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My main take away from your comment is that Keith Alexander is Enabran Tain & that I feel like the US is approximating the Cardassian Union more everyday. The

My main take away from your comment is that Keith Alexander is Enabran Tain & that I feel like the US is approximating the Cardassian Union more everyday. The existence of nuclear weapons has rendered traditional warfare unprofitable, except against the very weak, and even in those cases only military contractors benefit. We invaded and occupied Iraq and didn't even get any oil, just a trillion or so in national debt. At least in the time of Rome citizen soldiers were titled large swaths of land in the conquered territories. I expect in the long drawn out economic warfare to come that cyber espionage and surveillance to be critical advantages & well connected military contractors with access to the NSA's total information awareness database to profit handsomely from insider trading. Update & Question: I'm taking a short break from work and wondering why this comment has been down voted twice? Instead of down voting & unless you just hate ST: DS9 references, can you provide a plausible argument against the inevitability that tapping the entire world's communications will not lead to insider trading? There are so few terrorists in the world, and so many opportunities to profit from having early access to employment reports, corporate revenue numbers and other economic data. Please give me a compelling reason why a wiretap on all the worlds communications is more likely to be used to catch terrorists than for simple greed?

northwest 13y ago
> profit handsomely from insider trading. ...a "business" which companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter et al. are certainly doing/planning on doing too, at least indirectly, privately or otherwise under the radar. They can also simply look at the correlations between the movements of their data and the market movements, and then make their predictions and thus investment decisions. It's not even rocket science. Given their "Big Data" treasures, I don't think they will be able to resist that temptation. This is another reason why I generally see a future of decentralization: it's simply a concept that's less prone to corruption and failure.
narrator 13y ago
>We invaded and occupied Iraq and didn't even get any oil, just a trillion or so in national debt. At least in the time of Rome citizen soldiers were titled large swaths of land in the conquered territories. The trillions in national debt benefits somebody. Somebody somewhere gets those interest payments and they wouldn't have if the U.S had not borrowed from them.
- northwest 13y ago
  And then, it's of course also about redistributing these tax dollars to your own benefit. It's about politicians taking money out of the tax pot and giving it to their friends.
- lurchpop 13y ago
  ...and the point wasn't to "get the oil" necessarily, but to take control of it so Hussein wouldn't flood the market and make the price go down.
  - foobarqux 13y ago
    Control of the oil in Iraq is more strategically important than in the one scenario you describe. As an aside I never read that Hussein had threatened to flood the market, I read that he threatened, as a negotiating tactic, to withhold oil. Do you have a source for the "flooding the market" claim?
    - gallerytungsten 13y ago
      It wasn't about flooding the market, it was about pricing in Euros, thus taking aim at the dollar as the sole reserve currency. (Among other things.) Example: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998512,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998512,00.h...
      - dredmorbius 13y ago
        (I'd just posted a related item on this) For values of "for other things" of creating a massive flood of dollars on the world financial markets, undercutting its value, and precipitating a financial crisis the likes of which the US still hasn't seen.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    There's also the theory suggested by some (I've just watched Robert Newberg's "History of Oil" though I've seen the point made elsewhere) that it was the move by Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela to move oil sales from dollars to Euros which had something to do with the war. Truth is the story's likely complicated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DCwafIntj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DCwafIntj0

northwest 13y ago

> profit handsomely from insider trading. ...a "business" which companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter et al. are certainly doing/planning on doing too, at least indirectly, privately or otherwise under the radar. They can also simply look at the correlations between the movements of their data and the market movements, and then make their predictions and thus investment decisions. It's not even rocket science. Given their "Big Data" treasures, I don't think they will be able to resist that temptation. This is another reason why I generally see a future of decentralization: it's simply a concept that's less prone to corruption and failure.

narrator 13y ago

>We invaded and occupied Iraq and didn't even get any oil, just a trillion or so in national debt. At least in the time of Rome citizen soldiers were titled large swaths of land in the conquered territories. The trillions in national debt benefits somebody. Somebody somewhere gets those interest payments and they wouldn't have if the U.S had not borrowed from them.

northwest 13y ago
And then, it's of course also about redistributing these tax dollars to your own benefit. It's about politicians taking money out of the tax pot and giving it to their friends.
lurchpop 13y ago
...and the point wasn't to "get the oil" necessarily, but to take control of it so Hussein wouldn't flood the market and make the price go down.
- foobarqux 13y ago
  Control of the oil in Iraq is more strategically important than in the one scenario you describe. As an aside I never read that Hussein had threatened to flood the market, I read that he threatened, as a negotiating tactic, to withhold oil. Do you have a source for the "flooding the market" claim?
  - gallerytungsten 13y ago
    It wasn't about flooding the market, it was about pricing in Euros, thus taking aim at the dollar as the sole reserve currency. (Among other things.) Example: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998512,00.html http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998512,00.h...
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      (I'd just posted a related item on this) For values of "for other things" of creating a massive flood of dollars on the world financial markets, undercutting its value, and precipitating a financial crisis the likes of which the US still hasn't seen.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  There's also the theory suggested by some (I've just watched Robert Newberg's "History of Oil" though I've seen the point made elsewhere) that it was the move by Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela to move oil sales from dollars to Euros which had something to do with the war. Truth is the story's likely complicated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DCwafIntj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DCwafIntj0