411 episodes

A podcast about context and the news.

letsknowthings.substack.com

Let's Know Things Understandary

    • News
    • 4.8 • 501 Ratings

A podcast about context and the news.

letsknowthings.substack.com

    DRC Conflict

    DRC Conflict

    This week we talk about the Rwandan genocide, the First and Second Congo Wars, and M23.
    We also discuss civil wars, proxy conflicts, and resource curses.
    Recommended Book: Everyday Utopia by Kristen R. Ghodsee
    Transcript
    The Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, was previously known as Zaïre, a name derived from a Portuguese mistranscription of the regional word for "river."
    It wore that monicker from 1971 until 1997, and this region had a rich history of redesignations before that, having been owned by various local kingdoms, then having been colonized by Europeans, sold to the King of Belgium in 1885, who owned it personally, not as a part of Belgium, which was unusual, until 1908, renaming it for that period the Congo Free State, which was kind of a branding exercise to convince all the Europeans who held territory thereabouts that he was doing philanthropic work, though while he did go to war with local and Arab slavers in the region, he also caused an estimated millions of deaths due to all that conflict, due to starvation and disease and punishments levied against people who failed to produce sufficient volumes of rubber from plantations he built in the region.
    So all that effort and rebranding also almost bankrupted him, the King of Belgium, because of the difficulties operating in this area, even when you step into it with vast wealth, overwhelming technological and military advantages, and the full backing of a powerful, if distant, nation.
    After the King's deadly little adventure, the region he held was ceded to the nation of Belgium as a colony, which renamed it the Belgium Congo, and it eventually gained independence from Belgium, alongside many other European colonies around the world, post-WWII, in mid-1960.
    Almost immediately there was conflict, a bunch of secessionist movements turning into civil wars, and those civil wars were amplified by the meddling of the United States and the Soviet Union, which supported different sides, funding and arming them as they tended to do in proxy conflicts around the world during this portion of the Cold War.
    This period, which lasted for about 5 years after independence, became known as the Congo Crisis, because government leaders kept being assassinated, different groups kept rising up, being armed, killing off other groups, and then settling in to keep the government from unifying or operating with any sense of security or normalcy.
    Eventually a man named Mobutu Sese Seko, usually just called Mobutu, launched a real deal coup that succeeded, and he imposed a hardcore military dictatorship on the country—his second coup, actually, but the previous one didn't grant him power, so he tried again a few years later, in 1965, and that one worked—and though he claimed, as many coup-launching military dictators do, that he would stabilize things over the next five years, restoring democracy to the country in the process, that never happened, though claiming he would did earn him the support of the US and other Western governments for the duration, even as he wiped out any government structure that could oppose him, including the position of Prime Minister in 1966, and the institution of Parliament in 1967.
    In 1971, as I mentioned, he renamed the country Zaïre, nationalized all remaining foreign owned assets in the country, and it took another war, which is now called the First Congo War, to finally unseat him. 
    And this conflict, which began in late-1996, spilled over into neighboring countries, including Sudan and Uganda, and a slew of other nations were involved, including but not limited to Chad, the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Eritrea, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and Tanzania, alongside foreign assistance granted to various sides by France, China, Israel, and covertly, the United States.
    The conflict kicked off when Rwanda invaded Zaïre, more neighboring states joined in, all of them intending to take out a bunch of rebel grou

    • 22 min
    Bigger Oil

    Bigger Oil

    This week we talk about mergers, acquisitions, and the Shale Oil Revolution.
    We also discuss liquid natural gas, energy diplomacy, and political hypocrisy.
    Recommended Book: Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
    Transcript
    For the sixth year in a row, the United States is the largest oil producer in the world.
    As of March 2024, it's producing an average of 12.93 million barrels of oil per day, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and it periodically pops above that average for stretches of time, like in December of last year when it managed to average just over 13.3 million barrels per day.
    That's an absolutely astonishing volume of oil.
    For context, while Saudi Arabia remains the holder of the world's most substantial spare oil capacity and was the largest oil exporter in 2023, they set aside plans to increase output to 12 million barrels a day back in January, which leaves them about a million barrels a day shy of the expansion target they set in 2020.
    In 2023, the US produced about 28% more oil than Russia and about 33% more than Saudi Arabia, on average.
    The US is becoming a huge player in oil exports, too, but it really shines if you look at not just crude oil, but also natural gas liquids and refined petroleum products. In aggregate, in 2023, the United States exported nearly the same volume of these products that both Saudi Arabia and Russia produced, not exported, which is pretty wild.
    As is the fact that in December of 2023, the US exported about 400 billion more cubic feet of natural gas than it imported; and it imports a lot, and it only started exporting natural gas a few years ago, so that's the figure for an industry that didn't even exist until 2016, and didn't really grow until the 2020s.
    The US hasn't always been this kind of force in the global oil market. It's long been a consumer of huge quantities of the stuff, but while it produced a decent amount until the late-90s, competing with Russia and trailing Saudi Arabia, though not by much, US production levels dropped substantially beginning in the early 90s, the US becoming a huge importer of fossil fuels, its production levels dipping down to something closer to those of Iran by the mid-2000s; when 9/11 happened in 2001, one of the big concerns was that the US's fundamental reliance on Middle Eastern oil would complicate its military options and hamstring its economy.
    That all changed, though, with what became known as the Shale Revolution, when the widespread investment in and deployment of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" technologies, combined with developments that allowed for horizontal drilling, opened up huge swathes of new oil-rich territories in the US and Canada, making what were previously usable, but incredibly expensive to exploit fossil fuel resources less expensive and easier to tap, and southern US states in particular saw a wave of new and expanded drilling, leading to a surge in the US's production output, and ultimately allowing the US to become the top producer in the world beginning in 2018.
    The degree to which this has changed things, geopolitically, cannot be overstated, in the US and globally.
    Stateside, petroleum prices became less tethered to the whims and political motivations of mostly Middle Eastern nations and Russia, which, working together via the OPEC+ oil cartel, were long able to threaten and coerce the US government and its allies in various ways.
    That remained the case for a while, even after this shale oil boom, as production and export figures weren't optimally aligned. But as this new reality has set in, the US government has been more strategic in how it has stockpiled fossil fuels resources and how it's been willing to use those stockpiles to manage price fluctuations, for itself and its allies, when warranted.
    This has also been important for manufacturing, shipping, and other energy-hungry aspects of the US economy, and it has stoked booms in all sorts of consumer-facing industries, alongside the de

    • 24 min
    Ukraine War Update (Early 2024)

    Ukraine War Update (Early 2024)

    This week we talk about foreign aid, brain drain, and long-term economic consequences.
    We also discuss the Rasputitsa, counteroffensives, and strategic rethinks.
    Recommended Book: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
    Transcript
    We've done this a few times before, but it's been a while since I've done a real update on Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine—September of last year, I think, was the last one, a bonus episode on the topic—and a fair bit has happened since then, even if a lot of these happenings have been overshadowed by other conflicts, most especially the invasion of Gaza by Israel following the attacks on Israel by Gaza-based Hamas.
    But before diving into what's been happening, recently, in Ukraine, let's walk through a quick summary of events up till this point.
    In early 2014, Ukraine's people rose up against their Russia-aligned government in what became known as the Maidan Revolution or Revolution of Dignity.
    This was a long time coming, by many estimates, because of changes that had been made to the country's constitution and government since a decade previous, most of those changes orienting Ukraine more toward Russia's sphere of influence, authoritarian policies, and various sorts of corruption at the top, and the protests that led to this revolution began in November of 2013 before culminating in February the following year, which led to the toppling of the government, the creation of a new, interim government, the president fleeing to Russia, and new elections that kicked off a period of decoupling from Russian influence.
    This was not well received in Russia, which has long seen Ukraine as being under its sway, if not belonging to Russia, outright, Ukraine serving as a large, friendly buffer between it and Europe, so Russian forces were send in, the flags and other identifiers on their fatigues removed, to support separatists in the eastern portion of Ukraine.
    This sparked what became known as the Donbas War, which periodically flared up and sometimes merely simmered, but continued from when it began in February of 2014 all the way up to Russia's more formal invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, following several months of buildup along the countries' shared border.
    Against the odds and most analysts' assumptions, Ukraine managed to fend off Russia's initial assault, Russia managing to capture some territory, but not the capital city, Kyiv, and thus it wasn't able to decapitate the Ukrainian government and replace it with folks who would be loyal to Russia, as was apparently planned.
    Russia's stated plans changed several times over the next few years, as their assaults continued to falter in the face of stiffer than expected resistance, and eventually the so-called "special military operation" in Ukraine became a more overt, full-on war, complete with forced conscriptions, massive loss of life, the demolition of infrastructure and entire towns, and a recalibration of the global order, new alliances popping up, others being challenged, and everyone, to some degree at least, being sorted into categories based on who they support, who they don't, and who they are willing to tolerate despite not supporting—that latter category consisting mostly of less-aligned nations like Brazil and India, which have done pretty well for themselves, economically, staying somewhat neutral and aloof from this conflict, and thus continuing to deal with both the Western alliance supporting Ukraine, and the comparably small team of opposing nations, including China, North Korea, and Iran, all of which back Russia to varying degrees.
    In September of 2023, when I did the last update episode on this conflict, the state of play was largely defined by drone-based harassment of soldiers and infrastructure, like energy sources and bridges, by both sides against the other, Ukraine's flagging counteroffensive against Russia, which started out pretty good, but then ran intro trouble, seemingly due to sturdy Russian d

    • 20 min
    LockBit

    LockBit

    This week we talk about virtual reality, the Meta Quest, and the Apple Vision Pro.
    We also discuss augmented reality, Magic Leap, and the iPhone.
    Recommended Book: Daemon by Daniel Suarez
    Transcript
    Ransomware is a sub-type of malware, which is malicious software that prevents its victim from accessing their data.
    So that might mean keeping them from logging into their cloud storage, but it might also mean encrypting their data so that there's no way to access it, ever again, unless they have the necessary decryptor, which is a piece of software or sometimes just a key that allows for the decryption of that encrypted, that locked-down data.
    The specifics of all this, though, are often less important than the practical reality of it.
    If you're attacked by a ransomware gang or hacker, your stuff, maybe your personal files, maybe your business files, all your customer information, your valuable trade secrets, anything that's stored digitally, might be completely inaccessible to you, and possibly even prone to deletion, though that might not even be necessary since strong encryption is essentially the same thing as deletion, for most intents and purposes; but all that data is gone, held hostage until and unless you pay some kind of ransom to the person or group that encrypted it, and which holds the key to its decryption.
    Most ransomware software is transmitted to its victims' computers via a trojan, which is a kind of malware that seems like real-deal software that you actually want or need to install, and folks are generally tricked into downloading and installing it because of that presumed legitimacy.
    So maybe you receive what looks like a software update for a tool you use at work, and it turns out the update was faked and what you installed was actually a trojan that installed malware on your computer, and consequently on your network, instead.
    Or maybe you pirated some software, and alongside the fake copy of Photoshop you installed, a trojan also carried another snippet of code that then, in the background, when your computer was hooked up to the internet, downloaded malware that looked for private data and encrypted it.
    At some point after ransomware is delivered and installed, your data successfully encrypted and inaccessible, you'll receive the ransom demand.
    For a while this was kind of an ad hoc thing, in some cases targeting people randomly on early internet usenet groups, in others big companies and other wealthy entities being specifically targeted and then ransomware teams calling or emailing or texting them directly, because they knew who they were hitting.
    In recent years, this has become a more distributed and mainstream effort, akin to an, organized business, and that mainstreamification was partially enabled by the dawn of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, which allow for relatively anonymous transactions with strangers, and the development of ransomware that is self-contained, in that it can install itself, find the right, valuable files, and then demand a ransom from its victim, providing that victim with the proper bitcoin wallet or other crypto-banking system into which they need to deposit a fixed amount of money in that less-trackable digital currency.
    The software can then, still autonomously, either decrypt the files once the ransom is paid, or delete the files, killing them off forever, if the ransom isn't paid by an established deadline.
    Other variations on this theme exist, and some ransomware doesn't use encryption as a motivator to pay, but instead locks down users' machines, displays some kind of demand for money, purporting to be a government agency (or lying about having encrypted or stolen something of value), or it threatens to install illegal pornographic images of minors on the victims' machine if they don't pay the ransom.
    By far the most popular approach to ransomware, today, though, is encryption-based, and recent evolutions in the business model backing ransomware has escalated its us

    • 15 min
    Japan's Economy

    Japan's Economy

    This week we talk about the Meiji Revolution, shoguns, and the Lost Decade.
    We also discuss NVIDIA, economic bubbles, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
    Recommended Book: The Blue Machine by Helen Czerski
    Transcript
    What became known as the Meiji Restoration, but which at the time was generally, locally, called the Honorable Restoration, refers to a period of massive and rapid change in Japan following the restoration of practical powers to the country's Emperor.
    In 1853, the arrival of Commodore Perry and his warships in Japan forced the country to open up trade to the rest of the world, initially with the US but shortly thereafter with other nations, as well. This led to the signing of a series of treaties that were heavily slanted in favor of those other nations, at Japan's expense, and the Meiji Restoration was a consequence of those humiliating treaties, which were essentially forced and enforced by military might, not because Japan wanted anything to do with these foreign entities and their money and goods.
    So in the 1860s, some reformist political leaders in Japan started to support the Emperor, who had become something of a ceremonial figure in recent generations, during the country's multi-century seclusion from the rest of the world, and this, among other things, led to a decision by those in charge, who now had more power at their disposal, to shift from a feudal society into an industrialized one.
    There was a fair bit of tumult and internal conflict during this period, but the eventual upside was the re-centralization of the country and its land and other assets under the Emperor, away from the shoguns who had been running their own pseudo-countries within Japan for a long while, alongside an order that the country would do a complete 180, no longer isolating itself and eschewing anything foreign, instead seeking knowledge far and wide, wherever it originates, sending folks around the world to discover whatever they can, and to then bring that understanding back to Japan, to strengthen this new iteration of the nation.
    By the end of the 19th century, industrialization was the name of the game in Japan, and those in charge had successfully encouraged civilians to bolster the economy by tying its success to the country's military success.
    Other governments were happy to play into this transition, as it meant enriching themselves, as well, creating a new, modernizing trade partner that they could exploit but also invest in, and this led to a doubling-down on rapid modernization by the the government, including the culling and destruction of traditional practices, landmarks, and social classes, which wasn't popular amongst the nation's many samurai and other previously celebrated and upper-class people, but it did help the government further centralize power and influence, and reorient things toward economic success and away from a more feudal style of distributed military-backed fiefdoms.
    This allowed Japan to become the first non-Western great power, and it's what allowed them to grow to the point that they could take on half the world in World War II, expanding their control throughout Asia and across the Pacific.
    Because Japan suffered relatively less from the Great Depression than most Western nations, it was also in a pretty good spot compared to the countries that would become its opponents in WWII leading up to the conflict, and its GDP growth in the 1920s and 30s is part of what allowed it to expand so rapidly across Southeast Asia, grabbing a lot of Chinese territory and turning much of the region, including parts of the Philippines, Burma, Malaya, and Thailand into plantation-like colonies.
    The war and post-war periods, though, were a lot less great for Japan, as essentially all the economic gains it made during the Meiji Restoration were lost, their manufacturing capacity wiped out, their infrastructure destroyed, their population numbers depleted, and their civilians psychologically scarred by the drawn-out

    • 18 min
    Spacial Computing

    Spacial Computing

    This week we talk about virtual reality, the Meta Quest, and the Apple Vision Pro.
    We also discuss augmented reality, Magic Leap, and the iPhone.
    Recommended Book: Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz
    Transcript
    The term spacial computing seems to have been coined in the mid-1980s within the field of geographic information systems, or GIS, which focuses on using digital technology to mess with geographic data in a variety of hopefully useful ways.
    So if you were to import a bunch of maps and GPS coordinates and the locations of buildings and parks and such into a database, and then make that database searchable, plotting its points onto a digital map in an app, making something like Google Maps, that would be a practical utility of GIS research and development.
    The term spacial computing refers to pulling computer-based engagement into physical spaces, allowing us to plot and use information in the real world, rather than relegating that information to flat screens like computers and smartphones.
    This could be useful, it was posited, back in the early days of the term, as it would theoretically allow us to map out and see, with deep accuracy and specificity, how a proposed building would look on a particular street corner when finished, and how it would feel to walk through a house we're thinking of building, when all we have available is blueprints.
    This seemed like it would be a killer application for all sorts of architectural, urban planning, and location intelligence purposes, and that meant it might someday be applicable to everyone from security services to construction workers to doctors and health researchers who are trying to figure out where a pandemic originated.
    In the 1990s, though, the embryonic field of virtual reality started to become a thing, moving from research labs owned by schools and military contractors out into the real world, increasingly flogged as the next big consumer technology, useful for all sorts of practical, but also entertainment purposes, like watching movies and playing games.
    During this period, VR began to serve as a stand-in for where technology was headed, and it was dropped into movies and other sorts of speculative fiction to illustrate the evolution of tech, and how the world might evolve as a consequence of that evolution, more of our lives lived within digital versions of the world, rather than in the world itself.
    As a result of that popularity, especially throughout pop culture, VR overtook spacial computing as the term of art typically used to discuss this type of computational application, though the latter term also encompassed use-cases that weren't generally covered by VR, like the ability to engage with one's environment while using the requisite headsets, and the consequent capacity to use this technology out in the world, rather than exclusively at home or in the office, replicating the real world in that confined space.
    The term augment reality, or AR, is generally used to refer to that other spacial computing use-case: projecting an overlay, basically, on the real world, generally using a VR-like headset or goggles or glasses to either display information onto lenses the user looks through, or serving the user video footage that is altered to include that data, rather than attempting to project the same over the real thing; the latter case more like virtual reality because users are viewing entirely digital feeds, but like AR in that those feeds include live video from the world around them.
    A slew of productized spacial computing products have made it to the consumer market over the past few decades, including Microsoft's HoloLens, which is an augmented-reality headset, Google's Glass, which projects information onto a tiny screen in the corner of the the user's eyeline, and Magic Leap's self-named 1 and 2 devices, which are similar to the HoloLens.
    All three of these products have had trouble making much of a dent in the market, though, and Magic Leap is in the proc

    • 19 min

Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5
501 Ratings

501 Ratings

Neen02 ,

Calm in the storm

I’ve been listening off and on since 2018, and I appreciate Colin’s calm delivery and exploration of context in a world of hot takes. He generally has an unbiased perspective, though his preferences creep in from time to time. I always appreciate his random book reviews at the end—some are in my wheelhouse and some I never would’ve known about without the pod.

fghjgktftyu ,

Amazing!

This podcast is amazing and so enjoyable and informative. I listen to this podcast every day and love all the detail Colin puts into these episodes. Keep up the great work!

The mak69 ,

A relaxing bit of knowledge

Wonderfully relaxing way to learn and be entertained. It helps keep me calm in these stressful times. Thank you.

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