Now that nearly a year has passed in the war in Ukraine, I think we should be able to agree that the best possible outcome is out of reach. The best possible outcome, of course, was Russia not invading Ukraine at all but failing that for Russia’s incursion to be limited in scope and duration and that Ukraine’s borders would return to their pre-2014 extent.

So, now what’s the least unacceptable but achievable outcome in Ukraine? I think it would be a negotiated settlement in which

1. Ukraine’s borders return to the pre-2014 extent
2. Russian access to the port at Sevastopol is guaranteed for a lengthy period
3. The rights of ethnic Russians in Ukraine are guaranteed
4. The rebuilding of Ukraine is largely undertaken by the Europeans

I guess that some would call that “appeasement” but as I see things it’s pragmatic. It assumes that Putin is as good as his word and essentially calls his bluff. It includes face-saving measures both for Ukraine and Russia. I do not think that complete Ukrainian victory is in the U. S. interest. Quite to the contrary it comes with risks of its own. I do not think a Russia without access to the Black Sea that has fallen into chaos, is even more nationalistic and aggressive than at present, or fragments into a dozen landlocked statelets is in the U. S. interest.

What would the least unacceptable but achievable outcome in Ukraine be?

I read this post by David Kramer of the Bush Center, “Supporting Ukraine: Why it is vital to U.S. national security interest”, as well as the accompanying report with interest, hoping to learn something. Sadly, I was disappointed. The closest he comes to an explanation of why supporting Ukraine is in the U. S. national security interest is a slippery slope argument.

A “slippery slope” argument is a claim that an action will inevitably lead to a chain reaction of events. For such an argument to be true the first, presumably small step must inexorably lead to the next and to the next and, ultimately, to an undesirable outcome. He never does that.

I agree that Russia should not have invaded Ukraine. I agree that the Russians have committed war crimes there. I find the evidence that the invasion of Ukraine would inevitably lead to Russian invasions of Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, etc. weak.

Beyond that the piece is an example of proof by assertion, as the “Hunting of the Snark” puts is, “what I tell you three times is true”.

I think that Russia is corrupt, illiberal, irredentist, and has interests that are not particularly well-aligned with our own. I don’t think they’re bent on world domination. The Soviet Union was but Russia is not the Soviet Union; Putin is not Stalin—he isn’t even Khrushchev. They were both committed revolutionaries. I see no evidence that Putin is.

I think that supporting Ukraine is in out national interest. I don’t think that unconditional unlimited support for Ukraine is.

I find assertions like this:

Concern about escalation, including the possibility that Putin would order the use of tactical nuclear weapons, must not deter us from providing Ukraine with the assistance it needs.

distressing. Survival is a permanent interest. Is Ukraine? To whatever extent he’s right in his dismissal of escalation, it’s also an assertion that deterrence has failed.

One of my ongoing concerns is that too many of the people offering advice are interested parties and Mr. Kramer appears to follow that pattern.

Rather than discuss the issue, I’m just going to show you four graphs. First, the 10 Year Treasury bond interest rate over the period of the last 50 years:

The federal debt:

The federal debt as a percent of GDP:

Note that doesn’t include the last two quarters. The interest rate has almost doubled since then (see the first chart). And spending on net interest:

I’ll add one small piece of analysis. It is an observed fact that debt overhang impedes economic growth and the causality goes in that direction (not the other way around). Translation: the situation is very different from what it was ten years or 20 years or 50 years ago. The present large debt overhang will make it very difficult for us to grow our way out of this problem.

I don’t care that Republicans don’t seem to care about this unless they have a Congressional majority and there’s a Democrat in the White House. That doesn’t matter unless you have a plan for 1) holding the federal debt constant; 2) holding the federal budget constant; 3) nearly trebling the amount of interest paid. If your plan is to borrow to cover the additional interest, it’s a lousy plan. If your plan is to raise taxes, tell me how you’ll do it and how you’ll raise enough revenue. If your plan is to cut spending, tell me how you’ll do it and what you plan to cut.

If your plan is to increase taxes and cut spending, keep Joschka Fischer’s advice in mind: the problem is not in knowing what to do but in how you’ll keep your job if you do it.

One caveat: don’t blame me. We’ve been doing nearly the opposite of what I’ve been saying to do over the period of the last 60 years.

Th editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the same wargames that I commented on earlier:

War games are a product of choices and assumptions, but there were four preconditions to defeating an invasion, none of them guaranteed. First the Taiwanese have to fight. The island is ramping up its spending on defense but its conscription and readiness are underwhelming. Condition two: Arms need to be pre-positioned; the U.S. can’t pour in weapons over friendly borders after the fight starts a la Ukraine. American weapons deliveries to Taiwan now lag years behind orders.

Three: The U.S. must be able to rely on its bases in Japan. American fighter jets lack the range to commute to the war without Japan’s outer islands, one more reason Tokyo is America’s most important Pacific ally. The fourth condition? The U.S. “must be able to strike the Chinese fleet rapidly and en masse” with long-range weapons.

The cost in blood of U.S. sailors and airmen would be enormous. “In three weeks,” the report notes, the U.S. would suffer “about half as many casualties as it did in 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Commanders would have to “move forward despite a high level of casualties not seen in living memory.”

The American public has no experience since World War II of enduring dozens of lost ships, including two U.S. Navy aircraft carriers (crew: 5,000) badly damaged or lost in most scenarios. The casualties and equipment losses compound the longer the U.S. waits to intervene, a warning about the costs of political indecision in a crisis. It’s also worth asking if a U.S. President in his 80s would have the stamina and concentration to manage the flood of difficult decisions coming at him.

I’m not comfortable with commenting on the pros and cons of particular tactics or weapons systems. I wish the editors had devoted more attention to cost-benefit analysis.

IMO we need to start looking at matters in a much more steely-eyed manner. Defending the U. S. homeland and possessions is not subject to cost-benefit analysis but defending other countries is. Furthermore, to a certain extent our strategy is working at cross-purposes. The stronger and more interventionist we are, the less our notional allies are willing to stand up and defend themselves. To my eye the lesson of the wargames was that we can’t do it alone.

Here’s an issue of Politico’s “West Wing Playbook” that illustrates my problems with technocracy, journalism, lawyers or maybe all three. Here’s how they introduce their resource, Mark Zaid:

To answer that, we called up MARK ZAID, a prominent national security attorney who has extensive experience dealing with claims around mishandling classified information.

But here are some of his responses:

Had you been in the White House on Nov. 2, the day the first batch of documents was discovered, what steps would you have taken?

I would not have revealed it at the time out of concern of influencing, unfairly and unduly, the elections.

and

Do we really care about the quality of the room? Isn’t the bigger question: What’s in the documents?

I’m not concerned about any of these blunders with respect to legal liability. The blunder pertains to public perception and undermining your credibility.

The problem I have with his answer is that he’s not answer the questions as a “national security attorney” but providing answers as a political operative or an advocate. They hypothetical “had you been…” gives him some cover but in this instance he has no client so answering as an advocate is improper. Attorneys are officers of the court and IMO he should have answered the questions accordingly.

Any ward heeler is equipped to answer the political questions. His intro confuses the issue.

“Technocracy” is supposed to be rule by experts. Being an expert in subject A does not automatically confer authority in subject B. That’s my problem with technocracy. In practice it’s not actually rule by experts but rule by specious authority.

As journalists, given their introduction, they should have limited their questions to those about national security rather than so many about politics.

And lawyers need to decide whether they’re officers of the court, experts, advocates, or political operatives. Pretty clearly they can’t be all of the above at the same time.

At the Wall Street Journal Amrith Ramkumar reports on a completely different style of carbon offset—carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). We may see an actual industry growing out of it:

Founded in 2009, Climeworks is effectively carrying out what trees do by taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The process promises to store the carbon in the earth for thousands of years. The company makes money by removing the carbon on behalf of businesses that can claim they are becoming carbon neutral.

Microsoft, e-commerce company Shopify Inc. and payments firm Stripe Inc. have prepaid or agreed to pay hundreds of dollars per credit, each of which represents one metric ton of carbon removed. Other carbon credits tied to projects such as keeping trees standing have often been criticized because the projects often don’t reduce emissions as much as promised.

Companies pay a premium, sometimes paying hundreds of times as much as they do for basic credits, for the credits from Climeworks because there is more certainty they remove carbon from the atmosphere. The companies are also willing to pay more to help jump-start the industry, hoping that costs decline rapidly.

“This is an important inflection point in the development of direct-air capture,” said Stacy Kauk, Shopify’s head of sustainability. “It isn’t just science fiction. It’s reality.”

The promise of the technology has prompted established businesses such as Occidental Petroleum Corp. to develop their own direct-air capture strategies.

Climeworks operates one of the world’s only operational direct-air capture plants in Iceland, which is capable of removing about 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of about 800 passenger cars. Other removals to this point had been done using methods such as burying carbon-rich plant material underground.

We’ll see if salesmanship is outrunning engineering.

IMO this is a very promising technology for a score of reasons among them being it builds an industry, is scalable, and doesn’t have to be stuck in the Amazon rainforest or sub-Saharan Africa. I can imagine a dozen different ways of structuring the business.

Best of all it would allow us to distinguish between motives, separating those who truly want to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere from those who are just anti-technology or, worse, anti-human.

Now for a pair of interrelated posts. Here’s the first. You know those carbon offset programs? As should surprise very few most are phonies. Patrick Greenfield reports at The Guardian:

The forest carbon offsets approved by the world’s leading provider and used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations are largely worthless and could make global heating worse, according to a new investigation.

The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that, based on analysis of a significant percentage of the projects, more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be “phantom credits” and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.

“Forest carbon offsets” are an idea which sound good in theory but founder on practical application. Practically by definition they’re far away and lack disinterested oversight.

I found this piece by Jordan Halvorsen at Medium thought-provoking. The author opens with a shout-out to “Schramm’s Law” and ends with a plea for venture capital to refocus its attentions.

Are you aware of the single most important contributor to a nation’s economic growth? It’s not the size of its established companies or the level of foreign investment. It’s the number of startups that grow to a billion dollars in revenue within 20 years. This is known as Schramm’s Law, named after Carl Schramm, the former President and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

What thoughts did it provoke? My first thought was that, although I agree that entrepeneurship is vitally important, I think Schramm’s Law has it backwards. It is an observable phenomenon that large companies actively seek to stamp out upstarts, using every force at their disposal. There are a number of things they can do, almost none of them having anything to do with having a better product at a lower price.

One of them is by acquisition: buy them. That removes the threat. Frequently, the acquisition is followed by discontinuing the competing product. I first became aware of an emerging Underpants Gnome-like business plan almost 40 years ago:

1. Start a company
2. ?
3. Get acquired by Microsoft

I actually had a couple of those as clients.

Another strategy is to sic the government on them. There are all sorts of ways to do that ranging from patents to strategic regulation.

Quite to the contrary I think that you can measure the decadence of an economy based on the role of billion dollar companies in it.

The second thought that occurred to me was to wonder how long has “Schramm’s Law” been promulgated? Based on Google and Bing I see no references to it prior to 2007 and the early references aren’t very helpful. I found no evidence that Carl Schramm had ever made such a pronouncement. Could it be just an evocation, a distillation? I’d sure like to see some quantitative measures of the number of companies that meet the criteria. I suspect it’s a post-Tech Bubble thing.

Based on this Wall Street Journal article here are the layoffs that have been announced so far in 2023:

Other major employers, e.g. McDonalds, have announced layoffs in unspecified numbers.

Some of those numbers may seem small but the tech sector is a lot smaller than you might think with as much attention as it receives. I think that the sector is getting a double whammy between the layoffs and the burgeoning effect of low-code/no-code. When you consider that a very large percentage of those in our colleges and unis pursuing STEM degrees are either studying computer sciences or life sciences, the ripple effects could be significant.