ITK Daily | October 8

Happy Saturday.

To be ITK, know this:

CNN: Massive blast cripples parts of Crimea-Russia bridge, in blow to Putin’s war effort

Russia’s bridge to Crimea severely damaged by explosion: FT reports the strategically important infrastructure is a symbol of Moscow’s pride in its invasion of Ukraine.

Explosion hits Crimean bridge, damaging Russian supply route to Ukraine: WP reports Ukrainian special services were behind the blast, a Ukrainian official told The Post. The bridge is a symbol of President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to control Ukraine, providing a connection to the Ukrainian peninsula the Kremlin illegally annexed in 2014.

+ @ianbremmer: one big near term question: with supply lines to crimea nearly severed, will putin allow ukraine port of odessa to remain open? or is food/fertilizer deal now at risk?

Today's geopolitical business question: Does the damage to Kerch Strait Bridge accelerate a peaceful negotiation to end the hostilities between Ukraine and Russia?

Ukraine takes Japan’s side in dispute with Russia: Ukraine officially recognized the disputed Kuril Islands as part of Japan.

Backstory: This is a territorial dispute between Japan and the Russian Federation over the ownership of the four southernmost Kuril Islands.

‘Armageddon’ warning reflects Biden’s instincts about Putin: WP reports the president’s stark comments were not prompted by Russia’s on-the-ground actions, aides say.

+ US officials stressed on Friday that they had seen no evidence that Russia had taken the measures necessary to use its nuclear arsenal and that the United States has no reason to change its nuclear posture.

+ But officials said they are taking Putin’s threats seriously and have said the United States is engaged in direct back-channel conversations with the Russians about the repercussions of taking steps such as the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Biden riffs on Armageddon: He needlessly raises nuclear anxiety at a cocktail party. That won’t help deterrence. WSJ - Editorial

+ President Biden will never be a great communicator, but his latest riff at a campaign fundraiser on the threat of nuclear Armageddon won’t reassure anyone. He succeeded mainly in demonstrating his own anxiety, which isn’t the right message to send Vladimir Putin or the American people.

+ If [President Biden] really does fear a nuclear escalation, he owes more of an explanation to the American people than cocktail-party doomsday chatter.

NYP: Jean-Pierre stalls reporters’ pleas to take questions after Biden ‘Armageddon’ warning

The White House Comms Team obviously wanted no part of this clean-up operation.

+ Jean-Pierre, who ultimately said there’s no new intelligence to back up Biden’s concern, entered the press area of the presidential plane as it neared its destination... “Hey guys, so this is gonna be an incredibly short gaggle.”

Presidential showboating is the worst kind of showboating.

US tries to hobble China chip industry with new export rules: Reuters reports the Biden administration published a sweeping set of export controls on Friday, including a measure to cut China off from certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with US equipment, vastly expanding its reach in its bid to slow Beijing's technological and military advances.

The global might of the tiny chip: Silicon chips power everything from cars and toys to phones and nukes. “Chip War,” by Chris Miller, recounts the rise of the chip industry and the outsize geopolitical implications of its ascendancy. NYT

+ Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, by Chris Miller

+ The extraordinary excitement of Moore’s Law, and the precarity of its ever-upward promise, are central to the pulse-quickening pace of Chris Miller’s new book, “Chip War,” which chronicles the development, proliferation, and strategic deployment of the semiconductor chips that now animate everything from cars to toys to nukes.

+ The book is not a polemic. Rather, it’s a nonfiction thriller — equal parts “The China Syndrome” and “Mission Impossible.”

+ Europe’s failure to grasp the importance of transistors comes through in a great story about the French president Charles de Gaulle sniffing at a transistor radio — a gift from Hayato Ikeda, the prime minister of Japan, in 1962.

+ De Gaulle apparently found the radio distasteful, a tacky gizmo for the petite bourgeoisie.

+ What Xi Jinping’s China has failed to do is grab its expected share of the chip market. With massive government assistance, the country now produces 15 percent of the world’s silicon chips - consider Japan (which makes 17 percent of the world’s chips) and Taiwan (a whopping 41 percent).

+ Taiwan is the Mount Olympus of silicon chips.

+ Trying to understand the digital world by studying only Facebook or Google is like trying to understand architecture by studying only frescoes.

The new oil war: OPEC moves against the US: Saudi Arabia and Russia’s agreement to cut oil production in defiance of Washington may upend the global energy order. FT

+ Half a century ago, the Yom Kippur war between Israel and Arab states put a new cartel of oil producers at the center of global politics. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries

+ On Wednesday, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Saudi Arabia and its oil allies — which now include Russia in the Opec+ group — moved to upend the world’s energy order again.

+ Their decision to slash 2mn barrels a day from production targets, or 2 percent of global supply, might sound modest - but doing so is a threat to a global economy stalked by inflation and mounting consumer anxiety about energy prices and shortages.

+ The timing of the cuts for the US was especially telling, coming just two and a half months after President Joe Biden had exchanged fist bumps with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, and five weeks before November’s midterm elections.

+ Roger Diwan, a veteran OPEC watcher at S&P Global Commodity Insight, said in a note the cuts marked a “weaponization of oil” and suggested the timing and location of the meeting were a deliberate signal from the cartel.

+ The presence of the Russian deputy prime minister Alexander Novak, pictured, to discuss tightening of oil supply in Vienna sent a clear message, says Roger Diwan of S&P Global Commodity Insight.

+ “In its support of Russia’s request for production cuts, Opec casts itself in a role that will hasten its own demise. Anyone who can move away from oil will — national governments, businesses, cities, and consumers. OPEC’s actions are simply a nail in a coffin that was already being built.” -- Amy Myers Jaffe, a professor in the Climate Policy Lab at Tufts University’s Fletcher School

Let Thatcher rest: Toryism must face modern challenges with modern ideas Eliot Wilson

+ Britain in 2022 is almost unrecognizable.

+ The Thatcher name has become a false god and a golden calf.

The cracks in the cult of the dead leader: What worshipping Margaret Thatcher can’t do for UK Conservatives. Simon Kuper

+ In countries in decline, cults develop around Dead Leaders: Perón in Argentina, Mussolini in Italy, and, increasingly, Thatcher in the UK.

+ Thatcher, Mussolini, and Perón each represent the strong leader who trampled over opponents and foreigners.

+ (Thatcher) was a rare politician who completed her project. Once she’d gone, there wasn’t much room for more privatization or tax-cutting if Britain were to remain a recognizable developed country. That left post-Thatcher Tories at a loss.

+ Dead leaders only ever united a faction of their nations. That’s part of their appeal: cultists of Thatcher, Mussolini or Perón band together to taunt enemies.

Beware of the Golden Age Fallacy.

A lost manuscript shows the fire Barack Obama couldn’t reveal on the campaign trail Timothy Shenk

+ Obama left Harvard with a blueprint for remaking American democracy. Written with Robert Fisher, a friend, and former economics professor, the 250-page manuscript had the working title of “Transformative Politics.”

+ As might be expected from two law students, Obama and Fisher were especially concerned with the courts, warning that counting on judges to deliver policy victories was a poor substitute for a political realignment.

+ “Transformative Politics” never became a book. But it laid out a strategy that helped bring Obama into the White House — and anticipated debates that Democrats are still wrestling with today.

Media moves of note:

+ Huma Abedin is joining MSNBC as a contributor.

+ Michael Cohen is on TikTok.

FTX signs a global partnership with Visa that will include the rollout of debit cards to customers internationally.

Skandal! Bringing Down Wirecard: I watched this Netflix documentary last night. Who knew digital banking fraud could be so entertaining? The doc has excellent insights on the power of journalism, the use of public affairs dark arts, economic diplomacy, Germany seeking a national tech champion, and the use of former intelligence officers by big finance. Good stuff and worth a watch.

Working from home is not an urban escape hatch: Contrary to popular perception, the nation’s WFH hotbeds are big-city neighborhoods and expensive suburbs, not mountain retreats and beach cottages. Justin Fox

Information is food: How do we consume data? At TED@SXSWi, technologist JP Rangaswami muses on our relationship to information and offers a surprising and sharp insight: we treat it like food. TED

+ Expensive tissue hypothesis (ETH) relates to brain and gut size in evolution (specifically in human evolution). It suggests that in order for an organism to evolve a large brain without a significant increase in basal metabolic rate (as seen in humans), the organism must use less energy on other expensive tissues.

+ "There's no such thing as information overload. There's only filter failure." -- Clay Shirky

Where the future of fashion is headed: What is the future of fashion, and where is the fashion industry heading? What kind of future do fashion pioneers think of, and how do they try to change the way of thinking about fashion? A documentary about the future and a new way of approach to fashion. VPRO

+ Every year, more than 100 billion new garments are produced. A third of that is never sold, worn and shredded or burned.

+ Fast Fashion is not only based on cheap wages and cheap materials but is also responsible for 10% of global CO2 emissions.

+ The production time between the catwalks in Paris, London, and Milan and the clothes racks of the big chains such as H&M and Zara is shorter than ever.

Elon Musk: ‘Aren’t you entertained?’ The Tesla chief talks to Roula Khalaf about moving to Mars, saving free speech via Twitter — and why aging is one ‘problem’ that should not be solved. Lunch with the FT

+ For the next couple of hours, I am better acquainted with the curious character of Elon Musk, the engineer and the visionary, the billionaire and the disrupter, the agitator and the troublemaker.

+ Musk has built Tesla into a more than $700bn market cap business and forced the car industry to speed up the shift to electric vehicles.

+ Musk is a maverick too, a serial tweeter to his more than 100mn followers who flouts convention, revels in outrageous outbursts, fights with regulators and staff, and taunts competitors.

+ “I play the fool on Twitter and often shoot myself in the foot and cause myself all sorts of trouble . . . I don’t know, I find it vaguely therapeutic to express myself on Twitter. It’s a way to get messages out to the public.”

+ Musk is capricious, but he sees himself as a problem solver, and the problem is everything from the potential end of life on Earth to climate change and even traffic.

+ “Something will happen to Earth eventually, it’s just a question of time. Eventually, the sun will expand and destroy all life on Earth, so we do need to move at some point, or at least be a multi-planet species.”

+ "I’m subject to literally a million laws and regulations, and I obey almost 99.99 percent of them."

+ He also has a dim view of regulators, whom he sees as bureaucrats justifying their jobs by going after high-profile targets like him.

+ Musk reckons that conflict over Taiwan is inevitable, but he is quick to point out that he won’t be alone in suffering the consequences.

+ “Apple would be in very deep trouble, that’s for sure . . . ” he adds, not to mention the global economy, which he estimates, with precision, will take a 30 percent hit. 

Where FT and Musk had lunch in Austin: Fonda San Miguel

Parag Agrawal: The Twitter CEO sparring with Elon Musk: The tech prodigy’s battles with a mercurial opponent are coming to a head. Richard Waters

Cyborg cockroaches are coming, and they just want to help: Inspired by insects, robotic engineers are creating machines that could aid in search-and-rescue, pollinate plants and sniff out gas leaks. Pranshu Verma

+ Robotic engineers are scouring the insect world for inspiration. Some are strapping 3D-printed sensors onto live Madagascar hissing cockroaches, while others are creating fully robotic bugs inspired by the ways insects move and fly.

+ Although batteries are improving, they would need to be smaller and more powerful. Miniature parts that convert energy into robotic motion, called actuators, need to become more efficient. Sensors have to be even lighter.

40 great business books curated by Trung Phan.

How to make yourself into a learning machine: Shopify ’s Director of Production Engineering explains how reading broadly helps him get to the bottom of things. Every

Why MasterClass isn’t really about mastery: And other lessons from a 9-figure edtech startup. Every

+ Borrowing social capital is easier than creating it.

+ Advertisements shouldn’t be an afterthought.

Why does time go forwards, not backwards? The arrow of time began its journey at the Big Bang, and when the Universe eventually dies there will be no more future and no past. In the meantime, what is it that drives time ever onward? BBC

+ When Isaac Newton published his famous Principia in 1687, his three elegant laws of motion solved a lot of problems. Without them, NASA couldn't have landed people on the Moon 282 years later.

+ "The interesting feature of Newton's laws, which wasn't appreciated till much later, is that they don't distinguish between the past and the future," says the theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll. "But the directionality to time is its most obvious feature, right? I have photographs of the past, I don't have any photographs of the future."

+ The only basic law of physics that can tell apart the past from the future is that heat can't flow from cold to hot.

+ The answer to why time goes forward is rooted in the way the Universe began.

New York’s Eleven Madison Park becomes first three-star vegan restaurant: FT reports the Michelin guide said it hoped that the recognition would encourage chefs to emphasize sustainability.

'Utter takeover': Pickleball invasion prompts turf war in West Village Gothamist

+ “The park used to be teeming with kids playing basketball and football and tag and chase. Now they’ve stopped going. It’s all adults playing pickleball,” complains a West Village parent. “It’s not a coexistence, it’s a complete and utter takeover.”

Sensational.

He rowed solo from New York to Ireland in 112 days — and he can’t swim Adela Suliman

+ After 112 days of near solitary existence among ferocious waves with only the odd passing whale for company, Irish adventurer Damian Browne this week returned to land, becoming the first person to row unsupported across the Atlantic from New York City to Galway, according to his team.

+ “Physically, it’s incredibly arduous. It’s just a relentless task, the workload everyday was absolutely enormous. There were moments of loneliness and moments of euphoria — it’s an emotional roller coaster.”

+ “You can’t win against the Atlantic … but you can survive it,” calling the sea an “overwhelming opponent.”

Surf and the city: Autumn may be the season of big swells, but the smaller waves found year-round near East Coast cities are perfect for beginners who want to give surfing a try. Lisa Fogarty

+ It’s a good workout for the body and the mind.

Pro-tip: Never buy a surfboard from a surf shop owner who doesn’t surf Caracal

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

Caracal produces ITK Daily.

Caracal is a geopolitical business intelligence firm specializing in global business issues at the intersection of globalization, disruption, and politics.

Clients are Chief Communications Officers with global responsibility who rely on Caracal for help navigating today's interconnected business environment with political intelligence, research, strategic planning, public affairs, and communications.

Caracal ITK Daily + actionable insights delivered directly, drop your email here.