Lessons from a fiasco

Here are the ‘lessons’ learned — in a 140-page official report published, coincidentally, this week:

1. Strategy: The U.S. government continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve.
2. Timelines: The U.S. government consistently underestimated the amount of time required to rebuild Afghanistan, and created unrealistic timelines and expectations that prioritized spending quickly. These choices increased corruption and reduced the effectiveness of programs.
3. Sustainability: Many of the institutions and infrastructure projects the United States built were not sustainable.
4. Personnel: Counterproductive civilian and military personnel policies and practices thwarted the effort.
5. Insecurity: Persistent insecurity severely undermined reconstruction efforts.
6. Context: The U.S. government did not understand the Afghan context and therefore failed to tailor its efforts accordingly.
7. Monitoring and Evaluation: U.S. government agencies rarely conducted sufficient monitoring and evaluation to understand the impact of their efforts.

Further on there are other interesting reflections on the general idea of trying to helicopter flatpack-democracy kits into medieval deserts.

1. They are very expensive. For example, all war-related costs for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan over the last two decades are estimated to be $6.4 trillion.
2. They usually go poorly.
3. Widespread recognition that they go poorly has not prevented U.S. officials from pursuing them.
4. Rebuilding countries mired in conflict is actually a continuous U.S. government endeavor, reflected by efforts in the Balkans and Haiti and smaller efforts currently underway in Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Yemen, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
5. Large reconstruction campaigns usually start small, so it would not be hard for the U.S. government to slip down this slope again somewhere else and for the outcome to be similar to that of Afghanistan.

Quote of the Day

”Politicians who complain about the media are like ships’ captains who complain about the sea.”

• Enoch Powell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder & David Lindley | Jesus On The Mainline

Link

I’ve heard Cooder and Lindley sing this many times, but this version is more impromptu than most, and includes audience participation.

Long Read(s) of the Day

The ironies of our love-affair with automobiles

On the one hand, we have reached “peak car” (as Tom Standage puts it), so it looks as though our infatuation with automobiles may be waning. On the other hand MoMa in New York has a new exhibition — “Automania” — based on airlifting nine iconic cars into its sculpture garden and galleries. As a recovering petrolhead, I noted approvingly that it had a VW beetle just like the one I once owned, and the wonderful Citroen DS19 (which I didn’t), but no Jaguar Mk2 (of which I was once a deluded owner). So I guess ICE-propelled cars are on their way to the same status as steam locomotives — objects of mechanical beauty revered only by collectors and those of a nostalgic disposition.

Which is why I suggest reading both pieces today.

People Now Spend More at Amazon Than at Walmart

From the New York Times:

Proof that the online future has arrived: The biggest e-commerce company outside China has unseated America’s biggest brick-and-mortar seller.

Amazon has eclipsed Walmart to become the world’s largest retail seller outside China, according to corporate and industry data, a milestone in the shift from brick-and-mortar to online shopping that has changed how people buy everything from Teddy Grahams to teddy bears.

Propelled in part by surging demand during the pandemic, people spent more than $610 billion on Amazon over the 12 months ending in June, according to Wall Street estimates compiled by the financial research firm FactSet. Walmart on Tuesday posted sales of $566 billion for the 12 months ending in July.

Alibaba, the giant online Chinese retailer, is the world’s top seller. Neither Amazon nor Walmart is a dominant player in China.

In racing past Walmart, Amazon has dethroned one of the most successful — and feared — companies of recent decades. Walmart perfected a thriving big-box model of retailing that squeezed every possible penny out of its costs, which drove down prices and vanquished competitors.

It’s a significant moment. And further evidence that convenience trumps everything, often including price.

Benedict Cumberbatch reads a letter from Kurt Vonnegut to the people of 2088

Link

Unmissable. Vonnegut was wiser than most of his contemporaries, and indeed than most of us now. Six and a half minutes. And worth it.

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Remind you of anything?

(Hint: 1975)

And how about this:

An uncropped photograph of 640 Afghan refugees in a USAF C-17 that flew from Kabul to Qatar on August 15. Source

Brings it home to one, doesn’t it?

Antonio García Martínez has a fiercely contemptuous blast about America’s Afghan adventure. Sample:

This is the true privilege of being an American in 2021 (vs. 1981): Enjoying an imperium so broad and blinding, you’re never made to suffer the limits of your understanding or re-assess your assumptions about a world that, even now, contains regions and peoples and governments antithetical to everything you stand for. If you fight demons, they’re entirely demons of your own creation, whether Cambridge Analytica or QAnon or the ‘insurrection’ or supposed electoral fraud or any of a host of bogeymen, and you get to tweet #resist while not dangling from the side of an airplane or risking your life on a raft to escape. If you’re overwhelmed by what you see, even if you work at places called ‘the Institute for the Study of War’, you can just take some ‘me time’ and not tune into the disturbing images because reality is purely optional at this stage of the game.

That last sentence is reference to a Tweet that really irritated him:

Key takeaways from the IPCC report

If you haven’t time to read the report but want to know what the key takeaways from it are, then this episode of the NYT‘s ‘The Daily’ podcast will see you right. And it only takes 26 minutes.

Quote of the Day

“A foreign correspondent is someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.”

• Tom Stoppard, Night and Day.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ennio Morricone | Main Theme music for the film The Mission

Link

I don’t normally pay attention to film music, but came on this the other day and enjoyed it.

Long Read of the Day

For Whom the Bells Toll

Lovely 1999 essay by Neil Shister in the Boston Review on Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway’s mythic status may have started with his books, but it transcended literature. By displaying physical virtues-hunting lions, fighting bulls, boxing-he slipped beneath the radar of mainstream America’s none-too-secret loathing of the artist. True, he had to go to Europe to escape the restrictive conformities of his suburban Chicago home-Oak Park, the same place that spawned Frank Lloyd Wright-and “the hopeless separation of small towns in the middle west and any kind of intellectual awareness,” in keynote speaker Nadine Gordimer’s telling phrase. But the America he fled eventually came to embrace him, as much for his vigorous persona as for his words. In our popular culture, manliness excuses most faults.

Hence the intriguing connection to John Kennedy. Although the two men never met, the young politician saw in the older writer a cultural touchstone for his version of manly fellowship. Kennedy and his entourage freely employed Hemingway’s definition of “grace under pressure,” as a template for their own style and as the measure by which they sized up others.

This was a useful accompaniment to the BBC’s screening of Ken Burn’s riveting six-part documentary series on Papa H which we’ve just finished watching.

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There was a crooked house…

Taken the other day in Lavenham, an exquisite old town in Suffolk.

Quote of the Day

”We cannot live without fossil fuels or chemicals, period, end of story.”

• Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who (according to the New York Times) wants to expand exports of liquefied natural gas, which is produced in Louisiana and emits half the carbon dioxide of coal but is a source of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Christine McVie | Fleetwood Mac | Songbird

Link

This was one of the favourite songs of my beloved Sue, who died nineteen years ago this month. I never hear it without thinking of her.

Long Read of the Day

 Playing Nice With the Fossil Fuel Industry Is Climate Denial

By Kate Aronoff, writing in The New Republic on the way the American political system is unable to deal with the challenge (as expressed above in Quote of the Day).

This is climate denial. These politicians don’t dispute that the climate is changing, but they are absolutely in denial about what curbing it would entail. The report has made clear that the climate in which this country became a superpower no longer exists. So why are politicians stuck on twentieth-century answers to the twenty-first century’s problems?

Link

Going from climate-denial to climate-delay

The latest IPCC report should make climate-denial the last refugee of nutters and conspiracy theorists (though, God knows, there are still plenty of those around), so reactionary activism is shifting its grounds — from denial to delay and new kinds of discourses which accept the existence of climate change, but justify inaction or inadequate efforts. These discourses focus on what actions should be taken, by whom and how fast. Advocates of climate delay are now arguing for minimal action or for action to be taken by others. (China, in particular.) They highlight the negative social effects of climate policies and — most importantly — raise doubt that mitigation is possible. This remarkable paper outlines the common features of these ‘climate delay’ discourses and provide a guide to identifying them, organised around this brilliant diagram.

Many thanks to Richard Sambrook and Andrew Curry for alerting me to it.

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CAPTCHA developments

Further to my post the other day about why CAPTCHA images are so depressing, Euan Williamson sent me a link to this witty spoof on the whole idea.

Link

Quote of the Day

”Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom and I will show you the makings of a dramatist.”

• Ken Tynan, theatre critic of the Observer in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Air on the G String (Suite No. 3, BWV 1068) | Voices of Music using original instruments

Link

I was feeling peaceful when I chose this. Hope you are too.

Long Read of the Day

The Future of EV Charging

Transcript of a terrific discussion by a group of experts about the infrastructure needed to support the UK government’s aspirations for adoption of electric vehicles.

Link

Apple’s image-scan plan

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Once upon a time, updates of computer operating systems were of interest only to geeks. No longer – at least in relation to Apple’s operating systems, iOS and Mac OS. You may recall how Version 14.5 of iOS, which required users to opt in to tracking, had the online advertising racketeers in a tizzy while their stout ally, Facebook, stood up for them. Now, the forthcoming version of iOS has libertarians, privacy campaigners and “thin-end-of-the-wedge” worriers in a spin.

It also has busy mainstream journalists struggling to find headline-friendly summaries of what Apple has in store for us. “Apple is prying into iPhones to find sexual predators, but privacy activists worry governments could weaponise the feature” was how the venerable Washington Post initially reported it. This was, to put it politely, a trifle misleading and the first three paragraphs below the headline were, as John Gruber brusquely pointed out, plain wrong.

To be fair to the Post though, we should acknowledge that there is no single-sentence formulation that accurately captures the scope of what Apple has in mind. The truth is that it’s complicated; worse still, it involves cryptography, a topic guaranteed to lead anyone to check for the nearest exit. And it concerns child sexual abuse images, which are (rightly) one of the most controversial topics in the online world…

Read on

Making Twitter useable again

When Twitter first appeared I thought it was wonderful. It enabled me to plug into the streams-of-consciousness of people I admired or valued. But over the years my feed has become cluttered and polluted by ads, nonsense and hysteria — to the point where I almost never use it.

I realise that the ads are inevitable — after all, Twitter is a surveillance capitalist operation (though I would happily pay to have it ad-free). But most of the other crap comes from people innocently, maliciously or lazily retweeting stuff. So, as Alexis Madrigal pointed out ages ago, retweeting is a large part of the problem.

I mentioned this to Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) at lunch yesterday and he sent me a link to “How to turn off retweets for everyone” by Luca Hammer. Turns out there are various ways to do it. The complicated ones (at least for non-geeks) are via the API or a Javascript snippet. The easy way is via something I’d never spotted: mute retweets through your Twitter settings! You just add the phrase “RT @“ to your ‘Muted Words’.

Luca points out that this simple method doesn’t provide a comprehensive solution: there will be some ‘false positives’ that the tech solutions will catch. But as a first step I’m trying it. Stay tuned.

Social media attention spans

Source

Heidegger and technology

On Friday, in a discussion about Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for the ‘Metaverse’, I attributed the adage that “Technology is the art of arranging the world so that you don’t have to experience it” to Martin Heidegger.

Kevin Cryan (Whom God Preserve) emailed to say that the adage “comes, I believe from somewhere in Homo faber. Ein Bericht, a 1957 novel by the Swiss novelist Max Frisch. Not possessing a copy, I looked up “Max Frisch Quotes”, and there it is at #7. But Frisch might have got it from Heidegger, I cavilled, so I looked up his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” (which is where I thought I’d seen it) and the quotation isn’t there, though the sentiments of the essay correspond to the general idea. So, unless some more learned evidence comes to light, the credit should go to Frisch.

Which only goes to show that blogging is great for autodidacts with flaky memories!

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Covid: We’re in for a long haul Link
• Hot air: Climate change targets are rising at a dangerous rate By Christopher Snowdon in The Critic Magazine. Link

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Seen on the Interwebby thing.

Quote of the Day

”In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture.”

• Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian, 1969.

Nancy was the Guardian’s TV critic for many years. I occupied the same post on the The Observer between 1987 and 1995, so was in an excellent position to know how good she was. As a critic she was wonderfully funny, sharp — and occasionally lethal for pretentious performers.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Samuel Barber | Adagio for Strings, Op.11 | Vienna Philharmonic | Conducted by Gustavo Dudamel with pianist Yuja Wang as soloist | Summer Night Concert 2019

Link

Long Read of the Day

 How to curate (just about) anything

Lovely essay by Glenn Anderson about a subject that bothers most of us and obsesses some. Tidying up is a start. But it won’t get you to the kind of lived-in, personalised space that defines an ideal of home.

Double-think about the climate crisis

If you’re optimistic about the political world’s determination to address the crisis, then this piece by Adam Tooze might make you choke on your muesli. Sample:

“Higher gasoline costs, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery. The price of crude oil has been higher than it was at the end of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic. While Opec+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that Opec+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough. President Biden has made clear that he wants Americans to have access to affordable and reliable energy, including at the pump. Although we are not a party to Opec, the United States will always speak to international partners regarding issues of significance that affect our national economic and security affairs, in public and private.”

Yes, you read that correctly. One of the most senior figures in the Biden administration, the administration that promised climate was “everywhere” in its policy, is declaring that an increase in petrol prices to $3.17 per gallon is a matter of national security and that the US reserves the right to cajole Opec and Russia into flooding the world with more oil.

Not to be outdone, the current UK government is allowing oil drillers to keep exploring the North Sea for new reserves, despite its pledge to tackle carbon emissions, as long as they pass a “climate compatibility” test.

Why are CAPTCHA images so depressing?

I hadn’t thought about this. I just find them annoying. But an interesting essay by Clive Thompson finds six reasons why they’re so off-putting:

1. They’re generally devoid of humans.
2. The angles are all wrong — usually shot from extremely awkward positions and angles that humans would never choose.
3. They’re voyeuristic: nobody gave consent for them to be taken.
4. They look like crime-scene footage — frequently grainy and badly focused.
5. The grids on the photos are an alien’s-eye view of the world.
6. There’s very little sign of nature in them. Self-driving vehicles need to recogne things in the built environment — red lights, taxis, cyclists, fire hydrants, pedestrian crossings. They don’t care about trees, or flowers or birds or any of the other sights to which the human eye naturally gravitates.

In other words,

They weren’t taken by humans, and they weren’t taken for humans. They are by AI, for AI. They thus lack any sense of human composition or human audience. They are creations of utterly bloodless industrial logic. Google’s CAPTCHA images demand you to look at the world the way an AI does.

It’s no wonder we wind up feeling so numbed and depressed as we click through them, day in and day out.

Nice, observant piece.

Why is the tech industry so enthused about a dystopian future?

The current faux-excitement in the industry about the ‘Metaverse’ idea floated by Mark Zuckerberg and other techbros is weird. It makes one wonder if any of these enthusiasts have actually read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash — which supposedly is the origin of the idea.

Here is an excerpt from Brian Merchant’s splendid blast on the subject:

The hero of Snow Crash is named Hiro, and he is a gig worker delivery driver who moonlights as a hacker, and lives in abject poverty in a 20×30 storage unit he shares with an alcoholic roommate. “Hiro spends a lot of time in the metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.”

The U.S. as we know it has ceased to exist, and corporate entities and organized crime control whole city-states. Workers like Hiro can be killed for taking too long to deliver a pizza, and they are driven into the metaverse underworld to find extralegal work and enough money to make ends meet. The only reasonably safe places in the physical world are heavily fortressed “burbclaves” where the wealthy reside behind batteries of guns and gated communities.

Or maybe this is the future that the Silicon Valley overlords are really looking forward to. After all, they will be the ones in the burbclaves.

What I’m reminded of most is Heidegger’s observation that “technology is the art of arranging the world so that you don’t have to experience it”.

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Quote of the Day

”I cannot bring myself to vote for a woman who has been house-trained to speak to me as though my dog has just died.”

• Daily Mirror columnist Keith Waterhouse on Margaret Thatcher

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Oboe Quartet in F Major, K. 370 | First movement: Allegro | Itzhak Perlman, Ray Still, Pinchas Zukerman, Lynn Harrell

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Real Story of Pixar 

How a bad hardware company turned itself into a great movie studio.

(And how Steve Jobs made a great investment after Apple threw him out.)

Link

How did this school do it?

From Politico’s London newsletter yesterday:

One epic success story: Fair play to Brampton Manor Academy in east London, where 55 pupils got into Oxford and Cambridge — compared with 48 students from Eton. The Standard reports: The majority of pupils at Brampton Manor Academy are from ethnic minority backgrounds, in receipt of free school meals, or will be the first in their family to attend university.” Remarkably, of the 350 Brampton students who took their A-levels this year, 330 got into Russell Group universities. There must be lessons here for all secondary schools. Wonder what they are.

Meanwhile, here’s the Metro report on the school.

What we know (and don’t know) about the Delta variant at the moment

From Technology Review’s daily newsletter:

What we know: The delta variant is nearly twice as contagious as previous versions of the virus, according to the CDC. It also seems to lead to higher viral loads. The evidence suggests that vaccinated people may be able to transmit the virus, perhaps even just as readily as unvaccinated people. The overwhelming majority of infections are still in unvaccinated people. So far, it looks as if vaccines still largely work, especially in preventing severe illness.

What we don’t know: The appearance of a new variant has people worried we’ll see other, even worse variants. There is some genuine cause for concern: viruses mutate all the time, so as long as there are places in the world where there’s unchecked spread, we’ll likely continue to see more variants that will behave differently. The solution is to increase vaccination rates, and fast.

Revisiting ‘The Limits to Growth’

The Limits to Growth (LtG) project, funded by a shadowy outfit called The Club of Rome in the early 1970s, was the first (and, as far as I know, still the only) serious attempt to build a dynamic model of the world viewed as a single system. It used System Dynamics, a simulation language developed by Jay Forrester at MIT which had earlier been used to create simulation models of (a) industrial corporations and (b) urban areas. (Urban Dynamics was a report on the findings from a simulation model of an unnamed city — in actual fact Detroit — and later on was the inspiration for the Sim City computer game.)

The Club of Rome project involved creating a ‘world dynamics’ model, which was published in 1972 and attracted a great deal of interest and controversy (in which I played an insignificant part — though, later, one of my PhD students did a dissertation on the ideological background to the Urban Dynamics model).

Most people have forgotten the LtG model, but its basic idea — conceptualising the world as a global dynamic system — has suddenly re-acquired salience in the light of the looming climate catastrophe. So it was a delightful surprise to open Andrew Curry’s Substack blog this morning and find a fascinating and insightful post on more recent scholarship which examines how four of the various scenarios explored by the LtG team relate to our recent experience.

The four are:

• Business as Usual (BAU);

• Business as Usual2 (BAU2) — a revised, later version of BAU;

• CT (continual technological innovation — the Bill Gates scenario, I guess); and

• SW (Stabilised World — a scenario assuming that, in addition to sustained technological innovation, global societal priorities change to favour, among other things, low desired family size, perfect birth control availability and a deliberate choice to limit industrial output and prioritise health and education services).

You can guess which one is worth backing; unfortunately, it’s also the one we’re least likely to choose.

Andrew has a great discussion of all this, which is why I think it’s worth reading in full.

Chart of the Day

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