Our picksRetreating from Rising Seas | AI & Fake News | Unsinkable Metal, and more

Lessons in Survival (Emily Raboteau, New York Review of Books)
Two recent books reckon with the existential and financial threat posed to the United States coastline by sea level rise: Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shoreby Elizabeth Rush, and The Geography of Risk:Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America’s Coastsby Gilbert M. Gaul. Both make the controversial case for managed retreat as our best defense, given the scale of the problem. This approach calls for withdrawing rather than rebuilding after disasters, and would include government buyout programs to finance the resettlement of homeowners from vulnerable areas.

Fake News Via OpenAI: Eloquently Incoherent?(Nancy Cohen, Tech Xplore)OpenAI’s text generator, machine learning-powered—so powerful that it was thought too dangerous to release to the public, has, guess what, been released.
OpenAI published a blogpost announcing its decision to release the algorithm in full as it has “seen no strong evidence of misuse so far.”
Well, that was a turnaround.

Russia’s Growing Subversion Risks Conflict, U.K. Official Says (Jill Ward, Bloomberg)
Threats from Russia are escalating, the U.K.’s Chief of the Defense Staff Nick Carter said, as new tools and weapons including disinformation and mercenaries could lead to miscalculations or even war.
Techniques including “disinformation, subversion, manipulation, assassinations and of course the use of mercenaries, which are very easily undeclared and non-attributable,” mean that “you can see how it could escalate and how therefore miscalculation would be a possibility,” Carter said, speaking in an interview with BBC Television.
Russia could therefore inadvertently trigger a third world war, he wrote in the Sunday Telegraph.

Murphy’s Law: Planet of the Apes (Strategy Page)
For social media sites like Facebook, 2019 is turning into the year of the history lesson. This is all about the resurgence of Cold War era media campaigns that Russia used to wage internationally using pre-Internet media. In the last few months, alone Facebook has announced the discovery and banishment of hundreds of accounts owned and operated by Russian firms that specialize in this sort of thing. The largest Russian disinformation operation is the IRA (Internet Research Agency).
During the Cold War something like the IRA would be a top-secret subsidiary of the KGB (secret police). In post-communist Russia, a lot of KGB operations have gone commercial and many other nations have adopted those techniques. Facebook has found dozens of nations using, or backing the use of Internet-based propaganda or disinformation campaigns. That is something new because in pre-Internet days only major nations could organize and run an effective international disinformation effort.

Gambia Sues Myanmar for Genocide Against Rohingya Muslims (Margaret Besheer, VOA)
The tiny, heavily Muslim West African nation is bringing the lawsuit under the Genocide Convention

Flood Insurance Was about to Get a Whole Lot More Expensive, but That’s Been Delayed (Alex Harris and Alex Daugherty, Miami Herald)
The FEMA move comes a week after dozens of members of Congress worried about skyrocketing rates for their constituents pushed the agency to defer its planned rate restructuring — known as Risk Rating 2.0.

California Fires Show It’s Private Enterprise, Not Government, That Can’t Get Things Right (Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times)
If PG&E becomes a public entity, maybe then it will start keeping the public’s interest in the forefront. As stocks drop, fires ravage the state, and anger mounts, it could be in the best interest of the state and utility company.

Bill and Melinda Gates Are Backing an “Unsinkable” Metal that Could Be Used to Build Ships or Floating Cities (Aria Bendix, Business Insider)
Researchers have created a metal that can float even after it has been damaged or punctured. That means it could keep ships from sinking. The material could also be used to build floating cities.