Sunday Cutdown XXIV
Clearing my inbox of stories I want to document
1) The mental health challenge of long-range thinking
GUARDIAN: We asked 380 top climate scientists what they felt about the future
GUARDIAN: World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target
H/T Bruce Whitehill.
First story is all about how climate scientists routinely fall into this funk about the future. Second story gives a good reason why.
My interest on this one is purely professional.
When you think long term, it is easy to go very existentialist about the meaning of life — the pointlessness of it all despite the grand narrative of progress.
Which is why, I argue, that anybody in this business, regardless of domain, needs to always keep in mind a happy ending — no matter how far out you need to go to get it.
My readings of history and projections into the future teach me that the dystopians are always wrong — given enough time, while the Gene Roddenberry-types are always right — when afforded enough effort by those interested in building a future worth creating.
The near and medium terms are always full of uncertainty, and that’s where the daily headlines can wreck your brain. But you need to believe that the long term is there for the taking/shaping, otherwise, why be in this business in the first place? [Unless scarying people for profit is your thrill, then shame on you for peddling that crap.]
If your message is doomed now and doomed tomorrow, then you’re hurting more than helping because, absent a space for positive thinking, inventiveness and creativity dry up. HOPE is a contagion of the best sort — the only real antidote for a similarly viral FEAR — the little mind-killer.
I think long term all the time. It’s how I’m wired. I’ve been thinking about the deep future since I was a kid. I can’t remember a time it wasn’t my primary mental activity. It’s why ANTICIPATION is my favorite emotion — like a drug. I barely exist in the here and now, which is dangerous when it comes to personal relationships (something I must work on constantly).
Because I live so much in the deep future, I need it to be a happy place, not just because that’s the source of long-term HOPE but because, the more I think about the long future, the more antsy I get about the near term.
Every morning scares me; the rest of this century … not at all.
In strategic thinking/mental health terms, I suffer far-sightedness in the extreme.
So, the balance is the key, but it’s also a necessary pursuit (happy ending) because of the occupational hazard of thinking long term all the time: the more confident you are of tomorrow, the more unsure you are about today (just too much variance).
If I didn’t have that long-term OPTIMISM, I would be a mental health basket case.
It’s part of why I think my version of a midlife crisis was so profound: one reaches the perfect balancing point in existence between realizing your life-reach (this is how much I can accomplish) and then sensing its smallness relative to the long term/eternity.
I firmly believe that long-term optimism, when paired with short-term pessimism, is the way to go so as to remain productive as a strategic thinker. It’s why I cannot sell doom-and-gloom and refuse to do so, despite it being a far more lucrative path.
Right now, in our political and environmental realms, we are deluged with long-term pessimism and it is highly corrosive, generating an almost overwhelming amount of short-term pessimism.
I expect better from the enviro types, but so many are locked into the MITIGATION=FAILURE mindset when we all need to be thinking more along the lines of ADAPTATION=OPPORTUNITY. Without such balance, the political players will veer between total inaction and manic desperation, and neither work out well over time.
2) Big demand = big decide
INSIDE EVs: I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked
H/T Andrew Barnett.
A worthy read that reminds us that demand is the true mother of invention (necessity being more like a midwife, in my mind).
The gist:
China's EV dominance takes shape
In 2023, the Shanghai Auto Show—China's first big industry event since the COVID lockdowns—revealed how far ahead the country is on EVs, software and connected vehicles. Now every automaker is scrambling to catch up while they lose sales in China, and while the U.S., Europe and others seek to limit Chinese EV imports they say would destroy their local car industries.
From America’s New Map, two bits. First, on why the auto industry is such a key indicator of globalization’s center of gravity in terms of demand:
Globalization’s shifting center of gravity is best represented by the auto industry. The automobile, a French word for the first practical vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine designed and built by the German Karl Benz in 1885, emerges in Europe at the height of its global economic domination. The fledgling industry jumps next to rising America, where our genius for mass production elevates the car (also of French origin) to middle-class status symbol. Our saturated auto market is then “invaded” by cheap Japanese and Korean vehicles (enough with the French!). Now, risen China’s auto industry balloons to three times our size, putting Beijing in the driver’s seat in an industry synonymous with American greatness. In 1960, the United States manufactured half the world’s motor vehicles; we now produce one-tenth of a global market five times larger in size.
That last fact is killer, expressed similarly here (also from the book):
China’s new car market is 50 percent larger than ours and double that of the EU. Beijing now wants EVs, which means consumers all over the world are going to get them, too. That is the supremacy of demand over supply in globalization—wanting trumping having.
Back to our man at the auto-show:
I’d later learn that the auto show had more than 100 new model debuts and concepts. That’s a far cry from the Detroit Auto Show last September, which only featured one fully new model. Two other models were refreshed versions of current cars already on sale. None were electric.
In China, the showroom floor was filled to the gills with new electrified models from every single domestic automaker. They all had something to prove, and by god, they were trying.
When America was preeminent, so were our cars. Then Japan came along with Honda and Toyota and conquered the world.
Now, it’s China’s turn, and before long, it will be India’s.
This is why I said in the book:
What China produces in the future is less important and influential than what China consumes.
3) You have to be an idiot before you can be made useful
FOREIGN AFFAIRS: Don’t Hype the Disinformation Threat
Good analysis with a simple point: external disinformation campaigns from players like Russia and China don’t really achieve “inception” of a viral negative idea; they merely work the negative notions already in our collective head.
Democracies allow for wing-nuts in numbers; that’s a feature, not a bug, so the vulnerability concerning outside manipulation is always there.
Once inside a person’s identity-sphere, there is plenty of mischief to be made
From Leo’s character (Cobb) in Nolan’s Inception:
What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.
How many minds has QAnon infected? How many bodies has Putin snatched?
4) Who’s your daddy primary trade partner?
CNBC: The U.S. is now Germany’s biggest trading partner — taking over from China
Continuing the theme that demand is power — more than supply (Thread 30 in America’s New Map), I’ve recently been working with my collaborators at U Maryland (where I am a lecturer) on the follow-on Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to my first one entitled Superpower Grand Strategies: Winning the Globalization Game. Something we’re looking at with regard to power relationships is the role that a nation’s chief trading partner plays in the exporting nation’s politics and market.
How much does it matter, for example, if China is your biggest trading partner versus the United States?
I think Germany will discover that it matters a good deal.
The reasons are complex and varied:
Carsten Brzeski, global head of macro research at ING Research, told CNBC … “This shift is the result of several factors: strong growth in the U.S. has boosted demand for German products. […] At the same time, decoupling from China, weaker domestic demand in China and China being able to produce goods it previously imported from Germany (mainly cars) reduced German exports to China,” he said.
We hear decoupling and think politics, but the deeper truth is China producing more for itself — actually making it more like America than the China we once knew. That is a simple proximity argument (close-in beats far away).
So, this is more than Germany moving back toward America’s economic orbit.
This is China establishing its own center of gravity in the global economy and hence being less reliant on Export Market A.
That is to be remembered when we process all this talk about China’s “collapse” or “demise” or “losing”: these judgments are both premature and off-base.
Check out where Germany ranks as an export target of China’s:
Germany is 1/25th of China’s export market, which is mostly directed to the rest of Asia.
Now Germany as source of Chinese imports:
Germany is there 1/20th of China’s imports, ranking it 7th.
Now, conversely, Germany’s export destinations:
And Germany’s import origins:
Point being that China is still Germany’s largest import source — far more than US. What has declined is Germany’s ability to sell to China.
Not exactly de-coupling as it is understood, ja?
5) Trust the bobbling head!
DAILY MAIL: The key sign that indicates a woman might be a PSYCHOPATH
I love how my wife’s head moves when she speaks. It allows me the confidence to sleep next to her every night … because …
Due to their often duplicitous nature, it can be hard to identify a psychopath.
But a new study suggests looking at a woman's head movement during a conversation could be a giveaway.
Using head tracking algorithms, experts in New Mexico analysed recordings of women being interviewed by police.
They found that the biggest psychopaths kept their head very still, just like men.
So … all men are psychopaths? Definitely nod if you agree.
Why this attracted my attention: Not hard to imagine this sort of knowledge being inserted into surveillance platforms so you can be picked out of a crowd for all manner of presumed characteristics and tells.
China is pioneering this sort of granular surveillance in public spaces. Today, it’s targeting jaywalking, tomorrow … who knows?
It tells me that one sure way to fool our ROBOT OVERLORDS of tomorrow is to constantly bob my head whenever I am in public.
You laugh.
And if you bobble your head when you do, then good on you!
6) 9/11 writ small
FORBES: A Ukrainian Sport Plane Drone Just Flew 800 Miles Into Russia To Blow Up An Oil Refinery
Kami, hold the Kaze.
In technical terms, a big nothing.
It’s just the homemade nature of it and the fact that it’s an actual plane turned into a drone bomb delivery system.
No, it doesn’t beat a swarm.
It’s just that, having lived through 9/11 with some degree of intimacy, it’s a chilling notion.
Why bother hijacking a jet? Why not just load one up and send it off?
Davids seem to have an almost unlimited array of rocks.
Goliaths beware.
7) Trump to Big Oil: pay and you shall receive
WAPO: What Trump promised oil CEOs as he asked them to steer $1 billion to his campaign
Trump is willing to sell the planet’s future for just one lousy billion dollars!
Is that too much to ask?
Makes you wonder, though: What else is Donald willing to sell to regain power and never give it up?
8) A superpower at-risk of losing its most important super power
WSJ: An Invisible Crisis Is Threatening America's Food Superpower Status
Excellent WSJ video on how so much of our productive farm land exploits the Ogallala Aquifer to the degree that we’re running through water that would take decades or even hundreds of years to replenish.
What I noted in America’s New Map:
Per our planet’s water cycle, some portion of that unfrozen fresh water is a renewable resource—as in, continuously exploitable. However, so-called “fossil water,” ancient underground bodies of water undisturbed for millennia, is more like oil and gas. When humans tap those supplies, they are effectively depleted—at least along a human timescale. The same can hold true for groundwater held in aquifers closer to the surface when local demand far outstrips their capacity to recharge—oftentimes measured in decades.
From the vid:
The Ogallala Aquifer is the lifeblood of one of the world's most abundant farming communities, stretching from Kansas to eastern Colorado and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. Today, it supports about 30% of all US crop and animal production, but in 2019, parts of the aquifer reached their lowest levels since the US Geological Survey started measuring more than seven decades ago.
One expert in the vid notes that ag-centric Kansas gets 90% of its water from it and that 80-85% of that is used for farm irrigation. He also notes that the Ogallala is down some 50-70% of what it was back in the 1940s.
America’s laws and regs on water drawing privileges need to be radically updated for the world we now live in — much less the one we will inhabit mid-century. Owning the land can’t just give you all the water you can tap from below.
America’s ability to feed the world is a huge stabilizing force in international affairs. We destroy that capacity at great risk to our power and the planet.
9) Pathogens on the march!
NATURE: A meta-analysis on global change drivers and the risk of infectious disease
What we have known for a while:
Basically all species are moving toward the poles and upwards in elevation — the move portion of the adapt/move/die choice for all creatures facing climate change.
The species that adapt the fastest, and thus most effectively exploit shifting climates tend to be the smallest ones — like pathogenic (disease-causing) micro organisms.
Thus, pathogens are on the move across our planet thanks to climate change and the human behaviors associated with its exacerbation (like cutting down forests).
So far there has been a lot of smaller regional studies (e.g., this bug spreading this disease there) examining how pathogens are spreading and evolving and thus posing a heightened threat to humans. Now there is a huge meta-analysis of all those analyses (almost 3,000).
The primary findings are described as such:
Anthropogenic change is contributing to the rise in emerging infectious diseases, which are significantly correlated with socioeconomic, environmental and ecological factors. Studies have shown that infectious disease risk is modified by changes to biodiversity, climate change, chemical pollution, landscape transformations and species introductions. However, it remains unclear which global change drivers most increase disease and under what contexts. Here we amassed a dataset from the literature that contains 2,938 observations of infectious disease responses to global change drivers across 1,497 host–parasite combinations, including plant, animal and human hosts. We found that biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, climate change and introduced species are associated with increases in disease-related end points or harm, whereas urbanization is associated with decreases in disease end points. [emphasis mine]
It is an environmental clusterf*&k being described here:
Biodiversity loss is both a cause and effect of climate change
Chem pollution is a general cause (emissions)
Introduced species happens because of globalization’s transportation networks PLUS the climate velocity introduced by climate change (putting species on the move).
This convergence of bad things is now recognized, though this meta-analysis, as increasing the spread of diseases around the world in a systematic fashion.
The weird bright spot: urbanization curtails it.
Our children are going to live in a world very different from the one we parents grew up in. That much is clear.
Meta-analyses like these should be the death knell for climate change skeptics.
10) The 4-2-1 Problem hits home in China
REUTERS: In rapidly ageing China, millions of migrant workers can't afford to retire
Chinese have been obsessing over this issue for years now. I stopped briefing this bit maybe a dozen years ago or more.
The gist of the outcome of the one-child policy:
One kid supporting …
Two parents supporting …
Four grandparents.
In terms of a worker-to-dependent ratio, this is a recipe for never being able to retire, and it has landed throughout most of China by this point.
This chart tells you where all us super-aging Northern powers are headed — namely, in the direction of super-aged Japan and South Korea.
Personally, I don’t believe in retirement. But I know a lot of people who do.
11) Let’s get small
To remind: https://madmusic.com/song_details.aspx?SongID=6143
WAPO: Fish are shrinking around the world. Here’s why scientists are worried.
Okay, that’s a long, long cultural reference.
We’ve already seen this adaptation dynamic reported concerning birds, now we’re getting the evidence from fish: a warming world shrinks them in size, making it easier for them to handle the more extreme climactic margins.
This matters big-time regarding fish:
Overfishing and human-caused climate change are decreasing the size of adult fish, threatening the food supply of more than 3 billion people who rely on seafood as a significant source of protein.
Scientists run an experiment raising trout in water of various temps. The results were stunning:
The trout raised in warmer waters were on average less than half the size as the other fish.
That is yet another reason why warming oceans are such a big deal.
12) Show me the money!
GUARDIAN: Soaring remittances to developing nations overtake foreign direct investment
Glass half full: remittances are now outpacing FDI flows around the world!
Glass half empty: remittances are now outpacing FDI flows around the world!
Remittances keep families doing well, but FDI is what builds economies.
Climate change is going to cost a lot of money around the world but, relative to the local resources, it’s going to cause a lot more damage across lower latitudes than those countries can possibly handle.
Remittances won’t cover this, only FDI will. Remember that.
Sign up to take the America’s New Map MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) at edX
