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

In summary, what can we conclude from these data?

[DrPBacon]

"In summary, what can we conclude from these data? Canada, with by far the most sole-country proposals, seems like it is up to something." Those shifty Canadians. I knew it.

Perl? Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the original article with a little more technical detail. To those interested (like me) what was Perl doing there, it was just a single line script with regex. The rest is R.

Don't worry, eh?

[smittyoneeach]

It's just Mayor Rob Ford's plan to go oot the hoose and take the world off to a the great, white, crystalline North. Beauty, eh?

Re:What a poor commentary

[Sockatume]

Yes, this one-page article clearly represents the entirety of his knowledge on the subject, he's obviously not a political science professor or anything.

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

[dkleinsc]

The US is being gently pushed ( nudged ) into a beginning of irrelevance

I'd consider it more the US government trying to do whatever it can for the 0.1% of the country that pays for the majority of political campaigning, and screw the other 99.9% of us. And whether the US government becomes irrelevant or not, as long as the corporate overlords are happy, the politicians will be kept comfortable.

In the words of Number Two: "But you, like an idiot, want to take over the world. And you don't realize there is no world anymore! It's only corporations!"

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?

Re:Go Canada

[ebno-10db]

brainwashing/groupthink

That's a very polite euphemism for corruption. The excessive influence of industries concerned about "intellectual property", was bought and paid for. In addition to locking up people, or fining them into penury, for sharing a few songs, it means the foreign and domestic economic policies of the US are distorted in favor of this handful of over-hyped industries, and to the detriment of the rest of the economy.

'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:Go Canada

[SuricouRaven]

That is why the talks are being conducted in secret. What the people don't know about, they can't protest over. Until it's too late.

Thanks

[langelgjm]

Author of the article here. You're right, I meant it to be a little funny. As I noted to the GP, most people studying these issues already know where the countries line up. Canada has a history of being different on IP issues than the US (much to the US's chagrin - it's why we put them on the Special 301 "priority watch list" in 2012).

Here's a link

[langelgjm]

Here's a link with more technical detail. I had to tone down the technical aspects for the Washington Post.

That link does not have full code, but if you want, I can e-mail it to you (I already have for two other people). I didn't post the code online because I wanted to keep track of who was asking for it. But I'm happy to share it.

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:Go Canada

[ebno-10db]

will shock most Americans when their purchasing power falls by 60% or more when everybody else leaves Bretton Woods

Bretton Woods was abandoned 40 years ago.

As for a reduction in the exchange value of the USD, 60% could only come from a panic, not an accurate readjustment. A panic won't be allowed to happen. If nothing else other countries have too much to lose from it.

OTOH a smaller reduction in the exchange value of the USD would be very good for us. It's idiotic that we've spent so much time and effort post-WWII to prop up the dollar, when it only gives us bigger trade deficits and destroys our industry. There have been a few exceptions, like the Plaza Accord, but that's been long undone, thanks in large part to the corrupt influence of the finance industry.

it's not even 'just' a law that Congress can theoretically repeal - this is International Treaty, which effectively becomes permanent law under the US Constitution

It's not a treaty, it's a "congressional-executive agreement". It requires simple majorities (like an ordinary bill) instead of 2/3 of the senate. It's a constitutional gray area, and it sounds like BS to me when applied to long term agreements like trade "agreements" (treaties in all but name), but they've been upheld. On the bright side they're easier to repeal.

New visualizations with D3

[langelgjm]

Author of the article here. Michael Simeone from the University of Illinois asked for my data and code so that he could experiment with some D3 visualizations. He did a little bit last night, and I thought I'd share the results.

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.