Week 44
"@schratze@todon.nl
Food stamps aren't there to prevent poor people from starving
They're there to prevent rich people from being eaten"
Major incursion to the west of Urazavo.
That must be another one of those RU "pipeline attacks" east of Myrnohrad. Whenever a thin, long new captured area extends deep into UA territory, one can suspect such attack?
#Ukraine 10/21 - 10/30
Yahoo News: "Steve Bannon Calls For Netanyahu To Be Toppled ‘Immediately’: ‘We Need Regime Change in Jerusalem and We Need It Tonight’"
Politico: "It’s hard to measure notions like “political opportunity,” but [Pelosi challenger] Chakrabarti may be correct to see one right now. He’s running for Pelosi’s seat as a handful of similar outsiders on the left like Zohran Mamdani in New York and Senate candidates Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Graham Platner in Maine have capitalized on the Democratic base’s discontent with their party, particularly as Trump has steamrolled Washington Democrats."
Will there be a third Sudan now, after the seperation of the South?
RSF gains in Sudan
"How ΛCDM Fakes the Cosmic Web"
"Surprising Discoveries From Venus Hint at Habitability In the Atmosphere"
The New York Times: "With SpaceX Behind Schedule, NASA Will Seek More Moon Lander Ideas"
My latest map shows Ford still in the Mediterrenian but I guess it is on its merry way to Venezuella... Nimitz, compared to previous week, appears to be pulled off from the "Iranian Theater", it is now in the South China Sea.
#USNavy #Map
"US Navy Moves the USS Gerald R. Ford Near Venezuela"
Newsweek: "Trump Ally Buys Rival NATO Jets As F-35 Talks Stall"
Defense News: "Turkey signs $10.7 billion deal with UK for 20 Eurofighter jets"
Pettis, Trade Wars are Class Wars, 2020: "There is no guaranteed way to identify the origin of an imbalance, but market prices can provide clues.. The current account deficit country is.. the likely source of the imbalance if its interest rates rise (or the international value of its assets goes down) as its external financing need rises. This is a frequent phenomenon for countries on the periphery of the international financial system.
Consider Turkey over the past few years. Between 2010 and 2018, the country went on an investment binge funded by borrowing from abroad. Turkey’s current account deficit was consistently worth about 6 percent of its domestic income. This boosted output at the cost of rising debt. Attracting foreign money to cover this excess of spending over income required persistent currency depreciation beyond what would have been implied by differences in inflation: the real value of the Turkish lira fell by half between 2010 and the middle of 2018. Unsurprisingly, foreign savers grew increasingly skeptical of Turkey and mostly lent in debt that could only be repaid with U.S. dollars, not Turkish lira. (Think of Argentina’s nineteenth-century gold-backed debts.)
Interest rates also had to rise. The cost of a dollar-denominated business loan rose from about 4 percent in 2010 to 6 percent by the second half of 2018. Over the same period, interest rates on lira-denominated business loans soared from 9 percent to 28 percent. Eventually, foreign revulsion with Turkish assets slashed Turkish spending power, which in turn forced Turks to cut their consumption and investment to the point that they moved into a current account surplus by the middle of 2019."
"@kimapr@ublog.kimapr.net
Updates. System updates. Please keep your system up to date to avoid bugs and security issues and get more bugs and security issues. Download size: 4 GiB. Installed size: 12 GiB. Net upgrade size: -70 MiB. Package install error: 404. Please update your system to continue installing packages. Please update your system to continue updating your system."
Beyond Fossil Fuels: "Europeans agree: Time to Put Limits on Big Tech Data Centres.. A staggering majority of respondents in a polling commissioned by Beyond Fossil Fuels and conducted by Savanta in five European countries do not want new data centres (DCs) to jeopardise Europe’s clean energy transition, drain water resources and raise costs for consumers."
Based on Masse's previous expertise I am not surprised a groundbreaking theory came from him. RM expertise is seismology, this is one of the most demanding, exacting areas in science while being 100% grounded in mechanics. Under the earth's crust there are massive forces at play, there is constant pull and push, there are waves that travel... If you can work with those you can basically work on anything else in theoretical physics. The first time I got a glimpse of their domain was while looking for ways to code a certain computational method, the top guys on it were from seismology, and I saw some of the other work they do, it was hard core. They have the right mix of theory, computation, and experimental domain that leaves no room for bullshittery. Theoretical physics as profession is full of wankers, they are paid to dream up stupid ideas, as a result, that is exactly what they produce.
8 - High-Precision Clocks in Variable Mass Configurations.. If aether flows into matter and produces gravitational effects, then the local aether density (and thus the speed of time/light propagation) should vary with nearby mass distribution. Deploy ultra-precise atomic clocks (optical lattice clocks with ~10^-18 fractional uncertainty) in carefully controlled geometries where massive objects can be repositioned. Measure whether clock rates show anomalous variations when large masses are moved nearby, beyond the standard gravitational time dilation predicted by general relativity. If ether accumulates or flows differently around matter, you might observe: Directional asymmetries in time dilation depending on mass orientation, transient clock-rate changes during rapid mass redistribution, non-linear effects when multiple massive objects create 'converging' ether flows.
This is a good test because his theory posits ubiquitous aether with directional flows into matter. Clock frequency depends on electromagnetic oscillations, which would be affected by local aether density/flow. This is similar to the idea #3 but focuses on the electromagnetic/temporal aspect rather than gravitational acceleration directly. Experimental advantage: Clock comparison experiments are among the most precise measurements in physics and are already used to test fundamental theory (tests of relativity, searches for fifth forces, etc.), so the infrastructure exists.
An 8th experimental idea above that can prove / disprove Robert Masse's aether hypothesis on top of the 7 already shared
The Verge: "Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like.. Next month, Samsung will start displaying ads for Samsung-related products and services on its Family Hub refrigerators in the US."
Russia FM Lavrov: "[In] April 22 when Boris Johnson came [to Ukraine] and prohibited Zelensky to accept the deal negotiated in Istanbul, which was actually proposed by Ukrainian side.. [the deal] was undermined... Now we know that [Johnson] got about 1 million pounds from his friend to continue the war because his friend was selling guns to Ukraine. [A]fter that they said 'no negotiations with Putin'"
Bloomberg: "China pledged to 'significantly' boost the share of consumption in its economy over the next five years"
#NZ #DoomsdayBunkers
It is true after 2003 German savings rate increased
Pettis: "The most straightforward effect of the [2003 Labor "reform"] law has been a steady rise in the poverty rate, particularly for Germans who have jobs. In 2005, when the data begin, only 5 percent of German workers were at risk of poverty. By 2015 that proportion had doubled to 10 percent. This was driven by a shift to low-paying part-time work..
Germany’s precrisis current account surplus—and the corresponding deficit in the rest of the world—was recycled abroad by Germany’s banks. Of the country’s cumulative €2.7 trillion in financial outflows, a little more than €1.6 trillion can be attributed to banks in Germany buying bonds and making loans abroad... Massive lending abroad was the only way the banks could reconcile weak German demand for credit and heightened German saving."
Pettis: "Before 2012, .. Germans consumed less than they produced, and they underinvested in their country, which produced large surpluses with the rest of the world. At the same time, Spaniards, Greeks, and the others experienced booms, spending far more than they earned and borrowing to cover the differences. In the years leading up to the global financial crisis, Spain had the second-biggest trade deficit in the world, behind only the United States, while Greece, a country of just eleven million people, had the fifth biggest. But Germany’s pathologies—rising inequality, depressed consumption, and systematic underinvestment—were a preview of what was to come for the rest of the continent...
The European crisis.. was about income distribution. German policies developed in response to the twin shocks of reunification and the postcommunist liberation of Eastern Europe transferred purchasing power from workers and retirees to the ultrarich, which in turn forced Germany’s neighbors to tolerate some combination of rising unemployment and soaring indebtedness. The sad result was that Germany’s leaders undermined what should have been one of the most positive transformations of modern times: the creation of a healthy, unified Europe."
Pettis' analysis is sound. But we also need to pay attn to the timeline, and the chicken-egg aspect of the issue in case of China... In the beginning if the Chinese state did not turn a blind eye to low wages and not supressed dissent, foreign companies would not build factories there which they needed for knowledge transfer. But later, once they had enough knowledge transfer, good infrastructure, and capabilities of their own should they have stopped the practice? The answer is, according to Pettis' logic, yes. Persistent trade imbalances is not a good thing.
Pettis, Trade Wars are Class Wars: "[T]here is a conflict between economic classes within China that has spilled over into the United States. Systematic transfers of wealth from Chinese workers to Chinese elites distort the Chinese economy by strangling purchasing power and subsidizing production at the expense of consumption. That, in turn, distorts the global economy by creating gluts of manufactured goods and by bidding up the prices of stocks, bonds, and real estate. Chinese underconsumption destroys jobs elsewhere, while inflated asset values lead to devastating cycles of booms, busts, and debt crises...
China’s policies do not just hurt Americans—they also harm ordinary Chinese workers and retirees. Chinese workers are underpaid relative to the value of what they produce, and they are taxed too much. They are unable to access the goods and services they ought to be able to afford. They breathe dirty air and drink polluted water because many local government officials place the financial interests of politically connected business owners above the well-being of the public."
#Werleman #Israel
Pettis: "The new [1996] rule, which came to be known as “check-the-box” by practitioners, was supposed to make things simpler for tax filers and make life easier for Internal Revenue Service (IRS) examiners. Instead, it opened up massive loopholes in the corporate tax code. Among other things, income from royalties and licenses could now be treated the same as income from foreign factories. The IRS quickly recognized some of the implications and proposed a new rule to prevent arrangements “contrary to the policies and rules of subpart F,” but political interference blocked any fix. Once subpart F had been neutered, the creatives in law and accounting departments all across America began to exploit the new potential of 'intangibility.' Unlike factories or office buildings filled with workers, patents and other intellectual property occupy no physical space. They can be moved anywhere in the world by filling out a few forms...
The simple version of the scheme is to set up a subsidiary in a corporate tax haven and then sell the subsidiary the right to license the patents to the rest of the company. The parent company gets a regular payment from the subsidiary holding the patents, often quoted as a share of total research and development (R&D) costs, and the subsidiary gets a large cut of the corporation’s global sales. Calibrate the deal correctly and profits can be shifted from places where taxes are high to places where taxes are low."
Michael Pettis, Trade Wars are Class Wars: "Although [tight, global] economic linkages have many benefits, they can also transmit problems from one society to another. People in one country are often responsible for unaffordable housing, debt crises, job losses, and pollution elsewhere. The Chinese government.. offers cheap bank loans to real estate developers, and American manufacturing workers lose their jobs. German companies slash wages as the German government cuts welfare spending, and Spaniards get a housing bubble.
The thesis of this book is that rising inequality within countries heightens trade conflicts between them. This is ultimately an optimistic argument: we do not believe that the world is destined to endure a zero-sum conflict between nations or economic blocs... The problems of the past few decades do not have their roots in geopolitical conflict or incompatible national characters. Rather, they have been caused by massive transfers of income to the rich and the companies they control."
Analog (not binary) matrix equation solving.. Nice. Analog computation.. Let's hope the claims hold up..
"[A Chinese] research team led by Dr. Sun Zhong.. published a groundbreaking paper in Nature Electronics titled 'Precise and scalable analogue matrix equation solving using resistive random-access memory chips.' The paper announced the creation of the new Chinese chip — a high-precision, scalable analog matrix computing chip based on resistive random-access memory (RRAM)... This achievement marks a significant milestone.. For the first time, analog computation has reached a precision comparable to digital computing, while delivering up to hundreds or even thousands of times higher computational efficiency and energy performance than today’s leading GPUs."
#JimmyDore #Argentina
Thorium Reserves per Country
"China’s Survey Estimates That a One-Million-Ton Deposit of Thorium Could Produce Limitless Energy"
Lead Scientist Xu Hongjie: "Rabbits sometimes make mistakes or grow lazy. That's when the tortoise seizes its chance"
Live Science: "[04/20] For the first time ever, scientists in China have refueled an experimental nuclear reactor without shutting it down — a significant advance in weaning the world off fossil fuels and onto more efficient, low-carbon energy sources.. The breakthrough, achieved using a prototype molten-salt design which runs on liquid thorium instead of uranium, means that China "now leads the global frontier" in nuclear innovation, the project's lead scientist, Xu Hongjie, said during an April 8 meeting at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Thorium reactors were first developed in the 1950s in the U.S., before it went all-in on uranium, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Following this decision, this early research was later declassified, and the Chinese researchers made use of it for the current project."
DW: "Germany's Porsche pauses shift to EVs as profits tank"
The Autopian: "Porsche’s Operating Profit Drops 99% As Company Pays For Overinvesting In Electric Cars"
Financial Trader Customers on Margin Loans (Total Leverage)
According to data, leverage deployed at this point is around half a trillion dollars, a sky-high amount and climbing.
#SystemUpdate #TPUSA
"@GeofCox@climatejustice.social
Meanwhile, the old Irish duopoly also stumbles, with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael polling at 17% and 18% respectively, and the broad-left supported presidential candidate, Catherine Connolly, likely to win big today."
FCW: "EU Parliament Clears Path for Low-Carbon Hydrogen Rules, Grandfathering Existing Projects"
Xi's "princeling status" is lower than some of the other princelings? I don't think so. Let's think CCP history, after the "Long March" Mao went to Yan'an, the Red Army was in a bad shape, who gave them refuge? Xi Jinping's father. That is some legendary stuff right there.
The CCP party conf is over, the result seems to be Xi lives to fight another day, but, according to the infighting scenario, power is still divided.
The Epoch Times: "Gen. Zhang Shengmin, a veteran political commissar, was officially promoted on Oct. 23 to the post of second-ranked vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agency that controls the armed forces.. The newly appointed vice chair of the CMC appears not to belong to a political faction loyal to Xi.. This contrasts with his direct predecessor, He, who was described by some China observers as Xi’s No. 1 confidant in the military."
The Epoch Times: "Xi’s Power Tested as 7 Officials Snubbed in CCP Leadership Shuffle.. One of the most striking signs was the quiet sidelining of seven alternate Central Committee members who were passed over for promotion—a rare move in party protocol that may signal their political downfall. The omissions, which include some of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s longtime allies from the military and his home province of Shaanxi, point to intensifying internal conflict"
The Lever: "Amid The Shutdown, Flood Insurance Profiteers Are Riding The Wave.. Private insurers like Neptune Insurance Holdings are cashing in on the shutdown and pushing to privatize the National Flood Insurance Program, despite risks to homeowners."
TAC: "As Israeli Settlers Attack Americans, When Will We Say ‘Enough’? Over the weekend, a group of armed Israeli settlers in the West Bank staged an attack on American journalist and Drop Site News contributor Jasper Nathaniel.. When Nathaniel contacted the U.S. Embassy to report the attack, he was told that his own government could not protect him."
If Ukraine falls Poland can take its Western section that are "historically Polish", and Hungary can probably take Transcarpathia - there is a Hungarian speaking minority there, and it is right across the border, right? It can happen... RU beats Ukraine, turning it into a rump state, its neighbors dismember it.