The new Syrian leadership issues a statement forbidding anyone from harassing women about their dress or preventing reporters from doing their job. Seems like a carefuly chosen signal.
A smaller share of Americans moved in 2023 than ever before.
Thinking too hard about Kafka's short story, "Investigations of a Dog."
Google's new quantum chip: "Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse." Seems a tad overblown.
Scott Aaronson on Google's new quantum chip. He is impressed, and he has been demolishing overblown quantum computing claims for years. But he also waves off the multiverse business.
The corruption trial of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan provides a good primer on how local corruption works in America. The basic deal was that he expected everyone who wanted his help to hire his tax law firm. There are other, more flagrant allegations, but the center of it was the miscegenation of politics and legal services.
The Trump Organization has been making money in India, selling their name to developers who crave the status they think the name conveys. There will likely be 10 Trump-branded buildings in India before 2028. Any guesses as to how Trump will treat the Modi government? (NY Times)
Daniel Penny is acquitted in the death Jordan Neely, a homeless man who was making trouble on the NY subway. This is another sign that Americans have had enough of crazy homeless people. If we can't find humane solutions the anger will only grow and we could see increasing pressure for mass incarceration. In the current climate you could probably wade into a homeless camp laying around you with a baseball bat and be in no legal jeopardy.
There is a unique subspecies of mosquito that lives in the London Underground.
Kevin Drum, more on how great things are in America.
Egypt is declared malaria free, quite an accomplishment for a nation that has suffered from this disease for at least 4,000 years.
Don't worry about your black plastic kitchen utensils.
The Raytheon Coyote drone has a variant designed to destroy other small drones by crashing into them, with a top speed of more than 300 mph. (wikipedia, ad from the manufacturer). Incidentally the Coyote is part of a system called Low, Slow, Small UAV Integrated Defeat System, or LIDS. If you install such a system in a fixed location, say an airfield, then you have a Fixed Site Low, Slow, Small UAV Integrated Defeat System, FIS-LIDS, pronounced "Fizz Lids". They seem to work pretty well but think how many of these drones you would need for a real war.
A statistical paradox: schizophrenia is about 80% genetic, but "The Nazis ran a eugenics program that killed most of the schizophrenics in Germany, eliminating their genes from the gene pool. But the next generation of Germans had a totally normal schizophrenia rate, comparable to pre-Nazi Germany or any other country." Via Scott Siskind.
Study finds that places within the old Soviet Union that were near labor camps where political prisoners were sent are now more prosperous than similar places without camps.
The Fish & Wildlife Service proposes listing the Monarch Butterfly as a threatened species. This would be a big deal, since just about any meadow in the central or eastern US is potential monarch habitat.
The engineer accused of selling America's stealth bomber secrets to China.
The Washington Post reports that Kyiv supplied drones and experienced operators to HTS to assist in their offensive against Assad. Hints go back as far as June.
Russia has been staging raids across the Dnipro River near Kherson. The casualty rate is so high that, according to this report, Russian soldiers have been sabotaging their boats so they don't have to go.
Did Iran and Russia decide to give up on Assad, or did things just move so quickly that they were unable to respond? (Twitter/X) I would note that Americans are used to our military being able to respond quickly almost anywhere in the world, but nobody else has that capability, so I find it believable that Iran was not able to mount an effective response within 11 days.
4 comments:
A smaller share of Americans moved in 2023 than ever before.
You can quote more typical statistics all day, but to me this is a major economic warning sign. Moving is expensive and time consuming - if people are moving less often, it either means they can't afford to do it... or they're just so extraordinarily happy with every aspect of their life that they don't feel any need to relocate. Somehow I can't imagine it's the latter at work.
Any guesses as to how Trump will treat the Modi government?
That's entirely dependent on how the Modi government treats him. If they flatter him and make his lucrative deals, he'll promote and defend anything Modi says. Heck, he might even knowingly let them assassinate more Sikhs, even openly on American soil.
In contrast, if Modi shows any kind of disdain for Trump, or in any way inhibits his ability to make money in India, Trump is liable to throw his usual sorts of tantrums, threaten to impose tariffs, tear up long-standing treaties, etc.
They seem to work pretty well but think how many of these drones you would need for a real war.
Think how many artillery shells were needed for World War I. And those were frequently the size of a man, and made out of metallic casings and filled with huge amounts of (chemically toxic) explosives. Yet during the war, they fired an estimated 1.5 billion such shells, on the Western Front alone.
Study finds that places within the old Soviet Union that were near labor camps where political prisoners were sent are now more prosperous than similar places without camps.
Not quite. You've misunderstood their conclusion. According to the linked paper:
"Sixty years after the death of Stalin and the demise of the GULAG, areas around camps that had a higher share of enemies are richer today, as captured by firms' wages and profits, as well as by night-lights per capita."
They aren't comparing places WITH camps to places WITHOUT camps.
They're solely comparing BETWEEN places that had camps. The distinction they are making between camps is which ones had high or low percentages of political prisoners (rather than non-political prisoners).
They are arguing that the camps which had more political prisoners than non-political ones ended up better developed than those with less.
But they don't at all investigate why or how that might be the case. I suspect the reason is probably rooted in bureaucracy and logistics more than anything else. You have to account for the locations of different camps, their sizes, when they were built, when they were accepting new prisoners, lengths of prison sentences, etc.
Rather than greater numbers of political prisoners causing the areas around a camp to prosper, maybe it's just that political prisoners tended to be sent to certain kinds of prisons over others, and that those kinds of prisons tended to possess qualities which offered better prospects for the areas down the line.
Camp size is potentially a massive factor - if you build a small camp with only a limited capacity, and then you reach that capacity, then all further prisoners have to be sent somewhere else.
Camp location is likewise critical - if you look at the map in the paper, you can tell that many camps were built in areas that already had considerable local infrastructure (most notably, you can tell where major rail lines run). This raises the question of the likelihood of assigning prisoners to camps based on the proximity of the camp to where the prisoners was arrested / tried / convicted. And it also raises the question of exceptions to such a system - presumably, more "dangerous" prisoners would have fewer options for where they were allowed to be sent, meaning that certain (presumably larger, better equipped, and better provided for) camps received larger numbers of "enemies of the state", as opposed to mere common petty criminals.
We also need to consider prison operation years, and prisoner sentence lengths. There would have been certain time periods in which more people were being declared political prisoners than others, and that would affect who gets sent where - a camp that was opened only AFTER a major purge (or wave of purges) will necessarily have lower numbers of political prisoners; likewise, a camp that existed BEFORE such a purge, but already reached capacity, will necessarily have lower numbers that other camps that had room when the purges happened. We also need to consider that petty criminals got released sooner (or even released at all), and how that would affect things. Smaller camps with mostly petty criminals would be likelier to be shut down sooner as their occupants get released, with remainders being relocated to large / more secure sites.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's SO MUCH to consider, and the paper addresses NONE of it - it just notes an odd correlation that you can find in the data, without actually considering causality of any kind.
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