ITK Sunday | March 26

Happy Sunday.

Here’s today’s ITK Daily.

To be ITK, know this:?

In the end, the Afghan army was always doomed: Donald Rumsfeld said you “go to war with the army you have.” Instead, the Western allies tried and failed to create a “mini-me” version of the vast American military.?James Stavridis

+ In retrospect, we trained the wrong kind of army for Afghanistan. America and the ISAF tried desperately to use the US army as the model, and it was the wrong approach.

+ The US way of war is very resource-rich: exquisite satellite-based intelligence; high-end technology with precision guided firing; superb air cover (manned and drone) with nearly instantaneous response times; crisp and clear command and control that provided over-the-horizon connectivity; “on time” logistic systems that allowed fuel, food and ammunition to support combat operations; and “golden hour” medical evacuation to sophisticated hospitals.

+ Think of the American revolution as an analogy: The US and ISAF trained up an army of British redcoats, but what was really needed were more minutemen. We should have emphasized what might be called “Afghan-right” fighters, meaning forces that were far lighter, and could fight in decentralized teams, squads, light platoons and quick-maneuver companies.

+ Like politics, all security is local; but instead the focus was on creating a “national army,” seeking to use it as a tool to unify the nation.

+ We did not sufficiently respect the culture, history, traditions and norms of this difficult nation. The Greeks have a word for it: hubris.

+ You can hear the immense frustration in the voices of President Joe Biden and his team, saying in effect, “We gave them everything they needed, and they failed.”

+ There is truth in that. But Americans also need to admit that we built that failed army, over the course of 15 years.

+ The Pentagon and civilian leadership must admit their part of this failure, and learn the lessons from those mistakes, for which the Afghan people will pay dearly. It was, tragically, the army we wanted. It just wasn’t the right army to win.

Xi Jinping’s Chinese tragedy:?Although Xi Jinping finally ended China's disastrous zero-COVID policy late last year, he has continued to double down on his Leninist project of deepening autocracy at home and aggression abroad. More Sino-Western "decoupling" and the emergence of Cold War-style blocs is all but assured.?Project Syndicate

+ Xi’s fear of an uncontrollable pandemic (and China’s possession of only moderately effective vaccines) led him to sustain his draconian zero-COVID policy, forcing lockdowns on any city, factory, or town that showed the slightest signs of infection.

+ But then demonstrations against these unprecedented controls erupted, and soon the protests expanded and acquired a more political valence, with some demonstrators even attacking the party and the state.

+ This gave the outside world a peek into what lies beneath the manicured surface of Chinese public discourse. Though we cannot always see it, there is a good deal of stifled critical sentiment.

+ Unlike many other earlier Chinese leaders who spent some time abroad in Russia, Europe, or elsewhere, Xi, like Mao, never left China for any great length of time.

+ He thus spent the Cultural Revolution learning how to struggle in the Maoist world, how to survive, and how to overcome.

+ Now, after so many decades of the reforms and openness that began with Deng Xiaoping, we find Xi taking China backwards, to a statecraft that is more Maoist than republican.

+ Because Xi believes that China is in a fundamentally hostile political relationship with the US and the West, he is bent on fostering self-reliance, even returning to a state that is somewhat reminiscent of Maoist autarchy.

+ Gone is the hope that China might become a responsible global stakeholder through “engagement.” Xi had other ideas, and now we are seeing divergence instead of convergence.

+ As Xi became convinced that China was rising (and the West declining) – that “The East Wind is Prevailing Over the West Wind” – he began to throw China’s weight around more, inflicting on others what China itself had experienced at the hands of “Great Powers” in previous centuries.

+ He is like the hero in a Greek tragedy who succumbs to unbridled hubris. He will continue to hoover up power, just like Mao did.

+ Xi wants China to be an independent superpower, but he also wants to create dependencies among certain foreign companies, so that he can use them as leverage with their governments.

+ Xi has been focusing on Western investment banks, offering them all kinds of new special rights to set up financial entities and wealth-management arms in China. Some firms are taking the bait, despite China’s increasingly hostile relations with the US.

+ The wind is blowing more and more ferociously in the direction of decoupling, even though that process is neither easy nor welcome.

+ Yes, some US and foreign companies – such as the stalwarts of Germany’s auto industry – have not yet reconciled themselves with the new reality.

+ CEOs do not like to countenance gloomy and disruptive scenarios. But all they have to do is look at what has happened in Ukraine. If China were to move against Taiwan, it would make the fallout from the war in Eastern Europe look like child’s play.

+?If companies wait until China attacks Taiwan – or until there is some military accident in the South China Sea or an explosion of tensions with Japan over the Senkaku Islands – it will already be too late to devise a Plan B.

+ Some corporate leaders still cannot believe that the era of “engagement” is over, and that China could end up in a conflict with the US. But they need to wake up. I am not predicting a conflict, but such a prediction is becoming impossible to dismiss.

?

Let the banks burn:?The banking system we take for granted is unfixable. The good news is that we no longer need to rely on any private, rent-seeking, socially destabilizing network of banks, at least not the way we have so far.?Yanis Varoufakis

+ The banking system we take for granted is unfixable. That’s the bad news. But we no longer need to rely on any private, rent-seeking, socially destabilizing network of banks, at least not the way we have so far.

+ The time has come to blow up an irredeemable banking system which delivers for property owners and shareholders at the expense of the majority.

+ Coal miners have found out the hard way that society does not owe them a permanent subsidy to damage the planet. It is time for bankers to learn a similar lesson.

Salon society: Highbrow nights out: Forget going to book club or arguing about Nietzsche over a few pints in the pub, Londoners hungry for knowledge are flocking to evenings of organized intellectual stimulation.?Alice-Azania Jarvis

+ Where has this hunger for intellectual enrichment come from? We’re inundated with entertainment opportunities: Netflix, TV on demand, ebooks. We don’t need to go to lectures to learn new information — we’ve got Wikipedia and Google Books for that. Neither, thanks to Twitter and below-the line comment feeds, must we leave the house to have an intellectual debate.

+ The debate culture fostered by social media has made us more hungry for the real-life version: ‘Of all the ways we could be using technology, people are using it to interact — on Twitter, on social networking groups, on Facebook. So then in a weird circular way people seem really interested in meeting up again. The internet seems to remind them there are ways of connecting with people they don’t know who have interesting ideas.’

Kevin Budelmann, President of Peopledesign: In this interview, Kevin talks with ID student Sai Allena (MDes + MBA 2024) about his journey to ID, design leadership at Peopledesign, and his advice for designers.?Institute of Design (ID)

+ I’ve always been a designer that asks a lot of questions. But I think I had a desire to have more structure in the way I would approach the strategic aspects of a project.?

+ I like systems thinking. I like thinking through complex problems. I like the relationship between business and the arts and user-centered methods, the idea that we’re trying to appeal to people.

+ We actually changed our company’s name to Peopledesign 10 years ago to remind ourselves and our clients to continue to remain focused on the end user, the customer.

+ I believe that my time teaching, writing, and speaking has helped tremendously, as it allows me to take the role of translator, allowing me to make our design concepts more accessible. It has allowed me to learn from others, and keep evolving.

+ Today, with the influence of technology, various spaces have emerged, and the world has changed dramatically with more people than ever focusing on user research, behavioral psychology, app and website development, and so on.

+ Design can mean design strategy, it can mean user research, it can mean all these things.

Connect with Kevin Budelmann

The musician using AI to redesign every street in the world?Carl Franzen

+ Katz began posting his imagery on a Twitter account, @betterstreetsai, and quickly made waves among transportation writers, activists, and politicians.?

+ In the intervening months, he’s received requests to redesign city streets from mayors and officials in some of America’s largest cities and received attention from major outlets such as Bloomberg, Vice, Axios, and the Los Angeles Times.

+ The Dutch developed a very deliberate set of street-planning guidelines over the last 50 years to get more people biking safely. They’re called the CROW guidelines, and they’re published online for anyone to follow.

MIT scientists twist apart more than 1,000 Oreos in search of perfect method: Team aimed to solve the frustrating problem of getting creme to stick to both wafers.?WSJ

+ After putting more than 1,000 Oreos to the test, the researchers discovered that the fickle filling stuck to just one wafer about 80% of the time.?

+ And the speed of the twisting didn’t matter.

+ That suggests the creme is stronger than it is sticky, so is more likely to stay together than adhere to the wafer.?

Science of forgetting: Why we’re already losing our pandemic memories: Because of information overload and the monotony of pandemic life, your brain may already be forgetting parts of the covid years.?Richard Sima

+ Our memories are centered around our life stories and what affected us personally the most.

+ Information overload and monotony interfere with memory

+ New memories, which happen by simply living more life, interfere with memories of older events.

+ People tend to view the future more positively than the past.

+ Remembering the past is something we do in the present, with all our current emotions, knowledge and attitudes.

+ COVID affected everyone but the mark it leaves on our lives and thus our memories will vary drastically.

+ How society decides to commemorate the pandemic will probably affect whether and how it lives in our society’s collective memory, and what future generations learn from our experiences.

Are coincidences real??I am an unequivocal rationalist, and yet I still want to see something strange and wonderful in life’s weird coincidences.?Paul Broks

+ frequency illusion: n. a quirk of perception whereby a phenomenon to which one is newly alert suddenly seems ubiquitous.

+ This is due to a combination of two well-understood psychological processes: selective attention (homing in on salient objects and events); and confirmation bias (seeking out objects and events that support our beliefs and perceptions, while ignoring evidence to the contrary).

Why our work trips are starting to look like holidays: The blurring of business travel and leisure — bleisure — is booming in an ‘always-on’ world.?Emma Jacobs

+ A report on travel by Deloitte has identified “laptop luggers” as “workers newly untethered from the office” with the desire to fit in some work while on holiday. They take more journeys, “adding days and dollars to those trips. [They] have above-average buying power [and] greater flexibility on travel dates.”

+ The business travel sector needs new sources of income. Several hotel groups, including Hilton, offer WFH (work from hotel) packages, including day hire of rooms for workers wanting quiet time to focus outside the home and office.

+ The remote workforce at 3Thinkrs, a small PR agency, is encouraged to work from different locations. Recently the whole company went to Amsterdam for four days. There were meetings, dinners and drinks, but they also had also time off to explore the city.

+ Salesforce has recently opened a resort, what it calls a Trailblazer Ranch, in Scotts Valley, California, for employees to collaborate, take part in training and immerse themselves in the company’s culture.?

Watch: A look at The Chicks with Kicks' 6,000-pair sneaker collection?iCollect

The dodgy science behind sports 'recovery' tech: The recovery tech industry claims to help athletes bounce back after training. Players endorse everything from massage guns to cryo-chambers. But the science behind much of it is questionable--at best.?Bloomberg

The Wave Project: This is not surfing — it’s schoolwork: The program helps struggling pupils to re-engage with education. Rachel Sylvester sees it in action.?The Times

+ The Beach School runs six-week courses for small groups of children aged between 5 and 16 who are referred by their mainstream school. They spend one day a week on the surfing programme and the rest of the time in their normal classroom. These pupils have all come from a local state primary called St Agnes Academy.

+ Usually these children are disruptive, disengaged or reluctant to learn. Some have autism, dyslexia or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), others are dealing with difficult home lives.

+ The Beach School grew out of the Wave Project’s surf therapy programme that has successfully helped thousands of young people with mental health problems for more than a decade.

+ School attendance improved from 82 percent to 92 percent among children who joined the programme. Two thirds of participants significantly reduced the number of sanctions they were given when they returned to their normal classes and more than half increased the number of merits or rewards they received.

+ “You can only ever learn to surf through the mistakes that you’ve made and through disastrous mistakes, like getting completely wiped and full of sand. It is understanding that something comes your way and you’ve got to go with it. The sea is a great leveller.”

Muslim hikers: ‘Racism won’t stop us — the outdoors is for all’: For one walking group, being accepted on Britain’s trails and in its national parks is proving an uphill battle. But they’re not about to give in.?Haroon Mota

+ For more, see @Muslim_Hikers on Twitter or muslim.hikers on Instagram.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc?

Marc A. Ross | Chief Communications Strategist @ Caracal

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