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Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
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17 Sep, 8 tweets, 2 min read
The AUKUS alliance resulted in losing support from France, America's oldest ally.
The future of the world may be a decentralized West and a centralized East.
Western nations are scattering like pinballs while ostensibly uniting vs China.

- UK now moves independently of the EU
- France is now mad at Australia and the US
- New Zealand actively refuses to join AUKUS
- NATO + EU absent

Meanwhile, Asia observes quizzically.
The AUKUS deal is about submarines that will appear in...2040?

This is the opposite of the OODA loop concept. By the time the action is taken it's irrelevant. It's symptomatic of the point: the West can no longer build in the physical world.
abc.net.au/news/2021-09-1…
It's not exactly apples-to-apples, but in WW2 America they cranked out dozens of aircraft carriers in months.
nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/stud…
“If the United States military with all its might could not beat a bunch of Taliban rebels with AK47 rifles in pickup trucks, what chance would it have in a full blown war against China?” — former PM of Australia on AUKUS
skynews.com.au/australia-news…
The alternate universe US could have announced an expansion of the Quad with South Korea, the Philippines, and other states in the South China Sea. Maybe Taiwan too, if part of a big alliance.

That would have been "NATO Asia" and worthy of a joint heads-of-state announcement.
But that scenario is projecting onto the present day US government qualities that don't exist.

These folks are nepotists who've inherited things they could never build, like the postwar system of alliances.

Japan, India, and others may need to deal with China without the US.

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More from @balajis

Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
19 Sep
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.

But what if it didn't?
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.
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
18 Sep
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… Image
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_… Image
Read 4 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
18 Sep
Why did France take the dramatic step of recalling its ambassadors to the US and Australia?

One thesis is that Macron has wanted to break free of American wokeness for a while. And this gives him the diplomatic casus belli to do so.
Remember when media corporations reported[1] the beheading of Samuel Paty as a "police shooting", if they reported it at all?

France remembers[2].
[1] archive.is/fiXH3
[2] archive.is/pFw0G
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.

And Germany and France are the core of the EU.
Read 7 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
17 Sep
Odd aspects of the new AUKUS submarine deal

- 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.
Read 6 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
15 Sep
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:
1/ JP says:

"while it's easy to find scraped prices of laptop computers, forget about prices for haircuts, rent, or healthcare"

Disagree. Below are online prices for haircuts, rent, healthcare.

[1] booksy.com/en-us/s/haircu…
[2] zillow.com/homes/ks_rb/
[3] healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/northern-calif…
2/ In general, the economy is going online. For almost any good there is now a digital storefront.

Moreover, this is a long-run project, so any absent price will come online.

Finally, as noted in the post (1729.com/inflation), partnering is an alternative to scraping.
Read 13 tweets
Balaji Srinivasan Profile picture
14 Sep
People got real mad last week at the suggestion that equipment left in Afghanistan could be an intel windfall for the Chinese.

But here's the Sci-Tech editor of DefenseOne (@DefTechPat) making exactly that case with technical detail and multiple sources. defenseone.com/technology/202…
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.

A windfall, even.
defenseone.com/technology/202…
One line of argument was that equipment like C-130s date to the 1950s, so *obviously* having them captured was no big deal.

@jalospinoso spent ten years in the Army conducting penetration tests...and thinks differently.
Read 11 tweets

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