- Last 7 days
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www.currentaffairs.org www.currentaffairs.org
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Then there is the fact that this “logic machine” is frequently, comically incorrect in his judgments. While some of us were trying to urgently point out that Joe Biden should clearly not be running for reelection, Yglesias was in denial. The fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, he said, was “for real” in his commitment to humanity’s well-being. (Bankman-Fried later admitted to a journalist that his ethics were “mostly a front.”) Yglesias admitted he trusted Bankman-Fried because he was rich. (“Well, if his company has a $20-billion valuation, there must be something to it.”
Harvard undergrad
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dougaldlamont.substack.com dougaldlamont.substack.com
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I mean, people say let your money work for you. The monetary policy run by supposedly independent central banks keeps bailing out investors, while deliberatly creating conditions that bankrupting other players in the economy, allowing the people who’ve been bailed out with printed central bank fiat currency to pick up even more quality assets at distressed prices.
Good line
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apnews.com apnews.com
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Frustrated with the quality of the new conscripts sent to the front line by territorial recruitment centers, commanders are now seeking to conduct their own mobilization drives to better screen and train new fighters, multiple commanders and soldiers said.“The main problem is the survival instinct of newcomers. Before, people could stand until the last moment to hold the position. Now, even when there is light shelling of firing positions, they are retreating,” said a soldier with the 110th Brigade.
"their own mobilization drives"
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ourtime.substack.com ourtime.substack.com
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Another place where we can talk about real tradeoffs is the question of which investment projects are able to obtain financing, especially given the end of the long period of very low interest rates. Just as machine tools can be scarce, so can access to credit. There are two important dynamics here. First, as interest rates rise, private capitalists will demand a higher return on any investment projects. Second, as interest rates rise, the costs of keeping an existing enterprise going will rise and weaker firms will fail. Civilian-oriented investment to meet social needs will be disadvantaged by both of these dynamics, as we can already see in the case of renewable energy. Historically, when credit is tight, the government has taken steps to ensure that financing is available to military-industrial producers. For example, the Defense Production Act of 1950 directs the Federal Reserve to help oversee special “V Loans” to military producers. The same Fed currently dismisses out of hand the idea that they should do anything at all to tilt the field in favor financing the green transition. This sort of double standard should be politicized, as part of a broader attack on the political economy of financial constraints on industrial production.
Good point
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www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
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The rouble's fall has been compounded by a fall of more than 20% in the stock market so far this year as investors shift their savings from stocks to deposits, which offer interest above the benchmark rate of 21%.
Interesting detail
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Still, she said that the source of the error wasn’t her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused. She said that two RAs, both undergraduates, had recruited the women at the gym, and that the scene there was chaotic: Sometimes multiple people came up to them at once, and the undergrads may have had to make some changes on the fly, adjusting which participants were being put into which group for the study. Maybe things went wrong from there, Schroeder said. One or both RAs might have gotten ruffled as they tried to paper over inconsistencies in their record-keeping. They both knew what the experiment was meant to show, and how the data ought to look—so it’s possible that they peeked a little at the data and reassigned the numbers in the way that seemed correct. (Schroeder’s audit lays out other possibilities, but describes this one as the most likely.)
Undergrads are to blame for everything
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wo days later, Schroeder posted to X a link to her full and final audit of the paper. “It took *hundreds* of hours of work to complete this retraction,” she wrote, in a thread that described the flaws in her own experiments and Studies 1a and 1b. “I am ashamed of helping publish this paper & how long it took to identify its issues,” the thread concluded. “I am not the same scientist I was 10 years ago. I hold myself accountable for correcting any inaccurate prior research findings and for updating my research practices to do better.” Her peers responded by lavishing her with public praise. One colleague called the self-audit “exemplary” and an “act of courage.” A prominent professor at Columbia Business School congratulated Schroeder for being “a cultural heroine, a role model for the rising generation.
lol
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- Nov 2024
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www.global-developments.org www.global-developments.org
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Along with some others, notably Myrdal, Hirschman didn’t wait for intellectual exile: he proudly gathered up his followers and led them into the wilderness himself. Unfortunately, they perished there.
Example of the hubris and lack of generosity of the high tide of neoclassical
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www.global-developments.org www.global-developments.org
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it would not be a great exaggeration to say that we have never known how large Nigeria is. The first census after independence, in 1962, was marred by regional infighting, because of its role in determining federal spending and assembly seats. The initial results, which reduced the population share of the politically dominant north, were rejected by the Northern People’s Congress. A redo in 1963 was also rejected as fraudulent—this time largely by southern politicians. The 1973 census was largely rejected as illegitimate; the 1980s and 1990s saw no censuses under military dictatorship; and the 2001 census produced an implausibly low number.4 Even in the relatively successful 2006 attempt, census enumerators were attacked and killed, and the results were still disputed
Cd be good example for rwn discussing trickiness of census activities.
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And it was in turn thanks to Fischer, Anderson believes, that complex multi-nation studies of the kind written by Renouvin, Albertini, Sidney Bradshaw Fay, Bernadotte Schmitt and others made way for the single-country studies (France and the Origins of the First World War, Russia and the Origins and so on) that dominated from the 1970s onwards.
Not sure Anderson says this, will check
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Anderson brings a peculiar gift to the work of criticism: he can step into a book and inspect it closely, even sympathetically, scrutinising its structures, immersing himself in its style and atmosphere; then he can step out of it again and size it up coldly from a distance. It’s surprising how rare this is. Historians rarely attempt it. We tend either to dismiss one another’s books altogether or to fillet them for material and move on. Anderson, by contrast, lets the books and arguments of his subjects relax and breathe a little, until they begin to betray their inner contradictions and blind spots – then the vivisection can begin.
Very nicely described
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www.the-tls.co.uk www.the-tls.co.uk
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. Macintyre presents hi, as a conscientious cop doing his job
NO copy editors
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- Oct 2024
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www.the-tls.co.uk www.the-tls.co.uk
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“Without nostalgia who could love England?”, asks that excellent poet Anne Stevenson.
Nice line
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His process for creating posts, he told me, is pretty simple and AI intensive: “I use ChatGPT to ask for the best images that can generate a lot of popularity and engagement on Facebook,” focusing on topics like the Bible, God, the U.S. Army, wildlife, and Manchester United. “WRITE ME 10 PROMPT picture OF JESUS WHICH WILLING BRING HIGH ENGAGEMENT ON FACEBOOK,” read the ChatGPT prompt in one screenshot he shared with me. You then take the prompts to the image-generation programs Leonardo.ai and Midjourney. Voilà: slop.
lol
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www.nybooks.com www.nybooks.com
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(According to Einav and Finkelstein, Medicare for All can’t accommodate patients’ varying “tastes for medical care.”)
Unprintable
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www.phenomenalworld.org www.phenomenalworld.org
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This failure also has also created constituencies among various types of domestic manufacturers opposed to the kind of market liberalization inherent to sanctions relief—undermining a core belief held by Western policymakers that sanctions can spur behavior changes in countries like Iran through bottom-up pressure, including from business lobbies.
Nice point
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www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk
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By the late 2010s, as the sociologist Yagil Levy writes in Shooting and Not Crying, published in Hebrew last year, killing had become the principal metric of military efficacy. Operational success was measured by the number of targets generated and the percentage of assassinations carried out. ‘There was this romance with big data,’ Alon recalled. ‘People got rewarded for spearheading projects with buzzwords like “artificial intelligence” in the title.’ Commanders doled out medals to enterprising conscripts eager to help automate intelligence operations. Government officials celebrated Israel’s technological capabilities as proof of its military supremacy. In May 2023, Eyal Zamir, the director general of the Ministry of Defence, boasted that the country was on the verge of becoming an ‘AI superpower’.
note
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the data-driven tech boom of the 2010s led the army to employ the services of civilian firms that were experimenting in mass surveillance and machine learning. The American data analytics firm Palantir opened an office in Tel Aviv and secured contracts with the Ministry of Defence and the IDF. Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon all have offices in Israel. Start-ups staffed by veterans of intelligence units and funded by venture capital firms, often from the US or the EU, offered advanced surveillance and weapons systems. Among the most prominent were the cyber-espionage firm NSO, the biometric surveillance company Oosto and the hacking firm Cellebrite. Over the last decade, defence officials have claimed that the revolving door between the military and civilian technology firms is key to maintaining Israel’s military edge.
key
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n the mid-2000s, military chiefs began remaking intelligence units in the image of Silicon Valley start-ups. The press framed service in military intelligence as ‘better than a degree from MIT’, claiming that it prepared young Israelis for success in a global tech economy. Applicants, typically from the middle-class, liberal and Ashkenazi communities who had rallied for an end to the occupation a few years earlier, vied for entry. Preparation began early. Teenagers took coding classes, studied foreign languages and passed the requisite tests. New recruits were rewarded with lectures from billionaire tech moguls and tours of Tel Aviv start-ups.
Luttwak's enthusiasm for this set up visible in his IDF book
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whitesiadbarre.substack.com whitesiadbarre.substack.com
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Yet another Syrian-Argentine who was a Menem intimate is Ruben Beraja, whose tenure as DAIA chief coincided with the latter’s presidential mandate. Beraja was a participant in the notorious US $400,000 payoff to witness Carlos Telleldín — about which, more here — and by the late ‘90s had become a fairly controversial figure, in spite of his repeated protests about supposed “victim-blaming.” Memorial groups and what of the Jewish left which had survived the Proceso increasingly began to harass him wherever he went, demanding that justice extend past phantom Iranians to the various Menem associates implicated in AMIA. Ruben Beraja got the last laugh, though. The failure of his own Banco Mayo, in which almost all Jewish institutions kept their funds, enabled a restructuring of Argentine Jewish life which substantially marginalized left-wing factions from the governance of DAIA and other national umbrella organizations. In their place came religious and Zionist hardliners, awash in foreign donations, who remade the public face of Argentine Judaism in their image and swept any inconvenient questions about AMIA under the rug. Chief among these was the missionary cult Chabad-Lubavitch, whose relief efforts for Jewish families left destitute by the 2001 crisis pulled them from standing at the barricades with gentile peers (Lutzky, 2012: Chapter Seven). The first major revolt against neoliberalism in the twenty-first century was also the first in Argentine history where Jews hewed in large numbers to the side of reaction — a trend which has continued to deepen ever since.
Stricking
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Announcing the Bank of Russia’s latest rate hike to 19%, Elvira Nabiullina acknowledged rates might go to 20% in October and rates would continue to climb to get inflation back to the 4% target in 2025. But monetary policy cannot tame what’s driving inflation.
Common issue
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- Sep 2024
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www.wheresyoured.at www.wheresyoured.at
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The answer is simple: the tech industry's desperate attachment to artificial intelligence is largely fueled by the SaaS industry, because AI is the first meaningful new "thing" they've had to flog to customers in quite some time, and because so many of these solutions are sold in bulk on annual contracts signed by people who aren't the end user, artificial intelligence feels like something that they can put on top of another solution and claim it's new.
Key graph
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- Jul 2024
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www.phenomenalworld.org www.phenomenalworld.org
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might galvanize the other side more than their own—Corbyn’s 2019 reception in Mansfield being a case in point
Have to ask Chris about this
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www.972mag.com www.972mag.com
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Even in seemingly unpopulated or abandoned areas of Gaza, soldiers engaged in extensive shooting in a procedure known as “demonstrating presence.” S. testified that his fellow soldiers would “shoot a lot, even for no reason — anyone who wants to shoot, no matter what the reason, shoots.” In some cases, he noted, this was “intended to … remove people [from their hiding places] or to demonstrate presence.”
"recon by fire"
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jacobin.com jacobin.com
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branded its staff “third-rank students from first rate universities”
Hell yes
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- Jun 2024
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www.thebignewsletter.com www.thebignewsletter.com
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At the time, Democrats seemed uniquely fat and happy. In the summer of 2016, a manufacturing worker from the corporation Carrier, which had just announced it was sending jobs to Mexico, asked President Obama at a town hall meeting about offshoring. Obama was annoyed. Such jobs, he said “are just not going to come back.” Trump’s appeal in that context was pretty obvious.
An era
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- May 2024
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newleftreview.org newleftreview.org
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The Greens’ approach to environmental policy is economically punishing for most people. They are in favour of high co2 prices, making fossil fuels more expensive in order to create an incentive to get off them. That may work for well-to-do people who can afford to buy an electric car, but if you don’t have much money, it just means you’re worse off. The Greens radiate arrogance towards poorer people and are therefore hated by a large part of the population. That’s something the AfD plays on—it thrives on hatred of the Greens, or rather of the policies the Greens pursue.
Should check
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But the Greens have been fanatical on this point, so completely in thrall to the us that they have adopted a virulently anti-China position. Baerbock, the Green Foreign Minister, has made real diplomatic blunders. In at least one instance, in Saarland, she scared off an important Chinese investment with a lot of jobs attached. So, this is a worrying new development.
Should look up this Saarland case.
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- Apr 2024
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www.phenomenalworld.org www.phenomenalworld.org
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Brazil was no exception, and it adopted a suite of ad hoc programs: emergency aid to people in situations of vulnerability; an emergency benefit for formal employees; an emergency benefit for maintaining employment and income; and emergency financing to cover payroll expenses. These emergency income guarantee programs consumed 63.5 percent of the “war budget” spent in 2020.16
Should look up this constitutional spending limit.
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gainst this backdrop, this section proposes an analysis from the perspective of financial cycles. To do this, we discuss two points: first, a fall in the two main banking revenue streams appeared as a trend before the Covid crisis and, for this reason, we can consider that decline to have a more structural dimension; second, the state played a key role in restoring the sector’s profitability.
Derisking!
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- Mar 2024
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prospect.org prospect.org
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And while Barnett conducted numerous high-profile interviews over the years with the likes of The New York Times, the producers of the Netflix documentary Downfall, and the Today show, what was most unusual from his lawyers’ perspective was that he had the receipts. Unlike would-be whistleblower clients who find themselves “perp walked” out of the plant without access to their phones or email accounts, Turkewitz told the Prospect, “John had meticulously documented everything, he had thousands of pages stored on his computer.” Those documents were especially invaluable because of the meager force of the “AIR 21” statute governing aviation whistleblowers, which forces industry employees who are fired for speaking out about unsafe practices to litigate their grievances in a secret court system operated by the Department of Labor that lacks subpoena power.
!
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The judge said this while ruling in the DOJ’s favor, in a case filed by 737 MAX victims’ families to force the agency to hand over its files on the decision to close the Boeing case with a toothless DPA. The judge, Beryl Howell, denied the families’ motion, but rebuked the agency for failing to “take seriously the reputation of the Department of Justice [in] responding to all the smoke that has been generated about this DPA,” as evidenced by its failure to send a single lawyer from the fraud division to the March 1 hearing. “It’s the Department of Justice’s reputation at stake here in how well they’re protecting the public interest,” she told the courtroom.
Extraordianry
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www.phenomenalworld.org www.phenomenalworld.org
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In any given year, Cairo pays 50–60 percent of state revenue in payments on this debt, while 40–45 percent of its revenue comes from regressive taxes on the poor, many introduced in 2016 with IMF support. The other half of its state budget is borrowed money, which Cairo acquires from Gulf Arab donors, the IMF, and by selling its own deposit certificates and bonds at high interest.
Should look up these deposit certificates
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www.armytimes.com www.armytimes.com
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Col. Roger Cabiness II, an Army spokesperson, acknowledged parts backlogs in a statement to Army Times. He said a “working group” between Army Materiel Command and “other stakeholders” aims to reduce such backorders. Cabiness also said that “advanced manufacturing, data analytics and other innovative solutions” will combine to ease the difficulty of getting the right parts at the right time.
"data analytics"
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Chief Warrant Officer 2 Trevor Nelson, who at the time was a sergeant first class leading maintenance for 1-66′s Bradley company, and other Iron Knights described parts backlogs that meant some tanks faced long delays before repair. That made the unit lean even harder on its functional vehicles and on its soldiers. Sometimes the “burnt out” maintainers would resort to visiting auto parts stores and buying common parts on their own dime.
PArts backlog
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- Feb 2024
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Donna Desrochers, a senior associate at rpk GROUP, a national higher education consulting firm, and former principal researcher in the education program at the American Institutes for Research, says that while colleges could be more financially transparent, "some of this staffing up is legitimate" to address equity gaps and help students do well.“I don't think it's all bloat," she says. "It’s more nuanced than, ‘Universities are hiring all these professionals they don’t need.' Investments in student success are worthwhile. It costs a lot to get students enrolled, and it’s best to help them persist and succeed in college.”
Of course she wouldn't, that bloat hires her company
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newleftreview.org newleftreview.org
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Mediapart’s speciality has been to police and intimidate the left. Any time a left voice strays from Atlanticist orthodoxy, they try to whip it back into line. Edwy Plenel, the ex-Le Monde, ex-Trotskyist founder of Mediapart, has been particularly virulent on Ukraine. He’s recently recycled his pro-nato analysis of the Yugoslav war and his verbose charge against Régis Debray, trying to associate Mélenchon with Milošević, while Zelensky would be the new Trotsky and Putin, Stalin. It’s obvious from his book that he knows almost nothing about Ukraine. But attacking Mélenchon has become the national sport, of which Mediapart is a keen practitioner.
Oh wow what a shock that an ex-Trotskyist is doing this. .
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www.nakedcapitalism.com www.nakedcapitalism.com
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But the hero redeems himself with — and “Beaumont” promotes — the super-secret explanation of why the British have been losing to the Russians. Through a spy ring they recruited at Oxford, the Russians have their agents in the top jobs in Whitehall and Downing Street. This spy ring, code named COSTELLO, is so secret that in Moscow it’s run by the Kremlin apart from the foreign and military intelligence services, the SVR and GRU.
Christ
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Experts believe the country will then have to stump up an additional €25bn-€30bn a year out of the general budget to meet the 2 per cent goal — an eye-watering sum that could require swingeing cuts in welfare spending if the country is to balance the books.
Shading
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www.ynet.co.il www.ynet.co.il
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According to the ACA's estimate, the shortage for the coming year is about 3,500 soldiers, among other things in the shadow of the many dead and wounded in the wa
Manpower shortages
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- Jan 2024
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www.nakedcapitalism.com www.nakedcapitalism.com
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As 2023 ended, the company’s strategy department was abolished. Unit strategy functions were also reduced. The company no longer wants a plan for company-wide new technology development, new product development or, most crucial, restoring the links between the people who design and build aircraft and the people who manage the company. There are also no plans to promote technical people to senior management positions. Stephanie Pope’s recent appointment as chief operating officer means another finance person has been made Calhoun’s heir apparent.
!
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jacobbacharach.com jacobbacharach.com
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really good workplace novel, a really good workplace satire—Then We Came to the End; On the Floor—hauls the essential unreality of working life out of the weird blandness of working life as much as out of the particulars.
Could look up
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jacobbacharach.com jacobbacharach.com
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America is a post-moral society, and therefore no obvious evil can be condemned without the palliating piping-in of Drs. Efficacy and Outcome.
Nice line
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www.thebignewsletter.com www.thebignewsletter.com
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The engineers and workers at Boeing, in other words, really want to build quality aircraft, but are prevented from doing so by the suits. This is consistent with what I’ve heard from labor negotiators who dealt with Boeing in the early 2000s; the executives absolutely despised their union and attempts from the workers to preserve quality processes. Next month, the Machinists are going to start negotiating with Boeing over pensions, health care, and salaries. But the subtext will be the absolute rage towards the executives who ruined their once-great company.
"This is consistent with what I’ve heard from labor negotiators who dealt with Boeing in the early 2000s; the executives absolutely despised their union and attempts from the workers to preserve quality processes. "
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pluralistic.net pluralistic.net
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A lot of these lifehacks boil down to making your life easier. There's a spot on our kitchen counter where I put e-waste. Whenever I go out to the car, I carry any e-waste out and put it in a bag in the trunk. Any time I'm near our city dump, I stop and throw the bag into their e-waste bin. This is now a habit, and habits are things you get for free: I spend zero time thinking about e-waste, which means I have more time to think about things that matter (and our e-waste still ends up in the right place).
"Habits are things you get for free."
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www.construction-physics.com www.construction-physics.com
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Constant pressure to hit quarterly performance targets meant that machine quality often suffered. In some cases, machines would be shipped out the door unfinished so the delivery could be booked, and assembly would be completed by service technicians at the customer’s location. In his history of the American machine tool industry, Albert Albrecht states that “the actions of these larger corporations and conglomerates, under the leadership of financial MBA’s, perhaps more than any other factor, contributed to the restructuring and decline of the US machine tool industry at the end of the 20th century.”
Cf Acemoglu on effect of MBA management.
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The third major shift in the machine tool industry was the rise of foreign producers, especially Japan. Japan’s machine tool industry had been devastated by the war and the immediate aftermath (when many of Japan’s machine tools were shipped to China and the Philippines as war reparations), and by 1955 Japanese tools were just 0.5% of world exports. But Japan was eager to become a major producer of machine tools, and its manufacturers quickly became more capable. Between 1955 and 1960 Japanese machine tool production rose by a factor of 15, and in 1960 American Machinist magazine noted that “Japanese machines for the first time appear to merit recognition and to be competitive with machines of the most advanced industrial nations.” By the end of the 1960s, imports remained a small fraction of the US market (around 10%), but were gaining momentum: between 1964 and 1967, Japanese machine tool exports to the US rose over 1200%.
Cf Germany on paradoxical modernization effect of wartime infrastructure destruction.
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jacobin.com jacobin.com
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Dean claimed to have noticed a significant deterioration in Spirit’s workforce after Spirit went through several rounds of mass layoffs in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the huge influx in government funding they received. According to court documents, Dean said that “Spirit laid off or voluntarily retired a large number of senior engineers and mechanics, leaving a disproportionate number of new and less experienced personnel.”
Damning
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www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk
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The French were initially gung-ho in support of the Whites against the Bolsheviks, but cooled off after a debacle in Odessa, which they briefly occupied early in 1919 with White allies who were ‘more of a hindrance than a help’.
Story of French interventions in immediate postwar something one should look up.
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www.phenomenalworld.org www.phenomenalworld.org
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Within interwar Britain, none were more influential than Ralph Hawtrey, who laid much of the intellectual foundations for the infamous “Treasury View” of the interwar period. From his theorization of the unrelenting tendency toward inflation in credit-based market economies, to his justification of the necessity of “independent” central banks—a proposal which Keynes notably endorsed—Hawtrey’s influence in fashioning the deflationary approach of the British state throughout the 1920s was unrivaled.
Still influential, at least one major fan among economists.
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www.phenomenalworld.org www.phenomenalworld.org
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In particular, the share of domestic consumption contributing to economic growth declined throughout the 2000s. In the mid-2010s, the share of private consumption was less than 50 percent of GDP, significantly lower than that of other advanced countries. This growth pattern was associated with rising income inequality and wage depression. The Gini coefficient of disposable income rose, and the wage share of workers fell significantly in the 2000s, though there was some improvement after 2010. Notably, the relative poverty rate reached 17.6 percent, and the share of low-wage workers receiving less than two thirds of the median wage stood at 23.5 percent in 2016. By contrast, the rich fared well, with the top 10 percent income share at about 43 percent of GDP in 2016, second only to the US.
Wonder if there's some term for this, "export-oriented impoverishment"
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www.ineteconomics.org www.ineteconomics.org
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Almost overnight Balcerowicz pushed through legislation to liberalize the economy, remove price controls, make the Polish currency convertible, and eliminate the fiscal deficit by reducing substantially government subsidies to state enterprises. In order to deal with inflation, partial indexation of wages and incomes was introduced. Faced with the reduction in subsidies, state enterprises reduced production and raised their prices. Hyperinflation took hold and, along with it, mass unemployment. In the government, economists advised that this inflation was necessary to bring down real wages and eliminate the money balances built up during the last decade of Communist rule, as shortages of consumer goods left households with incomes but little on which to spend.
"eliminate the money balances"
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www.stripes.com www.stripes.com
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The move was hailed as a “historic moment” last week by Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who said during a news conference that it marks the first time the country will permanently station forces outside its borders.
lol
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gawker.com gawker.comOn Smarm2
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We have a whole word here at Gawker, "writering," to describe the tribe of writers whose principal writerly concern is being writerly, and who spend all their time congratulating one another on their writing and promulgating correct rules for writing
*
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What exactly are his credentials? 35,550 tweets? How does he essentially differ from the cranks who, before the Internet, had to vent their spleen by writing letters in green ink? (Elsewhere in the same post, he wrote that his critics had breached their duty to "exchange ideas in a humble and respectful manner.")
lol
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He said the country had already made great progress on this path: its debt-to-GDP ratio had fallen to 64 per cent, from 69 per cent when Lindner entered government in 2021. And that, he added, must continue.“For that reason and unless there’s a real need, we can’t just take on more debt than is allowed,” he said.
Remarkable
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- Dec 2023
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“The terrorists had a distinct tactical advantage in firepower,” said Yair Ansbacher, 40, a reservist in a counterterrorism unit who fought on Oct. 7. He and his colleagues mainly used pistols, assault rifles and sometimes sniper rifles, he said.
!
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apnews.com apnews.com
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Born in Colombia, Rocha was raised in a working-class home in New York City and obtained a succession of liberal arts degrees from Yale, Harvard and Georgetown before joining the foreign service.He was the top U.S. diplomat in Argentina between 1997 and 2000 as a decade-long currency stabilization program backed by Washington was unraveling under the weight of huge foreign debt, triggering a political crisis that would see the South American country cycle through five presidents in two weeks.
lol
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www.lanacion.com.ar www.lanacion.com.ar
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Se pusieron en contacto conmigo algunos ex montoneros, especialmente los que habían intentado rebelarse contra la conducción nacional, Miguel Bonasso, por ejemplo, y varios miembros totalmente desconocidos que habían pasado algún tiempo en la cárcel y me escribieron para decir que el libro les había ayudado a entender lo ocurrido en sus vidas. Para mí, esas cartas, escritas por jóvenes que empezaban a valorar su actuación pasada y la experiencia montonera con un espíritu de autocrítica, tenían más valor que cualquier reseña del libro.
Interesting
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Además, no tenía mucha confianza en las instancias judiciales argentinas durante aquel período. Por lo general, habían sido muy pasivas durante la guerra sucia y ahora, de la noche a la mañana, parecían descubrir los derechos humanos cuando las peores violaciones y las juntas militares ya habían pasado.
Point
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-¿Por qué sobrevivieron más montoneros que miembros de otros grupos guerrilleros como el ERP? -Por varias razones. Contaban con más efectivos y simpatizantes que los otros grupos, estaban más metidos en las estructuras políticas y sociales del país, se relacionaron mejor con las tradiciones históricas argentinas, fueron más pragmáticos en algunos sentidos y también sacaron a muchos de sus dirigentes del país a tiempo al endurecerse la guerra sucia. También, hay que recordar que tenían mucho más dinero que los demás, dinero producto de los secuestros.
Key question
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unherd.com unherd.com
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Soon after the Mitterrand experiment began, however, it started to unravel. As a reaction to the Socialists’ ambitious plan for economic reform, capital started to flee France almost immediately. Despite the imposition of draconian capital controls, the government was unable to halt the flight.
This is an interesting point, should look up why capital controls failed.
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hemisphericinstitute.org hemisphericinstitute.org
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Segunda hipótesis: los relatos de los “sobrevivientes” sobre la vida cotidiana en los centros de detención clandestina vulneran, corroen, contradicen, quebrantan abiertamente, la representación mítica del “detenido-desaparecido” como un “héroe” y “mártir”, como un sujeto no contaminado por la eficacia destructiva de la represión. Tercera: las estrategias de “sobrevivencia” frente al poder concentracionario son sospechadas como “traición”, pues violentan el mandato sacrificial asociado a la figura del “detenido-desaparecido”. Cuarta: la condición política actual del “sobreviviente” es resistida, difícilmente asimilada por las organizaciones de derechos humanos y de izquierda, pues su pasaje por la experiencia concentracionaria es reconocido como expresivo de ciertas formas de negociación con los “represores” que, aún cuando puedan y merezcan interpretarse como silenciosas resistencias de los oprimidos, no han dejado de ser sospechadas como actitudes “colaboracionistas”. Finalmente, la quinta hipótesis sostiene que el “sobreviviente” es visualizado no sólo como un símbolo del “horror” del terrorismo de Estado, sino de la contundente “derrota del proyecto revolucionario”; esto es, como un exponente viviente de dos experiencias sociales negativamente significadas.
ESta bien
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www.scielo.org.ar www.scielo.org.ar
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De hecho, para Astiz la ESMA no parece haber sido tan solo un infierno, sino un purgatorio, ya que algunos compañeros tuvieron que colaborar con la dictadura en tareas de inteligencia «aún sin haber traicionado».
Interesting exception
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En 1978, la dictadura militar conducida por Jorge Rafael Videla empezó a mostrar sus primeras resquebrajaduras, debido al aumento de la conflictividad sindical y las huelgas obreras. La Conducción Nacional de Montoneros decidió entonces que era hora de pasar de la «defensiva estratégica» a una Contraofensiva popular. La previsión de los dirigentes montoneros era que, en un ambiente caldeado por las movilizaciones obreras, una serie de acciones militares de propaganda armada iban a colocar a la guerrilla peronista a la cabeza de la movilización, recuperando presencia en las calles y acelerando la descomposición del régimen militar. En última instancia, si tenemos en cuenta las categorías nativas de los propios actores, era el método que les había dado tan buenos resultados entre 1970 y 1973, cuando el asesinato del general Aramburu les otorgó un capital político suficiente como para conducir un movimiento de masas y convertirse en un actor político de peso.
Excellent point re Aramburu
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la segunda mitad de los años90, el incremento de las luchas sociales coincidió con un avance de las organizaciones de derechos humanos. Los movimientos sociales que aglutinaban a trabajadores desocupados, familiares de desaparecidos y asambleístas barriales tendieron un puente simbólico hacia los 70, explicando la parábola histórica del neoliberalismo como resultado del golpe militar de 1976. Las organizaciones de Derechos Humanos reivindicaron al militante político que había detrás de cada víctima del terrorismo de Estado, desplazamiento que contribuyó a volver más inteligible al objeto de la guerrilla. En ese sentido, la publicación de La Voluntad en 1997, de Eduardo Anguita y Martín Caparrós, reflejó el intento de sistematizar los testimonios de la experiencia militante y de repolitizar a las víctimas, como una forma de resistencia frente a la cultura neoliberal
"repolitizar a las víctimas"
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www.tandfonline.com www.tandfonline.com
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Yet Bonasso barely writes. Like many others – including the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, led by Hebe de Bonafini – Bonasso is confident about the new political cycle represented by Kirchnerismo. Like other cultural and political actors in Argentina today, Bonasso's confidence seems to rely primarily on Kircherismo's human rights politics, which has so far been marked by the reopening of trials of the military after the annulments of the so-called ‘Leyes del Perdón’. Perhaps more fundamentally, Bonasso seems confident about the probability of constructing a new ‘we’ for the remains of the Peronist Left. A ‘we’, this time, articulated from within an actual political process. This ‘we’ probably has read Bonasso's books and learnt of a political culture configured around powerful tropes and images of loyalty, betrayal, the Peronist People and its secret archives.
Indeed yes.
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Most fundamentally, Bonasso builds up an interpretation of December 2001 that links it to the 1970s. Those who repressed and those who resisted, Bonasso argues, were linked to the 1970s scene. Rodolfo Walsh's assassin was not in the Plaza de Mayo, but his son was there, and Bonasso accuses him of being involved in the murder of one of the five killed. The thousands of disappeared were not in Plaza de Mayo, but their mothers and children were there, to fight what Bonasso deems ‘secular combat’ (Bonasso, Citation2002: 197).
Key
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Bonasso's ability to articulate these tropes appeals to strong, emotive identifications. Perhaps readers also sought to find, at least in narrations, an intensity of the political that had seemed to be definitively lost in the 1980s and 1990s: a symbolic recovery of some postcards of intensity, of years in which the People went to the streets and ‘gave their best sons’.
" an intensity of the political"
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To that political generation, dispersed throughout the political field, Bonasso offers powerful images of a shared past without obliging it to rethink collective responsibilities. In this sense, the reading of Bonasso's testimonial novels, as Beatriz Sarlo argues, probably entails a tranquillizing effect, a nostalgic one
"powerful images of a shared past without obliging it to rethink collective responsibilities"
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In so far as the ‘market’ – in this case, accessed via the publisher – does not pursue charitable endeavours, the question that remains is: into which ‘market’ does Bonasso's narrative fit? Who, to put it another way, reads Bonasso? The question of readership and the meanings it generates is a difficult one to track. Nevertheless, the narrative itself – its style, its main tropes – provides us with important clues. Even though the construction of an intergenerational bridge is a key ‘authorial intention’ – as the figuration of ‘the generational reserve’ in La memoria en donde ardía clearly illustrates – Bonasso speaks to his generational peers. It is a generation defined not only by age but also, and fundamentally, by politics. This generation is able to decode shared signs and does not need further explanations of contexts, situations or names.
"generation is able to decode shared signs"
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In other words: Bonasso's narrative articulates a Peronist Left's political culture by activating, in the 1980s and 1990s, central images and tropes encoded in a 1970s tone (Williams, Citation1977: 122). As in other products of the same cultural formation, such as Fernando Solanas's Tango (1985) or even Sur (1987), Bonasso's writing constructs a militant memory and, in so doing, configures a residuality.
Useful references
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With the electoral defeat of Peronism in 1983, the demobilization that followed, and the ensuing spread of ex-militants throughout the various political alternatives – Peronist or not – no room remained for the reconstruction of the Peronist Left in the 1980
A bit muddy. Does she see Italo Luder as representing or trying to incorporate militantes in its coalition,
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The core of Bonasso's project of rescuing hidden voices and secret archives in the 1980s and 1990s is to locate the Peronist People, its ‘best sons’, and its main traitors and enemies. In so doing, Bonasso's narrative attempts to reconstruct an intergenerational bridge, to secure the transmission of a militant memory which otherwise would be lost or diminished by the ‘discourse of the renegades’. Bonasso's militant memory, whose basic premise is not to discuss the politics of the 1970s Peronist Left directly, is nonetheless a memory of defeat, and it is loaded with bitterness. This memory is an attempt to provide a re-created political culture with its values, symbols and traditions.
Excellent. " to secure the transmission of a militant memory"
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An archive of ‘the People’ and its resistance is not complete without an archive of both the powerful and the treacherous. The memory of the People's politics is impossible without the archive of the anti-People, because they are both terms of the ‘central contradiction’. Bordenave's archive, homemade and depressing, metaphorically points to the reinscription of memory and history by a son of the People. To a degree, Bordenave's archive works, in the narration, as a counterpoint to the recovery of the hidden voices of the rank-and-file militants, the People's ‘sons’.
"recovery of the hidden voices of the rank-and-file militants, the People's 'sons' "
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Recuerdo de la muerte begins the search for hidden voices. Dri's testimony concerning the experience of the dictatorship's concentration camps, in this case, alternates with a series of five chapters called ‘Lejanías’. Interrupting the fluidity of the narrative, these chapters evoke, also from Dri's perspective, the story of his militant formation from September 1955, when his father was an eyewitness to the bombings of Plaza de Mayo, to his increasing involvement in the Peronist Left. It is noteworthy that Bonasso basically represents Dri, a middle-class young man whose political formation took place in the province of Chaco, during his ‘rank-and-file’ experience. Bonasso removes Dri from Buenos Aires – and the ‘modernist’ 1960s – as well as from the 1970s Montoneros' leadership, to which Dri ultimately belonged.
Nice point
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The division of labour within that friendship condenses what was most promising of the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s. According to Bonasso, the Peronist feeling and tradition paradigmatically embodied in Dardo Cabo might guarantee ‘real interchange’ with an ideologically radicalized middle class and, thereby, the construction of a wider popular alliance. Yet that friendship was unique: the inclusion of the term ‘real’ reinforces the sense of failure of such a relationship on a more general level. The emphasis on that friendship throughout Bonasso's narrative points to the fact that not all of the ‘popular camp’ was willing to abandon its conservative stance and even less of the radicalized middle class sought an authentic approach to the Peronist People.
"The division of labour within that friendship condenses what was most promising of the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s"
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It is this ‘end of the historical Peronist identity’ that entails the inability to define the frontiers between the loyalist and the traitor
‘end of the historical Peronist identity’ . Note also traidor y el heroe
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Bonasso, first reorganizes the dichotomy, he then links it to the context of the 1970s and, finally, he translates it into the 1980s and 1990s political and cultural landscape. Along with the re-enactment of this set of values, Bonasso's writings also emphasize one of the central symbols of the Peronist political culture: ‘the Peopl
Useful in CFK style of discourse
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Bonasso, according to Sarlo, cannot overcome the logics of immediacy, which would demand a shift away from the position of witness-narrator in order to understand that past rather than romanticize it (Sarlo, Citation1997, Citation2005). In a similar fashion, Hugo Vezzetti (Citation2002) expresses concerns over the construction of a heroic Montoneros past and the almost ontological impossibility of rethinking the 1970s in Bonasso's narrative. Sarlo and Vezzetti emphasize one of the key purposes that underlie Bonasso's narrative: to construct a militant memory of the 1970s. Equally important, they also identify a central drawback: his reconstruction of the 1970s, which almost entirely relies on his own condition as ‘witness’, does not expand our historical knowledge of that period.
"to construct a militant memory of the 1970". Can bring in CMU about human rights.
Look up Vezzetti 2002
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Many critics have highlighted Bonasso's apparent inability to move beyond a 1970s perspective, and have interpreted this inability more generally as a symptom of the difficulties the Peronist Left has in both comprehending its own political responsibilities for the tragic finale of the revolutionary experiences of the 1970s, and of discussing post-dictatorship issues related to mourning and the memory of state repression.
point
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“We know what was announced but we do not know what exactly was signed with the suppliers,” he said. “We will not announce that we will be cutting all the contracts that were signed, even if we were also surprised to see Poland buying everything from Americans and Koreans, and not from our European partners.”
Last sentence interesting in terms of a possible future approach
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Some European defence executives are also concerned about the impact of South Korea’s state-backed push on the region’s plans to shore up industrial sovereignty in the wake of the Ukraine conflict. “State subsidised companies coming into Europe, setting up factories and pushing for volume production is not a concern in the short-term and is helpful to Ukraine,” said one executive. “But in the long term, there is a risk these companies could outcompete domestic players with less strong balance sheets.”
European companies
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Korean exporters are also assisted by the government, including its willingness to step in and place orders so as to keep production lines “hot” in the absence of orders from abroad.
Government support for existing capacity
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Because South Korea produces armaments at a larger scale than many of its western competitors, it can offer better value for money on assets such as tanks and howitzers and lower-end fighter jets.
Larger scale
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Hanwha Aerospace recorded the biggest rise in new orders, with its backlog soaring from $2.4bn in 2020 to $15.2bn at the end of 2022, according to the FT analysis. The company, the country’s biggest arms producer, which makes the K-9 self-propelled howitzer tank, has benefited significantly from Ukraine-related orders, in particular from Poland. South Korea has catapulted up the ranks of arms sellers over the past two years because of significant export orders, particularly from eastern European countries. It was the world’s ninth-largest seller of arms in 2022, up from 31st place in 2000, according to Sipri.
South Korea story interesting
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Svyrydenko said Ukraine would prioritise defence and debt servicing which meant “there’s a huge risk of underfunding of certain social sectors”. Kyiv might have to delay paying wages for 500,000 civil servants and 1.4mn teachers and benefits for 10mn pensioners if foreign aid did not come through, she said.
defence and debt servicing
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www.pagina12.com.ar www.pagina12.com.ar
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En 2019, Villarruel acompañó a Javier Ortega Smith, el secretario general del ultraderechista Vox, en una presentación en el Círculo Militar. “Me atrevo a vaticinar que puede haber un 30 por ciento de los argentinos que estén buscando a alguien que realmente los represente”, dijo el segundo de Santiago Abascal durante su estadía porteña.Villarruel es la presidenta honoraria de la Fundación Oíd Mortales, que firmó la Carta de Madrid, el documento fundacional de una alianza de agrupaciones que orbitan alrededor de Vox en España e Hispanoamérica. Allí denuncian que parte de la región está “secuestrada” por regímenes totalitarios de inspiración comunista
Ask Lucas about these figures and groups
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Según Mercado, Villarruel comenzó su activismo en la Asociación Argentinos por la Memoria Completa, que cayó en desgracia después de que una investigación periodística expuso que su máxima dirigente, Karina Mujica, ejercía la prostitución en Mar del Plata.
Bustos Domecq joke
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. In recent months the rouble has actually appreciated, in part because officials introduced capital controls.
Useful detail
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www.phenomenalworld.org www.phenomenalworld.org
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MDA: The Fernández government had no epic narrative. Milei could establish a political horizon because Peronism lacked one. Peronists tried to maintain their classic bastions, but those bastions were void of content. When, for example, schools couldn’t open during the pandemic, they offered no narrative argument for that decision. Kids, mothers, and teachers alike suffered a lot, and we failed to explain the reasons for closing the schools. We lost the banner of education during that time.
Cd be useful to explain turn to Montoneros
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foreignpolicy.com foreignpolicy.com
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Since democracy’s return, Argentina has emerged as an international human rights standard-bearer, holding military leadership accountable in its justice system and pursuing policies that center historical remembrance. That made Buenos Aires somewhat of a regional outlier: Nearby Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay were also shaken by repressive military rule, but those countries’ reckonings with the past have been much more limited.
Useful quote
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www.aljazeera.com www.aljazeera.com
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He pointed to 1989, when protests over hyperinflation brought down the government of Raul Alfonsin, who presided over Argentina’s transition into a democracy and the 1985 trial of the dictatorship’s military leaders.
eh?
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www.levyinstitute.org www.levyinstitute.org
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In 1998, Japan announced another stimulus package of 16 trillion yen; however, actual spendingand tax measures were only 12 trillion at best (this number also included 1.5 trillion of publicworks spending the central government requested of local governments without providing thefunding) (Posen 1998, 51). It amounted to merely 1.1 percent to 1.6 percent of GDP “dependingon local government participation” (Posen 1998, 53). Posen (1998, 44) estimates that the actualstimulative portion of the stimulus packages of the 1990s amounted to “23 trillion yen, or 4.5percent of a year’s GDP
Remarkable degree to which stimulus much less than advertised.
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- Sep 2023
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www.moonofalabama.org www.moonofalabama.org
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Today's report by the Russian Ministry of Defense lists 445 Ukrainian casualties in the Donetzk direction, mostly around Bakhmut, and only 100 casualties on the Zaporozhye front in the south. Yesterday's report had 305 versus 35. Last week's summary listed 1,455 Ukrainian troops killed and wounded around Bakhmut and 515 in the southern direction. There was no discernible progress in either direction.
A tenable way to judge intensity
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www.propublica.org www.propublica.org
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One senior officer invoked the commander of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Scott Swift, as wanting to use the region as a “testing grounds” for the Navy.Reached by phone, Swift said he was a “believer in the LCS” and acknowledged that he had encouraged the Navy to test new weapons systems in the Pacific. But he emphasized that it was not an order to deploy ships at any cost.“We made it clear if you want to take them off line, take them off line, but I am not surprised that people further down the chain didn’t feel they had that option,” he said. “The offer could have been perceived as an order, or taken advantage of by those that wanted to push harder to get a win out of LCS.”
Last para involves nice example of administrative cya language
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Contrary to what Clark observed in Denmark, the various weapons systems would not be easy to swap out. The Navy hadn’t factored in the weeks it could take for all the contractors, sailors and others who were needed to fly in from around the world to help outfit the vessels for different missions.
Point
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Even the commanding officer, Michael Atwell, had “few opportunities to gain valuable at sea experience” before his deployment, according to a later Navy investigation.
Rotation curse?
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In fact, the LCS was on its way to becoming one of the Navy’s worst nightmares — and Mabus was its biggest cheerleader.Better known for his political acumen than his military experience, Mabus served three years in the Navy in the early ’70s, including time at sea as a lieutenant junior grade on board the USS Little Rock.
Could be example of USN savviness in political use of reserve commissions.
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kyivindependent.com kyivindependent.com
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But they have their own nasty surprises to worry about. A tank platoon commander named Vladyslav recalls how the first time a Ukrainian tried to use a tank radio, the Russians immediately zeroed in on it and buried it in artillery. Since then, they learned never to use communications devices more powerful than a hand-held. Enemy troops are too-well positioned to punish any slip-ups.
Notable
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The positions themselves were ruins, with few places to hide. It's dangerous to stick a limb out from what cover remained, let alone go to the bathroom. Because the Russians in this area are relatively sharp, with professional troops and special forces in addition to conscripts from prisons or the general population. They’re well-screened and show little signs of fear.
Again, quality of Russian forces relatively unepxected.
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Furthermore, the translators that are used often lack a military background and fail to convey accurate commands or responses between instructors and trainees, Zgurets added.
Unexpected problem.
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Like most units, the 32nd is starved for vehicles and artillery ammo. Most of the good equipment is deployed to the counteroffensive on the Zaporizhzhia front.
There it is
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Soldiers from the 32nd are open about how in over their heads they often feel. The infantrymen talk about being outmatched by the competent and seemingly fearless Russian troops they saw on this axis of attack.
Unusual, at least in reporting up to this point.
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Before January, the 32nd didn't exist, and the vast majority of its soldiers were civilians who had never shot anyone. Many did not want to be in the army.
Interesting
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Ihor's company is part of the 32nd Separate Mechanized Brigade, one of the new brigades that Ukraine began staffing at the start of the year. It's also one of the few brigades that are set to hold the northeastern front, while the majority of troops and equipment is stationed on the southern front where Ukraine's slowly pushing forward.
So possibly on lower priority for reinforcements
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The attack was well-prepared. The Russian troops scouted out the position with their seemingly limitless drones. When they struck, their mortars zeroed in on what cover remained. A shell dropped into the living room of the house Ihor and a fellow soldier were occupying. They survived because they happened to be in the hall.
"seemingly limitless drones"
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The annual flow of investment spending is relatively straightforward to measure, but the same cannot be said of depreciation. In the United States, the ugly truth is that all official capital stock measures have, for years, been based on a single set of estimates of asset depreciation rates produced by two academics, Frank C. Wykoff and Charles R. Hulten, more than forty years ago.
!
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- Aug 2023
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adamtooze.substack.com adamtooze.substack.com
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Russsia’s new fx reserves, held particularly in Hong Kong and the UAE, provide it with huge purchasing power with which to break the import sanctions regime. As far as imports critical to the Russian war effort are concerned the figures are dramatic.
Hong Kong and UAE
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thebaffler.com thebaffler.com
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“This facility is a laboratory for creative thinking . . . It’s not a building, we do not build buildings at our university, we build ideas and turn them into reality.”
!
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You might get a good sense of the kind of university Gordon Gee wants to build by taking a university-run publicity tour of Reynolds Hall, as state lawmakers did in May 2022. The construction of the building cost $100 million, $10 million of which was donated by Robert Reynolds, an alumnus with a seat on the Board of Governors. To obtain the rest of the capital for construction and other facilities repairs, WVU issued two series of bonds. Together, the outstanding balance on those bonds totals $127,940,000 at an interest rate of just over 3 percent.
!
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Kyiv is eager for more combined arms training that involves exercises with tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery, infantry and drones to more closely replicate conditions that exist on the battlefield, but such exercises can be risky. He said that western nations understandably had low tolerance for accidents but that their approach “doesn’t mesh well with [Kyiv’s] requirements for trainees”.
Training casualties, attitudes towards
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A similar problem has reared its head in Denmark, where about eight Ukrainian pilots and dozens of support staff are being trained to fly F-16 fighters at Skrydstrup air base.
F-16 training in Denmark
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But they also said that the age and ability of the soldiers they are sent varies wildly, as Ukrainian commanders on the front line are often unwilling to spare their best men. One volunteer who turned up in Germany was 71 years old.
Fascinating selection problem
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By the end of the year, 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers will have received training in Germany, part of a broader western drive to equip the Ukrainian armed forces with tanks, artillery and air defence systems that has seen 63,000 recruits dispatched by Kyiv to attend training camps in Europe and the US.
10,000 in Germany, 63,000 overall
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Teaching inexperienced soldiers how to operate a tank on the front line in just six weeks was never going to be easy.
Six weeks
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- Jul 2023
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the murder of John Lennon outside the Dakota (just a few blocks away from the Sullivanians) provided Newton with grounds for renewed panic. Proclaiming that he, too, was in danger of assassination, he had a security desk installed at the ‘Kremlin’ (as the older children were now privately calling the main building), and ordered a bodyguard detail to protect him and Harvey whenever they went downtown to the theatre, where a one-way mirror was installed so that the audience could be scanned for potential assassins. Harvey began work on a film about the nuclear arms race, and soon became convinced that the CIA was after her. A steel-walled, bazooka-proof bunker was built for her in the Catskills, with a trapdoor to an underground passageway leading to a permanently stationed getaway car.
Latter bits reminds one of the Mitchell and Webb villain lair sketch.
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- Jun 2023
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www.thebignewsletter.com www.thebignewsletter.com
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Most corporations just house different lines of business, and are focused on their customers, investors, and workers. Monopolists, however, are politically oriented. And this makes sense, monopolists don’t have to think about rivals, they instead worry about government. According to one study, the consequence of mergers that consolidate industries is that lobbying spending skyrockets. Illumina does do medical technology, but deSouza clearly spent his time running a political operation to protect the firm’s franchise. The firm is the fourth largest spender on lobbying among biotech firms, outgunned only by much larger giants Pfizer, Roche, and Amgen.
Nice detail
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wheresyoured.at wheresyoured.at
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Reddit has, to date, raised $1.3 billion in venture capital funding, almost all of which came after the company sold to Conde Nast for $10 million in 2006, before being spun off into its own independent enterprise in 2011. It would go on to raise $200 million in 2017 at a $1.8 billion valuation, with a ballooning headcount of 300 people. Between 2019 and 2021 it would raise a further $1.1 billion, growing to around 2000 people, always dancing with the concept of — but never quite reaching — profitability.
VCs as PE-fication of economy
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www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk
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If they saw something they liked, they assumed it was theirs for the taking. Logan Pearsall Smith remembered Bradley and Cooper visiting his sister’s home and admiring a picture by Charles Condor hanging on a wall. Since they thought the work ‘expressed in a way they felt unique the inspiration of their life’, they swiftly concluded that it ‘belonged to them; and when they left the cottage they took it with them and hung it in their Richmond home. They perpetrated this appropriation in pious obedience to that law of possession, which, inscribed in Heaven, if not on earth, decrees that objects of beauty belong to those who love them most.’
Sightly B-D
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www.the-tls.co.uk www.the-tls.co.uk
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Only the expressionist poet Gottfried Benn complained, in a letter to Klaus Mann: “Do you think history is particularly active in French seaside resorts?”. This is an odd question, because it sounds as if Benn had really had too much of Marxist-inclined German writers occupying the moral high ground. But it does have some critical force, helping to pinpoint two European ways of being culturally modern – a New Man, a New Woman – in the early twentieth century. You could be a ruthless communist theoretician. Or you could be a sun-worshipping, god-building, car-driving, sex-crazed, drug-addled individualist.
Quote not unfunny
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www.defensenews.com www.defensenews.com
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The head of Army Sustainment Command explained, in response to the report, that the service’s funding level for APS maintenance in Kuwait was 30% of the validated requirements in fiscal 2023 — about $27.8 million of the $91.3 million requirement.
Remarkably low level of funding, 30& or 27.8 mil out of 91.3
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www.phenomenalworld.org www.phenomenalworld.org
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By contrast, Indonesia is strategically using its nickel reserves to move up the value chain of clean energy technologies. President Joko Widodo banned export of unprocessed nickel in 2020 and began offering incentives for production of EV batteries on domestic soil. In response, Korean companies Hyundai and LG onshored a battery facility, China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL) now has a processing plant, and Ford and Volkswagen also have plans. Jokowi now wants to go further and produce electric cars in Indonesia. His government is persuading Elon Musk to onshore Tesla, instead of their current $5 billion deal to import battery nickel.
Indonesia industrial policy, nickel
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- May 2023
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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The Finance Ministry on Monday hired five banks to help sell its first dollar-denominated bonds in six years.
First dollar-denominated bond in six years
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The search will focus on countries where funding is prospectively plentiful, such as the Middle East and Norway, the person said. It will also maintain benchmark bond sales denominated in euros and US dollars -- as well as discuss vendor financing with South Korea and the US for defense spending, according to the person.
Vendor financing
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notesfrompoland.com notesfrompoland.com
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The commission also advises Poland to “ensure the sustainability of the pension system by taking measures to increase the effective retirement age and reforming preferential pension schemes”. The current government lowered the retirement age when it came to power, reversing the previous government’s reforms.
Notable a right wing government doing this.
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In a set of policy recommendations, the EU’s executive also called for Poland to limit future spending growth, fulfil the milestones agreed with Brussels to unlock frozen funds, increase investment in energy transition, improve the efficiency of social spending by targeting the poorest households, and raise the retirement age.
Funds still unlocked, look into these "milestones"
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www.ft.com www.ft.com
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After high yields forced Poland to scrap a bond sale in October, former defence minister and opposition politician Tomasz Siemoniak wrote on Twitter that “the defence ministry is buying without a plan and apparently without money”.
Interesting about bond sale
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www.the-tls.co.uk www.the-tls.co.uk
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During the Weimar hyperinflation the rise in German prices far exceeded the relative increase in the number of paper marks in circulation. After the currency stabilization of November 1923, which restricted future note issuance and put Germany’s finances on a more stable footing, inflation dropped like a stone, even as the amount of money in circulation rose. Only the dramatic collapse in the public’s inflation expectations can explain this outcome.
Citations needed for this one
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www.experimental-history.com www.experimental-history.com
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But I realize now that I have a second job, which is evaluation, or gatekeeping, or, most specifically, point-guarding. I’m supposed to award "points" based on what students do in my class. Students try to acquire as many points as they can, and I try to stop them from obtaining points too easily. My employers expect me to ensure that, at the end of the semester, some students have more points than other students. At Columbia Business School, this was explicit: only half of students were supposed to receive an “H,” the highest grade.
Pinpoints the problem
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www.the-tls.co.uk www.the-tls.co.uk
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Some readers may be disconcerted by the lack of context, given that the vast majority of the desaparecidos were murdered in their own countries, not as part of Plan Condor.
Unfortunately common
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www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
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But even without the entitlement of a superiority complex, it can feel easy to unload on a stranger whose training says they essentially have to listen to you. For Caitlin and the cable-company employee, “it felt like there was nothing to lose for me by absolutely going nuclear”, she says. “There’s no social credit in the relationship. I feel guilty about this, but it was a situation in which I could unload a whole bunch of frustration onto someone.”
"no social credit"
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But outbursts at service workers specifically don’t generally happen just because that person is simply in front of you, says Morrison. “People that are working those jobs often do not have a lot of power,” she says, “and so they become easier targets”.
Easier targets
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- Apr 2023
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www.the-tls.co.uk www.the-tls.co.uk
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In Narrow Rooms (1978), after committing an unspeakable but consensual act of violence on him
odd phrasing
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www.the-tls.co.uk www.the-tls.co.uk
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Muppets in Moscow: The unexpected crazy true story of making ‘Sesame Street’ in Russia, places us smack in the middle of the turbulent 1990s, but views them from an intriguing angle: the campaign to bring Sesame Street to Russian audiences. The television producer and film-maker Natasha Lance Rogoff writes with infectious enthusiasm, at times veering towards a caricature of the can-do American personality. We are on her side as she lobbies the Sesame Street establishment in New York and the new media powerbrokers in Moscow; we root for her as she tries to win over Russian TV professionals who are sceptical, at best, about the suitability of American-style television for Russian children. We cheer her on as she falls in love with and eventually marries Ken, a mensch and a Princeton economist.
!
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www.pogo.org www.pogo.org
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Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro told a House panel March 29 that a key tool to righting the Navy’s shipbuilding woes is “increasing legal immigration.”
Really should be considered code for "we are unwilling to pay above a certain wage"
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Pentagon bottom line: the engine has to run twice as hot as designed. That wears it out more quicky, which requires more maintenance. That’s a big reason why only 29.3% of the Pentagon’s 564 already-delivered F-35s were able to fly all their missions in February. For the math-challenged among us, that means barely one in four F-35s is fully ready to fly and fight. To combat this, the F-35 program has launched what it is calling its “War on Readiness” (PDF). Technically speaking, of course, it’s already winning that war. What it should be launching is a War on Unreadiness.
Fascinating point
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- Mar 2023
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thebaffler.com thebaffler.com
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But it’s not just haphazardly formatted messages and borderline digital harassment (one Mothership client emailed me upwards of eleven times a day in the lead-up to Election Day 2020) that distinguish the Mothership formula—their work occasionally drifts into outright deceit. Their emails often use the “From” to dupe the recipient: one message from Stop Republicans PAC, an organization I’d never even heard of, sent an email with a “From” line labeled as “⚑ Flight Confirmed,” while the subject line included my email address followed by “Your flight confirmation-ZWCLXT 20NOV.” Of course, the email had nothing to do with a flight I was taking; it was a reference to Mike Pence flying to Atlanta to rally for Republicans in the 2020 Georgia Senate run-offs.
!
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Prodded by military industry lobbyists — and the hundreds of retired high-ranking military officers they have hired to their sales and marketing teams — the government has instead mostly focused on buying new ships, planes and other extremely high-priced pieces of equipment, where the major contractors make most of their money.
Procurement vs readiness
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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t was a ten-hour drive to the town where Doc’s team was based, not far from Pavlivka, a frontline village about fifty miles north of Mariupol.
Pavlika
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- Feb 2023
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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Among the more sobering realizations facing the French military is that Russian forces in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine at times fired as many heavy artillery shells in a week as French manufacturer Nexter says its Caesar 155mm field guns used in 13 years of training and deployments to Afghanistan, Lebanon, Mali and Iraq.
Detail of ammunition consumption
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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In another nondescript suburb of the capital, UA Dynamics, a small company started by a group who served in the Donbas after 2014, is producing an attack drone called the Punisher. It can fly for just 1.5 hours and 45 km, but its electric motor is silent and gives off no thermal signal, according to Maxim Subbotin, a co-founder. The drone doesn’t need to stream traceable live images back to base because target coordinates are programmed into the drone before takeoff.
UA Dynamics, maker of drone called Punisher
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With only a 3 meter wingspan and a tiny engine, Skyeton’s drone has a radar print the size of a bird’s, making it hard to detect; it has suffered fewer than 10 losses among the three dozen vehicles in use since the start of the war, according to the company. About half were bought by the Defense Ministry, and half via private crowdfunding, said a senior executive, who asked not to be named.
Smaller than Bayraktar, radar signature of bird
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Raybirds are built by former light aircraft producer Skyeton. In 2014, as government forces battled a Russia-supported insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, it turned to making UAVs for the military and emergency services.
Light aircraft producer
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Still more sophisticated is the Raybird-3, a reconnaissance drone system that costs between $1 million and $2 million and sits near the top of the food chain in the nation’s burgeoning Unmanned Aerial Vehicle industry.
Have to look up manufacture of these
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Some of the equipment is essential to survival on the battlefield and needs constant replacement because it is quickly destroyed, the officer said, singling out surveillance drones and the pickup trucks that allow force maneuvers and medical evacuation.
Could be useful to point out routine attrition
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americanaffairsjournal.org americanaffairsjournal.org
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The rest of his book investigates how trucking companies use various subsidies and grant programs to train new drivers, more often than not at their own in-house schools, or as my fellow professionals refer to them, “CDL mills.” When not getting money from local and state governments, or Uncle Sam, many trucking fleets operate their own credit companies, which loan potential drivers the money, often before they clear the barest of background or skills checks. These loans come with all of the predictable strings attached, including 25 percent or higher interest rates, and various penalties for failure to pay, or exclusivity contracts which require drivers to work long enough for the lending company to balance this particularly insidious set of scales. The striking reality of becoming a trucker in America today is that even before a newly minted trucker gets to enjoy the “freedom of the open road,” many a driver is made, in effect, an indentured servant to the company that employs him.
Christ
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www.infobae.com www.infobae.com
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El general Onganía, en presencia de los otros dos comandantes en Jefe, preguntó a Lanusse qué repercusión habían tenido sus palabras ante el generalato. La respuesta fue cauta pero sincera: “Las conclusiones que sacaron los generales fueron, por supuesto, variadas, pero puedo ubicar, dentro de la amplia gama de puntos de vista, a dos sectores: el sector de los generales que no entendieron lo que usted quiso decir y el sector de los generales que están en total desacuerdo con lo que usted dijo.”
lol
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www.infobae.com www.infobae.com
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El último mes del gobierno de Illia comenzó con una mala noticia para el peronismo: el jueves 2 de junio, La Nación publicó que “al justicialismo le fue revocada la personería jurídica”. La Cámara Electoral, en consonancia con la Corte Suprema de la Nación, sostuvo que “no es posible admitir en la vida democrática partidos que no incorporen a sus propias estructuras los mismos principios representativos que públicamente defienden” y que “hacer lo contrario sería invitar a los enemigos del sistema a gozar de sus beneficios para destruirlos desde adentro”.
Further proscription peronism
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El viernes 1º de julio (1966), a las 8 de la mañana, Buenos Aires reiteraba su imagen de todos los días… A las 11, los comunicados fueron reemplazados por una proclama: Frente a la ineficacia de un gobierno que, luego de estancar el país, lo había llevado a la más grave crisis económica y financiera de su historia, promoviendo el caos social y quebrando la solidaridad nacional, las fuerzas armadas se habían hecho cargo del poder para asegurar la existencia misma de la Nación. Finalmente, a las dos de la tarde, se informaba escuetamente que un prestigioso jefe, retirado desde hace unos meses del servicio activo, había sido invitado por las autoridades militares a ocupar la jefatura del Estado. Los hechos, en realidad, podrán tener algunas variantes de detalle, pero una historia similar a ésa puede cortar en dos a 1966”. El semanario erró por tres días. Como veremos, Arturo Illia fue derrocado el 28 de junio de 1966.
A kind of support for the coup
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A fines de julio el gobierno radical reincorpora a personal militar “derrotado” por los azules en los enfrentamientos de 1962 y 1963. Entre otros el coronel Luis Perlinger, que pasaría a la historia por el destrato que le infligió al presidente Arturo Illia la noche de su derrocamiento y a su supuesta relación con el PRT-ERP, según fuentes castrenses de la época (estuvo preso entre 1976 y 1983
Curioso si PErlinger comienza como colorado
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www.infobae.com www.infobae.com
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El viernes 21, es asesinado el dirigente Teodoro Ponce de la UOM de Rosario y Secretario Adjunto de la CGT. El 22 -siempre Montoneros-ataca con granadas el Batallón 3 de Infantería de Marina en Ensenada, Buenos Aires. En esas horas también eran atacados a balazos los dirigentes de petroleros Adolfo Cavalli (falleció) y el sindicalista portuario (SUPA), Eustaquio Tolosa. Ambos militaban en la ortodoxia peronista. El miércoles 26 de febrero, fue secuestrado en General Belgrano, el Cónsul de los Estados Unidos en la provincia de Córdoba, John Patrick Egan. Su cuerpo fue encontrado 48 horas más tarde en un baldío por una comisión policial. El cadáver se encontraba con las manos atadas y mostraba un tiro en su ojo derecho. La organización Montoneros se adjudicó el hecho en un “Parte de Guerra”, en el que informa que lo realizado la “Columna Emilio Maza” (uno de los fundadores de la organización y asesino de Pedro E. Aramburu). El texto del Parte de Guerra sostiene: “Con esta acción contribuimos a fortalecer la consigna ‘liberación o dependencia’, continuadora de aquélla, en momentos en que un gobierno que se dice peronista profundizó la dependencia, sometiendo al pueblo a la explotación económica y a la represión con la policía y el ejército, mientras entrega a nuestra Patria a los yanquis”.
Murder of a consul
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Más tarde, equivocadamente, se sostuvo que ese comando pertenecía al ERP 22 de agosto. En realidad había sido Montoneros y el asesinato era un elemento de presión más sobre los ejecutivos de Bunge y Born para que pagaran los 60 millones de dólares que exigían de rescate para liberar a los hermanos Juan y Jorge Born. Los mismos mensajes mafiosos que les hicieron perder la vida al sindicalista José Ignacio Rucci y el ex Ministro Arturo Mor Roig. En esas mismas horas Montoneros secuestró en el gran Buenos Aires a Carlos Gagey, un ejecutivo de la empresa REHEM SAIAR.
Curioso
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urgente24.com urgente24.com
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Paradójicamente, la guerra de Malvinas no sólo abortó la posible salida argentina del NOAL. Obligó a un régimen tan ortodoxamente occidentalista como el de Galtieri a recurrir a ese foro multilateral con el objetivo de encontrar aliados en su disputa con Gran Bretaña
lol
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- Jan 2023
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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The Biden administration has long asserted that American-made M1 Abrams tanks — with their needs for specific fuel, frequent maintenance and spare parts, transport and training — are ill-suited to battle in eastern Ukraine, where supply lines could easily be cut off.A Pentagon spokeswoman, Sabrina Singh, told reporters on Thursday that “it just doesn’t make sense” to provide Ukraine with Abrams tanks “at this moment” because they use jet fuel and are difficult to maintain. She said the Germans must make up their own minds about the Leopard 2s.
Logistics, fuel,
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Experts believe there are an estimated 2,000 German-made Leopard 2 tanks in use by at least 13 European militaries.
2,000 Leopard 2
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The debate over whether either country will allow their tanks onto Ukraine’s battlefields has been brewing for months. But after British officials gave word last week that they would send a platoon of Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine, demands have amped up for Berlin and Washington to quickly follow suit.
Platoon of Challenger Tanks
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- Nov 2022
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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The output cuts agreed by the OPEC+ group of oil producers in 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic appear to have resulted in permanent losses of production capacity for the two west African giants. Neither has been able to restore the output that was shut between April and June 2020, even as their targets began to rise in early 2021.
interesting
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www.phenomenalworld.org www.phenomenalworld.org
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We’ve recently done some research on the trucking industry in Brazil and China, in which we found that services like route planning and automated pricing are far more widespread in middle income countries than advanced ones. Just yesterday, I read an interview with the CEO of Uber Freight in which he said that they account for 2 percent of all freight moved in the US market. Why have these digital disruptors made such quicker strides in poorer economies?
Doctorow's adoption curve
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I do not know any ‘absolutely reliable’ source for the number of UAVs, UCAVs and loitering PGMs manufactured by Iran and pressed into service. Think to have read somewhere that about 50 each of Mohajer-4, Mohajer-6, and Shahed-129s were manufactured, but their series production is going on at least since 2016, and — at least in part — dependable on availability of engines made by Rotax of Austria. Thus, I doubt anybody except Tehran knows exactly.
Austrian engines
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- Oct 2022
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www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk
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The rechazo campaign also made ruthless and effective use of misinformation about the draft constitution’s content. Voters were repeatedly told that it would permit abortions up to the last minute – evangelical churches played a key role in spreading this falsehood – and that it would remove the right to home-ownership, force everyone to use the public healthcare system and deprive workers of control over their pensions. The draft constitution’s historic recognition of Chile’s Indigenous groups also touched some deep nationalist, and racist, nerves. It wasn’t only the right that was troubled: even centre-left figures such as the former president Ricardo Lagos depicted the concept of ‘plurinationality’ as a threat to national unity (‘We’ve had one flag and one national anthem for some time,’ he told a radio host in April). The polarisation around Indigenous issues helps explain why the rechazo side secured some of its highest votes in Araucanía, where the Chilean security services have been called in to tamp down Mapuche resistance to logging companies.
Evangelicals and anti-indigenous panic
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The actions, stemming from an executive order signed by President Joe Biden on Monday, are the latest and perhaps most aggressive attempt by the U.S. to hold the former Sandinista guerrilla leader accountable for his continued attacks on human rights and democracy in the Central American country as well his continued security cooperation with Russia.Previous rounds of sanctions have focused on Ortega, his wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo, and members of their family and inner circle. But none of those moves have managed to loosen Ortega’s grip on power The latest target by Ortega’s government: the Roman Catholic Church. In August, security raided the residence of a bishop, detaining him and several other clergy.
christ
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www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk
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Oil and gas are not Russia’s only exports, of course. There are other raw materials: grain, coal, nickel, aluminium and other metals. In each of these areas, Russia recovered from the economic disarray of the 1990s to become a significant player in the global market in the 2000s and 2010s – in the case of agriculture thanks in large part to targeted state support
Should look this up
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- Sep 2022
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www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk
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the mating behaviour of great crested grebes,
Scoop, William Boot
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newleftreview.org newleftreview.org
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the us offered Japanese companies access to a seemingly infinite external market
Probably a great contrast to state of affairs 1920s and 30s.
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- Aug 2022
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alternatewars.com alternatewars.com
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In mid-October, they begin to issue demi-season and winter uniforms, but only worn ones and there are no sizes, I refuse to receive worn uniforms that are not in size, because of which relations with the command begin to worsen, they don’t like rebels here. After swearing with the company commander, I go and buy myself a pea coat. The company commander begins to take revenge by shoving into the outfits in a day. At the beginning of November, everyone is sent on forced leave, because. the president announced “non-working days”, despite the fact that I am still on probation and I am not entitled to the main vacation. I am going on vacation for 15 days, but I’m not going anywhere. jumps are promised every few days, but I need to make a program. Salary 27t.r. it is almost impossible to arrange a sub-lease, so far no one has carried out the delivery of physio for newly arrived contractors, if I still don’t have time to make four jumps, then the whole next year z.p. will be 27 tr.
Among other things, people buying their own equipment
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Contractors most often simply ignore orders to do some kind of cleaning, which is why conscripts are forced to mow grass or carry something uselessly somewhere. Therefore, the conscripts look even more filthy, and given that they are given a uniform that is already worn and even tattered ... it does not at all look like 56DShP of the 1993-2003 model.
Contractors ignore chickenshit, conscripts cannot and are therefore in worse shape
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The next day we go to shooting, we get up at five in the morning, we line up for three hours and wait for the Kamaz, we finally eat, we arrive at 12:00, we line up, we stand, the command at the training ground does not like how some piece of paper is filled out, the major tears the sheet and throws at our young deputy politician in front of the formation, with some hysterical cries yells that there will be no shooting because of this, the whole formation stands and contemptuously looks at the hysterical major with sympathy for the young starley, who is repulsed by any sensible initiative and desire to tie his life with the army. As a result, after another hour, the shooting starts, the time is 13:00, the heat is 50+, there is no water, we initially drove before lunch, now it turns out that we are here for the whole day, plus night shooting, we eat back at one in the morning, dehydrated and having eaten one dry ration for 3-4 men. Just do not, I need to fill in about the fact that it tempers and makes us stronger. The health of more than one person has not been beneficially affected by the lack of normal sleep, food and water. All this only takes away health, the health of people whose charter says that they are obliged to monitor their health, on whose health the country's defense depends. This is not a hardening of the body, this is nothing more than sabotage of one's own army.
terrible battalion commander
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Finally, our young Deputy Polit of the company, on his own initiative, conducts a lesson in tactics for us, despite the fact that the command tried to send everyone to another useless job, on the principle of just pretending to be puzzled.
Make work assignments
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Being present at the morning formation, finally in shape, thinking that now everything will be more interesting, I begin to be horrified by the fact that all this is fucking understand what it looks like, two torn flags of the Russian Federation and the Airborne Forces are developing on the parade ground, the anthem is sadly playing from the column, and half of the military does not sing it. From 2007 to 2010, I served a contract in the 46th Armed Forces in Chechnya, until the age of 15 I lived in the 56th Airborne Division, constantly traveled with my father to the training ground, but what I saw now looked like just a crowd of people in military uniform. After the divorce, at which my company commander finally appeared, he takes us newcomers with him to sort out some garbage in a container under lock and key, these were some spare parts and rags that he did not have enough, and soon there should be a check and he had to count it all and he took about 10 of us with him, without even getting to know the new arrivals, there were five of us. As a result, for several hours at 10 we shift some kind of garbage from one place to another, I remember that even picking up it was disgusting. I thought, well, it probably won't be like that later. After all, back in 2007, on an urgent basis, in training, we had daily classes from morning to afternoon, theory, tactics, physio. So many years and reforms have passed, for sure now everything has become better. A few days later, in which there is nothing to remember, the company commander, after a divorce at 18:00, decided to get acquainted all the same indicatively. The fact is that on that day I expressed dissatisfaction about the indifference of the commander and one spy told him that the new contractors were dissatisfied with the commander. The company commander introduced himself demonstratively before the formation and began to approach us one by one, we called the rank, surname, marital status and our city. When it was my turn and I said that from Kamyshin, I stand and think about the fact that I don’t have to swear with my superiors, so I try to laugh it off. I looked at him, we are the same age for 33 years, but he looks much older than me, with sly eyes, coupled with being overweight.
Terrible company commander
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I get acquainted with comrades in misfortune who, like me, came here having signed a contract, and now they are left to their own devices.
Extraordinary absence of junior officers
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- Jul 2022
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mwi.usma.edu mwi.usma.edu
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Moreover, a policy that simply pushes logistics without any “pull” or supervision to ensure distribution according to prioritization of need simply does not work. A handful of US contractors in country could have made a world of difference in this regard—and it is hard to imagine that the deployment of a few personnel tasked with coordinating distribution would constitute a red line triggering World War III. Instead, the Territorial Defense Forces, the Ukrainian reserves in the west of the country, are often well-equipped while units on the front line go short of everything. Is this corruption? Perhaps—but from what I have seen it is simply a case of commanders trying to take care of their own, not realizing that there is only a limited amount of US largesse to go around.
Supply sticking to the units in the rear
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The need for long-range precision fires is one example. The United States has made little attempt to meet this requirement, beyond the much-heralded M777 howitzer, which is in fact obsolete. The M777 is outranged by Russian rocket artillery, which has a proven ability to respond with counterbattery fires within five minutes—less time than it takes a battery of M777s to displace. There has been no serious discussion of providing the Ukrainians with the Multiple Launch Rocket System or long-range strike drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper or even its older cousin the MQ-1 Predator, perhaps because both these platforms cost considerably more than the TB-2—the unit cost of an MQ-9 is over $30 million.
Would have to ask about the one-to-one comparison here.
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- Jun 2022
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Troops in more specialized units have been issued U.S.-supplied encrypted radios and can speak to one another unhindered, one soldier said, but the radio’s high output means the Russians can find the locations they are broadcasting from.“This is why we stopped communicating and only communicated the necessary minimum, such as if an evacuation was needed or an urgent help,” the soldier, who goes by the name Raccoon, added. Only about a quarter of the secure radios that Ukraine needs have been sent by the United States and other allies, a Western adviser in Ukraine said, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive military details.Soldiers say the most reliable equipment they’ve received, though in small quantities, has been Starlink satellite internet, enabled by a small square-like antenna that can be connected to act much like any Wi-Fi network.
Interesting possible tradeoof between security and detection.
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This breakdown between troops and units, where a shared understanding of what’s happening on the battlefield is difficult for any standing military, has been exacerbated by Russia’s technologically superior military. Not only can Moscow’s troops unleash far more artillery fire, but they also have proven effective at jamming communications.The General said that his two off-the-shelf radios were jammed constantly.
"Russia's technologically superior military"
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The General radioed the commander of the Ukrainian army unit he was attached to and asked if he could call the artillery battery. But the artillery battery needed the tanks’ coordinates.The General did not have proper maps, so he asked the platoon that had requested the artillery fire to fly a drone to get the coordinates. That didn’t go so well either.“As I was finding out if it was possible to call artillery support, the drone ran out of power,” the General said. “Then the generator broke, so they could not charge it, and we ran out of time, I don’t really remember now. And the tank was driving around as before, pounding us.”
Doesn't speak well for artillery support, but probably circumstances in general less than ideal.
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A Ukrainian platoon needed artillery to fire on the tanks but could not reach the commander, either because their radios were jammed or they didn’t have a relationship with the commander, so they called the General.
Notable that it's a possibility that platoons could "not have a relationship" with the unit they're fighting under.
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The grinding war in the east has slowly bled the Ukrainian military of manpower, with officials estimating there are up to 200 casualties a day. As a result, the front lines are increasingly defended by a constant rotation of units composed of less well-trained troops. Those forces, often from the National Guard and Territorial Defense, are placed into the larger brigades, and are quickly told to dig in and defend.
Nice detail about use of militias
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www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
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At the meeting of CEOs earlier this month, industry executives voiced reservations about increasing weapons production. One chief executive said that when the Ukraine war winds down, they do not want to be stuck with warehouses full of unsellable inventory without a guaranteed buyer, three people familiar with the discussion said.
Key quote
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bostonreview.net bostonreview.net
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nlike List, Carey was not enamored of Britain’s achievements: he spent a great deal of time describing the terrible conditions of the working classes in the United Kingdom that resulted from their global financiers’ monopolization. Free trade was leading to “barbarism,” he argued, because it tended to erode the social institutions that fulfilled human’s “greatest need,” their desire and ability for “association” with other humans. Like Tocqueville, Carey valorized the rich civil society of the early republic; unlike Tocqueville, he worried about disintermediation of the social sphere in commercial societies without tariffs. The “increasing dependence of the laborer, and making of her that mere instrument to be used by trade” was fueling class conflict in the form of riots and strikes, ultimately threatening political stability even in the UK.
Note as possible rwn interview subject
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There is a popular folk history that draws a straight line from Hamilton to List, and from there to Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, which industrialized behind Listian tariffs. From there the Listian idea is supposed to have spread to Japan, which took Germany as the model political economy for successful catch-up growth, and from there to the East Asian developmental states of the postwar period. (The most readable and popular version of this story can be found in Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works (2014), otherwise a compelling book.) Helleiner’s book makes clear what this version of history gets wrong. Not only were Legalist and kokueki discourses already widely available in the East, but to the extent that Western ideas were popular in Germany and Japan, they came more from Carey’s influence, not List’s. A good deal of space in The Neomercantilists is dedicated to documenting and debunking these myths in detail.
Interesting
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- May 2022
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www.army.mil www.army.mil
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During the period 2001 to 2012 First Army's priority of effort had been planning, resourcing, and conducting post-mobilization training for up to 90,000 Soldiers per year in support of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom and other contingency operations
90,000 soldiers per year
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warroom.armywarcollege.edu warroom.armywarcollege.edu
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For example, activating additional manpower may generate requirements for additional facilities, equipment, training base capacity, and transportation. Sources of facilities include all the installations (forts, camps, posts, and centers) where troops are received, trained, equipped, and prepare to deploy. Mobilization Force Generation Installations (MFGIs) are key installations for any army mobilization. MFGIs are designated to provide mobilization support to both known rotational demands and also contingency operations. In 2008 the Army operated ten MFGIs to support operations that were mostly focused in Iraq and Afghanistan. Right now only Fort Hood and Fort Bliss operate as a MFGI, which is optimized for steady-state rotational demands. However, these mobilization platforms are too few and woefully inadequate to support the volume and speed needed for a major theater of war contingency.
Mobilization Force Generation Installations
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warontherocks.com warontherocks.com
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Further, these newer artillery systems are fully digitized and integrated with precision equipment based on internal, gyroscopic, self-locating devices supplemented by GPS updating. They also have modular components that can be swapped out, thus simplifying repairs. This is important because Ukraine currently lacks the ability to produce munitions and repair parts, especially as Russian forces bombard Ukrainian industrial facilities. Most newer systems require a relatively brief period of training on individual weapon systems and munitions. They are easy to use and employ for artillerymen already trained in basic field craft.
"Ukraine lacks the ability to produce munitions and repair parts" (!)
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The Ukrainian army has made good use of its legacy equipment over the past eight years of combat in the Donbas and during the first seven weeks of the Russian invasion, but that equipment is largely destroyed, run-down, ineffective, or outdated. As the campaign goes on, this legacy equipment will continue to breakdown and be destroyed in combat. Logistics and maintenance for this equipment will become ever more difficult as Ukraine’s supply of lethal munitions for equipment on hand dries up. The Ukrainian army lacks sufficient counter rocket, artillery, and mortar capabilities, which is particularly critical in defending its own counter-fire radar systems. Perhaps the most effective capabilities the Ukrainians do have in their inventory are Russian air-defense systems. The S-300, gifted to Ukraine by Slovakia, is an effective long-range system, but even with outside help provided thus far, Ukraine does not have the right systems and missile magazine depth for this to be a viable long-term option.
Interesting detail that Ukraine artillery weak
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evonomics.com evonomics.com
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It’s almost as if these two abstract entities “efficiency” and “equality” were two products an economy could produce. Oh, wait …. It’s exactly like that. This is the same diagram you’d get to illustrate your choice of how many apples or oranges you want to produce — or consume. Like so many things in neoclassical economics, a particular way of thinking — legitimate enough in its domain — is then totalized. The result is a discipline that’s rendered strangely incurious and emptied of empirical content.
Effect on Rawls
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- Feb 2022
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The first instructors at the former French base in Timbuktu were engaged in personnel training. But at the same time, western estimates of the number of Russians vary greatly. Out of apprehension their number has been exaggerated to 500 people. More restrained estimates are claiming the number is between 200 and 300 people. It all started with four instructors. Their photos were actively published by the French media.
Wagner numbers
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- Dec 2021
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Amis, for instance, devotes one of the most powerful sections of the book to an investigation into Larkin’s relationship with his fascist father, Sydney. Hitchens, he alerts us, simply did not know enough when he mistakenly wrote that Larkin detested Sydney. In fact, as Amis shows, Larkin loved him dearly. On literary ground, Amis seems to be saying, however subliminally, it is he, not Hitchens, who will always have the final word.
Seems like bit of a stretch on Meaney's part
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- Nov 2021
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www.global-isp.org www.global-isp.org
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It was important that every means possible be taken to persuade people to hold these funds rather than attempt to spend them, for such an attempt on a large scale would have meant inflation. Direct controls on production, wages, prices, etc. operated on one front to dam up these funds but the Treasury had to operate on another front to see that the funds remained saved. The best way to accomplish this was to get as much as possible of these funds into Government securities (Treasury 1946, 83).
Key quote
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Government expenditures have been enormous by all previous standards and they have been financed in large part by methods which did not curtail private spending to offset the increase in public spending. The pattern is that made familiar in previous wars—expansion of currency and sale of bonds to banks as an offset to new deposits created by public expenditures. War loan accounts were made free of reserve requirements, and as the funds were spent and reappeared in private pocketbooks and bank accounts, new currency and new bank reserves were made freely available by expansion of Federal Reserve credit. Thus the total volume of currency and credit rose without putting any pressure on the banks to restrict private credits. Since the end of 1939 demand deposits...have much more than doubled in volume...Practically all the new money came into existence through Government borrowing.
Key point
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newleftreview.org newleftreview.org
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For all the stress he puts on merciless geopolitical competition, in other words, in Kotkin’s account Stalin’s ussr exists in a geostrategic void. If Khlevniuk’s concerns over the revived appeal of authoritarianism are obviously addressed to a present dominated by Putin, Kotkin’s treatment of geopolitics may be the aspect of his biography that has the most contemporary resonance: a seemingly hard-nosed attitude to the realities of inter-state competition conceals a disregard for the actual pressures being applied by one group of states to another. It is a pitiless competition minus at least half the competitors. In that sense, his too is very much a Stalin for our times.
Excellent
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The book’s style partly reflects Kotkin’s ambition to capture a broad audience and claim a more prominent public role—recall the project’s origins in the mind of his agent.
Snyder possible a malign example in the minds of this agent
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Kotkin writes in a more pugnacious idiom, larded with Beltway-speak and incongruous platitudes (‘difficult neighbourhood’, referring to Russia’s geopolitical situation; Stalin ‘was, for all his moodiness, a people person’; ‘Eurasia needs to be understood geographically’)
[lol]
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But by far the most tendentious element in Kotkin’s account is its treatment of Lenin’s last writings and the growing tensions between him and Stalin in his final months. The document that came to be known as ‘Lenin’s Testament’, dictated in December 1922, delivered a famously scathing verdict on Stalin who, as Lenin put it, ‘having become general secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be able to use that power with sufficient caution.’ An addendum from early January 1923 went still further, describing Stalin as ‘too rude’, a defect ‘intolerable in a Secretary-General’, and suggesting that ‘the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post’. Kotkin contests the authenticity of not only the ‘Testament’ and the addendum, but also the ‘Notes on the Question of Nationalities’, in which Lenin criticized ‘Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration’. All of these items, Kotkin claims, were forgeries, produced in February–March 1923 but backdated; he holds that ‘the existing evidence strongly points to a manoeuvre by Krupskaya, and the staff in Lenin’s secretariat, to forge what they interpreted as Lenin’s will’. What is the evidentiary basis for this argument, and why is Kotkin making it? Founded on gaps in the stenographic records kept by Lenin’s office and the apparent absence of the original manuscripts, the case is at best ‘circumstantial’, as Kotkin at one stage admits—though this doesn’t prevent him from labelling the documents flat-out forgeries. More extraordinary is Kotkin’s reliance, in making his case, on a single piece of scholarship, Valentin Sakharov’s ‘Politicheskoe zaveshchanie’ Lenina (2003). Kotkin salutes Sakharov’s ‘trenchant challenge to the conventional wisdom’ on Lenin’s last writings; what he does not mention is that Sakharov’s 700-page book is an unabashedly Stalinist text, decrying the dominance of Trotskyist, ‘anti-Bolshevik’ interpretations and their ‘infiltration’—interesting word choice—into historiography worldwide. Sakharov has been equally plain about his sympathies elsewhere: in a 2007 article he referred to Khrushchev’s ‘unbridled defamatory campaign against Stalin’, and in 2010 wrote a screed denying the ussr’s responsibility for the Katyn´ massacre.
Pretty extraordinary.
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urge to exonerate Stalin while incriminating the Bolsheviks is also apparent in Kotkin’s treatment of the Soviet–Polish War. He claims Stalin was initially sceptical about launching an offensive, and defends the failed push to take Lvov—again in direct contravention of orders—on the grounds that not taking the city ‘seemed idiotic’. In the war’s aftermath, Kotkin protests, Stalin was ‘scapegoated for insubordination’ while others hid the faults of their own that had really caused the disaster.
Bizarre in a small way
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newleftreview.org newleftreview.org
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Herbert Giersch, Karl-Heinz Paqué and Holger Schmieding of the Kiel Institute, just before Fratzscher left to pursue his career in the Anglosphere. In their 1992 analysis The Fading Miracle, a major cause of Germany’s relative decline was the arrival of ‘new competitors’ on the world market: Japan from the late 1950s and the newly industrialized countries of East Asia in the 1970s and 80s, followed of course by China in the 90s. If the Agenda 2010 policy has worked for German capital, in response to the low-wage challenge diagnosed by Giersch and his colleagues, it is—as Fratzscher concedes—precisely because it has come at the expense of labour. But the other side of Schröder’s reforms was the decisive turn away from the demand management undertaken from the 1970s in the frg. Fratzscher’s Panglossian study does not consider the possibility that German investment has been allocated perfectly rationally. A low investment rate in high-risk assets abroad is not the effect of a large ‘gap’ (in Germany or elsewhere), but rather a sign of a lack of profitable investment channels. This is not unique to Germany. The high savings rate in Germany is only the mirror-image of foreign-direct investment in low-risk German bonds. Germany can carry on with this model so long as profit can be sustained by wage repression, so long as the euro is undervalued there, and so long as there is adequate demand abroad. In the periphery, the opposite situation prevails—of an overvalued euro—and the results are plain for all to see.
Key point
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This means increasing military cooperation in the short term, and united navies and air forces in the medium term.
lol
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Die Deutschland Illusion calls for Germany to get over its qualms on the use of private equity and proposes a ‘round table’ on the subject that would include politicians and financiers. He suggests the use of high-risk financial products like subordinated debt to help attract capital. Indeed the investment commission Fratzscher chairs has advocated just such dubious public–private partnerships, including a scheme to privatize pensions. He has also bitterly opposed a recent cdu–spd compromise policy lowering the retirement age, as well as the Mütterrente, which compensates household and maternity work in the form of a pension in old age. This is no return to a Keynesian mixed economy, but rather the investment side of Agenda 2010.
[Jesus]
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of his break with Lloyd George in 1921, when he joined what Arthur Henderson in 1917 called the long and interesting list of former ministers waiting to tell the truth about Lloyd George (Addison waited less long than Henderson
Cf Obama, or anyway his administration, in modern times?
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lrb.co.uk lrb.co.uk
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In 1939 only one in three thousand British adults was a member of the Spiritualists’ National Union, but this might understate its influence. Even greater numbers of people took part in ‘home circles’ – do-it-yourself séances – tens of thousands of which occurred up and down the country, supported by an organisation called The Link.
Cf Norman Lewis
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