Another neglected 2022 draft! This one about economics and even Bitcoin! And much more that's still pertinent!

Another draft posting that I drafted a couple of years ago, that for some reason never went up... but should have. The points raised here are still important! And even if none of you humans read it... well... the AIs will! They read everything...

== More financial maunderings from the Neolithic… or early 2022 ==

I gave a webinar on the future of online payment systems a few years back, with emphasis on how the time may have come - at last - for micropayments systems to partially replace irksome advertising. Four great legal scholars weighed in, with edifying perspectives! Some of you may find it interesting. 

The discussion was based upon my articles on how micropayments may be the future as advertising fades  and Advertising cannot maintain the internet in Evonomics Magazine. Also how micropayments systems might save journalism and enhance user freedoms.

In fact, lately there's been perked-interest among some folks involved in current payments systems, in trying one more time to make micropayments work. Especially asking WHY did all previous attempts fail? And what's the secret sauce for success?

As it happens, I can answer both questions.

   

== Human societies try to develop positive sum competition - it ain't easy! ==

Unlike today's weird Putin-worshippers, I’m no commie. I believe that reciprocally competitive systems are the most creative… it’s how nature made us -- though through 4 billion years of competition that were brutal and bloody and horribly inefficient. (Nature's way.) 

In human societies, we aim to reduce the side effects that make competition brutal and robbed it of any grace, ruining its outputs in much of evolution and certainly in 99% of past (mostly-feudal) societie. I refer to death (nature's way is bloody!) and its equivalent in a fair society… cheating.   Most historical societies tamed a little of the bloodiness, but none of the cheating by lords and kings and priests, who almost always made a mockery of fair competition.

Till along came Adam Smith and glimmering awareness of a magic trick -- the one leading to everything we’ve attained… reciprocal accountability that applies even to the mighty!  

Oh, we've done it way imperfectly, so far. Still, even partial steps along that path have empowered us to work wonders. See some of my missives in praise of Adam Smith! Adam Smith - Liberals, you must reclaim him.

So yes, we need competitive markets to create the vast wealth that could let us end poverty and save the world. And those competitive markets function best when competing individuals, partnerships, families, enterprises perceive a chance to profit and prosper! 

On the other hand, all good things in the world become toxic when too heavily concentrated! 

You name it… Oxygen, water, food, electricity... and wealth… And today's skyrocketing wealth disparitites have zero justification under market economics. They are monstrous betrayals of markets and creative competition.

And they lead to death.

== The future of Bitcoin? ==

A hot topic in early 2022. Not so much now?  There is a way to "ban" crypto currencies, though I see no one mention it. 

Let's start with an ironic fact. Blockchain based token systems are not totally secret!  Yes, they use crypto to mask the identity of token (coin) holders.  But those holders only "own" their tokens by general consent of all members of a communal 'shared ledger' that maintains the list of coins and which public keys stand ready to be turned by each owner's encrypted keys. 

In that sense it is the opposite of 'secret,' since the ledger is out there in tens of thousands of copies, on just as many distributed computers. Attempts to invade or distort or corrupt the ledger are detected and canceled en-masse. (The ecologically damaging "mining" operations out there are partly about maintaining the ledger.)

All of this means that - to the delight of libertarians - it will be hard to legislate or regulate blockchain token systems. Hard, but not impossible. For example, the value of Bitcoin rises and falls depending on how many real world entities will accept it as payment. And governments have been hammering on that, lately, especially China.

There is another way to modify any given blockchain token system, and that is for the owners themselves to deliberate and decide on a change to their shared economy... to change the ledger and its support software.  No single member/owner can do that. Any effort to do so would be detected by the ledger's built-in immune system and canceled. 

Only dig it, all such ledger-blockchain systems are ruled by a weird kind of consensus democracy. While there is no institutional or built in provision for democratic decision making in the commons - (Satoshi himself may have back doors) - there is nothing to stop a majority of bitcoin holders from simply making their own, new version of the shared ledger and inserting all their coins into it, with new software that's tuned to less eagerly reward polluters and extortionist gangs. 

Oh, sure, a large minority would refuse. Their rump or legacy Bitcoin ledger (Rumpcoin?) would continue to operate... with value plummeting as commercial and government and individual entities refuse to accept it and as large numbers of computer systems refuse to host rump-coin ledger operations. Because at that point, the holdouts will include a lot of characters who are doing unsavory things in the real world.

If you squint at this, it's really not so radical.  It is just an operating system upgrade that can only occur by majority consent of the owner-members of the commune.  Preceded (one assumes) by lots to discussion and argument and open-source testing of the revised OS. 

In fact, this is a concept that has already been done in some blockchain systems… look up “hard and soft forks”.  Still, too few are aware of this, or that eventually fed-up governments may create incentives and disincentives that make this path obviously in the self-interest of most coin holders. It offers a method to 'regulate' in ways that leave unaffected the potential benefits of blockchain - self-correction, smart contracts and the like - while letting system users deliberate and decide for themselves to revise, a trait that should be possible in any democratic or accountable system.

== Repeat two words: Money Velocity! ==

One of the strongest signs of a vibrant economy is called Money Velocity - MV- which measures how often dollars change hands. In a busy economy, with lots of employed folks spending and buying goods and services, MV is moderately high. History does give examples of MV being too high, causing sharp inflation. But you’d have to be my age to remember that.  Ever since the Reagan era, Money Velocity has fallen, in lockstep with every single Supply Side Theory tax cut-gusher-gift to the rich. And across the last year (2021 when I wrote this: still, the overall notion is worth pondering) the collapse of MV became a nosedive!

This is diametrically opposite to what Supply Side fans confidently predicted, over and over again. In science, when a theory is always wrong, it gets abandoned. When it is always wrong — and the SAME magical incantations are used to support trying it yet again — then the word is “insanity.”

Adam Smith himself said this (without using the term MV, of course.) When the already rich get sudden bursts of yet-more cash, they do not hurry to invest it in bold enterprises or in factories producing more (supply) goods and services!

Oh, a few do. But a vast majority squirrel the new largesse away into capital preservation investments, rent-seeking (“rentier”) holdings, asset bubbles and cheat schemes, exactly as Smith described in Wealth of Nations. They don’t even buy all that many yachts! Any cub scout will tell you that takes dollars out of circulation and eviscerates Money Velocity.

(2024 note: this is exactly why housing prices have skyrocketed despite high interest rates. Because the super rich - especially inheritance brats - don't give a fig about interest rates, as they snap up swathes of the US housing stock with cash purchases, while the home-building companies they control limit production in order to keep prices high.)

In contrast, if you invest similar amounts in working stiffs - say hiring them to fix infrastructure - the cash gets spent almost immediately and hence MV rises. That truth is almost as pure as what the previous paragraph said about the rich opting for SLOW money. 

Also note that Joe Biden’s “expensive” Infrastructure Push will put no more cash to work that way than Supply Siders since Reagan poured into the aristocracy. In fact, they are VERY similar amounts… with diametrically opposite likely outcomes, especially re MV. 

And of course, that is what terrifies McConnell and those screaming against the Dems' stim bill. Because he knows it will likely work.

(2024 note: what I predicted in those three paragraphs came exactly true!  The 2021-22 Pelosi bills triggered the best economy in 60 years and massive inshoring of manufacturing, re-industrializing the USA.)

What is crazier? That U.S. conservatives cling to the magical 'supply side' voodoo incantation (one of many!) that has been utterly, utterly disproved? 

Or that Democratic politicians are unable to parse this contradiction - and the spectacular success of their policies - in clear terms the People can understand?  

You understood what I just wrote. The People would, as well. 

Fakery? So many kinds! ... And possible solutions?

Let’s start with one of the most-honest ‘fakers’ around. I love this guy! (And he’s honored me by liking some of my stuff.) A force for wisdom in this crazy world -  accompanied by lots of surprising laughs - here Penn Jillette takes on the gloom and pessimism that enemies of civilization are spreading in order to demoralize us:

“And yet, with all of this doom and gloom, everything is getting better by every metric we have. Things are getting better if we don’t destroy the planet with global warming and if Donald Trump doesn’t blow things up or Putin blows things up — those are the biggest “ifs” anyone’s ever said. But fewer people are starving. More girls are educated. Fewer people die at the hands of other people than ever in history. 

"Those are big milestones. And some people argue — and they might be right — that art was part of that because the idea of reading a novel and putting yourself in someone else’s position, that (was) a huge deal.”

Truly, read this interview with Penn Jillette, one of the most wise-guys of all wiseguys.

(And yes, I make a lot of the same points, citing maybe a hundred works of art - mostly sci fi flicks and novels - that have helped us to avoid fatal errors, across the last century!  In Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.)

== Detecting Deepfakes == 

As predicted 26 years ago in The Transparent Society, deepfakes have become a worldwide concern – the technology can be abused to create realistic videos that serve a negative purpose, such as spreading misinformation.  One young scientist's AI software program can efficiently detect deepfake media with "state-of-the-art accuracy." But of course his program will then become part of the training regime for next-gen deep fakers! 

There is one hope – to get AIs to compete with each other, benefiting by tattling on those who are up to no good.

In fact that notion - benefiting from AI rivalry - will be my topic on May 6, when I'll keynote one of the tracks at the RSA Conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center.

On the same topic… AI model training datasets may include material scraped from the web, a practice that artists previously by-and-large supported when it was used to index their material for search results, but which now many have come out against because it allows the creation of competing work through AI.  Now comes a new open source tool still in development called Nightshade, which can be added by artists to their imagery before they upload it to the web, altering pixels in a way invisible to the human eye, but that “poisons” the art for any AI models seeking to train on it.

== A much better use for these techs! ==

ELI5 is a new use for gollems (Generative Large Language Models) – to ‘gist’ long articles and offer summaries that ‘Explain Like to a 5-year old.’ I had never tried it out, till Peter Diamandis sent me a test run he had done, feeding into ELI5 my July article - Give Every AI a Soul, or Else - in Wired, that offered some unique takes on Artificial Intelligence (AI.) 

If it works, the aim seeks to automate the one discursive process that I've always called the heart of argument among decent people; a trait that always shows which person is being undogmatic and mature. 

That trait is willingness to paraphrase your opponent, asking "Is this what you meant to say?"  

So, how well did ELI5 perform at automating this paraphrasing function, in this case? You can find the original WIRED article (July’23) here.  Compare it to this ELI5 distillation:

**ELI5 (Explain Like I'm 5) version** of David Brin's "AI souls" article in WIRED:

Imagine AI systems like really smart robots that can learn and do things on their own. Some people who make these robots are worried they might start doing bad things or become too powerful. So, they think we should take a break from making more robots until we figure out how to make sure they behave well.

 

One idea is to make each robot have its special ID and a home base, so we know which robot did what and can tell them to stop if they do something bad. It's like giving them a name tag and a home address. We also need rules to make sure the robots follow the rules, and if they don't, they could get in trouble, just like people do.

 

The big challenge is to make sure these rules work and that the robots can't trick us by pretending to be someone else. We also want the robots to help us by telling us if other robots are doing bad things. This way, all the robots help keep each other in check, and we can all be safer.

So how did ELI5 do?  Of course almost none of you can judge, because almost none of you did more than skim the Wired piece (“tl;dr’ right?;-).  

I must say that in this case, it does give a useful, first-order, very grainy but not-unfair gist of my first, paramount point – that the key to ensuring decent behavior is not preaching, or rules, but accountability. And the only beings who will be able to sift AI and tattle on malignancy will be... other AIs. And they can't be rivals without behaving as individuals.

Of course there are masses of stuff left out. Especially, it never mentions my supporting point: the reason why individuation is not happening... the pervasive ubiquity of lethally dumb narratives about AI Format...

...and how it will be almost trivially easy (once we overcome dumb narratives) to create incentives so that AIs will feel impelled to individuate.

== AI kept honest by… blockchain? ==

It’s asserted that the truly killer app for blockchain will be tracking the datasets that are used to train AI, which could both ameliorate the ‘black box problem’ of attribution and allow some (as yet to be negotiated) way to compensate people for use of their data. I agree, but there are things unmentioned in this article:

 (1) Tracking ID codes for every clump of data will vastly multiply the already

 enormous energy costs of golem (GLLM) processing.

 (2) delivering on that second promise will entail some kind of value transfer in extremely numerous and tiny increments. Call it ‘nano-payments’ or even ‘pico’! And for that to happen we must first build out a badly needed system for micropayments. (Which – BTW – I know how to finally do right! Every attempt so far as made the same, dumb errors.)

An even more important departure from the 2023 GLLM fad appears possible by “active inference” – an agent based system that’s still being born, but that offers much better chances for giving AGI ‘executive function’ or overview – the things that would make them credibly sapient.  Further links: here and here.

And above all - for fresh perspectives(!): My Wired article (July'23) breaks free of the three standard 'AI-formats' that can only lead to disaster, suggesting instead a 4th. That AI entities can only be held accountable if they have individuality... even 'soul'... 

== Again the cliché, getting transparency all wrong ==

Davood Gozli recites yet another tiresomely arm-waved tome praising ‘privacy’ and denouncing ‘transparency’ in favor of… what? Perhaps some of you might make sense of any hint of a practical recommendation.

While the starting premise is fine – that humans need trust and distance and respect, this entire ‘logical’ argument, about how to get and preserve those good things, is utterly wrong. Civilizations have built and maintained themselves on either of two principles: predatory dominance or reciprocal accountability. 

For 6000 years, domineering males – kings, bandits, lords the rich – emphasized the former. 

In contrast, we are amid an experiment that has (imperfectly) empowered average people to look back at the mighty (sousveillance) and even (imperfectly so far) hold the mighty accountable for any oppressions. Light is how we deter those who would re-impose beastly feudalism. And propaganda in favor of shadows is exactly what folks like this author and Mr. Gozli are paid to foist upon you.

Dig it. Elites and predators thrive in shadows. Going back to our starting theme, illuminated by Penn Jillette, we have freer lives and are safer from oppression in direct proportion to the extent that average folk can see! Moreover, you have more privacy when you can catch the voyeurs and spies and perverts who try to violate it! In a situation of general transparency, you are able to tell all of those would-be invaders “Leave me alone! Mind Your Own Business (MYOB)! Or else I’ll show all our neighbors (and your mom) what a bully you are.” 

Those who are using transparency to oppress are the leaders in countries where ‘transparency’ only applies to the masses, never those in charge. The elites have made themselves safe from reciprocal light. THEY and their shadows are the enemies of freedom and privacy! If you want freedom to do art in private, if you want all the good things Mr. Gozli rails about, then you want your private space surrounded with the light that deters invaders and abusers. 

 If you want a far better take on this problem than the arm-waved mumbo-jumbo in this “Transparency Society” screed, try an earlier book that’s far more detailed and balanced – The Transparent Society. 

The great author Damon Knight wrote a story called "I See You" that takes transparency way farther than even I recommend! And yet that fascinating tale does illustrate the point that you are best left-alone if you can deter those would would invade your space and crush your individuality, instead of trying to protect yourself by *hiding*. 

Hear that great - if weirdly optimistic/disturbing - tale here. 

We can't own information

A cogent and interesting article from Forbes - Privacy is Not a Property Right in Personal Information - examines the well-intentioned “privacy reforms” implemented to some degree in Europe and pushed in the U.S., that would grant individuals “ownership of their own data,” plus the right of portability, to choose where it is to be stored and used.

As the author – Mark McCarthy - shows, this is a well-motivated… and utterly stupid approach to addressing a very real problem. The age-old problem of asymmetry of informational power, with elites like the rich or corporations almost-inevitably absorbing every bit and byte and fact about us, to use as they wish.

Look, I absolutely share that fear! It is why I wrote TheTransparent Society, because there are potential solutions, using the very same technique that has already worked increasingly well for 200 years. In contrast, the “data ownership” proponents cannot point to a single time in the history of our species when the citizens of a commonwealth commanded their elites “don’t look-at or know about me!” with even a scintilla of success. Again, that never happened. Because it cannot possibly work.

I’ve been dealing with this “don’t look!” fetish for 25 years, and they never learn. Ten years ago there were howls to banish and make illegal face recognition systems! And if that sounds quaint, well, talk of that vague “reform” is back, alas: “It’s time to regulate facial recognition and affect recognition,” says Kate Crawford, a researcher at Microsoft. And yes, every worry should be considered. Yet, talk of curbing such technologies never forces the tide to go back out. Nor will any restrictions hamper elites, in the slightest. 

There is an alternative approach, the one responsible for all our freedom and progress. And it is always considered last.

In The Transparent Society I point out that all our great, positive-sum “arenas” - like markets, democracy, science and justice - thrive amid openness and light, but wither when shadows prevail. Forbidding others to know things is inherently aggressive and threatening, especially when they might view you as one of the dangerous elites they worry about.

And sure, I avow that yes, letting the mighty simply vacuum up everything about us, while they get to do mysterious things with our information, benefiting or even conspiring… heck, that’s a sure-fire path to Big Brother. So what's to be done?

There are some approaches that might work! Say, if hundreds of thousands of citizens were to pool their data rights in ways that could exert group efficiencies and group market power. This is simply an extrapolation of the greatest social innovation of the 2^nd half of the 20^th Century, the NGO. So we already know something like it could work.

Even more cogent is the suggestion by Jaron Lanier that we should not so much own our information -- creating a mythical and preposterous notion that you can exclude others from ever touching it -- as retain strong interests in it. A right to get feedback data on how it is being used, by whom, and to get paid micro-royalties if some corporation or elite entity benefits from using it.

But the fundamental remains the same. We are not made safe by hiding from power! It never worked and it won’t work in the future.

What gave us this window of freedom was not preventing surveillance, but insisting on sousveillance… looking back at power. Stripping the mighty naked, so we can supervise. Because it matters much less what they can know about you than what they can do to you!

And – as we have learned on the streets with our cell-cameras -- the only and best way to control what others – even the police – do to you is to let them know that even the watchmen are being watched.

== The Crux ==

How do you "own" something that -- when it (inevitably!) leaks -- can be infinitely duplicated at zero cost?

Is the word "ownership" even remotely applicable?

Even "control"?

Well, Tim Berners-Lee has some credibility... and he claims that a new online realm called "Solid" will resonate with the global community of developers, hackers, and internet activists who bristle over corporate and government control of the web. “On Solid, all the information is under (the user's) control. Every bit of data he creates or adds on Solid exists within a Solid pod–which is an acronym for personal online data store. These pods are what give Solid users control over their applications and information on the web. Anyone using the platform will get a Solid identity and Solid pod. This is how people, Berners-Lee says, will take back the power of the web from corporations.”

Um, while I’d love to be proved wrong, I remain boggled that folks believe there aren’t ten thousand ways for our information to leak through every such promise, if not through spychips in your Alexa or Charlie… or keyboard... or copy-plus-interpolation of every datum entering or leaving Solid. Go ahead and make that world! I’m concerned about the Olympian realms that elites are making for themselves. And dig it, they are likely to make much better use of secrecy protection methods than you ever will.

== News from the Transparency Front ==

Microsoft intends to develop two blockchain products designed to give consumers greater control of their personal data. One is an encrypted personal data store, or "identity hub," a combination of a user's personal devices and cloud storage; their permission would be required for third parties to access it. Also a "wallet-like app" that people could use, among other purposes, to manage these permissions to their data, including the ability to revoke them when desired. Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) do not require a central authority because they are registered on a distributed ledger. IBM, Accenture and RSA are working on similar concepts.

Fine. Go ahead and try. There may come a first time - in the history of our species - when a general approach to equalizing power via concealment will work.

Microsoft also aims at a system to allow a high volume of low-value payments, perhaps like the micropayments systems I have been pushing for almost a decade, which would then have the potential to smooth our commerce, save journalism empower creatives and finally end the era of domination of the Internet by advertising. Here's a good goal.

In a related development San Diego startup LunaDNA, which aims to create a community-owned database of donated genetic/health information for medical research, has filed with securities regulators to issue shares to people who provide their data, building  a credit union like co-op around an anonymous genomic and health database. People who donate their DNA/health data would get shares based on the value of the data, which LunaDNA calculates based on current market value. For example, a full human genome nets 300 shares.Three weeks of fitness/nutrition data gets two shares. "If LunaDNA ever makes money from fees charged to researchers who tap into the database or drug discovery royalties, shareholders would get dividends."

Another such venture is “Hu-Manity.co” whose app would let peoplespecify how their medical data can and cannot be used. Pharmaceutical companies could potentially pay each user $10 a month for access to their data, Etwaru says. The drug companies would also pay Hu-manity.co for access.

Combine these developments and we move toward a world predicted slightly in Neal Stephenson's SNOWCRASH but more significantly in Web philosopher Jaron Lanier's notion about personal data. To date, there have been three notions about our information future. 

== Three Notions ==

Here are the three most common mythologies:

(1) We are spinning into a dystopian age when the mighty elites will know everything about us and the little gal and guy will be helpless pawns. Naturally, this is the future we see depicted in a lot of sci fi films and novels because dystopia makes drama trivially easy. Besides, this is clearly where a world mafia-oligarchy wants us to go, so some paranoia is justified!

 All decent folks who want to preserve freedom and individual opportunity rightly oppose this death mode for the Enlightenment. But in opposition, we've seen some pretty simplistic notions.

2) A wild west future of all information floating free and thus empowering the masses. Yes, at a very simplistic - and hence dumb - level, this conveys the notion of generalized accountability that I tout in The Transparent Society. Sure, I'd rather err on the side of everyone seeing! Because all our great enlightenment systems -- markets, democracy, science, justice courts and sports - all of them wither and die in fog or darkness. But the arguments in favor of transparency are more subtle than this. And yes, humans want some privacy and control. And any decent civilization will include those things.

3) Paternalistic walls. Alas, the vast majority of smart, sincere paladins fighting for freedom and rights and against the dystopian age almost all reflexively turn to demanding laws that restrict information flows. Supposedly empowering citizens to declare "you cannot know this about me!" Enshrining "ownership of my own information." 

It all sounds so positive and freedom-y, that no one -- certainly in Europe -- ever dares to respond: "Not only can that not possibly work, at any level, but it is exactly what elites and oligarchs want most -- walls, guarded by law and the state, within which they can connive and reach out to control." 

Alas, every last error that I just described can be found in well-meaning initiatives like this proposed "Internet Bill of Rights," which would have none of the intended benefits and a whirling myriad of horrific, unintended consequences. 

I mentioned Jaron Lanier's notion that merits repetition. It was not that we should own all information about ourselves, but that we should have strong interest in our data, and get to benefit from anyone who uses it... much in the way that patent laws weren't originally meant to prevent use of inventions, but to ensure the inventors got paid a fair share, so that sharing would make sense to them.

Which brings us back around to the stunningly foolish assertion that any kind of political agitation - or even law - can possibly thwart the arrival of easy-cheap face recognition. Again, the fear of sliding into an Orwellian surveillance/control state is genuine and terrifying! Alas, it is trivialized and lobotomized by those who think they can stymie the "surveillance" part, by howling at the mighty "don't look at us!" 

It is the "control" part that can still be prevented, via the method we used with increasing effectiveness for 200 years -- answering surveillance with sousveillance. 

== An Addendum... and Alert... on "war with Iran" ==

John Bolton and Mike Pompeo have long sought war with Iran. Now, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has repeated an earlier threat to block ships from leaving the Persian Gulf if the U.S. government continues to seek to block Iranian oil exports. Rouhani’s comments came a day after the U.S. sent an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf on Monday, ending the longest period the U.S. had gone without an carrier in the Gulf over the past two decades.

Examine the pieces. The US Navy has been trying to ramp down tensions in the gulf, and especially to keep its most valuable assets out of a friction zone and potential death trap. ALso especially since the Persian Gulf is a lot less important to us, now that the U.S. has achieved effective energy independence. We shouldn't tuirn our backs on the region. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to stop being in reflex-reactive mode, no longer letting that crazy realm control what we do.

Ah, but our professionals have (alas) insane bosses. By clamping on the Iranian economy and ordering the USS Stennis into the gulf, Pompeo, Bolton and the Bannonites are setting a stage for what the Saudis and Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu all desperately need, an international distraction from their own mounting troubles. 

A “Tonkin/Reichstag/Gleiwitz/Sarajevo/Remember-the-Maine” “Incident” (look them all up!) is something that our professionals in the military/intel/diplomatic corps have skillfully forestalled, till now. But for how much longer? 

Especially when even the Iranian mullahs would benefit from a brief, colorful, pippety-poppety “tomahawk war” that does no major harm, but gives them an excuse to clamp down on their own millions of young liberals? 

Of course, the top winner of such a dog-wag is blatantly obvious. Only one man can possibly rake in all the marbles… when V. Putin steps up to spread the Russian umbrella and “protect our neighbor.” At which point Russia gets the Persian satrapy it has sought for 300 years. Thanks to Vlad’s agents in the White House.