Review: Supervirus
I read a book last night called Supervirus by Andrew Mitchell. Basically, it reads like a skin-deep version of Daemon. But that’s OK.
Basically, cliche characters jet around trying to find the world’s smartest hacker, then stumble into a Jurassic Park-like botnet-and-gorilla-infused hell island and we see things go haywire. It reads… pretty much exactly how you would expect something with a description like that to read.
If you have a few hours to kill and want to think about AI/self-replication/bots/bizarro cyberwar, get it. That said, the book costs .99 cents on the Kindle. I wouldn’t pay anymore than that to read it.
It’s a book you read in between other, better books. It’s not bad – it’s just very superficial, and therefore very quick.
Crowdsourcing COIN Primer For Army Aviators
Starbuck is on the ball. Nicely done.
The Global Scavenger
An estimated 2% of the world lives the life of a scavenger – sorting through the refuge of the other 98%, finding things that can be recycled or re-used, and then selling them back for a subsistence living.
However, they have been crushed by the insistence of
Industries that consume recyclables in developing countries encourage and support the existence of middlemen or waste dealers between the companies and the scavengers in order to assure an adequate volume and quality of the materials. As a result, opportunities arise for the exploitation and/or political control of the scavengers, since they must sell their pickings to a middleman, who in turn sells to industry. Industry demands a minimum quantity from their suppliers and will not buy from individual scavengers. Industry usually demands also that the materials be baled, crushed and classified, processing that the middlemen carry out.
And this has given rise to a predatory middle-man class (a la Wall Street for the gutters):
The poverty of most Third World scavengers can largely be accounted for by the low prices they are paid for recyclables. Studies in some Colombian, Indian and Mexican cities have found that scavengers selling recyclables to only one buyer receive as little as six percent of the price that industry pays for those materials. In Mexico City, dumpsite scavengers must sell the materials collected to their leader who then sells them to industry,, making a profit of at least 300 percent. As a result, Mexico City dumpsite scavengers usually earn incomes lower than the minimum wage, are forced to live around the dumps, and have a life expectancy of 39 years.
Emphasis mine.
[Scavenger cooperatives in developing countries. By: Medina, Martin, BioCycle, 02765055, Jun98, Vol. 39, Issue 6]
Review: Slouching Towards Dystopia
Read through Matt Carr essay titled Slouching Towards Dystopia: The New Military Futurism. It’s a mildly interesting mixed bag. His thesis is that this kind of futurism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
While he critique of the over-the-top stuff coming out of DoD and Booz is somewhat on target, I don’t buy that argument. Sunshine and rainbows aren’t dying because I’m writing about a sophisticated internal insurgency controlling huge swathes of the Indian state.
Overall though, he picks and chooses what he wants to talk about to meld with an agenda I don’t really care about. Ex: He doesn’t really come down effectively against the rise of the feral city (claiming its combat in these areas is just war against the poor). He also makes far too big a deal out of $50 million on non-lethal weapons (of a budget of hundreds of billions).