The Ethereum whitepaper states:
The motivation behind GHOST is that blockchains with fast confirmation times currently suffer from reduced security due to a high stale rate - because blocks take a certain time to propagate through the network, if miner A mines a block and then miner B happens to mine another block before miner A's block propagates to B, miner B's block will end up wasted and will not contribute to network security.
What is meant by confirmation time? Is that the amount of time it takes for a block to be confirmed by other nodes, or the amount of time it takes to mine a block i.e. difficulty?
Secondly, I'm confused about why faster confirmation times lead to a higher stale rate - wouldn't you encounter the same problem with slower confirmation times as well?