Disruptive technology

What is disruptive technology?  It is technology that brings in a change to our understanding of what is fundamental to a system.  Computers changed how businesses processed information which meant that whole categories of workers were put out of jobs.  Rooms that used to be filled with accountants were downsized.  Similarly rooms full of draftsmen and architects got pared down, as did rooms of engineers to design everything from squeeze bottles to jet aircraft.  Computers disrupted business in ways large and small, and that intruded on our lives and our lives slowly began to change, as well.  Connecting computers to a network and having them internetworked was meant, way back when, to be a way to have computers split processes amongst them as they were few and expensive and idle time was money lost.  Instead the internetworked systems allowed people to contact each other across all the networks in a way that enabled human intelligence to be shared and increased.  E-mail was the first real disruptive technology of networks, and then, later, would come the ability to browse from site to site with information put up in a flat network system with agreed-upon means to display information.  The Internet with World Wide Web came into being and the compelling way it changed lives was through interaction of people to do many things that they could have never done before.  People who would never dream of publishing anything soon had blogs and realized that there was readership available with people desperate for something interesting to read.  Videos also were shared when bandwidth increased, and that also changed our view of each other and the world.  And commerce moved onto a global stage accessible by anyone with a computer connected to a network, and competition became global at a retail level.

Our world changed.

Yet the seasons still come and go, the Earth orbits the sun and the Moon orbits the Earth.  That world did not change as it is Nature and beyond our reach to change, as its laws are required to allow us to be here.

Today we see the last gasp of governments trying to regain control of people in ways large and small, from the Transnational Left and Right we see the disruption of societies as governments and companies try to liquidate what it means to be a citizen of a Nation.  Across much of Europe the attempt to socialize health care has resulted in the horrors of the British system and people left to die of thirst, to the lax attitude of physicians all taking their holiday on the hottest days of the year so that hospitals cannot treat those with heat stroke, to the much admired German system that can't seem to ask its own people if they actually like having to wander from doctor to doctor to get seen on a timely basis and never have continuity of care from a physician that knows them.  These systems have tremendous overhead and lacks big, small and always at the cost of actual health provisioning in a way people prefer.  Bureaucrats run these systems and they are run for the interest of the governments involved, not the people.  Control over personal health is one of the fastest ways a tyrannical system can find and eliminate opposition as it finds out just who has what, and then figure out how to deny opponents actual health services.  With such a whip the political class finds ways to dole out a bit here and there to get re-elected, all in the knowledge that the people are afraid of government as it has taken over the health care system.

This is an antiquated way of doing things, with large lab systems taking lots of time running costly tests at high overhead with may companies and levels of bureaucracy which now must be sustained by the individuals actually using the system.  Put in a few levels of bureaucracy and the actual cost of provisioning health care goes up, timeliness and quality of care goes down.  Computers have not made inroads to anything but forms processing so that forms get ignored on a more timely basis by bureaucrats playing solitaire on their systems instead of just hanging out at the water cooler instead of doing their jobs.  They do that, too.  Computers increase inefficiency as well as efficiency and provide many ways to goof off that could not have been conceived of just 30 years ago.  Health care has resisted disruption from the inside as the insiders have a vested interest in keeping a high overhead, high cost system going: it provides control and makes money for them, and grants those running it much power over others.

Yet automation and miniaturization are coming to the health care system, but this isn't coming from the decaying inside-out.  No this is coming from the outside, from people who don't much care for the inefficient, high overhead and centralized control realms that are the tyrannical features of government controlled health care.  Disruptive technology threatens the apple cart by putting power back in the hands of individuals who are able to walk away from aspects of the system to save money and empower those doing the liberation.  The place to start isn't with the 3D printing of organs... well, that is a pretty good place, actually, but to disrupt the entire system requires hitting at its underpinnings and that is with blood tests.  The things you have to get done to yield some information about what is going on with your body.  I've had so many of them it isn't funny, and if you have ever seen a nurse walk into a room with a full rack of vials to test your blood then you have some understanding of just how important the tests are.  Due to my health I've had up to 35 taken at a single draw, and there are people who have many more than that taken just to try and identify what is going on in their bodies.

From Instapundit I read, today, about a woman who, at age 19, started a company after dropping out of Stanford University and used her tuition money to put into the company (Article at Wired).  She is afraid of needles and thought that there must be a better way to do blood testing.  Now at 30, Elizabeth Holmes' company, Theranos, is featuring a 30 test service at Walgreens in Palo Alto, CA.  The blood sample is a miniscule amount that fits into a half inch collection vial.  Results for their tests are in 4 hours.  The company posts the costs of its tests on its website and they are a fraction of the cost of going to a traditional lab.  Their goal is to run thousands of tests via a single sample, and to have that sample available so that if a doctor wants secondary tests done on it they can be performed without the need for a re-draw.

Do they test for bacteria and viruses? Yes.  Instead of culturing blood, and risking contamination, they do a DNA screening to see if known viruses or bacteria are present and at what levels.  That is days of specialized culturing thrown out the door and the most definitive way to find a pathogen, via its DNA, put in its place. At some point my guess is that they will be able to give you your entire genome so that physicians can quickly see what medical conditions you might be susceptible to via your genetic profile.  The cost of a full genomic work up has been dropping drastically, and making it an everyday test done in hours, not days, would begin to change the course of medicine as diseases can be cross-referenced with genetic background and statistical results derived from it.

Even with Moore's Law slowing due to the fact that physics at the atomic level limits the size of processors, the ability to multiply what a processor does increases computing power per die for production.  Once some of this technology goes off patent, or once competition with alternative and faster ways gets into play, the cost of the tests will go down, the rate to get results will speed up and the size of the sample will decrease.  Give it two cycles of Moore's Law and the microengineering to get a 'lab on a chip' and you will begin to see the first generation of full spectrum blood sampling devices as something that becomes available in nearly every store.  Put in a few more cycles of Moore's Law and that then becomes a device you buy to add to your cellphone.  Cross that with the X-Prize for a non-invasive tricorder and you have Dr. McCoy's minimal test tricorder.

Time for something like this to get off the drawing board?  Less than a decade.

What is the basis for Larry Niven's device in the Known Space stories called an Autodoc (a capsule you rest in that does full medical procedures from a simple blood test and manicure to setting bones and treating cancer, or replacing organs or limbs)?  A full spectrum blood test.  As results are processed faster and cross-indexed with diseases, pathogens, and genetic background plus having a 360 degree body scan to see what is wrong with you, then the basis for the Autodoc appears.  The blood test is key as it is the basis of so much of modern medicine that it isn't funny.  As of today the first piece of the Autodoc is being worked on, although not as an Autodoc but as a way to get small blood samples to yield up information that used to take racks of vials to get.

This sort of technology is no longer a question of 'if' but of 'when' and 'how soon will it get here'.

Our health care system is on the verge of disappearing as we know it, with its high overhead bureaucracy, within 20 years.  Possibly within 10.

What will you do when you are given the freedom of having all of that medical knowledge on the cheap about yourself and then able to have a doctor step you through the beginning of understanding just what is in your body and how you can deal with it effectively?  Why would you want 'insurance' when you are in control of your medical life in an absolute way that is at once low cost and easy to do?  The power to control you begins to evaporate with low cost, effective blood testing that breaks the old system at its foundations.  How long will it take to do simple genomic cross-indexing of inherited conditions?  I'm guessing less than a decade, but certainly in that 20 year time horizon.

And what happens when governments try to take this away from stores, doctors and you?

That is an obvious power grab directly against you, the individual, to put a bureaucrat in control of your life and death.  Yet it will be cheap and easy to snub these control monsters.  Will you dare to be free of them?

This is just one disruptive technology.  Others are here and just being perfected.  Still more are coming from the horizon at a high rate of speed.  If you want to know why those wishing to dissolve your personality, your bonds to your country and your fellow citizens, are so desperate it is this: the future is arriving far faster than it can ever be controlled.  Governments are ill suited to coping and understanding what this means.  Individuals, however, are very able to do so as they do not have the burdens of collective stupidity and bureaucracy to hamper them.  And those who will benefit most are the poor, who do not need this controlled for them to get a good price as it already comes with a low price tag.  What happens when the poor are set free of the clutches of those wishing to control them?  Will they quake in fear of freedom or just shake their head at those who seek control and let them know that their day is over?

Change is here, but it isn't the one that the controllers hoped for.  Quite the opposite as this kind of change is their deadly enemy.

Welcome to the future.

I embrace it with open arms while those who seek control yell in fear of it.

Oh, happy day.

Neither portal nor destination be

This is a set of musings on the nature of blogging brought on via a post at Stacy McCain's site Where Were You in 2002? (h/t: Insty).

Seeing Overlawyered moving over to Cato spurred on the question about 'making the big time' and 'are you a portal or destination?' in Stacy McCain's post.

In 2002 I was healthy, working, and helping to get the last of the Afghan materials out the door in the Agency I worked in before moving over to my R&D slot which I had requested a temporary re-assignment after 9/11/01.  This did not mean I was not interested in blogging, far from it, I was an avid reader of a number of early blogs and attended conferences featuring both Old and New Media (like the old Seybold Seminars or Print '97).  Part of my work was to scour the early web for material and avenues of presenting and using data that were new or novel, that would help move information to the warfighter.  That meant learning all I could about everything from blogging to 3D interfaces to the coming transition to the post-32 bit world and IPv6.  The methodology is straight out of James Burke's Connections series: let the pinball effect give you information and insights from multiple realms and see if the ideas cross into the realm you inhabit so as to allow it to adapt and change.

It is from that perspective that I took in the idea that the Internet is not about portals and destinations, hubs and spokes, nor even about connected clouds of users and information.  I can't tell you who put it like this, there are numerous possible authors, but I picked up on the idea that the Internet, blogs, media sites... the entire thing from static repositories of information like the reference work sites I link to all the way to Big Old Media sites... are something called a hyperlinked conversation.  Hyperlinks are generic in type, they are an unbiased connectivity form for the electronic New Media.  Hyperlinks are also that most powerful of things that mankind invented in the Old Media: an indexing tool.

That comes from James Burke and the power of an index of a book, that list of ideas and pages where they appear, is that they allow you to cross-index.  You can take an idea word, go to a page, find another idea word, go to its index, and find things that it links to via the index.  Hyperlinks do this exact, same function, but a far faster than you can with a static, read-only memory system with a hand/finger interface with leafs to flip through known as a book.  What a hyperlink allows, however, is the ability to show source of an idea via that link, and you can find other ideas that are linked to in the article/video/etc. and follow those links to see how ideas connect.  Everything, even the person who is a minimal utility node in a Metcalfe's Law network offers utility because you can use a search engine (of your choice) to then find out all the other people who link to an article/video/etc. and follow those links back to their sources.  Even the most dead-end of sites, those that studiously don't link to other bloggers, is still connected to them via the link to the source material and your ability to check other incoming links and go back to those sites to find out what ideas are there.  The hyperlink is thus an indexing tool for ideas.

From this there is no such thing as a 'portal' nor 'destination', no 'hub' nor 'spoke', nor even 'communities' of blogs and sites.  What there are is conversations that link to ideas forming their own interconnected set of sites, pathways, and journeys. Following James Burke this means that no site that requires human thought to construct sentences that purvey ideas, that have a logic connecting them, is alone unless it links to no one, and accepts no links and is an isolated node.

That is what I thought in 2002.

People can move around, become highlights or disappear, as I am largely doing, and yet the conversation continues within and amongst humanity.  It is a huge, extended conversation that now includes mini-thoughts via Twitter, picture thoughts and video thoughts (not necessarily stories but just thoughts and ideas) and it is all connected by the generic thing we call the hyperlink.  It is one of the most powerful tools deployed by mankind, and yet its actual invention starts with indexing.  It is the simple but powerful things that move minds, spirits and humanity.  That also has a precursor description in the Noosphere and the Internet can just be seen as a crude, physical form of Noosphere, not the thing, itself.  The next simple tool will not supplant the hyperlink nor index, but will move that conception one more step and then everything changes. 

And yet where it comes from will be obvious. 

What it will enable is beyond imagining. 

Just like the hyperlink and Internet before the invention of the hyperlink.

I can remember where I was in 2002... and with difficulty back to 1992 when there was only the first hint of html via sgml.  Yes, I can do that.  Can you remember the world without the Internet?

When did the 19th century end?

A world map, pre-1910:

Map Courtesy of: LEARN NC

And this one circa 2012:

Map courtesy of: Freeworldmaps.net

Beyond the fact that one was done on high resolution paper and the other rendered graphic to a gif file just taking the countries into mind like a 19th century diplomat or foreign minister would, what jumps out at you?

To me there are a few major things that hit immediately:

1) The imperial colonial experiment in Africa failed.  There are some colonies that still have their shape, but the vast majority of Nations didn't exist in Africa in the late 19th century.  Imperialism, as a way of doing business, didn't work which would have huge implications to a foreign minister transported from the late 19th century to 2012.  Worse is that Africa splintered after the Empires receded, meaning that nothing coherent had been left in the wake of them.  The grand European experiment of civilizing the world via colonies hadn't worked out in Africa and may actually have left a worse result behind them.

2) The three 'sick men' of the late 19th century had two dying and one surviving.  The two that had died were the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  The former had left a mess in the Orient and the latter had left a mess in Eastern Europe.  There was little that the 19th century Europeans had seen as being able to save the Ottoman Empire and it had been breaking down for at least two centuries.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had episodes of ethnic strife prior to WWI, had been unable to reform itself and create a stable, multi-ethnic State.  It was gone.   The third sick Nation was China and it seems to have reconsolidated and even expanded even after the anti-Western rebellions.

3) The Western impositions in China were transitory and the history of unitary rule in China obviously (from a 19th century diplomat's eyes) overwhelmed Western troops no matter how well armed they were.

4) Russia has, apparently, remained intact even with many divergent sub-parts of it and has proven durable over time, like China.  Neither are Empires, as such, but have vast amounts of land under them which used to be Empires, albeit poor ones.

5) The Sun Set on the British Empire.  And the French Empire.  And the German Empire (such as it was).

6) The Balkans and ethnic sub-parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire obviously means that such a State cannot last long if it does not have common underpinnings deeper than the larger government at the old Imperial level.

7) The American Experiment has been strangely successful, by and large, unlike the European experiments with Empires and other top-down government systems.

What a 19th or early 20th century (pre-WWI) diplomat, foreign minster or secretary of State can't get from the map without any further discussion is vast.

1) After 2 World Wars, the Cold War, the rise and crumbling of Maoism, there isn't much really left of all of that by 2012, just looking at the map in small scale like this.

2) That same observer could not imagine the British Empire going down peacefully, and even the French putting up some resistance to letting go of their holdings, so there would be imagined strife of a different sort from the World Wars.

3) There has been some vast economic expansion in the world to get to the modern maps, and that indicates that no matter the social failures of the West, its technological triumphs have done vast good for mankind.  Surely, mankind, as a whole, must recognize this and rejoice in it?

So much to miss at the highest level, isn't there?

If you put in a GDP map of the world:

Map Courtesy: World Mapper

You then get a wholly different view of what must have happened in the intervening century.  The fact that Europe, by and large, has dropped so low is, of course, due to the lack of Imperial holdings and expansive use of those resources.  That China is the #2 economy is of little surprise as it was the #2 economy leaving the 19th century due to population and size combined.  The disheartening part would be the pure lack of capability in the rest of the world outside of the Western Nations or those having just large landmass, to economically develop.

In that realm, the lack of 'The White Man's Burden' success is palpable, for no matter how paternalistic, no matter that it was often put in by force, the idea was to get something on the ground better than what was there to help the Native populations to civilize and become productive and modern societies.  That it can be done is witnessed in places like Australia and the old co-dominion in S. America.

Now a look at GDP per capita in a cartogram:

Map Courtesy: Princeton QED

What would be a surprise is that country just next to China before you get to Japan. which would stand out to a late-19th century or early 20th century diplomat or minister since it was not much of anything there to start with.  The peninsular State of Korea was notable in being a place where the eastern empires roamed be they Russian, Chinese or Japanese.  Like Poland it was notable as a place constantly over-run by its more powerful neighbors.

The major question is: how did this come about?

And since Korea wasn't noted for it's infrastructure, industry or much else back then, there is a follow-up: how come this cannot be replicated across the world?

Even more astonishing would be to see that this isn't even all of Korea but just South Korea, which means that something happened to divide and impoverish North Korea and that something far different happened in the South to make it far more prosperous.  The time travelling diplomat or minister could not even begin to guess just what it was that could do that beyond some sort of civil war in which both sides came to a stalemate and the two different viewpoints then went their separate ways.  Seeing such a stark difference that time traveller would have seek further answers into why the rest of the world does not look at South Korea as a solution for global poverty via prosperity.

Perhaps we should do the same.

Riding out Sandy

Hurricane / Post-Tropical Storm Sandy started showing up on 27 OCT 2012 with clouds and some light winds and by 28 OCT the rain had started late in the day.  Where I'm at in NoVA was in the projected forecast of the storm up to late 28 OCT 2012, before Sandy sped up to make landfall south of Atlantic City, NJ on 29 OCT 2012, which puts it to the north of here.

The main effects in the section of NoVA that I'm in has been a steady wind from 28 OCT at around 30 MPH from the NNW which shifted just late yesterday to come from the NW.  Rain from 28 OCT to this morning has been in the o.5"/hr. range which means low-land flooding and a number of underpasses getting flooded out.  I know what that means heading towards the beltway having commuted that way for years, and it isn't pretty just for a normal storm or melt water flooding scenario.  As I'm up closer to a ridge top the only worry was winds, and those winds have to go over a lot of land to get here, which means friction and slowing of them.  There were some gusts last night as Sandy made landfall and just afterwards that got to about 45 MPH locally, but also brought a lessening of the constant rain.  As of this morning the post-Tropical Storm Sandy sits in West Central PA and is giving us very light winds (10-15 MPH) and mist, not real rain.

There has been only one interruption of power for less than a few minutes and that can be attributed to just about anything, and happened just after 10:30PM on 29 OCT.  The severe wind event this past summer may have helped to clear out trees and branches so that mild but sustained winds and rain had little effect on the local power grid.  Other areas are not as lucky, as swaths of NYC, NJ and other regions in New England and the Mid-West can attest to.

Household preparations for food were only for a few goods that we have duplicates of in storage in dehydrated or evaporated form.  Earlier this month two Sunfrost units came in: one full 19 cubic inch freezer and one 19 cubic inch refrigerator, both with drawer stands.  After getting them set-up and operational, a slow process of moving food to them began and is an ongoing process that would require a bit of speeding up if the power went out for days or a week or more.

To power those units two SUNRNR units were purchased (a 110v and 240v system) through one of their resellers (Alternative Energy).  Since there was a special on solar panels, I got 4 of the Kyocera 140 units and that all arrived on the same week as the Sunfrost units, which has meant a lot of work getting everything set up.  A frame mount for the Kyocera panels had to be found and put up, and they currently are bolted into 6x6 exterior lumber that a neighbor had taken out from their old deck during a replacement of it.  Large cinder blocks with unequal hole spacing allows the 6x6 lumber to fit through the cinder blocks, and they serve as an anti-tipping ballast at the end of the timber.  Three other pieces brace the forward (and lowest part of the panel mount) with two doing that and a third going across them with cinder blocks sitting on the intersection of the bracing pieces.

Together this array with the 2 SUNRNR units should power both the Sunfrost units just enough each day to let the Sunfrost units chill down to storage temps and then sit there utilizing their insulation to keep things cold.

The major drawbacks to this system are two-fold:

1)  First a pass-through for the Anderson cables from the solar panels needs to be installed in the house so that they don't have to go through a partially open screen door.

2)  Lack of much direct sunlight impedes the amount of power that can be collected greatly.  These panels sitting on my deck have much in the way of trees that block out collection space which means not much power is gathered at all during overcast and rainy conditions.  Which isn't to say that none is gathered, just an amount less than what is necessary to run the Sunfrost units.

Part of the reason to get the SUNRNR units was portability and the reseller I went through is getting portable frame mounts fabricated for sale in the near future.  Breaking up the array into two sub-arrays will allow for optimal placement of the panels to get at least 2 optimal panels of collection during daylight hours.  Mounting them on the roof (and having to go through building codes) means that they aren't portable, and that goes for a pole mount as well.  There isn't enough roof space to take the townhome I'm in off-grid in a built-up area and wind is erratic, which means that all alternative solutions for powering the place means either consumables or not running very much.  A whole house generator running off of natural gas (and supplemental LNG input if the natural gas pipeline system goes down) would be good if all building codes allow it.  I expect that my simple 4 panel mount will raise some local hackles, but that 2 mounts of 2 panels each will disappear from view and all questioning.

It seems that providence was on my side for ordering the systems, getting them in and up and running just before this encounter with Sandy.  We also had to get the be replaced, which is less fun than it sounds.  I'm exhausted.

Rain has just picked up a notch, but still not much more than light rain/drizzle.  Sandy isn't done, yet and for those in regions of the Mid-West, Northeast and New England who rarely get one of these storms, my thoughts are with you.  As I watched the tide gauges rise for NYC last night I knew that this was not going to be good...when the one at Providence, RI went off the top of its scale, the full size of Sandy got driven home to me as the gauges in NC were just starting to do down at that point.  This is no Cumbre Vieja event, to be sure, but Sandy is reminding us that the works of man, no matter how great they seem to us, aren't very much to Nature and that we must take heed of warning signs when they are clearly delivered to us.

The problems and course of rebuilding in Iraq

The following is a comment I left at Megan McArdle's site on A happy surge in Iraq. I will put the links to my previous posts on this after the commentary, which is as follows:

The ongoing problem is infrastructure: a decayed, Soviet era piece of junk that was not well maintained and then left to neglect in many areas.

Electricity distribution will require a long-term swap-out of electrical substations, new power lines (due to increased demand) and actual new generation capability. The old generators had been natural gas fired, but Saddam had them converted to crude oil use in the 1990s. A vigorous petro-industry captures natural gas not only from well heads (not all oil is, properly, just oil, and segregation and filtration of crude oil gets methane and other hydrocarbons coming out of solution) but from refineries. Not only did USACE have to see if they could get any of the old plants running, they then had to look to convert them back to natural gas as the oil pumping and refining system came back online. The first major part of the new system will be newer refineries as the old ones are just not working at anything like design capacity due to age. Currently Iraq needs to utilize Syrian refineries and, with the pipeline now opened to Turkey, it can be expected to help in that during the interim.

The lack of maintenance and needing to swap in new equipment means that there is an effective cap on Iraqi crude oil production until that can be done. As newer and higher capacity pipelines, pumps, pumping stations and distribution facilities come on line, older ones need to be removed from the system, so the petro-system gets a marginal but sustainable boost, overall, even when older equipment causes drops in production. As natural gas was *flared* by Saddam, that entire revenue stream is now slowly coming on line with LNG facilities and sales on the open market. Further, the IHS review of Iraqi total reserves re-examined the older geological data in Western Iraq in conjunction with those structures in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and what is known in Syria after their late 1990's prospecting boom. Overall reserves shifted Iraq into the #3 position in the world, shifting it past Iran, and the majority of that is in Anbar and other Sunni provinces, and that change made each of the major factions (Arab Shia, Arab Sunni, Kurds) have co-equal portions of the reserves and the Western portions remaining largely untapped. That got Japan and India interested in investment and the first long-term trade and production agreements are still in the works, but each of those has a lot of money to spend that they had not spent in Iran.

The USACE and Iraqi timelines for complete overhaul of the electrical system runs to 2015, and gets a reliable production and management system in place. Pre-war, Saddam managed the electrical system to the tune of 4,300 MW nationwide with 12-14 hours of electricity/day for Baghdad in 2002, residents in surrounding areas got at most 8 hrs/day. The 5,000 MW seen today is nominal load capacity with peak capacity a bit higher. The 4,300 Saddam era is peak, maximum productive capacity and the nominal load was in the 3,900 to 4,000 MW/day. You can get those figures from USAID, USACE, COMTEX, and a number of other aid and development agencies working with Iraq to bring it a modern era electricity network.

As noted above electricity is paid for via a flat rate, across the board, income tax at 15%. It is not metered. You pay one price for all you can use from the government via that single income tax, which results in folks buying refrigerators, stoves, lighting, televisions, audio systems, computers, VCRs, DVD players, air conditioners... the day the first meters are put into Iraq will be the day that electricity usage finally *drops* to set a supply/demand price-point. You want a key stat, that will be it and don't expect that any time soon as there are bigger fish to fry...

On the clean water front: Saddam also shut down water and sewage plants and let them go into disrepair. This was a weapon used by Saddam against his own people: limit both to those that would toe the line to him, and remove it from those that did not. Water projects for agriculture are even more important than for potable water, and have received more attention so that Iraqis can actually *eat food grown in Iraq*. Saddam destroyed the agricultural system, ripped up such things as date palms, and left to neglect and disrepair the agricultural farming water distribution system. Before Saddam Iraq had a vibrant agricultural system and even before 1991 it was a regional exporter of goods. Saddam turned that around, evicted farmers and made everyone queue up for government handouts.

Municipal water supplies are now being put into towns that have *never* had *any* reliable and clean water supplies. In the cities getting old mains repaired and cleaned, along with sewage treatment facilities is taking forever due to nearly 15 years of war time damage, neglect and purposeful non-maintenance. Photos taken inside one of the sewage facilities serving Baghdad to have concrete settling ponds that were dry and the concrete broken by plants growing up through them. Repairing that has been a hell of a problem. The Nasiriyah sewage facility had never been completed by Saddam, so re-fit and final construction and maintenance were key concerns going forward there.

Dams had been left in disrepair and a major concern early on was actually repairing the Mosul Dam to ensure that catastrophic flooding would not be seen due to dam failure. Basra, in particular, needs new water supplies and maintaining the Sweetwater Canal has been an undertaking, it being 240 km long. It needs maintenance to replace sections of it where gypsum had been used in the embankments and that was crumbling. Additionally the pumping plants on the canal needed not only refurbishment but electricity, so getting reliable electricity in-place is a double-purpose endeavor.

Similarly the overland transport network was in high states of disrepair outside the major cities, with some major towns still having dirt roads. Getting reliable roads for transport of food and other goods is critical, and such towns also needed to serve as a set of supply points, and thus, got other infrastructure to help maintain that. The rail system needs a complete overhaul and major repair across all of Iraq. Locomotives were left in the desert or just derailed, sometimes derailed in the desert and left to rust.

This does not even begin to address the outlying airport system, of which the old military airports are being converted to civilian or dual-use facilities once the Iraqi Air Force gets stood up. That is a major military logistical headache and while the transport aircraft are being delivered pilots are being found and trained and certified to fly them... another year or two for that at least.

Once infrastructure is stood up and reliable, even if only partially functional, manufacturing jobs can come back. In Ramadi, in JAN 2007, the first agreements to start re-opening factories there this year had been settled. While the number is modest, per factory, the jobs needed for supply chain, infrastructure, plant maintenance, costing, accounting, etc. is enormous. Each factory looks to employ 3,000 or more people, with, if memory serves, some 59 factories to be rehabilitated. That is already having an effect on double-digit unemployment slowly moderating downwards and allowing for the Central Bank of Iraq to put out numerous small business loans. Even without reliable branch banks, this is causing a moderating of unemployment in Baghdad and that is stretching to Ramadi and Fallujah. Baqubah was the major grain milling city in Iraq and the re-opening of the flour mills means that Iraq can now produce its own flour... and when the agricultural system is up and running a bit better, that now puts a reliable processing point into the mix.

These are the things one needs to dig through many sources to get, not only aid agencies, but places like TMC.net news and finding reliable local translation services and individuals interested in moving news into the english realm of the net. There are lots of newspapers, magazines, weekly and monthly publications in Iraq, along with commercially owned television and radio stations manned by local crews. They compete with the satellite networks on that basis: local news is very important in Iraq and most people have been starved of information on the goings-on elsewhere in their own Nation since the early 1990's. And the majority of journalists killed in Iraq are Iraqi, also... yet the Western news agencies never tell you about that, either. You know, Iraqi's reporting on the insurgents getting killed for that reporting?

Too bad no Western news agency can be bothered to do this work. I guess we are waiting for the Iraqis to do that for us. They already know our television news sources and what lazy sorts we are and scratch their heads at the disconnects between our Military and Civilian populations... apparently our Civilian population isn't reflecting well on the military, and Iraqis do wonder at that.

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In semi-reverse chronological order of posts related directly or indirectly to this comment:

A look at the underworld Kazali network and the role it plays in Iraq: Terror takedown in Iraq.

One of the top 'Most Wanted' by Iraqis, currently under extradition to the US from Spain: Monzer al-Kassar.

A review of the pre-surge Brookings numbers.

On the oil reserves view: Breaking the logjam of Iraq.

The Evaporating base of Sadr.

The rising power inside Iran.

A quick look at the Kerbala attack.

Dropping the dime on the 'oil drop': why that COIN could not work in post-war Iraq.

Oil outlook for Iran, which looks at infrastructure problems there and gives a feel for what the problems in Iraq are: original review and deeper look.

Building up a mosaic societal view of Iraq to understand what is going on there.

Syrian WMD site list for fun and frivolity.

The reason why 'realist' foreign policy failed us in Iraq. And if you want to cite post-war scenarios, can we go back a bit further than the 1960's?

Some FMSO document digging, one in a series.

Want to ferret out some terrorists? Find out how cars can be stolen from the US and shipped *whole* to Iraq for al Qaeda. It is beyond me, that's for sure.

First looks at rebuilding via the Quiet and Hidden news in Iraq: Part I and Part II.

Creating an Army, in this case Iraq... but, really, why are they supposed to be so much better than Americans?

The Iranian Foreign Legion: Hezbollah.

The Faultlines of the Middle East.

Peace in the Middle East: the checklist.