I remember commenting a couple months back on one of those “Arab-Americans not voting for Harris” posts, something along the lines of “it’s your vote, but I think that you’re going to find that you’d rather have Harris than Trump” and listing some past policy moves like the embassy in Jerusalem, and then someone downvoting and responding something along the lines of “identical candidates”.
In a city, maybe, though some Australians live on pretty remote farms. Going to be hard to set up a LAN with your buddies down the street.
kagis for discussion
https://flemmingbojensen.com/2007/08/07/the-australian-outback/
Stations (Australian for a ranch/farm) in the Outback are absolutely huge and the nearest neighbor is usually hundreds of kilometers away. People stay in touch through satellite phones, internet, cb radio and kids get their education long distance through the brilliant School of the Air.
Back under Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings was a very vocal advocate of the UK setting up something similar (though he referenced ARPA, DARPA’s predecessor, which wasn’t explicitly-military).
The result of that was ARIA being set up last year.
He was also very interested in advanced artificial intelligence work, so I kind of imagine that funding that was a goal.
I don’t know if all their work is public, but looking at that website, it looks like they’re publicly working on:
Genetic engineering of plants
Robot dexterity
Analysis of “tipping points” caused by climate change
Safeguarded AI research (how to “contain” advanced artificial intelligences)
Are there any specifics as to what the major disagreement was on, or has been in the past? All the article has is:
The coalition leaders meeting was widely reported as a “make or break” meeting for the coalition, with Lindner, in particular, having hinted in the run-up that he was not too worried about the latter.
In his reaction to Scholz’s scathing remarks, Lindner accused the chancellor of a “calaculated break-up of the coalition” and his coaliton partners of “not even accepting” the FDP’s proposals for turning the economy around “as a basis for discussion”. Discord about how to revive an ailing economy
The coalition had been at odds for a while, with serious strains on the budget for 2025 and a disappointing performance by the German economy eliciting increasingly different suggestions on how to face and solve the problems.
So I’m assuming that Lindner wants more-economically-liberal policy than Scholz does?
Is there reason to believe that there’s sufficient public support in elections to form a red-green coalition, or is it likely that the SDP and Greens would be out of government in a new election?
kagis
https://theweek.com/politics/german-economy-crisis-volkswagen
A snap election could be “disastrous for all three coalition parties,” said Reuters. SDP and the Greens have lost support since the 2021 election, and the FDP “could be ejected from parliament altogether.” But the dispute involves fundamental differences: FDP wants budget cuts, while the other two parties “agree that targeted government spending is needed to stimulate the economy,” Reuters said.
That doesn’t sound very good for them.
If they’re out, and the AfD has been at record-high levels of support, does that mean maybe an incoming AfD government?
watches video
What the heck is that gigantic thing attached below the barrel of that rifle?
kagis
Hmm. Apparently about a decade ago, North Korea was showing off a helical magazine. Dunno if the video footage DW is using is current, though, so no idea if it’s still in use.
The North Korean military uses a 100- to 150- round helical magazine in the Type 88 assault rifle.
https://armamentresearch.com/north-korean-helical-ak-magazines/
Damn, that must be heavy as hell, moves a bunch of the weight on the rifle way forward.
looks further
It sounds like they aren’t using them in this deployment, though, that Russia has provided arms:
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/first-north-korean-troops-come-under-fire-1730706704.html
According to Defense Intelligence data, Russia has equipped the North Korean military with:
- AK-12 assault rifles
The timeframe is pretty short.
That might be doable down the line if there were serious aims at long-run cooperation, but I’ve also read some articles making a case that due to divergent interest, Russia and NK probably won’t stick tightly together post-war.
Guess we’ll see.
I’m guessing that they’re gonna either try to have NK forces operate together, or gonna put them in roles that involve minimal interaction with other forces.
I expect that it’s some degree of problem, no matter what.
One element that’s kinda important in US military theory is the idea of the OODA loop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
The OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) is a decision-making model developed by United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. He applied the concept to the combat operations process, often at the operational level during military campaigns. It is often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The approach explains how agility can overcome raw power in dealing with human opponents.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%2Booda+site%3Amil
The basic idea is that the smaller that loop is, the more-quickly you can react to your opponent while they’re still trying to react to your prior actions, the greater the advantage. In some cases – think the Battle of France, where at a high level France had slow response time – it can lead to staggering differences in outcome.
Language barriers exacerbate that sort of thing.
In US military history, I remember that that was blamed for a lot of problems surrounding the Battle of the Java Sea, a serious Allied naval loss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Java_Sea
The Allies had a scratch force of American, British, Dutch, and Australian ships.
Unfortunately, these didn’t use common cryptographic mechanisms to encode communications, and the operational command was with the Dutch, who at the time didn’t work in English.
As a result, you had stuff like American reconaissance planes who would encode and transmit encoded data in English to a ship, which would decode the information, which would – assuming no extra relays were involved, which would involve more decoding and encoding – hand off the information in plaintext to a translator who knew English and Dutch, who would relay the Dutch to the person in command, who would make a decision on response, which would hand that back off to a translator, who would translate that to English, and encode and send the orders to, say, a British ship, who would decode those and relay to the ship commander, who would order people to then do something.
One of the things NATO did was establish common communication hardware and standardize on a subset of English for operational stuff to cut into the length of that loop.
These projects would hinder Sweden’s defense by disrupting radar, sensor systems, and submarine detection, important for NATO’s newest member given nearby Russian threats.
Hmmmmm. Haven’t seen discussion on the radar or other sensor implications there. Be interesting to see The War Zone or similar run an article.
If one can viably use offshore wind farms as radar cover, that seems like it might be something to look into developing counters for more-generally, because those are probably going to become more widespread.
That’s probably especially true for Europe and some places in Southeast Asia, as they’re surrounded by shallow seas, where there may be a lot of offshore wind infrastructure showing up.
EDIT: Going the other way – China might be building offshore wind, and we probably have an interest in having subs be able to operate without being detected in the South China Sea, I wonder if it’s possible to synchronize submarine prop RPM to turbine RPM or something to maximize stealth.
EDIT2: For radar, might be able to use aerostat-based radars, see over turbines. Won’t help with microphone arrays or whatever, though. Could maybe stick sensors on the wind turbine bases, though. Add some cost, maybe, but then instead of a veil obscuring your view, you’ve got a lot of eyeballs.
EDIT3:
V Adm Didier Maleterre, the deputy commander of Nato’s allied maritime command (Marcom), told the Guardian in April: “We know the Russians have developed a lot of hybrid warfare under the sea to disrupt the European economy through cables, internet cables, pipelines. All of our economy under the sea is under threat.”
Yeah, that’s a whole 'nother ball of wax. As I pointed out back during discussions around Nord Stream 2, there is literally not even legal protection for pipelines, as things stand.
The only protection for cables today is a treaty negotiated in France in the 1800s intended to cover telegraph cables (like, they weren’t running HVDC lines then).
kagis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Submarine_Telegraph_Cables
That does not limit coverage just to data cables (despite the phrasing in the WP article I link to).
Dates to 1884. That’s the state of the art legally in the world in 2024, which is kinda mind-blowing.
My guess is that the US never had a strong reason to drive this, because the US is mostly surrounded by deep seas and doesn’t have anything important nearby across water, so not a whole lot of reason to build submarine infrastructure in relative terms or for it to be really critical for US security.
But the legal status is probably a lot more important for Europe, which has the Scandinavian penninsula, is mostly made up of penninsulas surrounded by shallow seas, has Africa across the Med, stuff like that. I think that there’s a good argument for the EU to have internal legal rules, like, Brussels-level powers to facilitate things like building pipelines and power lines overland rather than submarine. You had Spain trying to build critical infrastructure submarine around France to link the Iberian energy island to the rest of the EU rather than through France because France didn’t agree, which is a clusterfuck, but even if they do that, there are still some inescapable geographic realities – they’re probably going to still have more incentive for submarine infrastructure. So my suspicion is that Europe is likely to drive any change in the legal situation.
EDIT4: Potential areas of improvement might include:
Legal requirements on where ships, or maybe large ships, can anchor. Anchor-dragging, “accidental” or not, can damage lines.
Some mechanism for providing legal protection for infrastructure in international waters, especially pipelines.
Some mechanism for quickly detecting and localizing damage to infrastructure. Possibly also detecting mechanical disruption, like dragging.
Possibly the means to defend infrastructure. Part of the problem is that you can take out a lot of infrastructure at the depths they’re talking about with a COTS UUV from a surface ship that, last I looked around the Nord Stream 2 thing, was like $20k. That means that counters to something like a submarine, like lining your infrastructure with the equivalent of CAPTORs, isn’t gonna be economically effective; you can’t counter a group of 10 of those showing up at some point along the infrastructure. I have no idea if it’s even possible to reasonably counter attacks using current technology, even if they can be detected. Being able to attribute attacks to an attacker and deter them might be more realistic.
Well, on the up side, last year the news was on drought.
Drought in Spain empties reservoirs, forces limits on water use
August 8, 202312:52 PM PDT
AGULLANA, Spain, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Artur Duran holds his hand out by his waist to show the level of water he remembers two years ago at the Darnius Boadella reservoir in northeastern Spain.
Then, it was still deep enough for sailing. Now a long drought has nearly emptied it.
“We have never seen (it) so low,” the 79-year-old local resident told Reuters at the reservoir, which is only 20% full.
I dunno if it’s the worst relative to historical stuff for Lahore and Delhi, but India tends to be at about the back of the pack globally when I look at AQI maps.
kagis
https://waqi.info/#/c/6.168/6.699/3z
They’re gonna have some pretty hefty smog going on.
.io is especially popular because it resembles the computer term “input-output.” It is huge with start-ups and IT companies.
Well, those companies should also have the technical chops to know better.
I still think that most of opening up the TLD space was a mistake, not just the two-character stuff. Very few new TLDs have actually provided a lot of use, but they have created a “brand tax” on companies that don’t want confusing use of similar registrations and who then go register the equivalent domains.
.biz vs .com is a great example.
Another replied: “The real lesson to be learned here is that a lot of people would clearly attend a Halloween parade and Dublin City Council should organise one next year.”
It’s going to be kind of funny if a hoax announcement winds up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Ah, the Canadian housing bubble Wikipedia article talks about some of the points I raised:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_property_bubble
Risks
Canada is a nation heavily dependent on the real estate industry which accounted for roughly 14% of its GDP in 2020[126] and over 20% in 2023.[127] There is a high risk that if investor sentiment changes, buyer demand may drop significantly, triggering a vicious cycle of prices declines that snowball.[128] Canadians hold increasing mortgage debt (almost $2 trillion in June 2021,[129] $2.16 trillion residential in 2023[130]) while unemployment rose and net employment fell in 2024.[131]
That “snowball” is referring to a bubble popping. And this also mentions the five-year mortgage factor:
Short-term fixed-rate mortgages are dominant in Canada,[132] typically with the interest rate locked in for five years. This contrasts with the United States, where most homeowners hold long-term fixed-rate mortgage contracts. If the reset rate in five, ten, or fifteen years is higher than in the past, there will be a large risk of default for Canadians with high amounts of debt. A July 2017 report noted that uninsured mortgages represent the greatest risk to the financial industry.[133] A decreasing number of Canadian mortgages are backed by insurance, from over 60% in 2012[134] to less than 22% in 2022.[135] Drops in home prices could cause homeowners to owe more on their mortgages than the house is currently valued, which is known as negative equity.[136][128]
Some 26 per cent of Canadians aged 18 to 34 own a home today, down from 47 per cent in 2021, according to the poll.
Not only that, but it sounds like homebuilders have been decreasing housing starts for several years, which seems counterintuitive if one has high housing prices.
TORONTO, April 4 (Reuters) - Canadian homebuilders are expected to dial back new construction for a third straight year in 2024 as elevated borrowing costs reduce the appeal of starting projects, Canada’s national housing agency said on Thursday.
Here’s my off-the-cuff understanding of the situation. I have not been closely following it.
In the wake of the global financial crisis, it looks like Canada cranked the central bank’s interest rate way down.
Shortly after Canada started bringing them back up, COVID-19 hit, and Canada slammed rates back down again. It wasn’t until inflation started to rapidly rise in mid-2022 that Canada started bringing them back up, at which point, Canada had had low interest rates for over a decade.
https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/interest-rate
My understanding is that one effect of running low interest rates is to create asset price bubbles. It’s cheap to borrow money, so people borrow a lot of money and dump a lot of it into housing, which blows the price of housing way up.
This has led to what is believed to be a housing price bubble considerably worse than the one that the US hit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_property_bubble
In 2023 Canada’s nonfinancial debt exceeded 300% of GDP and household debt surpassed 100% of GDP, both higher than the levels seen in the United States before the 2008 global financial crisis. Canada’s housing investment as a percentage of GDP ratio peaked at 8.9% in 2022, whereas the US, at the peak of their housing bubble, only reached 7% in 2006.
This happened because it was cheap to borrow a lot of money under Canadian policy, and so what people did – looking at the rapid increase in Canadian housing prices – was to borrow a lot of money and buy housing with the expectation that it would continue to rise, and that by doing so with a lot of borrowed money, they’d increase their gains:
Investor activity (measured as the percentage of non-owner-occupied homes) increased both housing price appreciation and price collapse during the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Investor activity peaked in 2005, with over 29% of new mortgages in Las Vegas taken out for investment properties. At this time, 15% of mortgages across the US were for non-owner-occupied homes.[80] In 2020, in Toronto, 21% of all housing, and 56% of condos were investor owned. In Vancouver, nearly 48% of condos, and 33% of all housing was owned by investors.[81] Across Canada, 1 in 5 homes were investment properties. Investors were found to be increasingly crowding out prospective first-time buyers in a 2024 analysis.[82]
With Canada finally bringing interest rates up, house builders – expecting that they’re going to have a hard time selling houses – are having a hard time borrowing money to build more houses, so they pulled back on new construction. At that point, you have a lot of people with borrowed money that have soaked up a lot of housing, expecting it to continue to rise.
So I’d expect Canadian house prices to begin falling. When that happens, suddenly that investment in housing that seems like a really great idea because you’re using borrowed money to increase gains becomes a really bad idea, and you want to get out. But…you can’t sell that housing to anyone. So you potentially have a lot of people who want to dump housing all at once, which causes a bubble to pop.
Normally, when a buyer gets a mortgage, they have to make a down payment, though in the runup to the global financial crisis, a lot of US mortgage lenders were issuing a lot of mortgages with no money down. The purpose of this is to shield the lender from risk (and reduces interest rates from the borrower). Someone with a mortgage has $E equity in a house, the part that they own, and then $M that they borrowed from the bank. If someone defaults on their mortgage, because the house was pledged as collateral, then the lender can seize the house and sell it on the market to recover their $M, with their $M getting priority over the borrower recovering their $E.
Normally, that down payment is chosen by a mortgage lender large enough that even if house prices fluctuate and the price drops shortly after sale, the money can be recovered by the lender, so the risk is mostly on the borrower.
However, if house prices rapidly collapse far enough, then it may be that a house price isn’t high enough for a lender to recover the money they lent. That is, after sale prices go “underwater”, such that the borrower has lost all their equity and then the lender can’t even recover their loan if they seize the house and sell it, then the lender faces risk that the borrower will simply default on the mortgage, and the lender will not be able to fully recover the money they lent on the house.
That can lead to mass defaults by borrowers, which is what happened in a number of places in the US when housing prices rapidly dropped, which led to houses being seized and placed on the market, which further drove down housing prices.
My vague recollection – and I have not followed the Canadian housing situation closely; this is going from my memory of comparative housing policy back around the global financial crisis – is that Canadian mortgages are all recourse. In a minority – but important minority – of US states, mortgages are non-recourse (at least on the primary mortgage; this doesn’t apply to secondary mortgages, HELOCs, etc, at least in California, by my way of recollection). What that refers to is whether the lender has recourse if a buyer defaults on their mortgage. That is, can they try to seize other personal assets, garnish income, have some other forms of trying to recover their money in a default.
That will probably tend to make it less-likely for Canadians to walk away from debts…but I don’t think that it makes lenders immune. That is, if someone files for personal bankruptcy – which might be a good idea if they don’t have a lot of assets outside the house and they have borrowed an enormous amount to buy a house that is worth far less than they paid for it – I’d guess that the lender probably has no recourse, though I haven’t gone researching Canadian law on the matter. Or if someone is an overseas buyer – something that Canada has recently severely restricted – it may be hard to go after their other assets to recover loss if they default even if they don’t declare bankruptcy.
In general, Canada’s less-borrower-friendly, more-lender-friendly laws probably means that the Canadian banking system won’t get into as much risk of banks getting clobbered as the US, even if a bubble pops. But that doesn’t mean that people who buy houses can’t be considerably-worse-off than they otherwise would have been.
Another factor is that in the US, the most-common type of mortgage is a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. As interest rates fluctuate, they don’t affect people who already have a mortgage rate locked in. That does mean that if interest rates rise, they may not be able to easily move; labor mobility will take a hit, which isn’t good. But they can probably continue to pay the mortgage on their existing home, as long as their income continues. Canadian borrowers, as I understand it, normally need to refinance their mortgage each five years, so their mortgage payments are affected by current interest rates. If interest rates rise, as they have their payments will also rise starting at some point in the next five years. Canadian interest rates have recently risen quite considerably.
One cause of high housing prices is if there just isn’t enough housing supply out there at all, like, construction can be constrained by zoning laws and such. Another is that the supply of housing is out there, but people are determined to purchase rather than renting. Potentially each is true to some degree, but a way to determine whether people are irrationally bent on purchasing is to look at the price-to-rent ratio. This, as a rule of thumb, is generally expected to hover in a vaguely-fixed range.
kagis for Canadian price-to-rent ratio data
https://www.zoocasa.com/blog/price-to-rent-ratios-across-canada/
https://www.zoocasa.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Townhouse-downpayment-1-1-768x1516.png
Based on that, the price-to-rent ratios in almost all of Canada are relatively high for detached homes. That means that at least part of the situation is people buying when they probably should be renting in terms of expected financial return. Unless what a Canadian is looking to live in is a unit in a multiunit building, I expect that it’s probably a good move for a Canadian to rent right now, avoid exposure to the real estate market. One would want to have their assets in something other than equity in single-family home real estate, like stocks or bonds or suchlike.
Thing is, your profit margin isn’t 100%, and this is gonna eat into this.
I’m sure they burn it off. I can see some reference to LNG tankers having the ability to use the LNG as fuel, so I assume that they just send it there.
Tankers bearing sanctioned Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG)
IIRC, you have to burn off a certain percentage each day to keep LNG on a tanker cool, so presumably, they’re going through their LNG supply.
kagis
https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-boil-off-gas-in-LNG
Despite LNG tanks being insulated due to natural evaporation and rolling of liquid due to sea conditions there is about 0.10 - 0.15 % of total amount of cargo evaporating daily.
What the hell did Cuba do to deserve this?
The embargo? Seized a bunch of American-owned property in the revolution. The US said “you can nationalize it, but you gotta pay for it”. The Cuban government said no, and the US said “then we won’t do business with you”.
Lot of property owned by Americans out there in the world. Makes people think twice about treating it as a free cash grab bag if the last group to try it regretted it.
Also, as someone else pointed out, it’s an embargo, not a blockade, which would be forcibly preventing them from doing business with anyone else, like, parking warships offshore and not letting anything in or out. A blockade would be an act of war. Embargoes are not.
Politically, it will be hard for the EU to permit the UK to rejoin with the opt-outs that the UK had.
I don’t think that’s an option. I think it’s a new application and new terms negotiated between the EU and the UK, not “back to how it was”.
I’m an American, so it’s maybe hard to put myself exactly in the same shoes, but if I were in the EU and able to act freely, I’d personally make the concession to permit the opt-outs to the UK if it permitted for Rejoin (that is, I don’t think that there is great harm, as things were working all right earlier and that any precedent concerns could be addressed arguing that this is a special case) and if I were in the UK and could act freely, I’d make the concession to the EU to give up the opt-outs if it permitted for Rejoin (that is, I think that ultimately, the UK was going to have to give up the opt-outs anyway if staying in the EU…I don’t think that Sweden’s approach of kicking the can down the road repeatedly on monetary union, for example, is going to be sustainable ad infinitum).
I’m just skeptical that political leaders are going to be able to act freely on this matter, as they have their own domestic political pressures.
Trading with “RoW” is hard while trading within the single market was easy. Rejoining the EU wouldn’t disrupt much other than lowering barriers.
Yeah, the existence of the TCA does mean that this is considerably less of a factor than otherwise would be the case, but there are still going to be affected parties – the economic disruption that Brexit would cause was one of the most-prominent arguments in favor of Remain I saw pre-referendum (auto factories using JIT manufacturing will close, vendors doing cross-Channel sales will go under, etc), and this would run through that again.
Fucking, Austria eventually gave in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria