- India and Japan from the Quad excluded
- Canada and New Zealand from Five Eyes not included
- France snubbed by Australia
- NATO not in the picture
- UK not what it once was in Asia
- Yet joint address by US, UK, AU heads of state?
The US is in several different alliances now (AUKUS, Quad, Five Eyes, NATO) with overlapping members.
Even though NATO is the "North Atlantic Treaty Organization" it put troops into Afghanistan and has a position on China. iiss.org/blogs/analysis…
Point: you'd expect an anti-China alliance announced with big fanfare to rope in as many Asian countries as possible.
At a minimum, extending the Quad to South Korea and the Philippines (both of which are arguably US- aligned) into a NATO Asia, or something like that.
Timing & tone suggest that this was set up to be an optical thing to counter the recent Afghanistan withdrawal, but they couldn't get many countries on stage, so they gave tech to Australia and marketed it as a big deal, even if this pissed off France.
Imagine an NBA game where players imagine they're playing for the same team, but only see their own points. That's how ideological movements work on social media today: only individual profiles, no team dashboards.
DAOs change this. Number go up means movement goes up.
DAOs are also a potential resolution to the long-running argument over whether corporations only have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders — or if they should be run by the "community", which in practice usually means the state.
A third way between (a) a small group of possibly societally-disaligned shareholders and (b) de facto nationalization by a dirigiste state is (c) many DAO coinholders with governance rights related to their skin-in-the-game.
Meanwhile, Iran has just been admitted as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a sort of China-centric version of NATO and the EU. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_…
"The SCO is probably the biggest international organization that you’ve never heard of, and that’s likely because the West is being expressly excluded. However, the SCO is increasingly influential and is set to only become more well-known in the West." speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2017/09/03/the…
The oddest thing about SCO is the membership list, as many others have observed. India is in there, alongside Pakistan, in a "security" alliance, and admitted on the same day. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_…
Germany also isn't happy with the US for threatening sanctions over their pipeline deal with Russia, then backing down, then doing some sanctions after all in a symbolic-but-annoying way. It shows petulance rather than strength.
Helpful feedback on the $100k prize for a decentralized inflation dashboard at 1729.com/inflation. His points are: (a) too much reliance on scraping, (b) no business model, & (c) too labor-intensive to replicate.
I disagree that these are show-stoppers, but go read first:
As I acknowledged at the time, I am by no means an expert on military hardware. But it strained credulity to imagine that billions of dollars of equipment captured without warning wouldn't give intelligence on US capabilities.