«As things stand, for all his dubious and impressive achievements, Murdoch seems destined to be remembered as the man who made another fortune from igniting a culture war in America, but who had no idea – short of the unthinkable step of losing money – how to put it out.»
I.e.: “set fire to America for profit.”
Interesting phrasing:
«…the events in China will change Xi and the CCP, who will prefer to be in power in a China that is not a superpower rather than out of power in Superpower China.
Having said this, the fact is that China remains a mighty nation. Its leaders believe that they can still conquer the sun.»
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/chinas-100-year-marathon-towards-global-domination-out/
Seems like a pretty cogent essay by a retired Indian general who is now an aerospace prof at IIT, India’s analogue of MIT.
This is what happens when democracy doesn’t give the right wing what they want: they want to end democracy. Everybody on the fringes (and sometimes not the fringes?) wants a hero on a white horse to ride in and “save us”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/01/red-caesar-authoritarianism-republicans-extreme-right
Drone pilots not necessarily so safe.
«Russian and Ukrainian soldiers also began using non-drone DJI products, including one called AeroScope. An antenna-studded box, it can be set up on the ground to track drone locations by detecting the signals they send. The system’s more dangerous feature is its ability to find the pilots who remotely fly DJI drones.»
War of supply chains;
«“Even when you see labels like America or Australia on a component, it’s still all manufactured in China,” he said. “To make something that could effectively replace China, it’s really close to impossible.”»
«Ukrainians compete with Russians to buy F.P.V.s from Chinese firms that are willing to sell directly. Russians often have the advantage because they can bid higher and order larger batches. Selling to Russians is also politically safer for Chinese companies.»
«Ukrspecsystems, a company in Kyiv that makes fixed-wing reconnaissance drones, said in a statement that supply chain issues with China had led it to look beyond the country.
“Today, we virtually do not use any Chinese components because we see and feel how China deliberately delays the delivery of any goods to Ukraine,” it said.»
I remember having argument with a (“conservative”) internet stranger around the time of the ’08 financial crisis. His position was that bleeding-heart liberal Congress had mandated subprime loans, and that’s why we were in that mess.
«An analysis conducted for the Wall Street Journal in 2007 showed that the majority of subprime loans were going to people who could have qualified for less expensive prime loans.
….
The public policy justification for allowing subprime loans was that they made the American Dream of homeownership possible for people who did not meet the credit standards to get a cheaper prime mortgage. But the subprime loans we started to see in the early 2000s were primarily marketed to existing homeowners, not people looking to buy—and they usually left the borrower worse off than before the loan. Instead of getting striving people into homeownership, the loans often wound up pushing existing homeowners out.»
#theSumOfUs
«“[Medicaid] State adoption decisions are positively related to white opinion and do not respond to nonwhite support levels,” they [Grogan and Park] concluded.»
#theSumOfUs
I.e., it’s up to us white people, again.
Wait, that sounds bad. What I mean is, we need to act. We can’t just wait for Black people to ask hard enough while we do nothing.
So… one of my favorite hymns, which has one of those turn-of-the-century sounds, has its melody from an African-American spiritual. Words written in 1913 (with the 3rd stanza inserted in 1987 from Galatians 3:28 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gal+3%3A28&version=NRSVUE)) , according to the fine print at the bottom of the page.
«the costs of incarceration are coming due in suburban and rural areas, squeezing state budgets and competing with education. It’s not a comeuppance but a bitter cost of the white majority’s willingness to accept the suffering of others, a cost of racism itself.»
#theSumOfUs
Why is college so expensive? Why is everybody in debt? Greedy Big Education?
«In 1976, state governments provided six out of every ten dollars of the cost of students attending public colleges.
….
State legislatures began to drastically cut what they spent per student on their public colleges, even as the taxable income base in the state grew.
….
The average public college tuition has nearly tripled since 1991, helping bring its counterpart, skyrocketing student debt, to the level of $1.5 trillion in 2020.
….
The federal government for its part slowly shifted its financial aid from grants that didn’t have to be repaid (such as Pell Grants for low-income students, which used to cover four-fifths of college costs and now cover at most one-third) to federal loans,
….
In 1978, a [California] ballot initiative known as Proposition 13 drastically limited property taxes by capping them at 1 percent of the property’s value at purchase, limiting increases and assessments, and requiring a supermajority to pass new taxes. Property tax revenue from corporate landowners and homeowners in the state dropped 60 percent the following year. The impact was felt most acutely in public K–12 schools;
….
Between 1979 and 2019, tuition and fees at the four-year public colleges increased eight-fold.
….
A decade later, voters in Colorado… passed a constitutional amendment severely limiting taxes. TABOR (Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights) has forced Coloradans to go without a long list of public services, including for two years children’s vaccines when the state couldn’t afford to purchase them—and the state has dropped to forty-seventh place in higher education investments.»
https://a.co/d3rw2xn
«“an extremely rare set of circumstances” with two identically named but separate waypoint markers outsidethe UK’s airspace»
Somewhere there is a software dev who advocated for disambiguating waypoint names seven or eight years ago, and a manager (or managerS) who said, no, that will add a month to the time this project takes. We’ll go back and fix it later.
Here, Read This 