially deleterious to the desired outcomes; it wasn't a forgiving regimen, with some of the drugs requiring three capsules be taken every 8 hours, and there was a chance that if a portion of a dose of one drug was missed, or not administered on time, the virus could develop an immunity to it and the whole thing would fall apart.

Consequently, the HAART regimen was generally reserved until things got really bad, and that meant it didn't have a very large effect on the infected population, and those who did benefit from it suffered consequences, alongside those benefits.

The change in terminology from HAART to ART arrived in 2001 when a drug called Viread, the brand name for tenofovir disoproxil, was released and added into the mix, replacing some of the most toxic and cumbersome of the previous therapies with a single pill per day, and one that came with far fewer, and far less extreme, side effects.

In 2005 it was finally demonstrable, with a bunch of data, that beginning this type of therapy early rather than waiting until things get really bad was worth the trade-offs—researchers showed that if folks received access to ART upon diagnosis, severe HIV associated and non HIV associated illnesses  were reduced by 61%.

As of 2016 there was still an average life expectancy gap between folks with HIV who received early care and people who were not infected of about 8 years, but that gap has been steadily closing with the introduction of new, easier to use, less side effect prone drugs—drugs that tend to attack the virus at different stages, and which take different approaches to hindering and blocking it—alongside innovations in how the drugs are delivered, like introducing substances that are converted by the body into the desired drug, which massively cuts the requisite dosage, in turn lessening the strain on the body's organs and the potential side effects associated with taking a higher dose of the drug, itself.

We've also seen the advent of fixed-dose combination drugs, which are exactly what they sound like: a single pill containing the entire combination of drugs one must take each day, which makes a combination therapy much easier to administration and stick with, which in turn has substantially reduced the risk of severe side effects, and prevented mutations that might otherwise make a patient's virus more immune to some component of the drug cocktail.

Some newer options just use two drugs, too, compared to the previous three-or-more, and most of these have been shown to be just as effective as the earlier, more bodily stressful combinations, and a recent, 2021 drug is injectable, rather than deliverable in pill-form, and can be administered just once a month—though a version of this drug, sold under the name Cabenuva, has been approved for administration every other month.

So things in this corner of the medical world are looking pretty good, due new approaches and innovations to existing therapy models.

These models remain imperfect, but they're getting better every year, and contracting HIV is no longer a death sentence, nor does it mean you'll always be infectious, or even detectably infected: the amount of HIV virus in one's blood can be kept undetectably low for essentially one's entire life, so long as one is able to get on the right therapy or combination of therapies and stick with it.

That said, the global HIV pandemic is far from over, and access to these drugs–many of which are pricy, if you don't have insurance that will cover them—is not equally distributed.

As of late-2022, the UN's official numbers indicate that about 39 million people, globally, have HIV, about 1.3 million were infected in 2022, and about 630,000 died from AIDS-related illnesses that year.

That said, of those 39 million or so who are infected, nearly 30 million are receiving some kind of antiretroviral therapy, and about 86% of people who are estimated to be infected know their status, so they can seek such therapies, and/or take other precautious to protect themselves and others; though that also means about 5.5 million people, globally, have HIV and don't realize it.

Here's a really remarkable figure, though: among people who are infected and know they are infected, about 93% of them were virally suppressed as of 2022.

That's astonishing; 93% of people who have HIV and are aware of it are on some kind of therapy that has allowed them to suppress the virus so that it's nearly undetectable—the difference between the two, by the way, is that suppressed means 200 copies of the HIV virus per milliliter of blood, while undetectable is generally considered to be less than 50 copies per milliliter.

So huge leaps in a relatively short period of time, and a massive improvement in both duration and quality of life for folks who might otherwise suffer mightily, and then die early, because of this virus and its associated symptoms.

That said, there are some interesting, new approaches to dealing with HIV on the horizon, and some of them might prove to be even more impactful than this current batch of incredibly impactful ART options.

As of September 2023, five people have been confirmed cured of HIV; not suppressed and not with viral loads at undetectable levels: cured.

The first of these cured people, often referred to as the Berlin Patient, received a stem cell transplant from a bone marrow donation database that contained a genetic mutation called CCR5 Delta 32, which makes those who have it essentially immune to HIV infection.

Three months after he received the transplant and stopped taking ART, doctors were unable to find any trace of the virus in his blood.

He died from cancer in 2020, but there didn't seem to be any HIV in his blood from when he received the stem cell transplant, onward, and that happened in the early 2000s, and was formally announced to the medical community in 2008.

At least two other people—two that we know about, anyway—have been cured of HIV using the same method; though at the moment at least, this option is severely limited as it requires that patients have a bone marrow match in donor databases, and that one of those donors have that specific, relatively rare mutation; so with existing science and techniques, at least, this is unlikely to be a widespread solution to this problem—though a 2017 experiment used stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood from a baby with that mutation to treat a woman' leukemia and cure her HIV, so there's a chance other approaches that make use of the same basic concept might be developed, opening this up to more people.

Cancer drugs may also help some people with HIV: a drug that's been approved to treat several cancers called Venetoclax seems to also bind to a protein that helps HIV-infected T cells dodge the body's immune system and survive, and that realization has led to a series of experiments that showed HIV was suppressed in mice receiving this drug—though it bounced back a week later, and two weeks later in mice receiving both this drug and ART.

This is unlikely to be a solution unto itself, then, but there's a chance either an adjusted version of this drug, or this drug in combination with other therapies, might be effective; and there's a clinical trial testing the efficacy of Venetoclax in human HIV patients at the end of this year, and another in 2024, so we may soon know if its safe and desirable to use this drug alongside ART, and that may, in turn, lead to a better understanding of how to amplify the drug's effects, or apply this method of hindering HIV from a different angle.

CRISPR, the gene-editing technology borrowed from bacteria that allows for the cutting and removing and adding of genetic information, has enabled the development of several new potential HIV cures, one of which, called EBT-101, basically enters the body, finds helper T cells, and then cuts out chunks of the HIV virus's DNA, which prevents it from being able to replicate itself or hide away, reemerging later after another treatment has suppressed it.

The benefit of this approach is that it could kill the viral reservoirs that otherwise allow HIV to persist in people who have undergone treatments, and a version of it that targets SIV, which is similar to HIV, but found in non-human primates—performed exactly as they hoped it would, finding and editing the targeted DNA, raising hopes than an HIV-targeting variation may manage similar wonders in human patients.

This would be great if it ends up working, as one injection would theoretically clear all HIV from a person's system in relatively short-order, but the trials done so far have been small and on monkeys, and because of the nature of the research, it's not clear the monkeys were cured of HIV—just that the treatment got where it was supposed to go and made some DNA edits.

A human trial of EBT-101 will finish up in March of 2025, though the researchers plan to follow up with their subjects for up to 15 years following the trial, to assess any long-term effects from their treatment, since CRISPR and this approach to messing with genes is still such a new thing.

So while this may be a solution at some point, there's a good chance it won't be a real-deal, available option for another decade, minimum.

So we've come a long way in a very short period of time with HIV and AIDS treatments, and the future is looking pretty good, with even more options and approaches on the horizon, including some actual cures, alongside high-quality, actually useable treatments.

But there's still room to grow in terms of infection awareness, there are still distribution issues for some of these drugs, and there's still a fair bit of prejudice, the consequence of ignorance and historical misunderstandings and biases, keeping folks and institutions from doing as much as they otherwise could in many parts of the world; so a lot to be proud of, a lot to look forward to, but still plenty of room for improvement across the board.

This week we talk about China’s standard map, the nine-dash line, and shoals.

We also discuss WWIII, undersea minerals, and realities on the ground.

Recommended Book: Outlive by Peter Attia

Show Notes

* https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202308/28/WS64ec91c2a31035260b81ea5b.html

* https://www.uscc.gov/research/south-china-sea-arbitration-ruling-what-happened-and-whats-next

* https://amti.csis.org/island-tracker/china/

* https://globalvoices.org/2023/09/05/the-chinese-2023-map-has-nothing-new-but-why-are-chinas-neighbours-mad-about-it/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_China

* https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/philippines-taiwan-malaysia-reject-chinas-latest-south-china-sea-map-2023-08-31/

* https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-nine-dash-line-and-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-the-barbie-movie-209043

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_(1912%E2%80%931949)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line

* https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-nine-dash-line-and-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-the-barbie-movie-209043

* https://hir.harvard.edu/vietnam-and-china-conflicting-neighbors-stuck-in-nationalism-and-memory/

Transcript

In the wake of some stunning defeats to European powers in the 19th century, and its place on the winning side of WWII, the Chinese government saw quite a lot of territory disappear, but then gained a fair bit back, following that global conflict, and this necessitated the redrawing of many maps, most of which were substantially outdated, because of the relative rapidity with which their territory was changing during this period—they lost Vietnam as a supplicant state, for instance, but also added a fair number of former Japanese islands to their collection, including Taiwan, which it took from Japan in 1945, and where the former Chinese government fled following Mao's revolution, which is what led to modern day Taiwan as a separate state, by their reckoning, at least, from that of Mainland China, which doesn't agree.

And as is the case with Taiwan, not everyone in the area agrees about which other islands and bodies of water belong to whom, and the huge number of islands of varying sizes in the South China Sea are especially fraught, in terms of ownership claims, as many of them are worthless for the purpose of building real-deal settlements, but could be useful in terms of military infrastructure, allowing ships to dock and refuel, serving as weapons platforms for missiles and anti-aircraft equipment; that sort of thing.

These island-related controversies have sparked or been components of several recent conflicts in the region, including clashes between the Chinese and Vietnamese militaries in 1974 and 1988, and as an apparent effort to lock-in their claim to some of these territories, the Chinese government, in December of 1947, published a map called the Location Map of South Sea Islands, which showed the South China Sea, along with an eleven-dash line that encompassed a huge, u-shaped portion of the region, with the implication that everything within that line belonged to China, though the Chinese government never outright said "all of this is ours, stay out."

Beginning in the early 1950s, this line used only nine dashes, and had changed shape a bit, no longer including the Gulf of Tonkin as a concession to the now-independent North Vietnamese government.

But the former Chinese government, the one that was now occupying and governing from Taiwan, continued to use an eleven-dash line on their official map, the implication being that they don't recognize the changes to Chinese territory made by the successor Chinese government that usurped them back in the mid-20th century.

However many dashes are used, and whatever the specific expanse of them, though, the significance of this line on what's become known as the Chinese standard maps released at a regular cadence by the government have become the topic of furious debate, as the Chinese government has never really clarified what they're saying when they publish these things, allowing the implication to be that this is their home turf, their islands and ocean, but never taking the next step that would be required to formalize that claim.

The implication of any territorial barrier is the violence required to defend it, so the presumed rationale here is that, like Taiwan's status, which is in an official sort of superposition right now, the Chinese government claiming it as their own, the Taiwanese government claiming independence, and everyone else just kind of making positive or negative noises while seldom taking a firm stance one way or the other, allows everyone involved to be unhappy and to hold their own opinions, but to not feel like they need to go to war over the issue, because no hands have been forced in that regard; a stronger stance and a more formal declaration of independence by Taiwan, supported by other nations, would presumably necessitate military action from China, while the same sort of concrete move by China to retake the island by force would probably trigger action from its opposition, as well.

Leaving things flexible and vague, though, keeps everything nebulous enough that nothing needs to be blown up and no one has to die.

The same seems to be true with this larger pseudo-claim of territory from the Chinese government, these maps showing an area that looks a lot like it belongs to China, but the Chinese government never formally saying "this is ours, and thus, if you want to go to these islands, travel these waters, you'll need our permission, and we'll blast you to kingdom come if you step over the line we've drawn here."

What I'd like to talk about today are the implications of this sort of intentional geographic uncertainty, and the response to a new standard map the Chinese government recently released.

—

The 2023 edition of China's standard map, which usually displays its now-famous nine-dash line alongside other information about the country, like its territorial delineations, capitol cities, and the like, has created a moderate uproar throughout the area in part due to the addition of a tenth dash, and in part because it seems to have added to its collection of territory at the expense of many of its neighbors.

Among those who are upset about these new visual claims is the Russian government, which has become increasingly close with the Chinese government following its invasion of Ukraine, which has left it a bit of a pariah, globally, and it's been in many ways propped up and sustained economically by trade with China; but even they made a statement of distaste about this map, which seems to show that an island which was previously divided between Chinese and Russian control, is now just China's.

India is also pissed that highly disputed areas along its border with China have seemingly been folded into its neighbor's official collection of territories with the advent of this new map, and Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and of course, Taiwan, have also spoken out against what this new map implies—the latter of which, Taiwan, perhaps more than most, as that additional tenth dash seems to more firmly embrace it than previous maps, implying that Taiwan is becoming more China's than ever before, which in the current geopolitical context represents a potential military threat.

But those other nations are also pretty peeved, as islands they claim as their own have been looped into this large u-shaped area, portrayed as being China's and China's alone; and although in many cases that's been true of previous versions of the map, as well, the context surrounding this version's release is substantially different than the context in previous years.

So in response to this hubbub of outcries, the Chinese government has said, basically, calm down, this is the same map, what are you all so upset about?

And to some degree that's largely true: most of these claims were on previous maps as well, but that additional dash does seem pretty aggressive in a world in which the Chinese government has made pretty clear that it both intends to retake Taiwan at some point, and that it's willing and able to do so, militarily, and in which the government has been feverishly investing in more guns, ships, jets, and missiles, and rapidly building out its military presence in these contested areas, including military bases high in the mountains along its border with India, in territory both nations claim as their own, and the construction of ship docks and turrets and missile launchers on tiny little islands in the middle of the ocean, which other nations claim, as well, but which China is physically occupying, punctuating their map-based claims with real-world threats toward anyone who challenges them; realities on the ground, to use the defense world parlance for building military assets of this kind in contested territory.

In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that China's nine-dash line didn't have any basis in international law, and that this region is mostly international waters, usable by anyone, anytime, for any reasons, more or less.

China dismissed this ruling and said it would ignore it, basically, so while other nations in the area, like the Philippines, have continued to fish in traditional areas, like the shoals surrounding the Spratly Islands, located between them and Malaysia and Vietnam in the South China Sea, China has been building artificial islands atop coral reefs on this island chain, dredging sand onto the reefs and then pouring concrete over that sand, allowing it to build permanent military structures and install radar systems, missile silos, and aircraft hangers, where it also now bases military aircraft.

This has been a huge investment and a lot of work for the Chinese government, but it's allowing them to convert the soft, vague claims printed on their maps into hard realities in the real-world; the international arbitrators in The Hague would not honor what they considered to be their historic, national territorial claims, so they went out and made them real; the equivalent of putting up fences around land with unclear ownership on a parcel near your home—it might still be legally debatable who owns that land, but it becomes very clear who has control over it and access to it and who can use it after a fence is put up; and that's even more the case when you begin to deny others access and imply that you are willing and able to defend it if someone decides to step into what is now, on a very practical level, your turf.

This carving out of new territory from international waters and in contested regions by the Chinese government has become an even more substantial issue over the past decade or so as the race to claim and develop undersea resources has become more frantic, with governments around the world scrambling to secure the minerals and other raw materials that will inform the next, post-fossil fuel paradigm, and many of these resources, from lithium to nickel to cobalt, are contained in hard-to-reach areas, like, in some cases, underwater continental shelves.

So just as the Arctic has become a hotbed for exploration and infrastructural development, everyone with borders touching the Arctic Ocean doing what they can to build-out their ship-based capacity, military bases, and knowledge of what's underneath all that water, for if and when they can eventually justify stepping in to start building and harvesting those raw materials, the South China Sea is also rich with such assets, and this line on this map, and all this real-world building and hardening of military defenses in the area, is meant to allow China, if and when it wants, to start claiming these resources as its own, as it will have already established clear ownership of the territory surrounding these stockpiles, and the ability to defend these assets if anyone else challenges their claim.

Physical conflict related to such claims has already broken out a few times, mostly related to fishing at the moment—the Chinese Coast Guard shooting high-powered water cannons at vessels owned by Philippines-based companies and Vietnamese fishing boats in order to drive them away and again, implicitly, partition-off these rich areas, over time redefining them as being for exclusive Chinese use.

But the big concern is that at some point these measures might become more serious and deadly, and this type of conflict, if it escalates, could spiral into something truly global.

The disagreement between China and Taiwan about who owns the island and whether the Taiwanese government is legit or not is generally seen as one of the most volatile hot-spots on the planet, in terms of the potential to accidentally set off WWIII, because of who's allied with whom, and what everyone involved has to gain or lose by engaging in such a conflict.

It's possible, though, that something seemingly lower-level, like a scuffle over fishing grounds, or the development of undersea mineral extraction infrastructure could be what sets off such a fight, as China defending international waters as if they are their own, putting up a fence on public property, basically, and then shooting anyone who approaches, becomes a test of the international system, and that could lead to a direct conflict between China and let's say the Philippines, and that could pull other regional entities like Vietnam and Indonesia, and maybe even India into the fight, which in turn would potentially bring the US and EU into the conflict, directly or indirectly, alongside Russia and Iran on China's side, again, directly or indirectly.

All of which could compound into something incredibly devastating, all because China is attempting to expand in a manner that is considered illegal by international bodies, because what we might think of as the Western bloc, the US and EU and India and its allies, are trying to box China in, as a response, which China doesn't like and which is probably amplifying their efforts in this regard, and because all of that is making this area a potential tinderbox for conflict—no one wanting to give ground, everyone aware the world is changing around them, economically, climactically, and so on, and everyone trying to set themselves up to be in the best possible position mid-century or so, doing the math and maybe even deciding a big conflict would be worth it, so long as that would make them a bigwig in the rapidly impending, next-step geopolitical paradigm.

This week we talk about Jimmy Buffett, Boomers, and the Soviet Union.

We also discuss Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, and the 2024 US Presidential Election.

Show Notes

(Notes on show notes: for Wikipedia or other reference articles, please follow source links as they tend to tell you which bits of data are legit and which are less so—these are excellent starting points for info, but ideally not the end-points.)

Some Relevant Links

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/health/mitch-mcconnell-health-seizures.html

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

https://theintercept.com/2023/07/27/gerontocracy-google-mcconnell-feinstein/

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-gets-younger-senate-gets-older-a-look-at-the-age-and-generation-of-lawmakers-in-the-118th-congress/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_by_age

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/dianne-feinstein-went-hospital-minor-fall-home-spokesperson-says-rcna98992

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/16/1194115265/sen-mitch-mcconnells-health-issues-spotlights-kentuckys-succession-process

https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/raising-social-securitys-retirement-age-would-cut-benefits-for-all-new

https://www.census.gov/popclock/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerontocracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/music/jimmy-buffett-margaritaville-singer-and-beach-themed-businessman-dies-26e63495

Endmatter

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Transcript

Jimmy Buffett, the singer behind megahits like Margaritaville and A Pirate Looks at Forty, died at age 76 the first weekend of September 2023.His songs celebrated a particular flavor of aspirational lifestyle, defined by beaches and casual day-drinking and being overall really, really chilled out; something that contrasted with his ambitious, tour-heavy lived experience, but which helped him become one of the wealthiest musicians on the planet, with an estimated net-worth of around $1 billion when he died, more than half of which came from his touring and recording efforts, the rest of which came from all sorts of investments and business dealings, including the Margaritaville Cafe in Key West, which kicked-off a portfolio of restaurant assets, and then casinos and cruise lines, and Margaritaville-branded clothing and alcohol products.

He wrote some books, he made some canny investments, and basically did really well for himself—but Buffett will probably remain best known, despite his many accolades, for the vibe that permeated all his public-facing efforts, which captured a sensibility popular with folks of a certain age.

If you were born between roughly 1946 and 1964 in the United States, and thus are categorized as a Baby Boomer, there’s a good chance you either romanticize the sort of lifestyle Buffett was a proponent of, or you know a lot of people who do.Maybe these people became Parrotheads—ardent fans of Buffett’s work—or maybe they just like the idea of cruises and beachside vacations and traveling to warmer locales during the winter and thumbing their noses at work when they’re enjoying downtime, completely flipping the switch so they can live as beachbums, even if only for a little while, in order to relax and wind-down and recover from the responsibilities they carry during their normal, everyday lives.

That sense of responsibility—derived from a sturdy work-ethic, imbued in them by their parents, who in many cases survived the Great Depression and World War II, and had habits and values shaped by those eras and events—is one of the key traits often attributed to Baby Boomers, people who are in their early 60s through their early 80s, as of 2023.Like all demographic definitions, this one is highly flawed and flexible and generic, and it doesn’t encapsulate the rich spectrum of personalities and variations included in the age-demo it refers to, but like all such categorizations it’s meant to capture a broad, superficial sense of what a group of folks are like, in this case, pointing at what a group of folks who were born and grew up beginning in the middle of the 20th century believe about the world, what they value, how they tend to see things, and so on; all of it in aggregate, and all of it potentially not applicable to any single person who falls into that age range.

This sort of categorization is super-flawed, then, but it can be useful to gesture at large-scale trends over time, and that, in turn, can provide us with additional ways of looking at macro-scale changes in society, our economies, and our governance.

What I’d like to talk about today is how things are changing in the US, demographically, and how those changes are not, thus far at least, being represented in our government.

—

At the tail-end of August 2023, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell went silent and froze-up while answering questions from reporters, those reporters capturing the unnerving moment on video.This mid-Q&A freeze was the second in just two months for McConnell, who—in late-July—went silent for about 30 seconds in the middle of a similar press scrum, that video also captured and shared, everyone able to see McConnell seemingly unable to speak, maybe no longer aware of what was going on around him, visibly not well, but because of how these things tend to be handled by the politicians involved and their employees, also not clearly the consequence of one thing or another.

There have been all sorts of concerns raised since that first video went public, and though these are not the first health-related questions McConnell and his team have had to field—last Winter he fell and suffered a concussion, which required some time-off for rehab before he could return to his job leading the Republican Party in the Senate—these new, overt symptoms have been just really disturbing and worrying, and have served as evidence for anyone who doubted that McConnell may be reaching an age at which it’s time to look at retirement.

That’s a tough pill to swallow for anyone, but perhaps especially for a careerist like McConnell, who many analysts have said is responsible for the shape of the modern Republican Party, the dominance of his party’s ideology in the Supreme Court, and other major political victories over the past several decades; he’s been the brains and strategist behind a lot of these efforts, and the idea that someone with that much power and influence and reputation might be physically and mentally less capable because of the health-eroding effects of age, feels strange; it seems like a slap in the face, but also just bizarre, since he’s apparently lucid and still quite adept at his work much of the time.

Many societies throughout history have revered their elders, holding them up as something more than human in some cases, as people about to inherit the wisdom they’ll soon receive as deceased, also revered ancestors.But in other cases we’ve seen gangs of older, powerful, influential people grab control of the reins of a society and then hold onto them for dear life: the Soviet Union comes to mind, here, as many members of the ruling Politburo, the folks making policy in the Union, were in their late-60s and early 70s, which was unusual at the time.That norm-defying ruling age demographic in the Soviet Union wasn’t a mistake: many of the people who controlled the levers of society in the country were survivors of the Great Purge of the 30s and 40s, which meant those who made it through that filter had the opportunity to grab power and resources that were previously held by others, and from that point forward, they were able to use that power and those resources to bulwark their own positions; a right place, right time sort of situation that allowed them to redistribute newly available wealth and prestige, liberated from the previous holders of those assets, and then lock them back into place, themselves and their friends and family the beneficiaries of those things from that point forward.This cycle repeated itself in the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed and a group of what we now call oligarchs swept in to take control of the country’s resources, reallocating them to themselves, and then using those assets to bolster their own positions within the economy and society.

Something similar happened in the US with the Baby Boomer generation, as many people and institutions didn’t make it through the war, which led to a sort of churn in power and influence.Many of those who were in control before the war retained that control after, but some of those people disappeared, or their businesses went under, which left big, gaping holes for new, younger people to fill in the following decades.And those who were able to step into those spots at the moment, because they were of the proper age, with the proper know-how, and the proper legs-up that allowed them to outcompete others who would have liked to do the same, were able to basically do the democratic and capitalist version of what the Politburo members did, redistributing some of that previously locked-down wealth and power to themselves and their peers, before then locking that wealth and power into a new arrangement, solidifying their hold on everything from business to politics to pop culture.

This happens to some degree with every new generation, and that’s actually how these demographic labels tend to be created and delineated.We look at periods that seem to be bracketed by momentous happenings that change things, and then slice up the population into portions that may help us understand, for instance, how people who were born before and after the arrival and widespread adoption of the mobile internet differ from each other, and how people who fought in WWII differ from those who were born right after it?

But we live with the consequences of some of these shifts longer into the future, because the average human being’s life expectancy has been increasing pretty steadily since the post-Industrial Revolution era, more than doubling since 1900, recently reaching just over 79 years old for people living in the US.There was a dip the first couple of years of the pandemic in this growth in many countries, but in general, worldwide, this has been increasing steadily as medicine has changed, hygiene standards have improved, new technologies have allowed us to do cool things like screen for cancers and figure out that cigarettes are bad for you; our general lifespan is expected to keep increasing, too, with the Social Security Admiration currently anticipating a life expectancy of around 80 years for men and 83.4 years for women by 2050, and that’s similar—with a year or two of wiggle room—to other estimations.

Important to note here is that there’s a difference between life expectancy and health expectancy, the former being how long a person is technically alive, the latter being how long a person is alive and well enough to function and operate as normal, mentally and physically.That latter figure is also increasing as we get better at tackling age-related conditions, from cancer to Alzheimer’s, but there’s still a lot of work to be done, and many people still lose out on many of those later years of their lives because they’re in one way or another limited or incapacitated.

All that said, this general increase in longevity has meant that with each new generation, people live longer, and thus don’t churn out of their positions of power, don’t step down from their positions of influence and don’t will their resources to the next generation, and don’t necessarily even leave the workforce as the previous generation would have predicted and prepared everyone for, in terms of education and in terms of benefits, which has made it more difficult for folks aging into that workforce, and those who are hoping to accrue their own wealth and influence, because there’s less to go around—more of it is still accumulated in those older age demographics.

This has huge implications for things like Social Security, which has to pay out to people longer if they’re living longer, and it also means the math these sorts of safety net systems rely upon to function no longer work, because older people are getting more than was anticipated, because they’re around longer, and that in turn means folks on the younger end will probably have to pay more to keep these systems functioning, meaning more wealth ends up accumulating at the top and more wealth is drained from the bottom—perpetuating and amplifying that existing issue wealth and power accumulation imbalance.

This also means the higher rungs of business, government, and society as a whole tend to have more older people than previous generations would have seen, because folks are sticking around longer, are healthy enough for more of those years to keep functioning and doing the things they like doing, or feel compelled to do, and that means more of the levers that shape society from the top-down are held by these older folks, even as the population under them becomes younger and younger, on average.

The term “gerontocracy” refers to a society or business or some other entity that is run by people who are a lot older than those they’re managing or ruling or governing.

In the United States, the past two Presidents—Biden and Trump—have been the oldest presidents in US history.Teddy Roosevelt was the youngest-ever President to be inaugurated at 42, JFK was the youngest to be elected at 43, Ronald Reagan was the previous oldest president, leaving office at 78, and Biden was the oldest to have been elected at 77.Trump was nearly 71 when elected, was 74 when he left office, and is 77 today, while Biden is 80 years old, currently, but will soon be 81.

Not all modern presidents have been in their 60s or 70s: Bill Clinton was only 46 when he started his presidency, and Jimmy Carter was 52.But presidents have been getting older, on average, over time—the median age of a US president is still 55 years old, so those earlier presidents are doing a lot of weighing on that figure, considering the older ones we’ve got today—and politicians in general have been staying around for longer and longer, which allows them to accumulate connections, resources, influence, reputation, and all the other assets that allow someone to rule the roost when it comes to this sort of profession.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing: as was assumed by those countless earlier human societies that revere their elders, many older politicians have the benefit of wisdom, experience, and good relations—even with their opponents—to lean on when crafting and proposing legislation.Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell are reportedly on very good terms as humans, despite being at odds almost constantly as politicians, and that has apparently helped them pass some bipartisan laws that otherwise may never have seen the light of day.

There’ve been allegations, though, especially in recent years, that folks in the Boomer generation were able to buy homes cheap, on a single, minimum-wage job, were able to get education free or basically free, and were able to, in many other ways, benefit from the post-war growth spurt that the country enjoyed.There are a lot of quite severe downsides to have grown up and come of age during that same period, of course, too, but—to give one example—the tax-related laws folks in that demographic have passed in the years since, which have been beneficial primarily to people who have already accumulated wealth and assets, at the expense of those who have not, these laws been presented as one example of the older age demographic giving itself more and more of the fruits of a burgeoning society and economy at the expense of people earlier in their careers, who haven’t had the opportunity to accrue the same, and who, because of how slanted these laws and other biases toward the already-wealthy have become, may never have the opportunity to accrue.

It’s also been argued, time and time again, that those in power, those making laws and establishing what’s right and wrong, even to the point of making legal and illegal certain behaviors and trends, are being shaped by folks who are out of touch with how the world is, today, which in turn is slowing down development and prioritizing the preferences of older generations at the expense of younger generations.

Jimmy Buffet’s conception of a good life, while surely shared by some teens and twenty-somethings out there, at least superficially, is not at the top of many young peoples’ lists; young people are drinking less than their elders, engaging in healthier habits, overall, and care about different things than their parents’ generation.Among other differences, young people tend to consider the idea of owning a house as perpetually out of reach, but also an aspirational attribute of true freedom—a pie-in-the-sky dream that would allow them to reduce their crippling monthly expenses—whereas for Boomers the opposite might be true, their house psychologically tied to their work, and freedom represented by being as far away from work as possible.

Again, these are broad generalizations, and these sorts of claims about generations are based on snapshots of data that may also be imperfect, filtered through also-imperfect interpretations and suppositions.

But one of the concerns with a gerontocracy, in addition to it not seeming very democratic, in the representative democracy sense of the word, as those in charge do not reflect those they’re governing terribly accurately—in addition to that, the worry is that those in government might prioritize wildly different things from the majority of the US population, and that may lead to a further accumulation of power and resources in the hands of the already-favored few at the top of the age-heap, that favoring of one generation preventing the other from ever stepping in and iterating things; that traditional churn of wealth and power delayed and delayed and delayed again.

This topic is perhaps more important now than ever before in the US, because it’s looking possible that the 2024 election will be a rematch between President Biden and former-President Trump, who—again—are currently 77 and nearly 81 years old, respectively.Both of them are squarely in older-than-average territory; the median age of the United States was just shy of 39 in 2022, and the retirement age for folks born after 1960, as of 2022, is 67; so both men are well past typical retirement age, but still vying to run the biggest economy, most powerful military, and third-largest, in terms of population, country on the planet.

None of which is something they’re unable to do because of their age; as we get older we’re more likely to deal with health issues, but that’s not destiny, at least not until the very end.And just as generalizing based on made-up generational labels isn’t fair, and at times can be outright agist, prejudiced against people who are older because they’re older, it’s been posited that applying age-ceilings to those representing us in the government may likewise be unwarranted, as some people are spry and chipper and completely cognitively alert and capable well into their 80s or even 90s, while others reach the point where that’s no longer the case as early as their 60s or 70s; it’s not a predictable thing, and even average outcomes in this regard are changing rapidly as our science and healthcare changes.

That said, it may be that age ends up being a significant issue in this upcoming presidential election, which could then lead to churn via other means: folks getting out and voting for younger people with less experience, but also less age-related baggage could prod parties to start pitching and investing in more such candidates, coming to feel in subsequent elections—in stark contrast to how things are today—that having older party members on the ticket is more of a liability than an asset.

This week we talk about BRIC, BRICs, and BRICS+.

We also discuss the USD, sanctions, and alternative global financial systems.

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com

This week we talk about ECOWAS, Niger, and proxy conflicts.

We also discuss military dictatorships, Wagner, and colonies.

Show notes/transcript: letsknowthings.com