Tag: us

$40b Missile Defense unreliable

Despite years of tinkering and vows to fix technical shortcomings, the system’s performance has gotten worse, not better, since testing began in 1999. Of the 8 tests held since GMD became operational in 2004, 5 have been failures.

awkward for international relations, given that this missile defense system was supposed to keep others in check, both rogue and not.

US luddites

We have one hell of a luddite problem to contend with. The silly nonsense in San Francisco is just a first taste of widespread future shock. There’s an interesting essay on these shocks that I come back to again and again.

66% think it would be a change for the worse if prospective parents could alter the DNA of their children to produce smarter, healthier, or more athletic offspring.
65% think it would be a change for the worse if lifelike robots become the primary caregivers for the elderly and people in poor health.
63% think it would be a change for the worse if personal and commercial drones are given permission to fly through most US airspace.
53% of Americans think it would be a change for the worse if most people wear implants or other devices that constantly show them information about the world around them. Women are especially wary of a future in which these devices are widespread.

Japan copied US culture and made it better

If you’re looking for some of America’s best bourbon, denim and burgers, go to Japan, where designers are re-engineering our culture in loving detail. This movement of American style across the ocean to Japan and back to America with a Japanese twist is happening more frequently. The most famous example is probably Daiki Suzuki, who was design director for the quintessentially American brand Woolrich Woolen Mills and now produces his own menswear line—Engineered Garments, a Japanese-run American brand that manufactures its unique take on vintage Americana in New York and sells it in both Japan and the US One of his former employees, Shinya Hasegawa, now has a Brooklyn-based line called Battenwear that offers his interpretation of American outdoor wear from the ’60s to the ’80s. I had never encountered the brand in the States, but I found it in Kyoto.

Anatomy of the Deep State

“During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115m to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, 2 bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, 1 killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7m constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields.