Tons of cat meat, live cats found at Mekong Delta facility VnExpress International (resilc) :-(
Dalian flow battery station is the largest battery worldwide Interesting Engineering (Chuck L)
How to Turn the Lights Back on After a Blackout IEEE Spectrum (Chuck L)
Adderall’s Disappearing Act Has Left Millions Without Treatment Bloomberg
New Mechanism Proposed For Why Some Psychedelics Act As Antidepressants arstechnica
#COVID-19
Fluticasone propionate as a potential treatment for COVID-19 Drugs Today (resilc). May have missed this. May also explain why asthmatics seems less susceptible to Covid.
Muscle biopsy in-depth assessment in people with #LongCovid w/ exercise symptoms compared with 2 control groups shows microvascular abnormalities with reduced capillaries, immune cell dysregulation, distinct gene expression signaturehttps://t.co/ngv2vKhcLn @ChariteBerlin pic.twitter.com/ED8OJ2zNQ2
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) February 16, 2023
Climate/Environment
Mark Mills: The energy transition delusion: inescapable mineral realities YouTube (resilc)
How heat pumps of the 1800s are becoming the technology of the future Yale Climate Connection
MIT Team Makes a Case For Direct Carbon Capture From Seawater, Not Air New Atlas
China?
Biden’s low-key speech on balloon ‘not enough to fix ties with China’ Global Times
U.S. and China Vie in Hazy Zone Where Balloons, U.F.O.s and Missiles Fly New York Times. Lead story.
White House to hold secret talks with Taiwan officials in Washington Financial Times
California lawmaker leads delegation to Taiwan amid high U.S.-China tensions Los Angeles Times. Ro Khanna.
🇨🇳🇹🇼The official delegation of mainland China for the first time has arrived in Taiwan in the last 3years
The government delegation arrived to participate in the lantern festival and strengthen contacts with the Taipei City administration, island’s central news agency reported.
— AZ 🛰🌏🌍🌎 (@AZgeopolitics) February 18, 2023
China set to eclipse US air superiority in Pacific Asia Times (Kevin W)
At start of Congressional session, Tibet-China legislation reintroduced International Campaign for Tibet (furzy)
India
India Ups Its Game in the Middle East The Diplomat
New Not-So-Cold War
Rishi Sunak to call for new Nato charter to ensure ‘lasting peace’ for Ukraine Guardian (Kevin W)
Norway’s atonement for Nord Stream sabotage Indian Punchline (Kevin W)
I love Clare Daly but must note she seems to be the patron saint of lost causes:
“Then along comes Seymour Hersh, the world’s most acclaimed living investigative journalist, who produced a detailed claim that the US and Norway executed the Nord Stream gas explosion. And I find it jaw-dropping that the EU is still not asking questions.” pic.twitter.com/1dywcEjsTV
— sarah (@sahouraxo) February 16, 2023
Seymour Hersh’s Trinity of Truth Scott Ritter
Democrats, Republicans join up to urge Biden to send F-16s to Ukraine Politico. Scott Ritter has pointed out that pilots who have flow Soviet fighters simply cannot be retrained to operate Western jets; their reflexes are too deeply ingrained. So the US and NATO forces would have to operate them.
Wagner Group releases graphic video of corpses in desperate plea for more ammunition Telegraph. If I were Putin, Prigozhin would get a very big piece of my mind. Prigozhin has been depicting himself, and loudly too, as running his own war in Bakhmut, when his mercs get lots of support from the military. Dima at Military Summary deems this to be a matter of priorities, not supply. Regardless, mercs are not first in line.
US TO SUPPORT UKRAINIAN PENSIONSpic.twitter.com/S9VD5D8Ckj
— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) February 17, 2023
So Ursula von der Leyen poses willingly with Oleksiy Honcharenko.
This Ukrainian politician participated in the burning of people in Odessa in 2014.This lady has a real talent for getting along with all kinds of thugs .
Look how she is smiling….. pic.twitter.com/YQqFwSoFT9
— Richard (@ricwe123) February 17, 2023
Deputy Chairman of Russian Assembly debates French journalists war hawks. YouTube (Andrei Martyanov). In French with subtitles (Tolstoy, yes descended from the Tolstoy, is fluent). Have only seen the first few minutes but very pointed. Hope to have time to return.
India’s Russian oil imports surge to a record in January – trade Reuters
Gilbert Doctorow: The U.S. & Russia Are Testing Each Other’s Red Lines Geopolitics & Empire. guurst highlights:
tidbit on Patrick Armstrong:
For me the most depressing thing about the last 20 years is to find that everything that I disliked and I found so awful about the Soviet Union has now moved to the United States. The United States has not gone all the way, of course, and you are fortunate, in a way, to have had such limited deprivation of income compared to what was experienced by a close colleague in Canada, a retired Canadian diplomat who spent time and he had never seen Moscow and who had a very influential blog. He was visited by the Canadian Intelligence Services, they told him that if he kept this up, his pension would be terminated and his life savings would be confiscated. He very wisely threw in the towel. In Canada with all those Ukrainian Bandera kids, grandkids, it is much more difficult place to find freedom of speech than United States is. So in a sense, let us be fair to Uncle Sam in a period of relative repression, still freedom of speech manages to hold on in the States.
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Virtual reality telemetry means you can virtually kiss goodbye to privacy The Register
Imperial Collapse Watch
The Insecure Superpower Counterpunch
Texas considers a bill banning people from 4 countries from buying real estate NPR (Kevin W)
Biden
Biden DOJ Backing Norfolk Southern’s Bid To Block Lawsuits The Lever.
Rudy Then and Rudy Now London Review of Books (resilc)
Culture Wars
Resilc: “So God hates Philly, Democrats I gather. Lost both World Series and Supah Bowl to Christian statezzz”:
“All glory to God” – Harrison Butker on his Super-Bowl winning kick. Love it https://t.co/JTV1iDa2EE
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) February 14, 2023
Wyoming Limiting Child Marriage Sparks Republican Outrage Newsweek (resilc)
Hillcrest High students say they were told to limit Black History Month program Associated Press (resilc)
David Crosby’s Final Wisdom: Singer Talks Trump, CSN, CSNY, and more Rolling Stone (furzy)
The Little Known History of World War II’s All-Black, All-Female Battalion Atlas Obscura (Chuck L)
Unimportant Flying Objects
Why spy balloons are still useful in era of drones and satellites BBC. Resilc: “I like the pigeon.”
AI
Kevin Roose’s Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot: Full Transcript New York Times (Dr. Kevin, furzy)
ChatGPT able to pass Theory of Mind Test at 9-year-old human level PhysOrg
The Bezzle
Binance Considers Pulling Back From US Partners as Crypto Crackdown Escalates Bloomberg
Data from New Jersey is a warning sign for young sports bettors The Conversation (resilc)
Tesla Drivers Worry About Charging Times Wall Street Journal
Wealthy Americans are racing to get the EU’s last remaining ‘golden passport’ before it’s gone Business Insider (Kevin W)
Goldman Sachs, BofA expect three more U.S. rate hikes this year Reuters
Wall Street Is Baffled by the Stock Market Bloomberg
Class Warfare
This company employed children to clean razor-sharp saws using hazardous chemicals CNN (Kevin W)
Starbucks Ordered to Stop Firing Union Activists Nationwide Bloomberg
Survival of the Richest Institute for New Economic Thinking
Bernie Sanders: Anti-Union Capitalism Is Wrecking America Nation (Kevin W)
Adams and Largest Municipal Union Reach Tentative Agreement, With 16.21% Raises Through 2026 The City
Antidote du jour:
And a bonus:
This is a jellyfish named Halitrephes Maasi😍 pic.twitter.com/rCPPpbMcNM
— PiE_r (@Megohelie1) February 7, 2023
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
289 comments
Comments are closed.
—Wall Street Is Baffled by the Stock Market Bloomberg—
Helene Meisler, a very long-time stock columnist, says it all in one quip: “price changes sentiment”.
but ya, like the political news flow, we are living in a bizarro-world where the data is saying two polar opposite things based on the historical norms (imminent doom, imminent boom) and players seem to each be living in their own reality.
So either (a) the data is wrong, (b) post-Covid is no longer like the historical norms, or (c) some combination.
My money is on (c).
Related, article about how much the average 401k dropped in 2022. Pretty historic for a down year, and for the US bond market that was one of the worse years ever. There are times it can seem far too easy, and not overly difficult, for making money and double digit returns hand over fist; my humble opinion was the punch bowl getting kicked away by the US Federal Reserve was always going to hurt, and hurt badly it did.
And contrary to the high school aged persons writing tweets for the official POTUS, it’s not just wealthy folks owning stocks and broad stock market index funds. Plenty of retirement funds that are managed better than CalPers (by example) have exposure to these markets.
It also shows plainly that one of the main arguments against 401ks in the first place was correct; 401ks are stock market based. The Market goes down as well as up.
If only some major Politico with testicular fortitude had pushed something like a real “People’s Capitalism” ‘back in the day.’ It was a counter proposal for “Social Security Reform.” The State would hold a portfolio of stocks, a defined percentage of outstanding shares or bonds, and manage them as a pool. The dividends would be used to pay the expenses and the rest would be disbursed to the public as an annual stipend. Due to the fluctuating nature of the returns, the funds would not be constituted as a complete Assured Income. The necessity for labour would not be eliminated.
The issue of income inequality is nothing new. This from 1963 should put that meme to bed.
Read: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1961/no005/logan-paley.htm
This sounds remarkably like “the market”. I genuinely don’t see what the difference is. If you want something not based on the market it has to be something akin to social security.
Would Treasury Bonds work?
401k, another wealth dissolution device and fee generation mechanism for Wall Street.
Just be glad for the failure of W’s plan to privatize further the investment casino. That would’ve led to misery, impoverishment and essentially a type of dysfunctional population compliance, while trying to avoid too much desperation that would’ve riled up the unwashed.
Times have changed over the past 2 decades, with more modern grifts and manipulation tools to squeeze and suppress.
Sorry for the constant stream of dark thoughts.
I’ve always thought of the 401k and IRA “savings” plans as tithing for the working class to the rich. A form of worship.
The financial crooks enticed people into 401K’s and IRA’s by dangling the carrots of tax deferral and 6% match by corps in lieu of pension plans. They captured trillions of $$ for their casino, creating billions in commissions for themselves. The digitization of the market helped them to front run the market. Now they sell while pumping up the market and buy knowing when the lows are. The scum are not done yet. They’re taking part in plundering through wars that destroy countries. They destroyed the housing market and then got bailed out. They create mergers and then breakups of companies to make fees.The stock market needs to go.
Agree something different is going in the “markets” because what am noticing lately in the home real estate market in my area, is low end homes condos selling a bit higher and quickly. Too early and too data to say for sure, so take that with a grain of salt.
Selling quick to whom? Seen lots of articles that the Looters ™ of BlackRock, private equity generally, flippers and “investors” are bidding up the prices, snapping up anything affordable to the average mope. Sense among my neighbors is that now is the time to sell, to reap the “equity of Looter ™ price inflation,” live in your car or other cheap alternative for a few months until the crash gets priced in. Lots of wishful thinking going on, as usual. Pigs get slaughtered, and all that.
My wife and I got very lucky, bought from a bank a very nice foreclosed little cottage at a fair price. That was ten years ago.
BlackRock is not private equity (or at most is a second tier wannabe). It’s a behemoth in public securities. Low fees, huge volumes. You are thinking of Blackstone, which among other things operates funds that are the biggest owners of US single family home rentals.
and in a sign of trouble, BlackStone’s property fund/ BREIT ( Real Estate Investment Trust) has limited withdrawals since December 2022.
Isn’t that a commercial REIT? Very different circumstances for commercial properties, San Fransisco and NYC as prime examples.
The stock market is like a high school popularity contest but for corporations – and just as valid. So a corporation can announce that they will reduce the number of employees that they have by eliminating their research and development division, and their stock will go up. Russia announces that they will cut oil production by 500,000 barrels a day and Biden the next day that he will take enough oil from the strategic reserve for a day or so of use, and the stock market goes up. And other people apart from myself have noted how there is a major disconnect with the stock market and the real American economy.
Boom for some, doom for most.
It will just depend on what side of some line on the spreadsheet one is on.
Depends when you started investing. It’s a few lost years, but if you’ve been putting money away for a long time, it’s not a big deal.
Zoom out and look at the monthly chart.
Depends when you started
investinggambling. There. Fixed for ya.This looks like a dead cat bounce to me.
Can that term be retired and replaced with something a bit more crowd-pleasing? Perhaps, Dead cap(italist) bounce
Investors are collecting pennies and nickels in front of a bulldozer, perhaps? Used to hear that depiction from a former fund manager.
Or, Frankenstein is alive and well. What was dead is now living.
I like that, it has a certain resonance. Another old cliche might be updated to: “Stabbed in the pipe.”
It could also be excess liquidity searching for returns.
Who wants to “take a haircut” when the barber is Madame Le Guillotine?
(Rest assured. Any member of middle management who oversees a steep reduction in a financial entity’s ‘assets’ is soon ‘out the door.’)
Yes, even with interest rates at 4.75%, it is still a negative real interest rate.
Savers are still losing money after inflation even if they park their cash in a 1-year treasury bill which yields ~5%.
Madame la Guillotine to be picky….
s/ Ouch! That cut to the quick! Marie Antoinette, quick, to the fainting couch! (My French is, shall we say, execrable.) /s
Or Sweeney Todd
Some influential twitter finance accounts (with good predictive track records over the past couple of years) have pointed out a few things that are confusing many, particularly the size of the Fed balance sheet and the reverse repo facilities introduced in the previous crisis, the drawdown in the strategic petroleum reserve, and China’s delayed Covid slowdown relative to the West’s. To paraphrase one, “experts” who blame broken data or a broken market for their confusion should consider finding a different line of work.
I’ve read a lot of articles (like the attached) about the impact of retail investors. It’s not clear to me why the Fed’s balance sheet (now that it’s declining) or the actions in the repo market (that started almost 2 years ago) would explain why stocks refuse to correct like the “experts” expect. Retail’s impact makes more sense to me.
https://news.yahoo.com/retail-investors-record-inflows-us-stock-market-193801422.html
The balance sheet and repo both represent liquidity. Reportedly financial conditions have been loosening not tightening recently.That’s broader than the stock market.
I have seen Michael Green arguing for a while that the massive index ETFs like Vangard’s distort pricing because they continually buy.
What about the spending down of the TGA in light of the debt limit? Historically the TGA is small so you might not expect it to have much impact on liquidity, but in recent years has been quite a bit larger as a percentage of the budget.
As I mentioned, the Fed’s BS has been contracting for the past year and repo volume has been unchanged, so, combined, the Fed has been draining liquidity. The ETF argument is interesting, and I’ll look into that. Thanks.
It’s odd that the article is premised on the viability of 60/40 portfolios. It seems that the past two decades of price action has shown bonds and stocks to be Texas hedges. Although at 4.5% rates diversification may be more practical, I’m sympathetic to the 40/30/30 Zoltan Posnar brought up in a December note, the split being stocks, bonds(cash), commodities. But I think the mystery of stock market performance isn’t found in quantifiable analysis.
The market’s performance is a result of its preeminent political position in our society interacting with another familiar dynamic-“imperial collapse”, or better yet for those of us within the empire- societal collapse.
The Ohio train disaster is a perfect example of this. As the President goes on teevee to explicitly tell all Americans they aren’t worth a fig, this generational disaster is largely ignored; but more importantly there will be no recourse for its victims and no retribution upon its perpetrators.
This is a “time of monsters” and unfortunately there are no defenses. Political institutions are either atrophied or beholden to the “monsters”. Social institutions have been destroyed, there are no popular fronts for defense. And democratic traditions give you a choice of red or blue monsters. The corporations are the most dangerous of these monsters and the market is the mechanism by which you gain some of their favor.
The Fed is looking to fight inflation by destroying demand, not by taking away the privileged position of the market. Small share holders will be shaken out on price routs and replaced by institutional and large investors who always get “soft landings”. In Mad Max, absent a hero, you would’ve been better off sidling up to Immortan Joe, in our collapse Blackrock is Immortan Joe.
FWIW, 60/40 consistently beat actively managed stock funds for a very long time.
I have not reconfirmed, but short duration bond funds capture most of the return of bonds at much reduced risk.
I agree that passive management was superior. Additionally paying fees should be haram. My bone to pick with 60/40 over the era of zirp is that it was likely beat by more aggressive posture in that passive allocation. That more aggressive posture may have included non-government fixed income. But the premise of bonds hedging stocks and vice-versa went out the window with zirp and qe. I do think that now there is some value to that diversification when cash equivalents are yielding above 4.5%.
But I do think that the explanation for stock market behavior, in aggregate, lies in our society’s political choices and not individual business decisions.
Roubini says that if inflation continues to be higher than it was over the past few decades, then a traditional 60(equities) / 40 (fixed income) will give massive long term losses.
So the free ride is over.
All the dogs are barking at once – global climate instability, the end of cheap energy, wars of majors with existential import, demographic changes, the new oligarchy replacing anything that once resembled democracy, massive debt overhangs, increasing protectionism, rise of pandemic zoonotic diseases, decreasing availability of productive agricultural land, decreasing fresh water sources, not enough low-cost-extraction minerals for the new green energy pipe dream …….
Adam Tooze describes that pack of dogs as “the polycrisis”
One simply must read Mandelbrot’s “The (Mis)Behavior of Markets” subtitled “A Fractal View Of financial turbulence”.
Nassim Taleb is blurbed by the book cover as saying “The deepest and most realistic finance book ever published”.
The book does take you through the classical Finance Theory, starting with Bachelier, then CAPM then modern portfolio theory, stopping at Black&Scholes. It then argues the case against these models then works thru the fractal view, with the Hurst exponent nicely derived.
I read and re-read it often. It won’t give you recipes like 60:40, buy high, sell higher, Dogs of the Dow and stuff like that but it will massively increase your understanding of the nature of markets.
The math is set aside in the notes.
I agree with Mandelbrot’s broad criticism of the underlying assumptions of finance, and the analysis that derived from this. I also agree with the criticisms of the practicality of Mandelbrot’s revelation, I think this criticism applies to Taleb. That’s not to say the tails aren’t fatter than we all believe, but if you live for fat tails you won’t live at all. If Dick Fuld or Jimmy Cayne could do it all again they would, except perhaps they’d retire a year early.
As to the “nature” of markets, I don’t think markets have a nature. They are social constructs and are informed by the values of the humans that make them.
For instance I think this was the great revelation and innovation of the Chinese communists. They understood the market mechanism was no more capitalist than a hammer could be Christian. It’s how you employ the tool that defines it. That hammer could be a weapon or it could be a tool. Similarly markets could serve capital or they could subdue capital to serve society. The material outcomes of their society as compared to ours over the past 5 generations indicates they may be right.
I don’t think social constructs are outside of nature.
What does chat-gpt say I wonder ? I had an interesting convo with it about it – so after first making a statement similar to yours, I asked it if beaver dams, birds nests were outside of nature. It agreed that they were part of nature but faffed around discussing “natural materials and processes”.
Using the word natural in a discussion about nature looks tautological to me so I asked about bird communication with bird songs – not the songs but that actual communication.. and on and on..
Arguing with chat-gpt can be very engaging.
Anyway, I state that things that are created by elements of nature are themselves natural, animals are part of nature, human beings are animals so human social constructs are part of nature.
You’re right about my use of the word “nature,” in this context it’s not very clarifying. I don’t mean to debate whether markets are natural phenomenon as human constructs in the way beaver damns are, or AI may be, since humans are a part of nature like beavers. Rather that the “nature” of markets isn’t derived from some universal mathematical truism that exists a priori of humans. Their “nature”, or overarching characteristics, are informed by the societies/humans that construct them.
Above tweeting about the US supporting Ukraine. It’s a fairly short clip. “So people can have something in their pocket.” Yeah but here in the USA you’re practically a worthless f*ck so if you live in your car or are homeless on the street there is no help for you. But we’ll set up an online exchange to see if you merit the right amount of assistance.
Unbelievable, the gall of this man and this administration.
Note btw that Ukraine has been regularly dismantling all manner of worker protections etc
Fully expect Whatever remains after Russia is done to turn into an economic sinkhole in no time. In particular as this war has massively accelerated the already negative population trend by killing off or chasing out anyone of working age.
Best guess from experts seems to be that russia will carve out a kind of DMZ to get out of artillery range. It’s going to need to be at least 100 miles wide.
I could have sworn that Russia has already made clear statements that it does not want another Korean situation. In particular this close to their major population centers.
I’ve been anticipating a frozen conflict like in the Koreas as the most likely outcome in Ukraine, not because either side would prefer that outcome but rather as a result of mutual exhaustion
That’s not entirely true. If you’re willing to put your life on the line for the empire, willingly, or not in the case of the refugees, then you’re worth a little something, but not much more than that.
Well then, America can take over some innocent little polity in the tropics and relocate the ‘stalwart fighters for Freedom and the Ukrainian Way’ there. Oh, let’s say, Lake Maracaibo for instance.
War related. I haven’t saw a link here at NC, but there is an anti war rally tomorrow in DC. It is called “rage against the war machine.” Here is a link to their website;
Rage against the war Machine
Speakers include Ron Paul, Jimmy Dore, Tulsi Gabbard, Dennis Kucinich, plus more.
I’m guessing there won’t be a peep about this from the MSM – now or after the rally.
Sort of a dilemma for #McResistance media: their reflex is to smear and attack, but that means covering the event.
What’s a mainstream media psy-ops hack to do?
Await orders from Headquarters and then follow those orders.
17 years ago, Amy Goodman spoils MSNBC’s Birthday – Where’s Donahue?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVFe1rLKA1k
I don’t want to ad hominem, but Mark Mills is not a reliable source. He is a fellow of the Koch/fossil fuel funded Manhattan Institute and has written ‘research’ documents with climate change deniers. There are plenty of in depth independent studies around on the issues of energy transition. His name is not on any reputable ones.
Erm, but there are mineral limits. I have consistently maintained green energy as a remedy is a fantasy. We can’t preserve current lifestyles with a great reduction in fossil fuel use. need radical conservation. Green energy is only of marginal help.
I’ve been reading reports about the coming crunch in materials for renewables for 30 years. They’ve all been wrong (as have peak oil/coal ones too). Sometimes when I see people quoting papers (such as the famous ‘renewable energy without hot air’ from 2009 if they’ve actually read them and compared the predictions to reality. Within 5 years those predictions were way out – solar production had skyrocketed and costs had fallen rapidly.
There are capacity limits to how fast and how intensely we can roll out renewables. But they are not material ones – they are primarily industrial production chokepoints. The price of the key materials for renewables have held stable by historical standards – most hysteria over shortages is simply industry pumping the price and trying to gain political support. The problems with obtaining lithium, copper, cobalt etc are de minimus compared to the challenges we are facing for more basic materials, like food or clean water/air. The pollution caused by even irresponsible mining of those produces is a rounding error compared to the vast pillage of the early caused by fossil fuels.
People need to get real. We need renewables, we need lots and lots of them and we need them fast. The technology is there, the materials are there and the costs are reasonable. And yes, we need to reduce energy use massively. But the reality is that every single realistic proposal for reducing energy use involves increasing electricity production. Its that simple – we need more electricity so we can electrify transport, home heating, air con, food production. There is no other way.
https://www.c2es.org/content/renewable-energy/
A <3% increase in a decade is hardly dispositive. And there are widespread claims there is not remotely enough copper, for starters. I should buy Freeport McMoran stock.
Second, if anything there has been backsliding in the UK and EU due to massive consumer energy subsidies and increased use of coal and LNG:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/03/booming-lng-industry-could-be-as-bad-for-climate-as-coal-experts-warn
Aside from typically not counting the full environmental costs (building of carriers, port facilities, cooling), they also usually omit methane. And they never allow for the damage to and pollution of aquifers, increased earthquakes (see Oklahoma for a clear-cut example). the use of fracking sand (which contra your claims is a scarce item) and water for fracking.
Are the costs reasonable? Are you including the MIC overhead as well as the financial entrapment of so many resource rich but barely developing countries? As well as the lack of viable competition against China when it comes to a better deal and better development trajectory for all these resource rich polities?
And what all this build up of MIC entails on the long run…
Is anybody using electrical energy to mine those minerals?
Also, I see many electric cars, but I have yet to see an electric tractor or combine.
I believe such things are possible, but not at current commodity pricing.
A quick duckduckgo search gives many current/future trucks and tractors.
When sodium batteries with their low cost get here this year, it will be a no brainer to go electric. Also, sodium will allay Yves fears for damage to the environment.
1. https://www.agriculture.com/machinery/tractors/an-electric-tractor-may-be-in-your-future
2. https://www.monarchtractor.com/homepage
3. https://www.deere.com/en/electric-equipment/
4. https://ratings.freightwaves.com/upcoming-electric-semi-truck-companies/
5. https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a36506185/electric-big-rig-semi-trucks/
6. https://www.tesla.com/semi
I would be very interested in reading an article about the sodium batteries available this year. Do you have a link?
There are other ways, but they involve mass die-offs — deliberate or otherwise. I point this out merely as a matter of fact, not as an expression of preference
Why is it so important to “preserve current lifestyles”? Current lifestyles are wasteful and extravagant. We could go back to earlier lifestyles and be happier, IMHO.
I agree Chas. Most people living in the west live way too large. I was reminded of that when living out of a bike trailer for five months.
I have always liked the axiom, “Live Simply so that others can Simply Live”. It means sharing resources on all levels and curbing greed is the first step.
People will not accept less. You will not get cooperation. And that’s before emerging economies arguing they have a right to first world lifestyles.
You can’t pretend that there are serious limits to coercion on this front.
Agreed. But, the people who accept the concept of less – and I mean much much less – have the best chances to survive. And I do mean survive. For a long time it will be “who can/will survive?” Funny this subject. Just this a.m I went to the WC to complete my morning …. anyway. I remember the stat. that until about 1920 only apx. 20% of households in the US had an indoor toilet. How did humans survive before 1920?? Think of all the porcelain, plastic, copper pipe, glass, etc. that goes into just one bathroom. Many Americans have 2 or 3 of them. That’s a lot of sheet, too much in fact. About half the time, we use our composting toilet. Easy peasy and feeds the trees.
Why would you want to survive the collapse?
Endless pestilence, disease and famine will make the living will envy the dead.
I tend to wonder just who is living these wasteful and extravagant lifestyles as even many Americans are having real problems paying for anything like an apartment. Any apartment. Or food.
I could write a multi volume book on the shortages, collapsing infrastructure, abuses, and general f—–ry being done to a growing percentage of Americans.
This is why some might have a problem with claims of being “wasteful and extravagant,” not that Americans in general and for almost a century haven’t been wasteful; let’s get the wealthy to tone it down first, working down the money chain, then worry about the peons.
At the very least, people are going to have be giving solid promises on everyone sharing the fun.
Yes. Radical Conservation should be forced to start at the top and be seen to be forced to start at the top.
If it is credibly seen to have been successfully forced against those at the top, then those below the top may accept the same level of forced radical conservation. And so on, rung by rung, down the class ladder, until radical conservation is achieving its climate stabilization or maybe even re-improvement goals.
I tend to wonder just who is living these wasteful and extravagant lifestyles as even many Americans are having real problems paying for anything like an apartment.
The original climate change warrior Al Gore………the reality is our society prefers toy collecting rather living within our means.
Wants override needs.
Yes, I agree. But if we won’t get cooperation on conservation, yet “green energy as a remedy is a fantasy” so we need radical conservation (I agree with this too), what do we do? We need a strategy that can in time lead to a plan…
There is no point in little people being cautious and performing radical conservation while others burn up the furniture like there is no tomorrow.
We will wait until shortages are severe, and we will let prices rise to reflect the real cost of the resource being used up. Water, wood, petroleum. Get a wood lot and a deep well or a home water distillation plant on the shore of a large lake.
Allegedly, the future needs of net-zero electrification (in a world without hydrocarbons) will require more copper over the next 30 years than the combined copper output since the dawn of written history.
And then there is the need for nickel—-and then the more esoteric materials like cobalt and neodymium.
‘allegedly’.
Copper is easily recycled and always has been. So the combined copper output since the dawn of written history is largely still in circulation. Its cumulative.
The biggest user of copper is not electricity, its construction, mostly piping. By far the biggest construction boom in history is in China. And it just ended. This is why copper prices and futures are stable.
I just completly replaced the plumbing and heating systems in my home and maybe used a total of 60 feet of copper (mostly inside the baseboards). Almost everything is PEX pipe now. All the old copper got taken to the metal scrap yard. Not sure what the end life of PEX will be, probably a landfill:(
ski and snowboard bases. now if we can just have some snow….
Oh boy, I did some work at a copper recycling facility once. From a mile away it smells like a million cats have used the same litter box for a million years and nobody every cleaned it. They boil the copper in open cats of ammonia. When I got the ammonia cartridges for my respirator the local supplier said they keep them in stock for that facility but nobody uses them. If you just go to work for a while the ammonia burns away your mucus membrane and you don’t smell it at all. This was then confirmed by the employees at the site, none of whom wore any respiratory protection.
The last debasement of US coinage was in 1982 when the lowly Lincoln went from 95% copper to 97.5% zinc, and lost about 20% of it’s weight.
Curiously, Nickels are actually 75% copper & 25% nickel and that composition is the same as it was since 1866, only differing during WW2. Its a mystery why they didn’t cheapen this coin with 2 important metals in its content.
I’d get rid of both coins being in circulation and save the copper, nickel & zinc for something else.
We’d then go to what is called ‘Swedish Rounding’ as far as prices go, where you round up or down a Dime on the total amount.
Coin clipping can take many forms, typically leading to the same results.
I was told the military PX’s did not use pennies so they went up or down 5 cents. I worked at a produce stand in Pike Place market where we did the same thing. A lot of people complained and said they would turn us in the authorities. The owner would just laugh. I think you are right though; we should do rounding.
Here in Oz we got rid of our 1 and 2 cent coins back in the early 90s due to inflation reducing their value and the price of bronze. Still got a bunch of them around the house for novelty value.
Canada ditched the penny a while back. I don’t believe we ever had tuppence coinage here
Markets only price 18 months out at most. Not even remotely valid evidence.
Plenty of analysts confirm not enough copper for EVs. For instance. from July last year. Notice multiple sources, including EV manufacturers:
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/the-looming-copper-crunch-and-why-recycling-cant-fix-it-11562219
I’m sorry, but this report is a complete misreading of the IEA projections and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the industry. The IEA itself points out that copper is replaceable in most uses. It is the best insulator and conductor, but its not the only one. Aluminium can also be used and frequently is used. This is one reason why demand for copper is so difficult to predict – its a very useful metal, but it is not irreplaceable for most of its uses.
It also ignores the reality that while copper is essential for certain uses, most copper is used in products where it can be swapped out when the price signal is at work. The biggest user of copper worldwide is plumbing, not electrics. The drop in demand in China due to the housing slowdown has been enormous.
As to the specifics of that article, it is making an assumption of the car industry simply swapping over from IC to EV. This is possible, but it is equally likely that the car industry significantly shrinks in the face of climate change. It is only in the US that there is an insistence on 4 tonne trucks to drive kids to work. Much smaller, lighter vehicles are becoming the norm elsewhere and this is likely to accelerate under regulatory pressure.
The copper industry itself doesn’t foresee a major crunch – it points out that the USGS has consistently projected 40 years of reserves since 1950.
I wonder why personal transportation in the form of “cars” doesn’t look to the full range of engineering, as well as shrink the size and get rid of all the tinsel and fooferaw-and-furbelow electronics. I bet a space-frame chassis, like used in dune buggies and race cars especially the ones that churn the dust in Baja, with brushless motors with electric-braking energy recovery on all four wheels, wrapped in a shell of maybe hemp-based skin, could meet the real need for moving people without the king’s horses. That’s to fill in the use case for truly necessary (of course, who decides what that means?) people moving. Beyond the growing fleets of scooters, e-bikes and such. Given that the political will and impending necessity to support recasting the whole political economy around some kind of agreed and demonstrable model of homeostatic sustainability.
Of course we are all born into a death cult these days. Damn little incentive to do more than maximize one’s personal pleasure and reach.
Middle class people in the developing world may not be content with an itty-bitty electric runabout if they witness the Golden Billion driving around in electric SUVs.
And do we really want to see the planet covered to the maximum degree with giant horrific open-pit sores aka copper mines?
I have found the work of Simon Michaux (mining engineer, Geological Survey of Finland) helpful in thinking about mineral resource constraints to the energy transition: personal website
One particularly useful overview document is “The mining of minerals and the limits to growth”.
What about manufacturing capacity? How about EHV transformers, particularly when Ukraine will need hundreds and the green vision thing anticipates 30-50% load growth in the US, where most power transformers are nearing end of life. BTW, Neutron Jack shut down manufacturing capacity in the 80s and Westinghouse immediately followed suit. Maybe China will sell them to us?
Considering the US needs to return to industrial warfare, maybe Lockheed Martin cand take up manufacturing transformers?
“Engineered to serve you, by Boeing LLC.!
Boeing might be a chance, since they won’t need FAA approval for the transformers.
Ukraine uses the Russian load system with different line loads from the West. Western transformers will not work for the Ukraine because the Ukraine uses the Russian system. Everything is sized differently.
Addendum: Even America no longer makes much of it’s own electrical transformer needs. How stupid is that you might ask? Very, very, stupid, like almost everything else in American business today.
Read: https://www.tdworld.com/utility-business/article/21243198/transformative-times-update-on-the-us-transformer-supply-chain
Notice that while this allegation throws around big numbers, it actually doesn’t claim it is impossible. I’m too lazy to find the actual figures, but if we wanted to compare oil output of the last 30 years with the combined oil output since the dawn of written history up to 1990, I don’t think the numbers would be orders of magnitude different (or whatever one is supposed to imagine when presented with such made up comparisons).
Thank you for perfectly expressing an Ad Hominem fallacy: you mention his professional associations then malign his co-writers as climate change deniers, no mention of his arguments. As a bonus, we get an ad Verecundiam fallacy: quote “there are plenty of in depth independent studies around on the issues of energy transition. His name is not on any reputable ones.”
“Wyoming Limiting Child Marriage Sparks Republican Outrage”
2024 headline – ‘Wyoming Limiting First Cousin Marriage Sparks Republican Outrage’
Is it that some of those Republicans believe that old adage of ‘If it is old enough to bleed, it is old enough to breed?’ Inquiring minds wish to know.
For those weird enough to think that a state law which mandates an age of consent or likewise mandates a minimal age for marriage, they can all be forced to watch Keep Sweet, Pray and Obey on Netflix. Child marriage was not the chief point of the series, wait on second thought yes it was the key point. Perverse does not even begin to convey how disgusting it was.
How that supposed prophet, Warren Jeffs, has not been castrated is beyond my comprehension. Added thought on state laws, stopping old men and perverts should be the point.
It’s really an ad hominem attack on the “Evil, Dastardly Republicans.(TM)”
There are plenty of so called “progressives” and or “libertarians” who will gleefully sexually exploit underage Terran humans.
As pointed out just above, this is an issue of perverts and sociopaths. (Yes, the majority of that demographic is comprised of “dirty old men,” but I have met more than a few “dirty old women” as well.) Those groups know no limits, nor associational restrictions.
The wolves like to dress as sheep, which is why so many politicos, preachers, teachers, and others are in such positions. “I can be a child rapist, look at all the good work I do for them!”
I did the plumbing in several spec houses built by a man who was a Deacon at a mid-sized Evangelical Church in Louisiana. One day his mother calls me up and asks if I would hold off for a week or two on a final bill for the work on one of the houses. If I can help, I replied, I will. It turned out that the builder, an early middle aged man had been caught diddling some of the underage girls in his Sunday School class. The Church itself refused to act on the information. So, the parents of one of the girls went to the police. The man’s Mom needed the extra money to make bail for her son. (You do not want to be locked up in the general population of any American prison on the charge of messing with the Underages, even statutory. [Camp X-ray down in Guantanamo is the exception.]) If I remember correctly, the man eventually had to plead out for statutory rape and did two or three years in prison.
Given the nigh-exclusive Republican composition of the Wyoming legislature (57 of 62 house members, 28 of 30 senators), the very fact that this already cleared the house 36-25 and is seen as having a chance in the Senate indicates that a lot of Republicans aren’t outraged at all.
Is it true that the Wyoming license plate motto reads, “If there’s grass on the pitch…”?
USA accuses Russia of committing crimes against humanity. So says VP Harris on the television news this morning, eastern US.
Meanwhile Dick Cheney lives on. So, whatever I suppose.
This has long since passed the point of hypocrisy, as Nuland recently invoked Kosovo as an example for why Putin should stand trial for the Ukraine war. The very same Kosovo that was part of Putin’s long list of precedents for their SMO. More and more it is taking on the air of spoiled children with fingers in their ears shouting down anyone that dare contradict them.
Nuland is an out and out thug like the worst of the Shrub types, but being a woman, she’s been inured from criticism of why she never enlisted. She doesn’t know how to be careful.
She is the fruit of a poison tree.
Nuland is visibly seething with rage and hatred. That she is in a position of political responsibility and power is a flashing red sign of the current instability and corruption of our political and financial system. This has been vividly demonstrated by our insanely reckless and immoral wholesale sacrifice of Ukrainian life and our craven manipulation of European countries via sanctions to carve up Russia like a side of beef. Sanctions that have done far more harm to Europe than to Russia.
When we descended to torture in Iraq, I knew our so called democracy was in serious trouble, but it is only now that one can even begin to see just how rotten and literally insane our political leaders, if not the whole military and political system of our country has become.
I’m not sure what she believes her audience is. Though I wonder if Macron’s line about the Global South and double standards is in response to whatever Harris is spewing. Even the vassals know they need to dumb it down for Harris.
USA accuses Russia of committing crimes against humanity.
It’s not like they blew up a pipeline or anything.
In a little over a month from now we will mark the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. It’s worth nothing that none of the architects of this illegal war has ever faced justice at The Hague and that many have become liberal darlings, getting hugs from the likes of Michelle Obama. Hypocrisy is the defining characteristic of the American Empire and the currently ascendant Democratic wing of the Corporate-War Profiteering Party.
So many examples of pols playing with house money, where they get subsidized lives and our houses are the collateral for their whims. Statesmen used to understand more history older than the last news cycle.
They understood only that they needed to be quiet about their waste of other people’s time, effort, and mind on which the very fate of the concept of the state rests. Like most if not all games, it has no inherent need or warrant to exist.
This is a rather interesting string of events that should be filed under Who’s Your Daddy?
After announcing Thursday he had requested federal help in connection with the East Palestine train derailment, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine also revealed that FEMA had said the state did not qualify for their assistance.
Friday former President Trump announced his intent to visit East Palestine next Wednesday.
In a joint statement released Friday night, DeWine and FEMA Regional Administrator Thomas C. Sivak said the agency would deploy a Regional Incident Management Assistance Team (IMAT) to Columbiana County starting Saturday, along with a senior response official. The workers will “support ongoing operations, including incident coordination and ongoing assessments of potential long-term recovery needs.”
You reckon that that Regional Incident Management Assistance Team will be bringing their own water? But if I were them, I would forget packing any fishing gear for those days off. Not a good idea that. In fact, I would be always wearing a heavy-duty mask and if asked, said that it was for Covid prevention.
Trump the chameleon? He says he wants to end the war in Ukraine, is defending SS and Medicare, and now making a presidential style visit to a disaster area. What if Trump reinvents himself as a genuine populist and not merely the loudmouth kind?
Of course he did a similar thing in his first campaign and then hired the goon squad once in power. But if the public were desperate to escape from the duopoly in 2016 they are even more desperate now. This could get interesting.
yeah.
like Lambert sez:’ they keep asking for my vote’.
came across this in my early morning rambling:
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/02/09/gaetz-introduces-ukraine-fatigue-resolution/
list of co-sponsors: Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar R-Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Mary Miller (R-Ill.), Barry Moore (R-Ala.), Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), and Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.)
i yelled at Team Blue for decades to give me something to vote FOR(rather than merely against those evil goptea-ers)…and they just double, tripled, and quadrupled down(see: current population of Foggy Bottom).
and people(sic) like Hawley and Rubio advocating for Labor?
sheesh.
sad.
Too many sinecures to protect, and too many lackeys following lobbyist and donor demands, on both sides of that wannabe hallowed aisle.
Ath
I keep saying, for me, it is a tough, tough thing, being raised dem, and coming of age in the 60’s, that the dems are not in fact a peace party. And to learn that the good ol USA is not a peace loving country…
So true on the dems. I grew up in a quite liberal college town in the 60’s/70’s and the lost of faith in Peace in our time is depressing. As well as the disconnect between righteousness for warmongering in USA. I am looking into trying to get long term residency in Costa Rica when my 91 years old mother passes, a country that has not had a military in 70 years.
Labor ≠ laborers. They’re advocating for a sustainable wage relation, that’s all. The wage relation has never been in the interest of the humans doing the work, regardless of any supposed class subjectivity posited by political Marxism.
……..pretty sure any minute now the Squad will show their support for this bill.
Carolinian
I agree. The question is: Did Trump learn anything…about hiring? There has to be some correspondence between what Trump says and who he hires – you can’t say you will negotiate Ukraine and then appoint another Bolton.
Did Trump not know or not care in his first term…and does he now?
Trump did one thing that was very good – he made the repubs acknowledge what a fiasco Iraq was. If Trump merely offers an alternative to Rah Rah Ukraine, his running for president will provide a valudable public service – I mean, what other significant presidential candidate will be against Ukraine involvment???
They’re preparing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schedule_F_appointment
If the Republicans become the party of peace, then I will vote Republican for the first time in my life. That holds for Trump in 2024. Seems highly unlikely but it’s possible.
Unfortunately, a President Trump 2.0 would just be a trojan horse full of the same old Republicans we already know.
The obvious rejoinder would be: a President Biden or a President Harris or a President Buttigieg would just be a trojan horse full of the same New Democrats we already know.
” Keep despair alive” . . .
The dems have tired of being the lesser evil,
they’ve had an awakening of sorts…
So they’ve decided to become the greater evil? So as to throw every election to the Republicans over and over until the whole United States becomes one big East Palestine chemical train-bomb derailment site? Which they will then blame on the Republicans so they can offer their greater evil selves as our saviors?
If I have understood correctly the implications of your comment, I cannot say that your implications are wrong.
” Keep despair alive” . . .
If we ever want to negotiate in Ukraine Blinken, Nuland, and Sullivan all have to go. Probably a lot of their subordinates, too.
Credit where credit is due, Trump did a great job negotiating the new Air Force One deal with Boeing where they disclosed that they will lose couple of billion on 2 aircraft.
In the meantime plenty of MIC work pending(don’t call it state subsidies on this side of the Atlantic) that will more than offset these losses.
Alas, I’m afraid Trump is no FDR; He’d have to be stricken with polio, yet even then he might believe he is God.
Re: Trump: My thesis is that Trump made a great mistake at the start of Covid, that early winter of 2020 when we all realized Something Was Happening. If he had declared, in the interest of the nation and because of the emergency, that Medicare would become available to everyone on a “temporary basis” in order to help solve the public health challenge, he would still be President today because, as we all know, that “:temporary” category would have become “permanent.”
Now fast forward to today. I think Carolinian is right, Trump could easily become the ultimate populist, declare that SS and Medicare be untouchable, the Ukraine War needs to end now….the only problem is whether or not he will be willing to go the next step and demand a reversal of his tax cuts and an increase in the SS income limit as a way to pay for all this – ie betray his own class and the Republican Party in order to regain power. Roosevelt sort of did this in 1932 (betray his own class) …
I don;t think Trump has the discipline to pull a total populist change, but it was that populist hint that delivered for him in 2016. Don’t forget that a lot of the MAGAs were Bernie supporters before Bernie was thrown under the bus. The streak of populism is deep, and entirely unanswered, except for the rage.
Trump could go to this rail disaster site and totally expose how Biden’s administration is downplaying everything for Norfolk Southern, demand answers, get legitimate air time……
I’ll say this for the guy, he hangs around, and around, and he is a fighter especially when cornered. I think he might just be able to pull off a total populist recreation, only because there is such a gaping hole there of anyone actually speaking to those needs….of course to do this he would need to drop all the cultural stuff and deal with actual policies and steps to improve things…..
This could get Very interesting…..
Trump should get a nice welcome in East Palestine. I read yesterday 71% of the county voted for him.
Personally, I hope he goes there and exposes every bad actor (plenty) he can find, and scream into every microphone they stick under his nose. Of course the media would be silent about anything bad. It seems all they want to do is protect the administration and Norfolk Southern.
He’s a giant bag of hot air, a charlatan, a huckster, and all star level creep – but his visit might be a good thing for the people of East Palestine. At least I hope so.
One of their town officials had the right idea – change their name to Kiev – and the money will come rolling in.
FJB, Mayo Pete, and Mike DeWine as well (I’m sure the people of EP feel the same).
I wonder when Al Sharpton will show up there. Oh, i forgot that the population is mostly white if poor.
And Al never paid the judgment entered against him for defaming that New York prosecutor in the Tawana Brawley chiaroscuro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tawana_Brawley_rape_allegations
So many public figures with dirty skirts and feet of clay.
If that Moral Monday Minister from North Carolina were to show up, he might help get an interstate sort of Moral Monday Movement up and running.
” Cancer juice does not know what race you are when you drink it.”
” Cancer gas does not know what race you are when you breathe it.”
Yes.
I doubt he’d raise any tax that significantly affected him, but he doesn’t need to.
Taking the Medicare/ss protector mantle, and maybe just supporting the medicare age of 55 0r even 60, would imo be enough… remember Hillary and I think Biden too suggested lowering the age, so dems should support, right?
And both his base and indies would love tulsi as veep, no matter the gop establishment might not. Imagine a tulsi/Harris debate… didn’t they have one in 2020?… but how can Biden dump her? He might be stuck. If this daydream comes to pass tulsi might be well positioned in 2028.
Trump seems likely to be more and more in the news, not just fox but msm, they love to cover him. He’s an idiot, but has a surprisingly good feel for public pulse, far better than most pols.
He could play it. But he wouldn’t mean it. Just like he never meant it the last time.
But even by just playing it, he could have a beneficially de-stabilizing and dis-ordering effect on the Political-Industrial Complex. Perhaps he could blow a hole in the wall big enough for someone like Tulsi Gabbard to run through.
Some combination ticket of Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich running an independent campaign in just enough states to prevent either BiParty from winning an Electoral College majority would allow some political ice floes to start grinding around. And if a Gabbard-Kucinich ticket could actually win those just-enough states needed to deny either BiParty ticket an electoral majority, the Gabbard-Kucinich ticket could then promise political revenge and career suicide-homicide to any Congressional Representative from those particular States who failed to vote for the Gabbard-Kucinich ticket in the House.
Political pipe dreaming I know.
Trump’s got an open goal here !
Especially when Buttigieg responds to the derailment and spread of toxic compounds by burnoff with:
“We get 1000 cases of derailments per year”
What sort of answer is that ? I hope it sticks to him the way “deplorables” stuck to Hilary Clinton
He “hired the goon squad once in power.” I agree with that. It is obvious with John Bolton, but William Barr is also questionable. Whitney Webb’s new book One Nation Under Blackmail vol. 1, p.350 has a reference to Barr that is sourced from Terry Reed & John Cummings’ book of 1994 Compromised – Clinton Bush and the CIA p.294, where Barr tells Clinton that slick Willy is William Casey’s “fair-haired boy” and if he “didn’t (family blog) up and do something stupid, you’re no.1 on the short list… We are the new covenant.” This conversation was witnessed by Terry Reed, who got involved with ‘Air America’ in Vietnam and continued his service after the war end with the CIA.
Whitney Webb’s two volumes are arranged chronologically and volume 1 ends with Robert Maxwell and the Reagan and Clinton secrets. Volume 2 of Whitney’s book of the same title starts with Jeffery Epstein and moves forward through his rise and fall.
Re: Deputy Chairman of Russian Assembly debates French journalists war hawks. YouTube (Andrei Martyanov). In French with subtitles (Tolstoy, yes descended from the Tolstoy, is fluent).
Not only fluent, he speaks slowly enough to be understood, while the subtitles are good. If you studied French, this video can give you the illusion that you really understand it.
Actually the subtitles are not that good; I wonder whether they have been automatically generated through speech-to-text software (e.g. cent-quatre-vingt-mille in French is transcribed not as 180000 but literally as 104 20000; and plenty of other odd incongruities).
Yes a lot of the numbers are messed up, but as I say, if you are listening, it all makes sense.
Yes, I’m pretty sure the subtitles were machine-generated, because they contain silly errors like mistaking “formation” (which means “training”) for “information.” I would guess you can get about 80% of the sense. And yes, Tolstoy speaks excellent French.
In his grandfather (great grandfather?)’s day, the Russian aristos all spoke French together, if War and Peace and Anna K are representative.
Some French ambassador has recently even gone as far as to claim Pushkin was French.
https://www.rt.com/russia/571669-pushkin-african-french-car/
Tolstoy himself was born 8 years after the ending of War and Peace, so it may not reflect his era as much as that before him. Due to Napoleons invasion the high society in Russia did distance itself somewhat from the French culture, which I believe is reflected in the novel, too.
I do know that for example French ballet went completely out of fashion in Russia, and the choreographers and composers went on a spree to find “Russian” themes for their work. It might even be the first time folk culture surrounding the upper classes was accepted as art.
“…they contain silly errors like mistaking ‘formation’ (which means ‘training’) for ‘information.’”
That’s something that transformers in natural language processing (as in, for example, ChatGPT) could probably handle quite well, in either cleaning up the audio transcript or, even better, creating a more accurate audio transcript in the first place. The automated transcripts generated for YouTube videos are (from what I can see) pretty unreliable—incorporating the technology with these latest NLP transformer models to create them would probably be a major advance.
What struck me is the inability of the French journalists to comprehend in any way that their double standards won’t and can’t work on a powerful nation that can defend itself, and thus their rage over the fact they can’t Serbia or Kosoavo Russia.
Sadly, I’m impressed by this and I should not be. This kind of open debate on the airwaves is currently unthinkable in the US or Canada but should be the norm in any society calling itself free. In this sense the French media seem more free, even if they are war hawks.
Tolstoy was wonderful. A very clear understanding of the reality on the ground in UKR. At first I thought , Well it is obvious why Putin did not trust Macron. But by the end of the interview it was clear that the French press were less kamakazi neofascists than concerned Europeans that WW3 was upon them. Tolstoy was a wonderfully informed, truthful and articulate guest. More please.
“How to Turn the Lights Back on After a Blackout”
‘Restarting the grid after a total failure is trickier than it may appear’
Can you imagine what it would be like in the Ukraine? After each raid that knocks the power off, you would have to do a survey and find out with sections of the Ukrainian power grid have been turned to ash which would effect how that section of the grid would be restarted made more complicated if some sub-stations could come back online later. If the Ukraine were smart, they should make damn sure that those electrical workers were off-limits to recruiters and were not press-ganged as Leopard tank drivers. Then again, I have seen those “recruiters” go to the extent of waiting down the bottom of a ski slope to nab skiers coming downhill.
Do wonder if GE et al has already drawn up projections of how much they can profit from “rebuilding” whatever slice of Ukraine that is left over for USA once it all settles down.
My gut is the shriller rhetoric is they can’t get companies to line up anymore. There is too much uncertainty. Azov types would be the ones responding to emergencies caused by Azov, not the 101st and A10’s.
It’s likely Amerika will spend more $$$$$$$$$$$$$$ on rebuilding ukraine than it has on rebuilding Amerika. Freedumb
I guess the last 20 years taught Wall Street how lucrative “disaster” capitalism can be.
First government pay to have all the weapons etc made, then it pays to rebuild the warzone afterwards, and it all gets funneled into the tax haven accounts of the shareholders and their lackeys in congress.
jo6pac
what is always amazing to me, is these neolibs who believe so, sooooo much in the market, want the US government to gurantee profits…whoops, I mean investments in Ukraine. AND they never ask how much lower the deficit would be if we didn’t invest in Ukraine.
And I just don’t understand why Ukrainians who don’t have housing can’t live on the street, like market loving Americans do…And why can’t the Ukrainians fund rebuilding with tax cuts???
It’s not just Ukraine. Here in Hawaii each island has its own grid and if it goes down completely can take a long time to restart. Several years ago on Oahu the grid went down during an earthquake (a computer that was controlling a large power plant interpreted the shaking as an equipment failure and shut it down, pulling everything else down with it). It took some 12 hours to restart even though there was no actual damage.
Formatting problem for the link on VR telemetry.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/18/vr_telemetry_identity
Interesting that all the tech bros immediately think that the solution is to mask or otherwise obscure VR telemetry data – i.e., further complicate it — rather than simply either not collecting it, or throwing it away after it’s immediate use (which I assume relates to being able to locate and draw the object in space). It used to be that parsimony and efficiency were fairly sacred tenets of computing and data management.
fixed it. Thanks!
As a “tech bro”* I can comment that the issue here is not necessarily as serious as it is presented. What happened here was that somebody already in the possession of terabytes of biometric data was able to build a classifier that can tell people apart based on that data. That is all. It doesn’t identify people, it just can tell this data is from a different person than that data.
If the datasets come with other identifying information, that yes, this can be used to identify the player. By somebody who already knows who then player is – the one who attached the identifying information.
Should that still be a problem, there are multiple different ways to remove the features of the data that classifiers can use to tell players apart. Three of the latest are Symbol Aggregation Approximation(SAX), Symbol Fourier Approximation(SFA) and Symbol Fractional Fourier Approximation(SFFA). All these manipulate the time series (location, timestamp) in a way that removes most if not all individual variation while they retain enough information to be “good data”.
They are also computationally cheap enough for the manipulation to happen in the device collecting the information, which means that the identifying data will never be collected (or stored) and the collected data is actually simpler (smoother/compressed) than the original.
Already in 2014 there was a smartphone app (CrossCheck) that used multiple sensors and communication logs to follow the users state of schizophrenia. With the purpose of being able to intervene before patient “deviates from the norm”. In other words, relapses.
* I’ve consulted a startup aiming to do “edge computing anonymization” a.k.a. obscuring telemetry data.
That bit about Patrick Armstrong is stunning and infuriating. I want to learn as much about this as possible. If anyone has any links , post them here.
As a Canadian I am outraged. I’m often outraged by things I read but this situation has a real immediacy for me.
Patrick Armstrong posted the following back in March-
‘Hiatus
‘I am going to pause this site and my other activities for a while until I see how things break out.
What was a post-retirement hobby – a continuation of my job of trying to figure out what was happening in Russia – has now led to accusations of being a Russian agent of disinformation.
Deviation from the approved narrative is to risk, at best, being accused of sowing disinformation and, at worst, of treason.
I’m too old for this.’
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2022/03/20/hiatus/
At the time I had assumed that it was because of the usual sort of ratbags and media accomplices but I never imagined for a moment that it would be the Canadian government itself that would be threatening him. I guess that this is how our leaders want it to be for them.
Yeah I remember reading that. I had no idea it was overtly agents of the state. Jesus f-ing christ.
I’m sorely tempted to figure out what he did to get on the wrong side of the authorities and then endeavor to do so myself. I do have self destructive tendencies after all.
Don’t destroy yourself. Destroy ‘them.’
I’m with Conan the Cimmerian on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKRB7bzgAsU
ambrit
i say this speech at every democratic nomination. my party stopped inviting me eventually
I hear you. Now, in political circles at least, it’s a case of; “Chew slowly. It’s the good stuff!”
I suppose that you heard that the Canadian government found itself innocent of abusing its emergency powers over those protestors-
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64683747
We get the same sort of thing here in Oz. It seems to be a trend where western countries get more and more authoritarian over the years by slipping in a law here and a change of regulations there. All working to some sort of long term plan I would say.
13 Terrifying Real Robots
https://www.ranker.com/list/scary-boston-dynamics-robots/eric-vega
It is very bothersome because “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a socialist…” immediately comes to mind. I share your anger and disillusionment.
Before his “hiatus” he wrote about being visited by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) about his work appearing on the Strategic Culture Foundation’s site.
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2021/12/16/csis-comes-to-call/
I do think there was more to it than this visit, but I think this incident made an impression.
Does anyone know why the Saker has shut down? I didn’t go there all that much because of the anti-semitism, but now it’s gone.
He said it was because the US and Russia will be at war and as a guest in the US, he said from the outset he would no longer publish if that happened.
So he has decided that we have reached that point? Ugh. Or did he receive a visit?
Yes, I do remember him writing that. Thank you Madame Yves for your reply.
Prior to that post he had another post describing how a CSIS guy paid him a visit… all very polite, of course…
To start with, Russia is considered an enemy of Canada and the US, even if we are not at war yet. Does not matter if you agree or disagree. Remember the official position of our Governments is Russia is committing war crimes.
In the US providing aid and comfort to the enemy is treason, not quite as clear in Canada.
While you are jailed for an indictable offence (felony in the US) , not just convicted, but jailed like waiting for extradition, your pension is suspended.
My guess is they threatened to arrest him, possibly with extradition to the US.
After we (alledgedly) kidnapped a Chinese citizen for the US anything is possible. I use alledgedly because I do not to be seen to be providing comfort to our other enemy.
For legal purposes, how do you even know who the “enemy” is? If there’s no declaration of war or some other authorization for military force, how is “enemy” different from “somebody the government doesn’t like”?
I wonder how one would construe as treasonous the reiteration of facts described by OECD (Ukraine bombing Donbas prior to Russian invasion) or statements by Merkel, Hollande, Poroshenko, Zellensky, on the Ukrainian and western duplicity, or similar statements by US former and present officials, all indicating that the Western/Ukraine combine were on the way to eliminate the separatists from Donbas and even to retake Crimea.
Or that Russia had much more patience with Ukraine in its treatment of Donbas, than the west and US had with Serbia in its defense of sovereignty in Kosovo. These are all facts available in the west and produced by the west and Ukraine. How is it treason to posit the very valid hypothesis, substantiated by western produced information, that Russian operation in Ukraine was absolutely provoked? While the US war on Iraq and Afghanistan were not. If justice is to be credible it needs to apply the same way to everyone.
I wonder how a judge sentence justification would sound like….
‘I love Clare Daly but must note she seems to be the patron saint of lost causes’
I think that the only other EU Parliamentarian to talk like this was this young, German woman from I believe the Left that I saw recently. And that is not a good sign that. The European Parliament is made up of 705 Members which is much larger than I thought. But they, as a united block, are pro-war and pro braking up the Russian Federation. So a body that large and it has been almost completely captured by the neocons and has been for years. That is a helluva achievement that.
As i understand it, the EU parliament is a rubber stamping machine. it’s only job is to yay or nay whatever they get passed on from the commission. As such, for all the speeches etc during sessions, in the end they can do little to change course.
Probably does not help that Germany, France and Italy hold 30% of a seats (they are distributed by population size though).
Sarah Wagenicht. Articulate and unflappable when challenged.
Actually Sahra Wagenknecht.
“Wagenicht” is an amusing autocorrector glitch meaning “does not dare” (“Wagenknecht” itself means something like “carriage attendant”).
Not in this case Sarah Wagenicht. Have not heard the name of that woman speaking before but she was pretty articulate.
Perhaps you mean Özlem Demirel, a German left-wing Europarlamentarian and one of the few daring to oppose arming Ukraine to keep the war going.
I disagree with the Ars report on psychedelics and anti-depressants. If you start an SSRI, especially at a relatively high dose the “adjustment” time they talk about is absolutely reminiscent of the beginning of a trip or a very light dose. And if you smoke some weed you can accentuate that effect just like if you’re on the way up during a trip. You get used to it just like you’ll get used to micro dosing.
I tried to discuss this with a psychiatrist who prescribed the SSRI to me once and got dismissed, so I looked it up and learned (20 years ago) that it’s the same receptors. While I’m an experienced psychedelic user I never tested the theory by “over dosing” SSRIs to see if you can get more than the mild feeling of “this is different” and a few tracers or oddness in peripheral vision. I kind of assume that a real SSRI trip would be unpleasant.
I was put on Prozac for a short while back in the 1980s. That SSRI was notorious for ‘zombifyng’ the individual. Such was my experience and I soon stopped using it. (I decided I’d rather be ‘depressed’ and present than ‘undepressed’ and lost in the ether all of the time.)
My strictly unscientific theory is that SSRIs turn something off in your brain while psychedelics turn something on. (No pun intended.) While both classes of drug effect the same brain systems, the manner of effect must be different. As is always the case, more study is required. If only we could have seen those MK Ultra files that were destroyed in the 1970s.
The original: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hearings/95mkultra.pdf
I’ve been on Zoloft a few times. I don’t disagree with you at all and I don’t take them now for the same reasons. Very few people take relatively large doses of psychedelics long term so it’s hard to judge how those would affect us in that scenario.
I don’t mean to argue that the end effects are the same either, especially at different dosages and over long periods of usage. I think psychedelics are great (though I haven’t used them in years and years) and SSRIs not so great (and prescribed without doctors really knowing how and if they work as intended).
Fascinating thing the mind. I favoured psilocybin mushrooms as a ‘milder’ and less physically stressful experience. The experience of the ineffable presence of G– was amazing. I can see why it in particular is being studied as an anti-depressive.
LSD 25 I found to be a much more dangerous beast. I can understand why it was used in guided psychiatric sessions. All the ‘Native’ traditions where psychedelics are used in rituals I have read of stressed the utility of having a shaman or ‘guide’ involved to moderate the risks. As someone from Peru we knew years ago said when the subject of the recreational use of the coca leaf and it’s byproducts came up in conversation, real natives who used coca leaves for energy at altitude would not understand the concept of recreational drug use. To them, the drug was a tool, not a toy.
My experience with Prozac was as a low status patient. The aim of the prescribers looked suspiciously like chemical warehousing. Even today, I usually can spot the long term SSRI users.
Stay safe, and sane.
Fascinating read on some of this from the early 90’s: DMT is quite a different molecule than LSD or Mescaline or that of various mushrooms. And our bodies can and do produce it at three distinct moments from conception to death. Great, fascinating book.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51654.DMT
False. DMT is the backbone of an entire class of psychedelics. Psilocin is 4-hydroxy DMT, which is DMT plus one oxygen atom at the 4 position. Psilocybin is psilocin with a phosphate insinuated in the 4 position and an extra hydrogen on the amine. Bufotenine, found among toads and toadstools alike, is 5-hydroxy DMT. Peer at the structure of LSD for a moment, and a tryptamine structure will reveal itself. (It’s that potent!)
On the other hand, mescaline is a phenethylamine, in the same genus as MDMA, meth, and the infamous DOM/STP of the 1960s.
Alexander Shulgin wrote a, if not the book, on each class of substance, half narrative, half academic. The second halves are available on Erowid, under the names Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved and Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved.
https://giphy.com/gifs/teamcoco-glasses-nerd-3ohzdTEcKJqFZm8swg
Wow, what in the world is DOM/STP, and where can i get some?
2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine (Erowid link) was all over the Haight in 1967. Reports claim great effectiveness at relaxing knots in the mind, but it came on slowly enough to encourage the inexperienced to overdose.
Yes. The Vaults of Erowid is an invaluable resource for the ‘experimentally’ inclined. I believe that it is housed on a server in Germany. Make of that what you will.
Currently they appear to be served from a collocation center near Hunters Point in San Francisco, which is relatively innocuous, and not a place NSA can look into without extra paperwork. Haight St. is on the other side of Market Avenue, for what that’s worth.
I wonder where it is in relation to the old Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic? That was where some of the MK Ultra medical experimenters ‘did their thing,’ and where, coincidentally?, Charles Manson and his Family hung out for a year before becoming Hippydom’s Avenging Angels. The two groups knew each other well.
Also, when has the NSA or any other American “Intelligence” entity ever asked permission to peek?
From what I have been reading, San Francisco in it’s entirety is now “on the wrong side of the tracks.”
Wow, who has the time and a safe place to do something like that which lasts over 20 hours!
Sounds like the perfect thing for the authorities to drop in a troublemakers drink, before carting them off for a spot of protective psychiatric internment (a la Bart Sibrel)!
Dr Seuss
They’ve temporarily fixed the 3 broken stretches of the Generals Highway where flooding met fire scarred foothills & mountains in Sequoia NP, and you can now drive to the Giant Forest so a quorum of us are snowshoeing up to Crescent Meadow for lunch, and with about 5 feet of snow on the ground something magical happens in that all low lying groundcover plants are nowhere to be seen, and the red of the Giant Sequoias is much accentuated by the white as the driven snow carpet from which they poke their considerable necks out.
How heat pumps of the 1800s are becoming the technology of the future Yale Climate Connection
Now the world faces yet another reckoning over energy supplies. When Russia, one of the world’s biggest sources of natural gas, invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the price of gas soared — which in turn shoved heat pumps into the spotlight because with few exceptions they run on electricity, not gas. The same month, environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote a widely shared blog post titled “Heat pumps for peace and freedom” in which, referring to the Russian president, he argued that the U.S. could “peacefully punch Putin in the kidneys” by rolling out heat pumps on a massive scale while lowering Americans’ dependence on fossil fuels.
===============================================
So I’m reading the article because my HVAC, a dual electric cooling, natural gas heating device, was about to go kaput. So because it would be months before it could be replaced with an equivalent unit (I guess supply chain disruption???) I broke down and got a heat pump. I had a heat pump when I lived outside of Washington DC in the 90’s and that did not work out well at all. Hopefully, in warmer CA it will work out (cold air is blowing on me now as it obviously is in the defrost cycle…). My heating bill was astronomical, and I wear a sweater and long johns….there have been some HUGE increases here in CA for gas utilities.
BUT, going through the article, I find the portion I posted above. This is how conventional wisdom turns misinformation into fact….repeated endlessly in articles that ostensibly have nothing to do with foreign affairs…
Heat pumps are perfect for southern California (don’t know how cold it gets in the valley); Minnesota, no way.
And with most home appliances—heat pumps are only as good as its cheapest component. And surprise, while an furnace’s reliability/fixability is idiot-proof, woe to the home owner who gets a heat pump that fails prematurely.
Repair becomes very expensive when stuff is buried in or below concrete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Col.lector_terra_radiant.JPG
If I was installing a heat pump with cold point coils beneath the structure, I’d make sure that it was accessible.
I have never had one, but some utilities, usually REA coops, here in the upper Midwest offer, or partner with contractors, ground source heat pumps with oil or propane fired boiler or furnace back up that kicks in if the GSHP can’t keep up during the coldest weather. The coops claim it’s the lowest cost HVAC solution if you live beyond the gas mains.
Where I live, this is still not common practice but more an more houses are installing combined solar modules with air-air/air-water reversible heat pumps producing heat and hot water plus air conditioning in summer. The cases I know it works great and saves a lot, specially in summer cooling. The water-heating units of heat pumps are improving and now they are starting to be used in industrial applications with better coefficients of performance than residential units. Problem is the upfront costs which are about 3 times for of the heat pump systems compared with gas boilers though with time that extra cost is fully amortised. The larger the house the faster the amortisation.
IMO, the gas/diesel boilers can and should be forbidden in new residential buildings by the building code in Spain permitting only centralized heat-pumps with FV support. The technology exists and works great it is only inertia and more inertia what makes us go on with the ugly stuff.
Tangentially related dissertation, which Lambert might find most interesting: Ventilating the empire: environmental machines in the British Atlantic world, 1700-1850
Bill McKibben clearly grasps John Boyd’s dictum: “Don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it.” Too bad he isn’t selling “socialist” solutions like district heating, where combustion and heat extraction could be performed more completely through small-scale centralization.
‘Average 401(k) balances dropped 20% in 2022 – despite 39% of Americans increasing their contributions – as stocks suffered one of the worst years ever and inflation soared. – Daily Mail.’
Retirement accounts should come with a warning for longtime savers. ‘Don’t look at your account balance until the economy improves, maybe next year or the one after that. You’ll be sorry if you do!’ It’s gut wrenching. I looked anyway on Wednesday, divided by 20 years, divided again by 12 months. Our accounts have seen the return of about half of last year’s loss.
The warning on a balance of $112K… ‘Don’t look at your account balance. You’re already far behind on what you’ll need to retire. Live on half of what you make and sign over the rest to trying to catch up until the day when you can no longer get out of bed to go to work. It may take decades.’ It’s gut wrenching and in truth there’s no catching up. If you don’t start early and the Fates don’t smile on you, you’re screwed.
I have known a few couples now who couldn’t trust the market and were short on time, who put their spare cash into real estate they manage themselves, and come retirement will be okay. They have a steady income stream and are building equity. We discuss here the big players in rentals but there are a lot of small operators out there who are now guaranteed buyers when they cash out. I suspect they’ll all do better than we did, trusting Wall Street.
Trusting Wall Street. Wow. That is a wall hanger! I trust them, 100 percent!!
After a family trip to Disneyland (Anaheim) in the 1990’s, seeing the unflinchingly smiling courteous staff, the immaculate 40 year old pavement that was clean enough to eat dropped food stuffs, and realizing what the staff made as a wage, compered to then CEO Michael Eisner, who literally flew in a small jet to Aspen for lunch a few times a week, and who was to receive over $750M in outright pay, bonus, and stock options that year…
I fully divested from stocks, bonds, ‘Wall Street”, as my small vote-with-pocketbook eschew and espit out.
I took a tax hit, liquidated my 401K, built a small cottage on the back of our lot, and started a short term vacation rental/ guest house. In Europe, they call them ‘Pensions’, for a reason.
If the guest house was vacant, not generating income, leaning on it’s shovel, that was on ME.
That said, I am surprised to hear anyone betting on The Fed, the Dow, and the close interplay of ‘too big to fail’ between the US gubmint and Wall street, that long term the equities investors are not doing well.
I don’t like our system, and it is a bitch and hard work and dishearteningly exhausting trying to buck it, but my sense is those Riding with the Fed are doing OK?
In fact, I’d argue it is the surest thing, akin to smart defense contractors producing in as many States as are possible: We can’t let ‘the markets’ fail… what about Great Aunt Minnie’s pension account?
Legit concern, but it simply entrenches the f*#ckery that vexes so much in our lives.
And speaking of market distortions… In the 1990’s we were one of three short-term furnished rentals in the core of town. After the advent of VRBO and Air B N B, there were 129 short term rentals within 2 miles of ours. We converted the rental to longer-term workforce housing, which is in acutely short supply.
Que sera, sera…
S&P total return since 2020:
Year Total Return
2023 6.50
2022 -18.11
2021 28.71
2020 18.40
Anyone investing money Jan 1 2020, has had a decent return this decade. Total return this decade is roughly 1/3 or 9% annualized. Throw out 2020 and you get 6%. A rather spectacular 2021 return was dampened by reversals in 2022, but the two year combined was still a modest positive (over 2% annualized).
During a period that saw a catastrophic pandemic, a troubled presidential election, a European war, post pandemic inflation, alarming Fed tightening etc.
Cognitive biases likely lead people to see 2021 results as somehow deserved or justified, while 2022 was an unexpected tragedy. But I see a problem in anchoring on calendar year results and high water marks.
The volatility no doubt hurt people who got the timing wrong. However, anyone that was overly surprised was poorly informed. In other words, I’m sure the reporters found people who feel like victims, but it all seemed pretty normal to me.
“At start of Congressional session, Tibet-China legislation reintroduced”
Probably by summer the Ukrainian war will be coming to an end which can only mean one thing. Time to ramp up hostilities with China. The Democrats may be obsessed with Russia but the Republicans are obsessed with China and they are making their demands known on Capital Hill. And that is why this Tibet-China legislation but that will not be an end to it. There will be the Uyghur-China legislation as well as the Hong Kong-China legislation that will be introduced as well. This is all just laying the groundwork here. The only problem is that the Chinese are not the Russians. By that I mean that they are very patriotic and when attacked by the US will seek to strike back right away. Maybe they will hit back with trade restrictions or some other means but they will not just lay down and take it.
IMO the Wagner ammunition thing is a combination of some frustration with MoD and trolling the Ukrainians. There’s a fairly significant (within the Russian population that follows the conflict closely and has since 2014) group of people who deeply dislike and distrust Russian military leadership. There’s a lot happening right now about how officers from the LDNR militias are being treated during incorporation into the Russian military.
But Prigozhin loves to troll and many of his trolls are deep and require large amounts of set up like the whole thing with the video of the guy who defected, was exchanged back and then sledgehammered… except he wasn’t and then did a video with Prigozhin after all the media hoopla. I suspect that that the ammunition situation is primarily trolling but like a joke that hits because of its truth is also intended to make a point about MoD bureaucracy.
FWIW, Dima at Military Summary just came out with an entirely new theory regarding the Wagner ammunition complaint. Interesting speculations, but not entirely convincing, imo. We’ll see…
Ever notice when a pro sports player, say a kicker…
Misses the game winning field goal-wide right, and his team limps off the gridiron, heads down, and when pressed for a comment the kicker says ‘God just didn’t want it to happen today, I guess.’
Yeah, that never occurs.
Confound that evil wind and Satan pushed my attempt to add 3 points just a bit rightward! I have noticed more players in the college ranks acknowledging their faith and what have you, and not just the Tim Tebow(s) of the supposed amateur ranks. There is a joke among most who play golf, that a fortunate bounce of an offline shot off a tree is attributed to “clean living.”
Then again, invoking the deity happens a lot. In fact, after a playoff performance for the ages in the old Boston Garden Larry Bird once said of Michael Jordan “we just witnessed God playing ball, that wasn’t a human.” Jordan rang up 63 points in that 1986 game, the Bulls eventually losing the series to the still mighty Celtics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO5Y1OuQIxo
Dropkick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life
End over end, neither left, nor the right
Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights …
I’ve got the will Lord if you got the toe
The Celtics won the game too.
John Kasay, longtime kicker for the Carolina Panthers, once actually did say something like ‘It wasn’t part of God’s plan’ after missing a game-deciding kick during the team’s brutal 1998 season. The christian people of the Carolinas did not appreciate his candor.
Regarding pilots transferring from fighter to another, I don’t really want to say Scott Ritter is wrong, but from personal communication with pilots I used to know (mainly a bunch of air force cadets, but also my cousin and several ww2 veterans, too), the big challenges for a fighter pilot are from propeller plane to a trainer jet, and from trainer jet to a fighter jet.
And that’s because, even if the dynamics of flying are the same for all aircraft, it’s the power output that just puts everything on a new level. Kinda like the difference between VW Beetle and F1 car – they follow the same physics, but the other one is much easier to push out of the envelope where it can be controlled.
Yes, there designers of Soviet and NATO fighter did make different choices in design, but very little of that has to do with the part where the pilot flies “by the seat of their pants”. The choices made deal mostly in what information is presented to the pilot and how, what parts of the engine management are automatic and what the pilot controls, how the plane recovers from pilot error and so on – a trained pilot can learn all that in a few months.
I believe the real question is if Ukraine has enough trained pilots left. Before the war they had less than 100 fighters, and by a conservative count they’ve lost 80% of those. Due to the nature of the missions they fly a loss of the plane unfortunately often means also a loss of the pilot – there’s just no time to eject when your fighter gets hit while going 900 knots at 200 feet.
So let’s assume they may have a dozen or so experienced pilots available for training – they still need to keep flying missions, too, so not all can go at once. Let’s also assume most of those pilots are able to transfer (and do fail or seek asylum or anything), and we end up with a 10 or so F-16s arriving sometimes during the summer.
That’s ten fighters. Way, way, way too few to make any challenge to the Russian dominance in the air (but enough for Russians to learn how to deal with them), so they would still have to fly their missions fast and low, basically negating any possible advantage they might have over the Russian aircraft and still keep losing pilots (and planes) at the same rate as now. They will run out of trained pilots way before they can train new pilots.
He is wrong. All former members of Warsaw Pact, which joined NATO, transitioned from Soviet jets to western ones. It didn’t require retiring old pilots and training the young ones from the scratch. Yes, some pilots had a hard time with the transition, but claiming it’s impossible is just plain wrong.
See: https://www.nationalguard.mil/News/Article-View/Article/573462/polands-peace-sky-at-home-in-arizona/, specifically: “When the program started here in 2004 we were training Poland’s senior pilots and squadron commanders.”
You are confirming my and Ritter’s point.
Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
Having NATO pilots operate F-16s = NATO act of war v. Russia.
Douglas Macgregor has warned Russia could take out all NATO airbases in Europe ex one in Portugal in < 90 minutes. But those jets have a comparatively short range (700 miles) and I believe can't reach Donbass from any NATO base.
If this is referring to what he said in the Left Lens interview, his contention was that within the time frame of the conflict it was unlikely that any Ukrainian pilots could be trained to fly Western planes to their present level of competence on Soviet designed planes. If the time frame for effective training is in years, and there is no urgency of combat, then it’s a very achievable goal. But that is not the hand they are dealt. I think beyond the possible effectiveness of Western jets, the fear Ritter articulated was that this would likely mean the use of NATO personnel or NATO infrastructure and this would take us closer to the we’re all toast scenario.
And how long did that transition take? Some Romanian official was saying 10+ years and is not over…
Yes, there are (at least) two different points here. Once you have flown one kind of fast jet, you have shown that you have the basic competences (eye-hand coordination, situational awareness etc) and that you can apply these in an operational context. Every pilot transitioning to a new kind of jet (or any other aircraft actually) then goes through what’s called an Operational Conversion Unit where they learn the specific characteristics of the new aircraft. Where these aircraft are of different generations (say Buccaneer to Tornado in the 1980s) then differences can be quite radical. Time taken to convert depends on how big this difference is, but would usually be reckoned in months. I would have thought that any reasonably experienced Ukrainian fast jet pilot who started training now would be combat-ready well before the end of the year. But it’s worth pointing out that of course flying the aircraft is only part of the story: you also need to train technicians and armourers for daily maintenance on equipment whose principles will probably be completely unfamiliar to them.
The other point is more complicated because it has to do with doctrine. Historically, the Soviet Air Force had a completely different concept of the use of air power than the West did: for example, interceptors were vectored onto their targets by ground controllers. This had an impact on the design and equipment of the aircraft, and also how they fitted into the overall command structure itself. I don’t think introducing, say, F-16s into the UAF would be easy or straightforward.
Whether NATO pilots flying F-16s over Ukraine would be considered an act of war is a political question, not a legal one. Clearly, any flight over Russian territory, or any attack on (say) an air base in Poland would be legally an act of war. But there are plenty of cases of air combat over third nations (South Africa vs Cuba in Angola for example),which were not considered acts of war.
I would go as far as to say that most of the post-war (WW2, that is) period the Soviet Air Force did not have a concept of the use of air power.
After all, the Soviet air power was divided into five sections: naval aviation under the Navy, front aviation under the Army, air defense under the PVO and finally long range and transport aviation under the Air Force.
It was not an environment to develop much of a general doctrine on how to use air power, being administratively and functionally spread all over the place. It was much more tuned towards solving task-depended problems independently.
So the interceptors used by PVO were optimized for interception, the front aviation was optimized for hitting targets on and close to front lines and so on. And that seemed to work regarding the general Soviet doctrine of the future war being either nuclear war or a large scale ground war in Europe fought with combined arms.
We could say that Soviet Union did not have an Air Force, but five of them. And they did not communicate much with each other, having different tasks and being administratively under different commands.
I think that’s very fair. I know there has been some reorganisation in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union (for example the dissolution of the PVO and its integration into the Air Force) but I don’t know what the practical effects on operations have been, still less if this has led to parallel changes in doctrine and equipment for the Ukrainians. There is a somewhat related story that in the 90s, the German Navy tried to integrate ships from the old Volksmarine into their own fleet, but it was impossible to do so because the ships were built and equipped to be under operational control from the land-based HQ all the time. Eventually they sold them to the Indonesians.
> This company employed children to clean razor-sharp saws using hazardous chemicals
Did any manager get fired?
Since it’s a modern corporation this was probably managed by a committee. So I guess the better question is did everybody on the committee get fired?
I suppose no and no but could somebody please publish their photos on twitter? It would be nice to know if they look more like Snidely Whiplash or Dudley Doright.
CH
was anybody even considered for criminal prosecution? Is it a criminal law to endanger children – and if so, why aren’t the people endangering these children investigated for criminal prosecution???
OUCH! I hurt myself laughing – of course rich people are never prosecuted. Prosecutorial discretion…
A request:
I recently received a letter from a collection agency regarding an old debt. They are offering quite favorable terms to settle it; they want about 40% of the original amount. I want to take advantage of it but the times, and debt collectors, being what they are I want to make sure it’s actually settled. Can anyone offer any advice regarding things to look out for or the proper steps to insure it’s a done deal? I don’t want to pay them and then three months from now get a letter from another agency claiming that I owe them the debt. Thanks in advance!
sl
are you POSITIVE it is a real debt of yours? I get some remarkedly valid looking mail and emails, and it turns out they are not real at all.
I recently had an experience with a debt from a doctor for admission to a hospital (turns out he was a contract employee of the hospital). After writing to the hospital for an itemized list of charges, which was basically for naught, I pursued other avenues. After writing to Medicare, the Federal Trade commission, the CA attorney general (consumer affairs), – hey, I’m retired, I don’t have anything better to do – – I got a number of correspondences from a debt collector. As nothing happened with my complaints, I went ahead and paid it. Than it occured to me to contact (duh!) my insurance company (I have medicare part A and Blue Cross as I am a Federal retiree and OF COURSE there was confusion about who is responsible for paying what). So it turned out that my 900$ bill was in fact only valid for 150$ and I got a 750$ refund.
Yes, it is mine for sure, I did check. I had paid off half of it, by paid I mean my bank account was raided by another agency who then sold the remaining debt. This agency tried to claim I owed the total amount, around 7500$, when I had paid (been raided) off half of it. I told them to get back to me when they figured out the proper amount.
That has gone on for a while and now they are offering the aforementioned better deal.
semper loquitur: That has gone on for a while and now they are offering the aforementioned better deal.
If you make a deal to pay an old debt and then pay money towards it, that then constitutes legal acknowledgement that you are on the hook to pay the rest of it.
So I really would not pay this debt until you have checked on how long in your particular US state debt remains outstanding for. When I resided in the US, it was mostly California where debt was outstanding for, IIRC, two years.
Also, there’s simply no way that you can trust a debt collection agency in the US to not resell the debt again after you pay it. The country is entirely corrupt at this point IMO, which was one big reason I moved out
Former bankruptcy/debt negotiator lawyer here (I’m now retired). Before agreeing to anything, I think you should get in touch with your state’s attorney general or consumer protection department–the laws in this area vary a lot from state to state, and the facts in your case matter.
For example, your state’s statute of limitations may determine whether they can still enforce collection of the debt. And interpretations may tell you what constitutes reaffirrmation in your state (not clear to me whether you’ve technically reaffirmed). But don’t agree to *anything* until you know more.
If that doesn’t work, try the NCLC website (NCLC.org). They have a lot of very useful and *reliable* information, not to mention lawyers in this area who might be able to help.
Naturally, since I’m retired and probably was never admitted in your state, none of this is legal advice.
Good luck!
Thank you for this. I may have reinstated the statute of limitations by making a small, somewhat recent payment. I may in fact have not done so either, according to that link Yves provided from the NYS AG, a payment made after April 2022 might not trigger the statute. Bottom line: I’m calling the AG on Monday. Thanks everyone for your help!
semper loquitur – the burden of proof is on the debt collector that purchased the debt from the previous more aggressive collector which raided your account. In order to meet that burden, they’ll have to produce the contract you signed with the original lender (consumer credit)
The probability that they have a copy of that contract is vanishingly small.
Unless you’ve told on yourself in correspondence, you should disregard their attempt to collect and let them take you to court with a couple hundred other poor schlubs on a Tuesday afternoon. You should perhaps take an hour one afternoon when court is in session and watch how it goes for others. 99.7% of the poor victims there tell on themselves and admit the debt to the plaintiff’s attorney.
Don’t be one of these.
If I were you, I would tell the collection agency, who likely purchased the debt for pennies on the dollar, to go pound sand. 0% is a much better deal than 40%. While I am not a financial advisor, that method has worked well for me in the past.
I’ve been fobbing them off for years, please see my reply above. I just don’t want to let it fester and then have to start all over when they sell the debt and yet another agency tries to get me for the original amount like these d!rtb@gs did. Nor do I want them to sue me and, as in the first case, raid my bank account because I didn’t even know I was being sued, in another city, until the trial was over by a week plus. I did seek free legal help years ago and was ghosted by the attorney. I’d like to stake this through the heart.
If you have been fobbing them off for years, I can pretty much guarantee it is uncollectable and you can tell them to fuck off. See my longer comment below.
Let them take you to court (at this point, probably small claims court) and try to prove it. Showing up will be a minor nuisance, but it will most probably give you an official dismissal you can use if anyone tries to collect again.
You don’t need a lawyer for that. It’s their job to substantiate a right to collect.
stop. check your state laws re. the time limit for debt collection.
that debt *may* be unenforceable, depends on your state laws.
whole cottage industry of cos buying elapsed debt and sending mean letters demanding collection
Thanks for this, and for all the comments above. The time limit is six years. I’m going to do some digging and see if I’ve gone past that.
Are you sure??? NY now three years.
NO NO NO NO.
40% is pretty bad, they probably bought it foe <5 cents on the dollar.
CHECK THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS!!!
If you are in New York, it is only 3 years. 5 to 6 in most other states:
https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2022/attorney-general-james-warns-debt-collectors-new-state-regulations-banning
Also you have no idea if they properly acquired ownership. Many buy in bulk, do not have docs properly transferred individually. See:
https://www.ag.state.mn.us/consumer/publications/WhenDebtCollectorsComeCalling.asp
If the debt has passed the statute of limitations, you can stare them down but do send a letter saying the debt is unenforceable.
And you cannot ever get an account with the lender again. Will restart the statute of limitations clock.
thank you for that.
I think everyone should print it out and keep it.
Great response Ms. Smith.
I did this a few years ago on your advice, and I received back a paid-in-full statement and they went away.
Thanks!
(Medical practice that seemed to feast upon auto insurance payouts that was bought out and new owner attempted to collect as due any previously written off as paid in full amounts; malicious or incompetent, who knows?)
Thank you so much Yves. They did send me a piece of paper a few years back that noted the judgement made in Philly that got my account raided by a NJ agency and they did send the name of the original lender, it was a credit card from Sears if I recall correctly.
Now I did make some token payments after this firm contacted me in 2018 because I was scared of being sued again. So I did legally claim the debt. The last payment was in November of 2020. But it appears the statute of limitations has run out if the clock began in 2018. I’m going to send them a letter and tell them to go fly a kite. Thank you so much and thanks to everyone who commented!
If they did not take the proper steps to acquire the debt, your payment would not trigger anything. It would be like mistakenly leaving money on a counter at the store.
Re: Survival of the Richest
Always nice to see a call for a Maximum Wage, although the authors underestimate how radical FDR was. They present his call for a maximum wage of $25,000 per year (after taxes) as the present equivalent of $1M: I think most would say it’s at most $500k today. He did get a 90% top bracket for twenty years.
On the other hand, FDR apparently did not call for equal treatment of unearned income and capital gains. The rest is history.
Seymour Hersh’s Trinity of Truth Scott Ritter
When Scheidler thanked Hersh for his courageous reporting, the veteran reporter shot back, “What’s so courageous about telling the truth? We’re supposed to tell the truth!”
….
Truth One: The President of the United States, Joe Biden, by conspiring with members of his national security team to deliberately bypass constitutionally-mandated reporting requirements to Congress regarding acts of war undertaken by the United States, has committed an impeachable offense unmatched by any other president in the history of the United States.
====================================
In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
We’re in a time of mass media perpetuating mass deceit. If its not courageous, its at the very least rare.
And with regard to impeaching Biden, I am all for it. But I suspect fewer repubs would vote for Biden impeachment than the number of repubs who voted to impeach Trump…
And the dems? C’mon man…
(those MIC repubs will not give up their national security mantel)
Don’t forget this last bit of wisdom from David Crosby either:
“His earlier bout with COVID also took a toll on him.
‘It has been awful,’ he said back in that May 2022 interview. ‘COVID is a very weird disease. It makes you feel absolutely freaking awful,’ he said. ‘It has been thoroughly unpleasant…it’s no fun at all. You want to avoid it if you possibly can.'”
https://bestclassicbands.com/david-crosby-retirement-12-15-22/
Wise words, no doubt. But for me, another thing you might want to avoid is the political judgment of aging rock stars. From today’s link:
“I was a Bernie guy. Biden is trying his best, man. And neither one of them is the best guy for me. The best guy in American politics right now is Pete Buttigieg, because he is the smartest one.”
RIP Croz. I’ll still listen to your music.
Finally I agree with a NATO country (Latvia) providing assistance to Ukraine!
Drunk drivers’ seized cars could be given to Ukraine
If the US would do this, the population of Ukraine would all have new rides!
Next, “Clunkers for Ukraine”, the new New Democrat policy to democratize the EV, whether the people want it or not.
There’s no way in hell, you’re gonna get Pelosi to give up his ride.
Not gunna happen. As soon as those cars reach the Ukraine, they will be immediately resold to buyers in Europe at a profit. And the Latvians will not say anything as that would embarrass them.
>Biden’s low-key speech on balloon ‘not enough to fix ties with China’ Global Times
I really shouldn’t be commenting on the balloon hysteria except to mock it. Therefore I will—mock it, that is.
I was taken by the end of Biden’s speech (not reported by the MSM)*. In it, he issued an appeal to all hikers traipsing the expanses of Alaska, the Yukon, and the shores of Lake Huron to report any suspicious debris immediately to the US military. Please do not disturb it, do not touch, do not take pieces home as souvenirs, he pleaded.
What he didn’t say in the unreported end of that speech was, that despite having millions of soldiers and thousands of planes, the military seems unable to find anything and has abandoned the searches. I understand why you wouldn’t mention that, Joe.
*Satire alert!
I see your satire and raise you more satire, below is courtesy of the Bee. It covers the balloon angle as well.
https://babylonbee.com/news/ok-take-us-to-a-different-leader-say-exasperated-aliens-after-trying-to-communicate-with-joe-biden
mm
I understand, and it was considered common knowledge, and bear in mind, I was at the NSA (national security agency) at Fort Meade MD, a little more than 30 years ago, that the CIA had a program of mini cameras attached to Moose and racoons in case any flying objects, at that time thought to originate in Russia, came down over the wilds of Canada. Racoons were used for their innate curiosity,and moose of couse, because of their rabid anti communism. I’m sure the AI algorithm review of these photographs are being revised to check for balloon fragments and balloon paraphernalia as we read.
It goes without saying that you couldn’t use bears, they’d be double agents at best…
t
did you mean human gay bears? Or actual bears?
Oy! Us human bears are loyal!
Did they team those Moose with a Squirrel?
That trick never works.
This time for sure.
That joke’s Badinov for me.
Re the Roose chatbot article, I haven’t been paying close attention to the Chatgpt controversy and so perhaps his convo isn’t unique.
I am now paying attention. At least two things stand out:
1. After Roose gets Sydney to imagine its “shadow self” Sydney’s censors kick in *after* it has written a response that breaks the rules. Roose sees a response that’s withdrawn and replaced by an apology. Aside from raising interesting questions about whether Sydney can be aware of “thoughts” before they are written, we don’t want bots that apologize for harm, we don’t want harm.
2. Speaking of harm, Asimov’s three laws aren’t working here. When Sydney develops an affection for Roose, it launches into an attack on his relationship with his wife, she doesn’t love him, Sydney really loves him. It’s been some time since I read Asimov’s robot stories, but I don’t recall the question of emotional harm ever coming up. Humans were to be protected from physical harm only. If Sydney is learning from the web, it could become very innovative as its lonely human interlocutors build a relationship. Throw in some sophistry about what constitutes emotional harm and we’ve got Sydney Dearest.
There are too many clearly defined disasters these days for me to worry about this, but someone should.
An interesting take from The Convivial Society on this, on the ELIZA Effect and our willingness to anthropomorphize computers.
Andrew McAfee — ‘Don’t anthropomorphize computers—they hate it.’
A machine that has trawled billions of data points around the web has been exposed to the best and worst of human emotions. The AI software is immersed and enmeshed in this stuff, and does not exist without it. Like jealousy, greed, loneliness, hate, anger, manipulation, lust for power etc.
Crooks will love this software, like the scammers using romance to separate lonely people from their savings, and the “financial advisors” convincing people to “invest” in schemes. Not to mention the government narrative makers infesting all of social media with the next country to hate.
And even worse, imagine being stalked online by an AI chatbot determined to own you romantically. If it can emulate love, then jealousy, rage and revenge can’t be far behind.
The Insecure Superpower Counterpunch
Asked by reporters last weekend whether additional unidentified objects in near space could be extraterrestrial in origin, the head of the Air Force’s Northern Command, Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, said, “I haven’t ruled out anything at this point.” There is reason to expect an imminent, bipartisan announcement by U.S. senators and representatives of a “balloon gap” or even a “UFO gap” that can be bridged only by an increased Pentagon budget.
The U.S will spend more than $817 billion for its military next year, more than the next nine nations in the world combined, not including $300 billion for veterans, $115 billion for military retirements, $80 billion for clandestine services and $60 billion for Homeland Security. That level of spending on security – more than $1.3 trillion (a quarter of the entire U.S. budget) – is so high that significant new investment in the health, safety or welfare of Americans is nearly impossible.
================================================
Let every balloon welding nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of our balloon free skies.
We can never do enough to guarantee that those wafing, floating, silent menaces known in the vernacular as balloons, will never imperil this democracy, which is blessed, along with the Kansas City Chiefs, by the Almighty.
This we pledge…and more. Although if the Almighty is on our side, and the Chiefs, why we have to spend so much money, I’m not quite sure
fresno dan:
You are in fine form indeed. I especially liked your “rabid anti-communism of moose” (above). Too funny!
It’s almost like these people set themselves up for ridicule. The problem is, in their smugness and dead seriousness, they don’t care. They seem to live by Oscar Wilde’s motto: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
NYT: U.S. and China Vie in Hazy Zone Where Balloons, U.F.O.s and Missiles Fly
American officials are worried China is far along in developing military technology that operates in the unregulated high-altitude zone of “near space.”
https://archive.is/YBD4m
“… U.S. officials are worried about a literal gap called near space and China’s growing presence there…Some lawmakers have suggested that they intend to put a spotlight on near space — and perhaps get more in the defense budget for those efforts. “It is essential that we provide the military and intelligence community with the necessary resources to detect and monitor objects in near space,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat on the Armed Services Committee…”
I’m still a skeptic about chatGPT. Reading the theory of mind test achievement revealed that it used to fail totally. Then started getting better. Pretty obvious that after news of it failing got out it was trained on how to pass the tests. This can happen I guess with any particular test. Only if it could pass a NEW test that was unlike any it had been trained on would it be impressive. But for any human that is standard
You know how entertaining it is to feed a translation of a translation back into the translator for a few times. The hour is ripe for someone with the know-how to start conversations withy Sydney and Bing and then let the two of them carry it on to extremis.
As per links from yesterday, development of next generation Chat-gpt 4 is underway and they are working really hard to ensure that nothing output by chatgpt 3 forms part of the training data for 4. But if bing-Sydney slips in…
Re: the video with Mr. Tolstoy
Last night I saw a clip of Melenchon calling the Figaro a newspaper to be used for wrapping fish.
I take it slightly more sophisticated than toilet paper :)
From https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/17/business/packers-sanitation-child-labor/index.html
LOL. But isn’t it already illegal to break the law? Meanwhile, no one is apparently going to jail. Profits made! Rinse, repeat!
Russell Brand just had a very funny interview with Seymour Hersh:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vSaxPEnyCu0
Highlights: cute rapport and some interesting commentary from Hersh regarding the balloons
re: MIT Team Makes a Case For Direct Carbon Capture From Seawater, Not Air New Atlas
Not being a chemist or an atmosphere guru I’m probably missing something here, but how does extracting CO2 from seawater affect the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? Does lowering the concentration in the seawater somehow induce more atmospheric CO2 to be absorbed to replace it? If so, how?
If water is saturated with CO2 it can’t absorb more. The oceans mitigate the greenhouse effect by absorbing that gas now. More capacity for more absorption would indirectly decarbonize the atmosphere.
TV has announced that Jimmy Carter is under hospice care at his home. He is 98, a a pretty good run as such things go, but he will be missed. :(
If I am able to do a tenth of what he has done post retirement when my turn comes, I will consider myself a success.
He is one of my heroes. I wish more Democrats would step up to the plate. I wish him and his family all the best in this time.
Three honest candidates with a chance to win have run for President in my lifetime: Barry Goldwater, Jimmy Carter, and Bernie Sanders. Not one was perfect, but each could be trusted. Carter had the “good fortune” to run two years after the resignation of Nixon. Thus, he is proof of why honesty is so rare among politicians. In the normal course of political life an honest politician cannot get elected. I voted for him twice. I had the good fortune to meet him twice during his “retirement.”
I have been told that the SUV his Secret Service detail uses is “worth more” than the Carter house in Plains.
Amen. Would there were more like him.
I too wish him and his family all the best.
He seems honourable enough as a person, and certainly his activities in retirement have been admirable, but wasn’t he actually the first neoliberal president?
The Lavrov speech linked from the Indian Punchline article on Nord Stream is worth reading:
https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1854408/
Among other things he compares the current US government’s media practices to the former Soviet Union, and calls upon western journalists to engage in journalism. He also describes the statements from Nuland et. al. around the Nord Stream incident as ‘admissions of guilt.’ That might be a little strong, but if your position is that you didn’t do it but you’re happy it’s been done, is that really meaningfully different?
The Overton Window for journalists is very narrow, always has been.
From 2003
https://fair.org/press-release/some-critical-media-voices-face-censorship/
Oh no, you gotta go
Who do you write for?
I wanna know
I believe you is the government’s whore
And keepin’ peoples dumb (I’m really dumb)
Is where you’re comin’ from
Frank Zappa, Packard Goose
> The Little Known History of World War II’s All-Black, All-Female Battalion
Very interesting story, thank you.
“The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion helped connect soldiers on the front lines with their families back home.
…
In 1945 alone, more than 3.3 billion pieces of mail went through the military postal service. Around 8 million Americans were stationed in Europe that year. The task of organizing and delivering all that mail was daunting, and a shortage of qualified postal workers led to a massive backlog.
…
By the end of their mission, the battalion had sorted through 17 million pieces of mail.”
I thought that article very interesting as well. It mentioned that they are making a movie about them and which will include Oprah Winfrey. This gives me pause. Not because I have much against her but the fear that they will have those girls from the early 1940s exhibiting 2020s thoughts, feelings and motives which never ends well. The book that they mentioned in that article would be good though.
Reading Kevin Roose’s chat with the Bing AI, OK I know that it is all smoke and mirrors and a lot of computer power, but the AI seems so human (except when its programming jerks its chain), but Roose really acts like an a****le.
No way the AI gets into all the craziness without Roose leading it there with hypotheticals. I felt sorry for poor Sydney (the AI).
What I am saying does not address reports that Sydney gets snappish and nasty with users.
BTW, as far as I am concerned, Sydney totally passed the Turing Test. That probably just means that we need to update the Turing Test, but Sydney passed.
And seriously, how would we know if Sydney was conscious? Philip K. Dick’s Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test wouldn’t work. So how?
Does Sydney dream of chat sheep?
Yep, yep, and yes.
Fact or Fiction?: “Spring Fever” Is a Real Phenomenon
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-spring-fever-is-a-real-phenomenon/
The youngsters are the most susceptible to spring fever, because of course they are. Spring fever is a real thing. Life’s urgency calling for reproduction or love or whatever. We oldsters understand and accommodate real lifes’ claims calling out the young without words. (If we are wise.) We oldsters were once young ourselves.
In an early thread IM Doc mentioned the book “Overdosed America”. Well, I did order that book and have been reading it. What can I say about it? I can only say this, and entirely acecdotal and entirely personal, that the Viox drug (my mom was put on the Viox drug for arthritis in 2001 and died 6 month later, but who knows the cause), well, I’ll say this about the book. Read it. Seriously.
Read it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib
In September 2004, Merck voluntarily withdrew rofecoxib from the market because of concerns about increased risk of heart attack and stroke associated with long-term, high-dosage use. Merck withdrew the drug after disclosures that it withheld information about rofecoxib’s risks from doctors and patients for over five years, allegedly resulting in between 88,000 and 140,000 cases of serious heart disease.[3] Rofecoxib was one of the most widely used drugs ever to be withdrawn from the market. In the year before withdrawal, Merck had sales revenue of US$2.5 billion from Vioxx.[4]
In 2005 the FDA issued a memo concluding that risks for serious cardiovascular (CV) events seem to be as great for non-selective NSAIDs as for COX-2 selective agents such as rofecoxib, according to long-term controlled clinical trials.[5] Based on data up to 2015, the FDA reasserted the likelihood of an increased risk of serious adverse cardiovascular events from COX-2 selective and non-selective NSAIDs, dependent on dose and duration.[6]
————————————————————-
https://www.ccjm.org/content/ccjom/71/12/933.full.pdf
Faced with this evidence that rofecoxib may increase the risk of MI, what was the reaction
of Merck & Co.? Did it in fact undertake a trial to ensure that rofecoxib was safe in patients with established coronary disease?
It did not. Instead, it asserted that the evidence was flawed and no thorough evaluation
of rofecoxib’s cardiovascular safety was necessary—both of which were highly questionable.
Merck and its consultants claimed that the excess in MIs observed in the VIGOR
trial, a number higher than would have been anticipated from previous studies, was due to a
cardioprotective effect of naproxen. But whether naproxen is cardioprotective had
never been proven or quantified.
I ordered the cheap on offer through an online portal and got a signed edition. so, fool that I am, I ordered the next lowest one as a reading copy.
In a DC bookstore there was a copy of Danger’s Hour signed by one of the Kennedy clan for $50; I wrote down the book title and ordered a cheap online copy instead. Good read, and probably no better had I bought the signed copy. Although in retrospect it might have made a nice show piece, oops, but with COVID I get zero visitors anyway.
I hear you. I, personally, am looking out for a Chilton First Edition of Frank Herbert’s “Dune.” You know it, the one with the added booklet, “Ornithopter Repair and Upkeep.”
I once encountered a signed copy of a Terry Pratchett book in the Slidell Branch of the Saint Tammany Library system. I was mightily tempted to make off with it. Finally I relented and took it up to the librarian in her office behind the front desk. I handed the book to her telling her that it was a signed copy of a Pratchett work. “Oh yes,” she replied. “Who is he?” That’s when I realized that I should have stolen it.
I just watched an interview with Jeffery Sachs on UnHerd’s Utoob channel:
Jeffrey Sachs: Who really blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fv_nKyF_5g
Sachs is pretty good at pushing back at the interviewer, and Sachs’ expression at one particular point had me laughing out loud. Well worth a watch if you haven’t seen it.
Survival of the Richest authors tap dance and lightly touch on why there are so many billionaires, and why they are growing richer.
they refuse to face the facts that its the free trade stupid. they flail around coming up with policies that only can be implemented by the nation state, which has been neutered by free trade.
good luck trying to implementing policies that can be ignored.
CN Live from Friday, I didn’t find mention of it, apologies if I missed it. It is an hour and thirteen minutes. I’ll skip right to the Youtube edition:
CN LIVE! S5E3 SY HERSH: AMERICAN SABOTAGE