Saif Group
Nice history of how Pakistan’s Saif Group has exploited that country’s instability over the last fifty years to generate massive returns. They’re currently looking for a way to drill for hydrocarbons in Taliban territory. (Answer is simple: buy them off.)
Pakistan Oil Disruption
Burqa-clad assailants armed with Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades attempted to attack an oil terminal in southern Pakistan but were thwarted by a security guard who was gunned down as the suspects escaped, officials said Tuesday.
The three attackers, dressed in the all-encompassing garment traditionally worn by Muslim women, tried on Monday to enter the terminal in the port city of Karachi where oil supplies arrive for the country’s largest refinery, police said.
The Global Ghost Fleet
Fantastic read about where the shipping industry stands, and where it’s parking its excess capacity. Rough time to be a shipping broker/insurer. Industry tanking while excess capacity continues growing at the rate of when your business was at its peak. Feedback loop on this may be the impetus to drive the future of transportation (namely, moving electrons over the wire and air).
Zephyr Teachout on Virtual College
In the Washington Post. Can’t give it full treatment now. Makes some points but requires some pushback.
Crashing Electricity Grids
Use of OSINT:
Wang and colleagues at Dalian University of Technology in the Chinese province of Liaoning modelled the US’s west-coast grid using publicly available data on how it, and its subnetworks, are connected (Safety Science, DOI: 10.1016/j.ssci.2009.02.002).
Their aim was to examine the potential for cascade failures, where a major power outage in a subnetwork results in power being dumped into an adjacent subnetwork, causing a chain reaction of failures. Where, they wondered, were the weak spots? Common sense suggests they should be the most highly loaded networks, since pulling them offline would dump more energy into smaller networks.
Smart network analysis of vulnerabilities:
To find out if this is indeed the case, the team analysed both the power loading and the number of connections of each grid subnetwork to establish the order in which they would trip out in the event of a major failure. To their surprise, under particular loading conditions, taking out a lightly loaded subnetwork first caused more of the grid to trip out than starting with a highly loaded one.
“An attack on the nodes with the lowest loads can be a more effective way to destroy the electrical power grid of the western US due to cascading failures,” Wang says. To minimise the risk, he says, the grid’s operators should defend the west coast sections by adjusting their power capacity to ensure these specific conditions do not arise.