morry040

Are there any other industries willing to fund research that may not have a return on investment?

• crickets *

When Russia has repeatedly denied requests from other journalists in the past, I don’t think that you can really associate Carlson with being “free press”. This is a business deal, not journalism. How should we treat people who engage in business deals with sanctioned individuals?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tucker-carlson-vladimir-putin-interview-b2492192.html

“Does Tucker really think we journalists haven’t been trying to interview President Putin every day since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine? It’s absurd – we’ll continue to ask for an interview, just as we have for years now,” said CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

The BBC’s Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg, wrote on X: “Interesting to hear @TuckerCarlson claim that ‘no western journalist has bothered to interview’ Putin since the invasion of Ukraine. We’ve lodged several requests with the Kremlin in the last 18 months. Always a ‘no’ for us.”

Yevgenia Albats, a Russian journalist and author of a book about the KGB, described Mr Carlson’s claim as “unbelievable”.

“I am like hundreds of Russian journalists who have had to go into exile to keep reporting about the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. The alternative was to go to jail. And now this SoB is teaching us about good journalism, shooting from the $1,000 Ritz suite in Moscow,” she wrote on X.

No, you need to read the remarks again. Paragraphs like this one do not support your interpretation at all.
The US is saying that China’s economic trajectory has been too optimistic in the past and that the US needs to focus on domestic improvements, force China to play by the rules, and then facilitate the US becoming the leader.

A reasonable explanation is in this thread: https://twitter.com/BlakeMMurdoch/status/1728160700965523736

Basically, COVID causes a similar immune deficiency to that of HIV. This deficiency weakens the body’s response to other illnesses, making infections like RSV or pneumonia more severe or more frequent. We see this effect more commonly in children because children have a lower vaccination rate than adults.

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The growth rate is still lower than the pre-COVID years…

What’s a bigger problem than the IMF? Corruption.

The article itself links to another Oxfam report that details how correctly taxing the wealthy in these poorer countries would provide all of the critical social services that these regions are lacking.
https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/the-middle-east-and-north-africa-gap-prosperity-for-the-rich-austerity-for-the-621549/

The report, which includes 17 recommendations: https://cacyp.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/CACYP_Preliminary-Report-2023.pdf

As for the causes:

It’s a poorly designed chart, likely published this way so that it confuses the average reader and hides how bad the numbers actually are.
If you add up the year-on-year budget performance, the Jan-Aug 2023 budget performance is about 2.6 trillion rubles WORSE than last year.

The reporting tries to cover up these bad numbers by focusing on the surplus in June 2023 - the highest result since March 2021. However, the June result would not offset the deficit experienced in April 2023, let alone the Jan and Feb deficits.

There’s even a hilarious typo in the news story where the author has stated “800 trillion” instead of the actual “800 billion” result, plus they mixed up the months - the 800B was in June, not August. They really should run these numbers past an analyst before printing the story, but I expect disinformation is the real goal.

There’s a lot of FUD with this news, but it needs some facts to determine the impact.

1. This is a ban on work use, not personal use.
2. The central government already had restrictions in place since 2020. Since the start of 2020, Apple’s share price has grown 120%.
3. Apple’s share of the Chinese market is only 18%
4. The “economically active” population of China is 780m and only 56m (7.2%) work in state-owned organisations [Gov metrics].

And this is why’s Apple’s share price has only gone down by 5%, losing only 2 weeks of gains.

Australia’s coal exports to China were non-existent from 2020 - Jan 2023 due to an import ban. Most of AU coal now goes to Japan.
China now imports most of its coal from Indonesia and Russia.

https://www.ga.gov.au/digital-publication/aecr2023/coal
https://www.energymonitor.ai/industry/weekly-data-china-coal-imports-hit-a-high-but-not-from-australia/?cf-view

For comparison, Russia has been equipping their modern tanks with depleted uranium since Dec 2018.
https://tass.com/defense/1036958

And the Ukrainians have been destroying those tanks…
https://gagadget.com/en/war/253241-ukrainian-assault-squad-destroyed-russian-upgraded-t-80bvm-tank/

The official booklet provides a summary of the main points for both sides, each given 5 pages. That said, there has been a lot of criticism about how these points have been explained and published, so it’s not a perfectly balanced explanation from either side, but it’s a start.
https://www.aec.gov.au/referendums/files/pamphlet/referendum-booklet.pdf

As you can see from comments, if you try to offer any considerations about the No side, someone from the Yes side will call you a racist.

If it was Russia, a possible motive would be so that they frame the US for blowing it up in the hope that Europe would then blame the US for destroying the supply of gas to Europe. One of the biggest goals of Russia’s disinformation campaigns is to hurt relations between the US and Europe by portraying the US as the bad guy.

It it incorrect to state that voters don’t have a choice. The barriers are high to make radical change at the Federal level, sure, but that doesn’t mean that it cannot be done. One of the biggest problems is disenfranchisement and disengagement. People feel like they cannot make any change so they believe that the system is broken, but for all of the talk about politics, very few people actually vote in all of the possible elections.

Here’s an example of US voting in action…

The 2022 Dallas County elections covered a population of about 2.8 million residents in a large urban area, yet voter turnout was only 218,000 residents (7.8% of the population).
The county level of government manages a significant part of daily life for residents (e.g. police, utilities, public education, roads) yet the resident population seems disinterested with guiding local government. If you look at the election records, some roles voted into power are not even contested.
https://www.dallascountyvotes.org/election-results-and-maps/election-results/historical-election-results/#Election

If one wanted to run for office, the requirements at county levels are fairly simple. Fill in some forms, be a resident in the country for 6 months (12 months in the state), and you might need to arrange for 25 people to sign a petition for your nomination. That’s it. You don’t need to be a Democrat or a Republican - you just need the nomination.
https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/candidates/guide/2022/qualifications2022.shtml

And if you need more convincing about how easy it could be to make a change in local politics, meet the animal opponents: https://www.insider.com/dog-mayors-of-america-2019-7

Ok - here’s what it looks like if you were to group the GDP of each country into regions. If we group all of the regular trading partners and allies into “The West”, they comprise 58% of global GDP. BRICS and the 137 other countries would be 41%.
https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/

The data suggests otherwise…
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=RU-US-CN-IN-BR-ZA

You know you can follow the tweet to learn more about the author, right?

That “random person” is Trisha Greenhalgh - Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford.

Here’s an excerpt from her Oxford Uni profile:
Trish is the author of over 400 peer-reviewed publications and 16 textbooks. She was awarded the OBE for Services to Medicine by Her Majesty the Queen in 2001, made a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences in 2014, and elected an International Fellow of the US Academy of Medicine in 2021. She is also a Fellow of the UK Royal College of Physicians, Royal College of General Practitioners, Faculty of Clinical Informatics and Faculty of Public Health.
https://www.phc.ox.ac.uk/team/trish-greenhalgh

Her Google Scholar profile shows that her work has been cited almost 95,000 times in other research papers.
https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?sortby=pubdate&hl=en&user=8KQwEGcAAAAJ&view_op=list_works

I wear masks on public transport and when flying. Even without reading the latest research on long-term COVID impacts, the amount of people openly sneezing and coughing is enough to convince me to keep doing it.

This is the official government reporting: https://data.stats.gov.cn/english/easyquery.htm?cn=A01

As of Jun 2023, the “The Urban Surveyed Unemployment Rate of the Population Aged from 16 to 24(%)” was 21.3%.
The “Urban Surveyed Unemployment Rate of the Population Aged from 25 to 59(%)” was 4.1%.
The overall unemployment rate was 5.2%.

This site references the same data, but provides better visual charts:
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/youth-unemployment-rate
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/unemployment-rate