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These guys are jokers. A security firm that gets pwned by Anonymous... http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/28/anonymous-stratfor-hack-10-things-to-know/ http://vent

by vonnik 11y ago

These guys are jokers. A security firm that gets pwned by Anonymous... http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/28/anonymous-stratfor-hack-10-things-to-know/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/28/anonymous-stratfor-hack-10... Stratfor is flattering the sensibilities of the military industrial complex that pays its bills. > The greatest threat to the United States is its own tendency to retreat from international events. Stratfor would embroil the US in more foreign wars, because the best thing that happened to US foreign policy in the last 15 years was Iraq... These are the same people pushing for a Syrian intervention now. Peace time doesn't make anyone money, doesn't get any one promoted... Their reading of China is laughable. While has China has debt issues, it is not analogous to Japan. With 1.3 billion people, it is more than an order of magnitude larger, for one thing. China is actively colonizing the waters off the coasts of Vietnam and the Philippines, as well as expanding its space program. It is a rising, regional power attempting to revise the international order, much like Germany in the late 19th century. The US will need to strike a new balance of power with them. That rarely happens without war, sadly. The fetishism of Russia plays to the fears of the Kremlinologists in the old guard. But Russia has a declining population, a declining GDP, and a second-rate military. Hard to imagine them as a challenger on anything more than a regional basis. This is not the Cold War anymore. Did you notice there is not one mention of climate-driven migrations and disasters, which will hit the US and others with increasing violence? The Arab Spring and Syria were at least partially prompted by a drought-caused disastrous wheat harvest. Stratfor's failure to make valuable predictions about the future has a lot to do with its poor analysis of the present (even in 2011 when this was written.) Lastly, because this is HN, I'll just say that these arm-chair analyses do not take into account the mutually reinforcing, exponential technological changes that will remake the world as we know it. The costs of solar energy are approaching zero; the capacities of narrow AI are increasingly superhuman; our ability to edit new life forms in to being, old diseases out of it, and generally augment ourselves, will make make these linear, ceteris paribus forecasts seem quaint.

fsloth 11y ago
I think at least this first part reads like an explanation of the events of the last two centuries and based on my very light arm-chair historians knowledge I failed to see any obvious lapses in their analysis. Like any analysis, though, it should be read as interesting postulation based on known facts, rather than a complete explanatory model in itself. I fail to see how cheap solar or new life forms would provide more arable land. Sure, we can invent - I don't know - an edible nutritious city kudzu that grows everywhere and provides nutrition for everyone but until that happens I think the american farmlands do provide a considerable asset like the article stated. I see no obvious reason why at least a partial singularity nirvana could not come to being but until it does - no one really has a clue what it would look like and analyses like these must stick to understood reality and politics.
- vonnik 11y ago
  We can engineer yeast to produce almost any molecule. We can synthesize meat. We can do that with nearly free electricity from solar, among other ingredients. These things are happening now. Arable land is an archaic fetish, like much of Stratfor's thinking. Calling events inevitable in hindsight has zero value. Predicting the inevitability of a future event, and then seeing that prediction confirmed, has immense value. Stratfor's predictions, however, are much weaker than their analysis of the past.
  - fsloth 11y ago
    What are the theoretical economics of yeast based or synthetic food based nutrition on a global scale? The chemicals need to come from somewhere. The synthesis equipment needs to come from somwhere. As I understand it growing things in dirt is pretty efficient? Where is the cut-off point when test tube grown food is economically more viable than dirt based alimenation? I am not saying these things wont happen. But we are not there yet. How soon? It took a few hundreds of years of tweaking for steam engines to actually make an economic difference. It took a hundred years for the offspring of babbages difference engine to become the instruments of the cultural and economic transformation they are today. Today, we are locked to dirt. In five years, most food is dirt based. Probably still a decade or two from now. Most analysts predicitions turn out to be pretty bad - but it's their 'editorial view' of current events that I find most educating if done well.

by vonnik 11y ago

fsloth 11y ago

I think at least this first part reads like an explanation of the events of the last two centuries and based on my very light arm-chair historians knowledge I failed to see any obvious lapses in their analysis. Like any analysis, though, it should be read as interesting postulation based on known facts, rather than a complete explanatory model in itself. I fail to see how cheap solar or new life forms would provide more arable land. Sure, we can invent - I don't know - an edible nutritious city kudzu that grows everywhere and provides nutrition for everyone but until that happens I think the american farmlands do provide a considerable asset like the article stated. I see no obvious reason why at least a partial singularity nirvana could not come to being but until it does - no one really has a clue what it would look like and analyses like these must stick to understood reality and politics.

vonnik 11y ago
We can engineer yeast to produce almost any molecule. We can synthesize meat. We can do that with nearly free electricity from solar, among other ingredients. These things are happening now. Arable land is an archaic fetish, like much of Stratfor's thinking. Calling events inevitable in hindsight has zero value. Predicting the inevitability of a future event, and then seeing that prediction confirmed, has immense value. Stratfor's predictions, however, are much weaker than their analysis of the past.
- fsloth 11y ago
  What are the theoretical economics of yeast based or synthetic food based nutrition on a global scale? The chemicals need to come from somewhere. The synthesis equipment needs to come from somwhere. As I understand it growing things in dirt is pretty efficient? Where is the cut-off point when test tube grown food is economically more viable than dirt based alimenation? I am not saying these things wont happen. But we are not there yet. How soon? It took a few hundreds of years of tweaking for steam engines to actually make an economic difference. It took a hundred years for the offspring of babbages difference engine to become the instruments of the cultural and economic transformation they are today. Today, we are locked to dirt. In five years, most food is dirt based. Probably still a decade or two from now. Most analysts predicitions turn out to be pretty bad - but it's their 'editorial view' of current events that I find most educating if done well.