War – Second fase
Written by Pablo González and Pedro Nonay trying to understand War’s consequences.
Entry 9 – War (second phase)
Other de-globalizing wars.
January 8, 2023
I begin this entry in a different way from the previous ones, and with a different structure (which I explain below). I do it this way because one of the comments received from one of the readers (thank you, Luis) made me think about it. He comes to say that he likes the content, but that he finds the structure a bit confusing, and that the way I present the links incites to get lost. So, I will try to improve it.
In addition, I make another initial comment: I finally found the courage to write the English version of the entries. I am creating new blogs in English where I will post all the translations. Obviously, I would be very grateful if you could send the link to someone you know who might be interested and doesn’t speak Spanish (this is the one of note 8, although you can also send the direct link of the blog entry you liked the most). The translation is not perfect, my english is not perfect either, but I think it is “readable”, and you know that my goal is not the literary quality, but to try to expose the ideas, and make you think, …
My new context selection.
Recent news items I have selected to think about the evolution of the War are:
- Kissinger has said something again, … and he has had a lot of influence. He has come to state that the risk of escalation to World War is serious, and that it must be avoided. He proposes to seek peace in Ukraine, with a referendum supervised by international organizations to decide which territories Russia will keep and which will not. You can see his article here. Many opinions have been published on Kissinger’s proposal, from which I have selected this one.
- Related to the above, there is increasing pressure to seek an end to the War (by handing over something to Russia). They do a good summary here, where they acknowledge the future world of two power blocs, and where they don’t leave Zelenski very well off.
It is important to know that this news is from a media outlet closely related to the far right in the USA, who are the same ones who have had a lot of trouble this week to get control of the Congress´ table, being the issue of spending less money to support Ukraine one of the issues they have negotiated to vote for the candidate finally elected.
Changes in the structure of the notes.
As I said at the beginning, Luis’ comments have made me think about changing the way I organize the entries. I try to explain briefly here what I am going to try from now on.
The issue is that, since I started writing what I call “entries”, I have said that I want to avoid the concept of “book”, because that requires having a clear index and the complete text before publishing it, and it would not be at all useful in the process of “collective thinking”, and variant with the events, that I intend to apply here.
I also want to avoid the concept of “journalistic article”, because that leads to each article being independent of the others.
With the “entries” I seek that each one of them is almost complete in its concept (the one I have decided that day), but that they have a thread and continuity between them, studying a common subject (the War and its repercussions, in this case). And that they feed on the opinion of the readers, in addition to what I manage to investigate with my readings. Maybe it’s too ambitious to try to use a new genre (at least for me), but that’s what I’m trying to do.
Therefore, I do not intend to change my objectives, but it is logical to listen to opinions and adapt the method as much as possible to those objectives.
So, I have decided that I will make the following entries a bit shorter, to make them more convenient to follow, and to make each one more focused on a few issues. This will also allow me to make them more frequent.
I will also change the structure a bit. What I have been calling “my particular press review”, which I put at the beginning, I will divide into two parts. The first one I will call “my selection of new context”. In it I will include the few news items that I think have changed the context. The ones that are worth thinking about a bit before reading on. I will also share the rest of the interesting things that I have come across, but at the end of each entry, so that those who have gotten there and want to do so can go deeper, without getting scattered along the way.
China abandons Covid-0
There is a lot of talk these days about China’s decision to abandon its Covid-0 policy, and whether this will have repercussions. There are also doubts as to why this decision was made.
As with everything about China, there is little reliable information. So we will have to use our imagination and probability.
They may have made the decision for domestic political reasons, or for other foreign policy reasons, or for medical reasons, or for a mixture of all of them, which is likely.
Any of the reasons must be viewed through the filter of Chinese society. This implies remembering that China is a dictatorship with vast power, that its population is immense, and that its government does not think about the individual circumstances of each person (not even their life or death), but about the circumstances of society as a whole (communism: subjugation of individualities to the common good, at least in theory).
From a domestic policy point of view, it may be true that society was tired of so much confinement. It is also true that Xi Jinping did not want to make big experiments before he got his new mandate. Now he can. The fact that there are many deaths does not worry him too much, there will also be many people happy to have ended the confinements (even if that is not what the news say in our block of countries). And, whoever is afraid, can do voluntary confinement.
From the health point of view, the experience of the rest of the world in these years is clear. There have been countries with different degrees (and times) of response to confinements and vaccinations, but the world statistics on deaths have not changed much. What has changed is the concentration of deaths over time (the famous saturation of the hospital system, which turned out to be very decisive in countries where social pressure matters, which is not the case in China).
To see the results of different policies on pandemic deaths, it is useful to look at the data on the worldmeters website, where the data can be sorted in many different ways (the one I see as most representative is deaths per million inhabitants). We all know that several countries, like USA, UK, or Brazil, were reactionary to the strong confinements of others. However, the data say that most countries have had less than 4,000 deaths per million inhabitants (and more than 1,000), which, although it implies a four-fold difference, represents a small proportion of the population (between 0.4 and 0.1 %), and this in countries where the pandemic is almost considered to be over, i.e., the total deaths may end up being very similar to the present ones.
It is true that the countries with less confinement had more deaths. It is also logical, because the collapsed hospitals allowed for worse care of the sick. That will probably happen in China now. But, although it is hard to say so, I do not think that the Chinese government is very concerned about having an additional 0.4% of deaths in its population, even less so if those deaths are mostly of the oldest and weakest of its population.
What will probably happen in China, with this drastic change, will be an explosion of the virus also drastic, but short in time. That is, everyone will be infected almost at the same time, a few (in percentage) will die, the rest will be cured in a few weeks. And, in a few months, China will have the same degree of immunity that we have, having passed the disease. However, in the meantime, hospitals will be in chaos, as well as the functioning of society, with almost everything at functioning poorly due to not having enough healthy personnel.
On the other hand, I believe that the fear that Chinese travelers will generate great risks in our countries is overrated in the news. In places where we are already highly vaccinated, and highly immunized by the large proportion of the population that has passed the virus, the likelihood of these travelers generating major effects is very small.
A different question, within the health aspect, is whether a new mutation of the virus will appear that is more dangerous. That is not known, but experts have been saying that the new mutations are likely to be more contagious and less deadly (like the flu).
They make an interesting analysis of domestic and health policy approaches in China in this news item.
The other factor that may have influenced China’s decision is foreign policy, mixed with economics. Of course, by cutting the Covid-0 system, for a few months China will have many infections, which means (in addition to the health aspects already mentioned) that many people will not be able to work. Therefore, factories, ports, … will work worse during those months. This will have repercussions on the Chinese economy, but they may be greater in the West. Once again, there will be problems in the supply chains, which will fuel inflation. In other words, although counter-intuitive, this decision by China to end the Covid-0 policy may be another economic weapon in the War, aimed at weakening the West a bit more, even if China has to suffer part of the price, which is something they can do (you can see a news item in this regard here).
These supply chain problems will be caused by malfunctioning factories and ports during the short term of their massive infections. Once they are all immunized and back to normal, China will start producing at a high rate. However, given its control of the world’s raw materials (and factories), there is a risk that, at that point, China will devote its efforts to satisfying domestic demand (and that of its friendly countries), leaving demand from the West to the last resort. This could lead to another supply failure in the West, in this case, a longer-term one. And that will also generate inflation in the West. In other words, we have to forget about our inflation being under control soon.
The ChatGPT revolution and its impact on education.
Another topic that has been written about a lot lately is ChatGPT. For those who don’t know, this is a new software tool based on artificial intelligence. It feeds on everything that is published on the Internet. And, not only does it locate what the user is looking for, but, it even does its reasoning and draws conclusions and summaries. The user asks any question he wants, and ChatGPT gives him a fairly accurate answer based on the published knowledge.
I recommend testing it to understand the possibilities of the tool. This can be done by registering at https://chat.openai.com/chat
The truth is that I have asked it for things that I know a bit, and the answer has been very fast, and quite coherent. I have even asked it to write a poem about the sunset, and he has done it quite well.
A weakness of the tool is that there are many things published on the Internet that are not true, so it can give bad results if it accepts them. But, over time, and with the same artificial intelligence, the tool will be given algorithms to know what information to disregard and what not to disregard.
There is a lot of debate about whether this tool can “kill” Google. ChatGPT gives a single, quick answer, avoiding reading many different things on Google. It’s too early to know that, plus they haven’t declared their commercial interests yet. My guess is that they will be different services. One thing will be the quick answer to a specific question, in which ChatGPT may win (when it passes the reliability filter), and another different thing will be the access to different sources to read different opinions. In other words, Google may end up providing access to the “library”, and ChatGPT may end up providing the “expert’s” answer to the question (beware of the risks of manipulation of these answers, I mean “Big Brother”).
It is certainly an impressive step.
All this leads me to think about the future of education. With Google alone, there were already necessary changes, but this increases them. Today, it makes no sense to encourage traditional rote knowledge, since everything is just a click away. However, it makes more sense than before to educate in knowing how to discern if the answer is logical and good, or if the question should be asked in a different way to have a more adequate answer. It is necessary to teach more reasoning skills and conceptual structure, and less concrete knowledge.
Furthermore, and this is prior to ChatGPT, education also has to abandon the system derived from the industrial revolution, and adapt to that of the technological revolution. I mean that it is not logical to have students at the same time, in the same classroom (not even in a virtual classroom), with the same teacher, and with a closed syllabus. That is what I call the education of the industrial revolution, that of everyone at the same time to work at the pace of the factory (as in the video of TheWall – Pink Floid).
If we take a closer look, education with books is a “linear” education. You have to start with the first page, and move on with the rest until the end. Only the very interested stopped from time to time to go deeper with other sources on some subject.
However, the internet allows a “tree” education. You know where you start, but your interests lead you to go deeper through different links, without knowing where you end up, but knowing that you have read things that motivate you.
What will always be needed is the figure of the tutor. The one who tells the student who has spread himself too thin, or the one who detects his interests and helps him to deepen them. Without looking for everyone to end up knowing the same thing. He is the one who asks the student the right questions (wow, we are discovering Socrates).
Readings that have interested me.
In the process of writing this entry I have come across the following issues that have caught my attention. Some of them are related to what has been discussed in this entry, and others are not, but I recommend that you check them out.
- Related to the ChatGPT issue is the evolution of Internet queries. A “divorce” is taking place between different Internets, with different information, both because of government control (China has different access to the Internet than we do, it is the new Great Wall), and because of artificial intelligence (even on our Internet, different answers are offered to everyone depending on their clicking history). This leads to a “discrimination in access to knowledge”, perhaps logical, but dangerous. This article is very interesting.
- In the previous entry I talked about the loss of democratic quality in many places. Here they address the same issue. Although they focus on South Korea, they state the issue in other countries. I give the fact that the media that publishes it is close to the extreme left in the USA.
- The USA has approved the transfer to Ukraine of assets seized from Russian oligarchs. It may have some logic, but it remains to be seen how the USA maintains to other oligarchs in other countries that its legislation on private property is safe. News here.
- Exchanges (places to exchange cryptocurrencies for fiat money) continue to get more complicated. It seems that we are on the way to imitate the banking crisis of 1929. Here you can see how a senior executive of one of them committed suicide.
- Before accepting that the war will become much more complicated, it is worth remembering the serious and very long-lasting effects of this type of conflict. Here you can see how the effects of WWII are still being sought. Poland is trying to make Germany pay for it.
- The technological revolution in food is another very topical issue. I found this article interesting, where they tell about the attempts to create “artificial food”, which is not so much. What they do is to replicate the functioning of nature, but without having to deal with vegetables and animals (but with microbes). The process is similar to what is done in wastewater treatment plants with the so-called “activated sludge” treatments.
- I found this graph on lithium extraction over time very interesting. I remember that lithium is basic for batteries (of electric cars, and of almost everything).
At first glance, this would seem to be good news, since most of it is in Australia, which in theory belongs to the Western bloc. But, as the same graph says, China consumes 90% of Australian lithium, as well as controlling 60% of the world’s refining capacity.
It is also worth noting the large increase in consumption in recent years. It remains to be seen whether these increases are sustainable for future needs.
This is as far as I go for today. I will continue in the following entries.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed that this year 2023 will be the beginning of many solutions!