On Telepresence
Despite what the travel industry wants, telepresence is going to keep taking off. Why? It makes business sense. It’s cheaper (flights, hotels, expense accounts), its more effective (meetings in six cities in one day), and its empowering (work from anywhere). Over the next generation, this is going to become commonplace.
In the meanwhile, there’s an institutional/enterprise push to integrate this into existing offices. Autodesk for example, is using 20 telepresence suites (a combination of table, lighting, mics, cameras and big screens) to cut its travel by 16%. These are expensive (hundreds of thousands).
The atomization of this has already begun. To wit – the Vgo below:
Not sold that an office consisting of remote controlled segways-with screens is the form this will take. Why? The point of telepresence is to defeat the requirement of an office, not populate it with ghosts.
If we continue down the atomization path, we find distributed clients with extremely high quality video, sound, and monitors with built in mics/sound etc. Like Cisco’s umi. (Note, long run is a feature, not a standalone product. Roku, Apple TV, Kinect etc.) In the end, Skype or GChat Video.
So, I for one, am not worried about the nodes for this global telepresence network. The real vulnerability, however, is bandwidth.
Even assuming compression technology keeps pace with the fidelity of these set ups, demand is going to zoom, and bandwidth providers will have to keep up. Given the net neutrality debacle, I’m not optimistic when it comes to relying on existing providers to adapt to the future.
Indeed, if they were to pursue their current strategy of artificial cost increases and delayed infrastructure rollout, they could push the horizon back on telepresence penetration.
The End and Future of MEND
Co-option is one of the most important levers open source counterinsurgency specialists have. (Think the Awakening or ISCI cells in Helmand.) As such, several key component groups of MEND have been bought out of the system:
Eleven former warlords, who were themselves commanders of various camps of the MEND, spread across Nigeria’s southern oil patch, said in a paid advertisement in the local media that other[s], were using the group’s name to perpetuate their acts.
“We want to confirm that MEND as a structured organization operating in the Niger Delta, no longer exists,” the former militant leaders stated. “We disbanded our operations following the acceptance of the offer of amnesty and institutionalization of the post-amnesty program by the federal government.”
This approach (paying 25,000 at a rate of $235/month/militant) seems to be working, with oil production up to 2.6mbpd (up from ~1m bpd). However, a group calling itself the ‘Niger Delta People’s Liberation Front’ is still conducting attacks:
They urged the government, oil companies and the international community to disregard the recent threat purportedly issued by a spokesman for MEND under the pseudonym Jomo Gbomo, to attack oil targets in the Niger Delta, saying that it came from criminals.
This is probably due to the inequality of the amnesty program. That is, the distribution of funding and jobs to differing leaders and tribes (Ijaw and Itsekiri to name a few). The leaders share a common purpose in keeping the tap of amnesty funding flowing long enough for them to sort that matter out themselves, perhaps violently.
Meanwhile, criminality is still a lucrative business, especially if politicians are renting gangs to targeting the opposition leadership. Indeed, candidate Timi Alaibe has been the target of bombs three times.
The April elections will be contentious at best. This is important for the future of the amnesty program (and therefore MEND’s future), but it is also internationally significant, in that the stability of some 2.6 million barrels per day is also uncertain.
Role of Speculators
We saw this in 2008. Oil and food inflation (partly driven by the former, as well as ethanol) and spiking gas prices. Given that the public’s patience has been sapped (marked by protests all over the world) by gross mismanagement of the economy, this has the makings of a really messy summer.
The fall in food commodities is attributable in part to a shift in hot money. Rather than chase the food commodities higher, some of that money has moved decisively into the oil markets, which are bigger and more liquid.
Fordlândia
Unfortunately, rubber manufacturers in East Asia were running a virtual monopoly that drove up the price of raw materials.
Ford’s idea: Create the world’s largest rubber plantation in the middle of the Amazon forest, which after all is the native habitat of rubber trees. He bought over six million acres and named his Americanized colony Fordlândia.
Ford went so far as to build a modern hospital, a power plant, a library, a golf course, a hotel, and thousands of little white clapboard houses for the employees to live in.
Eventually, as the community grew, other businesses such as bakeries, butcher shops, restaurants, and shoemakers were established.
Fordlândia proved to be wildly unsuccessful. The rubber saplings that Ford had planted (without the help of a botanist) were barely growing, and those that did grow were soon hit by a leaf blight which ruined the remaining trees.
By the end of the 1920s malaria became a serious problem.
In December 1930 agitated workers rioted, breaking windows and overturning vehicles in the road. After the riots, which lasted less than three days, work continued, but there was almost no product to show for the millions of dollars Ford had poured into the jungle.