How Perl and R Reveal the United States' Isolation In the TPP Negotiations

langelgjm writes "As /. reported, last Thursday Wikileaks released a draft text of the intellectual property chapter in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Since then, many commentators have raised alarm about its contents. But what happens when you mix the leaked text together with Perl regular expressions and R's network analysis packages? You get some neat visualizations showing just how isolated the United States is in pushing for extreme copyright and patent laws."

Comments

Re:Perl? Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA:

print "$_\n" for @match = $txt =~ m/(?:(?:AU|BN|CA|CL|JP|MX|MY|NZ|PE|SG|US|VN)[0-9]*\/)+(?:AU|BN|CA|CL|JP|MX|MY|NZ|PE|SG|US|VN)[0-9]*/g;
It’s ugly, but it seems to get the job done.

I agree, it's Perl^Wugly. But Python wouldn't be much better. At least we can remove the redundancy in the regex:

countries="(?:AU|BN|CA|CL|JP|MX|MY|NZ|PE|SG|US|VN)[0-9]*"
print "\n".join(re.findall("(?:{0}/)+{0}".format(countries), txt))

Re:Go Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

I would personally say it is because the USA has bet the farm on being the monopoly holder on intellectual properties. Look where Hollyweird is, where silicon valley is, etc. A goodly portion of the US's GDP is based on intellectual properties, and ventures related to or hinging upon, intellectual properties or intellectual property laws. (Hollywood, music, software, biomedical, pharmecutical, biotech, etc.)

Compare that with the economies of the other countries implicated, who have GDPs predominantly composed of the trade and sale of material goods.

Given its market position, NATURALLY, the USA would only sign on to an agreement like this, if it could leverage market dominance in that market niche.

How unsurprising

[vikingpower]

The US is being gently pushed ( nudged ) into a beginning of rrelevance. Has already been going on for a couple of years: computer technology, aerospace tech, politics. NSA scandal accelerated it. The sun is going down over US America.

Re:How unsurprising

[VortexCortex]

Although it helps, you don't have to stop running to lose your position in a race; The others can simply speed up. When both factors are at work the rate of decline accelerates.

You can trace much of the change in position of USA and others via the amount of essential economies and state resources are privatized, and thus funding promised to them and thus the private interest in influencing politics (deregulation) increased. For instance: Solid Rocket Booster designs have had funding lobbied for based on the merit of bringing and keeping jobs in certain congressman's local economy instead of on the pros / cons of the various designs themselves. The same sort of thing ran amok in Chile in the 70's.

When progress is averse to profit you get stagnation in a private industry -- Like ISPs in the USA: Instead of spending on infrastructure to provide a better service they can simply charge more for less (oversell bandwidth) to make more money. Bits have never been cheaper to distribute and yet their cost doesn't reflect this.

The sun sets not upon one country, but around the world at different times. If we're not careful our country could be next.

Re:How unsurprising

[Sabriel]

It might not stay gentle. Do you remember the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire?

Oh, wait, yeah, that was a while back. Here, some reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire

Hmm, that's a tad indigestible, I need a car analogy. No, a gorilla analogy!

Imagine a tribe of gorillas. Let's call the biggest, strongest, most heavily-armed gorilla "Sam". Luckily enough for the tribe, Sam was actually a fairly nice guy - so long as you purchased his stuff or at least used his bananas to purchase stuff, and didn't draw attention to his tendencies to vanity and his insistence on being in charge - and it really helped that he kept the more aggressive males in check (every so often one'd get nasty where Sam could see it, or even challenge him, and everybody else'd get a reminder of why nobody fought Sam).

When the second-biggest gorilla, a tyrant and almost as big as Sam, collapsed from steroid abuse, things were really starting to look up.

But as time passed, the other gorillas noticed Sam was changing. Now some folk go doddery and forgetful, but Sam, he kept poking through the tribe's stuff, peeking in on them all the time. It was like he'd spent so long keeping a lookout for what his old nemesis did, he couldn't stop doing it. And he started to care less and less about whether the other gorillas complained when he rode roughshod over someone. He even started hassling his own young, creating lots of rules about where they could go, what they could take with them, what they should report back to him, and his punishments got harder too.

Trouble is, it's not just Sam's young and his friends in the tribe that have noticed. Some of those aggressive gorillas, both the older ones who kept their heads down while Sam was in his prime and the younger ones who don't remember how bad it was before Sam became the tribe's silverback, they've noticed too. They've noticed the changes, and they've noticed he's having trouble holding his bananas.

Can you guess what they'll try to do if, some day, Sam can't hold his bananas anymore?

'Free Trade Agreement'

[king neckbeard]

Can we drop the nonsense that TPP is a 'free trade agreement?' A free trade agreement would be very simple. Don't bomb us or torture our citizens, and you can trade freely with us. TPP undermines free trade by forcing countries into even further support of anti-capitalism legal monopolies as a condition for not restricting trade.

Re:Go Canada

[ebno-10db]

I would personally say it is because the USA has bet the farm on being the monopoly holder on intellectual properties.

That's a bad bet - something more affected by corruption and propaganda (the wonders of our "post-industrial" economy!) than by any rational policy choice. The excessive and corrupt influence of the "intellectual property" and financial parts of our economy hurts the rest of the economy. There are limits to the potential value of "intellectual property". It's not as big a part of our economy as is often hyped, other countries can easily produce large parts of it (e.g. movie and music production don't have major barriers to entry), and does anyone really expect other countries to rigorously enforce IP laws that mostly benefit the US, regardless of what trade agreements say?

Re:Perl? Why?

[biodata]

Why would you use something other than perl for parsing text? This is what perl was designed for and it's most likely faster than anything else scripted. I'm sure you could write a text parser in any language you happen to like, but if you have the skills then perl is the correct tool for this job.

Re:Here's a link

[fatphil]

Did you ever do a "countries on springs" analysis such that countries which concur with each other are pulled together, and those that disent are pushed apart? Similar to the 3rd quartile cutoff one, but with all countries, and with distance made more significant.

One way I've done this in the past is to stick all dots on the unit sphere, anneal them into a stable position on that sphere with a suitable repulsion law, and then to squash the sphere. Chose a random point on the surface, conformally map the sphere minus that point onto a unit disc, re-anneal, and chose the outcome with lowest energy. Random point selection will naturally find the biggest open areas, bordered by the most repulsive countries, ones which deserve to be on the peripheries of the flattened diagram.

Hehe, I like the idea of the US being the most repulsive country. ;-)

Re:I used to think Canada was quite European...

[Nemyst]

I'd be curious to compare the political stance before and after Harper's rise to power. To me the difference is quite stark and I feel like things went very much American when he arrived. Anti-environment, anti-science, pro-oil, pro-business, anti-social policies, etc. Heck, we've had more debates on abortion, the capital sentence and other such social issues since he came around than we've had in the decades before.