With widespread insecurity, escalating public discontent, an absence of the rule of law, pervasive poverty, and frail state institutions, Togo is ripe for a coup.
In the wake of a series of coups that have jolted Africa, speculation
about which nation will follow is rife. The pioneer of coups in Africa,
Togo frequently emerges as a prime candidate in these conjectures. The
country’s 1963 coup was the first on the continent under the leadership
of Gnassingbé Eyadéma. In 1967, Eyadéma orchestrated another coup and
held on to power for the next 38 years. Following his demise in 2005,
Eyadéma was succeeded by his son Faure Gnassingbé, who orchestrated his own coup before subsequently holding contested elections that resulted in at least 400 deaths, according to a UN report.
Togo’s vulnerability to military coups stems from its colonial past
and its long history of autocratic rule. The country also faces the same
socio-political turmoil that has precipitated regime change in other
African nations. One of Africa’s poorest countries, with a struggling
economy, Togo is also grappling with escalating terrorism, especially in the northern region bordering coup-prone Burkina Faso.
The current semblance of stability in Togo can be attributed to its robust militarisation.
While a number of African nations have transitioned peacefully to
democratic governance, Togo’s regime has craftily manipulated global
perception by positioning Gnassingbé Eyadéma’s non-military son, Faure,
at the helm, ensuring the perpetuation of his father’s authoritarian
legacy. Faure Gnassingbé’s journey to the presidency defies the
archetypal dictator narrative. Educated in military schools during his
formative years, he pursued higher studies in economics at the
University of Paris Dauphine and an MBA from George Washington
University in the US. His ascent in Togo’s political landscape has been
swift, becoming Minister of Communication in 1998 under his father’s
rule, then parliamentarian, Minister of Public Works, and ultimately
president.
Togo has suffered decades of oppression in the iron grip of the
Eyadéma dynasty. Gnassingbé Eyadéma is particularly infamous, remembered
as one of the continent’s most brutal dictators. Mysteriously disappearing opponents and egregious human rights abuses led to a ten-year suspension of European Union aid between
1993 and 2003. Nevertheless, Eyadéma sustained a puzzlingly close
relationship with France, the nation’s former colonial overseer that had
acquired two thirds of Togo after World War I.
Recent coups in Africa have predominantly taken place in ex-French colonies....
Talk about mixed emotions. On the blog we take a very "Don't mess with India" attitude but on the other hand Aadhaar is, frankly, creepy.
From naked capitalism, September 29:
The report calls into question key aspects of India’s digital
ID program, including its heavily centralised nature, the reliability
of its biometric identification systems and its vulnerability to data
breaches.
Relations between India and the so-called “Five Eye” nations (United
States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand) are in a bit
of a rough patch. According to an article in The Hindu,
India’s second most circulated English-language newspaper, India’s
relations with Canada are now at their lowest point since the 1980s,
after Justin Trudeau raised “credible” allegations last week that Indian
agents were involved in the murder of Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh
Nijjar — a Sikh plumber-cum-separatist leader shot dead by masked gunmen
on the outskirts of Vancouver in June.
Delhi, of course, has denied any involvement while saying it will
cooperate with any investigation. Nonetheless, the ensuing diplomatic
crisis has so far led to visa suspensions and reciprocal expulsions of
senior diplomats. The Trudeau government already paused negotiations on a Canada-India free trade agreement more than two weeks before going public with its allegations.
And it is not just Canada that is casting aspersions on India’s possible role in the crime. According to
the US envoy in Ottawa, David Cohen, Trudeau’s allegations, first aired
in Canada’s parliament last week and then reiterated at the UN General
Assembly last weekend, were based on “shared intelligence among Five
Eyes partners”:
“There was a lot of communication between Canada and the
United States about this… We have been consulting throughout very
closely with our Canadian colleagues — and not just consulting,
coordinating with them — on this issue. And from our perspective, it is
critical that the Canadian investigation proceed, and it would be
important that India work with the Canadians on this investigation. We
want to see accountability, and it’s important that the investigation
run its course and lead to that result.”
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has echoed these sentiments,
confirming that the US is “coordinating” with Canada and is seeking
“accountability,” while stressing that “it’s important that the
investigation run its course.” Interestingly, Blinken did not mention
the spiralling US-Canada dispute in the readout following his meeting
in Washington yesterday with India’s Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam
Jaishankar, but that does not mean it was not discussed.
Aadhaar Under Attack
Now, a report
by Moody’s Investor Services on some of the challenges facing digital
identity programs around the world is raising hackles in the
subcontinent. The main cause of the anger is a three-paragraph section
that calls into question key aspects of India’s digital ID program,
known as Aadhaar, including its heavily centralised nature, the
reliability of the biometric identification systems it uses and its
vulnerability to data breaches:
Aadhaar, the world’s largest digital ID program, assigns
unique numbers to over 1.2 billion Indian residents using biometric and
demographic data. This system enables access to public and private
services, with verification via fingerprint or iris scans, and
alternatives like One-Time Passcodes. The Unique Identification
Authority of India (UIDAI) administers Aadhaar, aiming to integrate
marginalized groups and expand welfare benefits access.
However, the system faces some hurdles, including the burden of
establishing authorization and concerns about biometric reliability.
There have been cases of service denials, and there are risks to
reliability of biometric technologies, especially for manual laborers in
hot, humid climates.
The real kicker comes in the third paragraph, which argues that
decentralised identity [DID] programs such as the SSI [Self-Sovereign
Identity] system rolled out by countries like Estonia — which is now working with the Zelensky government
to pilot a national mobile application modeled on Ukraine’s Diia
application — offer a far better approach to digital ID than India’s
heavily centralised system....
MUCH MORE, India's government is taking the Moody's action to be a threat and is reacting.
One of the commenters frames the issues:
The Rev Kev
This seems to be part of a move to unpick the BRICS and India is a
natural target. They also had a go at one of the new members of BRICS –
the United Arab Emirate – but that seems to have fizzled out. So
Trudeau’s attack was a shot across the bows and Blinken bringing up this
assassination with India is to let them know that Trudeau’s attack was
done with Washington’s backing. I suppose that you can say that the US
is telling India that either ‘they are with us or against us.’ India was
been all over the place between aligning with the west and aligning
with the BRICS as Modi is as erratic as Erdogan. Truth be told, aligning
with the west would be extremely dangerous for India because in the
long term they would be pushed into a fight with China as a proxy. But
India has seen how well that is working out for the Ukraine and the
wealth that they would have to give up abandoning the BRICS would never
be made up for by what the west has to for India – unless it is in
weapons.
This is a couple years old (May 3, 2018) but I wanted it on the blog for future reference. From India's News 18 (CNN International/Network18 j.v.): Bill Gates Dismisses 'Aadhaar' Privacy Threats; Funds World Bank to Bring it to Other Countries
A clear, concise look at the considerations the central bank of the world's largest democracy is juggling and balancing. Combined with the country's digital identity system, Aadhaar, which the IMF seems to like despite its flaws and vulnerabilities and you can glimpse the future, now.
From the Jacobins at Jacobin Magazine, September 28:
Director Craig Gillespie’s new film Dumb Money transforms
the 2021 GameStop short squeeze into a rousing comedy about everyday
Americans turning the tables against the financial elite. It’s the best
“COVID movie” so far.
Director Craig Gillespie won my heart with I, Tonya,
his scathing 2017 film about the quintessentially American life of
skater Tonya Harding. In demonstrating how to redeem the degraded biopic
genre, I, Tonya was so brilliant, I even forgave Gillespie for his subsequent film, the bloated Disney reboot Cruella(2021). He quickly rebounded, directing the first three episodes of the surprisingly insightful Hulu series Pam & Tommy
(2022). He always does great work when he’s back on his turf — sharp
satirical takes on the lives of working-class Americans who become
celebrities, however minor, and however briefly, thereby getting a
class-conscious range of grotesque cultural experience that’s
eye-opening.
“Dumb money,” as the movie tells us in one of its explanatory title
cards, is the scornful phrase used by big investment firm traders in
describing “retail investors,” the regular individuals who risk their
little savings on the stock market. The sneering contempt of the haves
for the have-nots is the context for the movie, which is about how one
adorkable real-life small trader named Keith Gill, working out of his
basement during the COVID epidemic, defied the odds by investing and
encouraging his online followers to invest in GameStop, a company
“shorted” by hedge fund managers who expected the company to fail.
Here’s what that means:
Basically, this means that an investor borrows the stock,
sells it on the open market, waits for the price to fall, then buys it
back at the lower price and pockets the difference after repaying
interest on the initial loan (stock that they borrowed).
Paul Dano has never given a more appealing performance than this one,
playing the nerdy longhaired Keith Gill aka Roaring Kitty, his online
handle in his YouTube videos, in which he wears assorted cat T-shirts
along with a hilarious Rambo-style red headband that we see him ritually
tie onto his forehead before logging on. Based on his own research,
he’s decided that GameStop stock is actually undervalued, and he invests
his little family’s entire savings.
Soon he becomes the unlikely David vs Goliath leader of an online
movement, via YouTube and Reddit, that causes the GameStop stock to
soar, eventually destabilizing the stock market and destroying at least
one large investment firm. Gill’s plainspoken endorsement of GameStop,
“I like the stock,” becomes a catchphrase that he uses with modest
defiance later on when he’s forced to appear before Congress at the
climactic point of the film to defend the role he played in the 2021
“short squeeze” that led to a Wall Street panic....
I have to be careful when linking to John Helmer at Dances with Wolves.
He's been reporting from Russia for a very long time, which raises the red flag question, why are the Rooskis putting up with him.
And the answer, of course, is that he serves some purpose for the regime and since he's in media it's probably because he's somewhere on the spectrum between CNN's Eason Jordan:
CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan yesterday sent a memo to his staff
defending his decision to withhold information about how Saddam
Hussein's regime had intimidated, tortured and killed Iraqis who had
helped the cable news network over the years....
His approach became known as "Taking the Eason Way Out...". Catchy, someone should write a song.
Somewhere between that and the New York Times' Pulitzer prize winner, Walter Duranty who was an actual mouthpiece for Stalin.
So with that heads-up here's Helmer, September 28:
In January of this year the United States Geological Survey (USGS)
reported the reserves of the nine leading countries in the world which
mine lithium, the new fuel to power electric batteries. Chile led,
followed by Australia, Argentina, China, and the US which claims to have
one million tonnes. Russia was left out of the USGS chart.
Russian sources report its lithium reserves are currently between 3.5 million and 5 million tonnes;
that’s at least three times more than the US. The US is also much
more limited in its capacity to develop new domestic lithium mines
compared to Russia. Bolivia was also omitted from the US Government
chart because its reserves were called unproven resources. In fact and
in the ground, Bolivia leads the lithium world with 21 million tonnes.
The difference between what USGS reports and what happens next isn’t
the distinction in geologists’ terminology between reserves and
resources. It’s US Government policy to stop, sabotage and destroy
Russia’s ability to meet its lithium requirement from its own, domestic
sources, or by importing from friendly countries like Bolivia.
In response, a new plan for combining lithium mining projects in
Bolivia and Russia will produce a surplus of Russia’s foreseeable
requirement for lithium battery production. But not only that. Allied in
technology sharing, investment, trade, and political agreement, the two
countries will protect each other in the conservation of the lithium
market. If everything goes according to plan, Russia, Bolivia, and the
three BRICS states – Argentina, Brazil and China – will dominate the
trade in global lithium. They are already discussing the formation of a
collective marketing organisation – a lithium OPEC.
Unless the US can stop them.
In the latest official paper issued by the State Department on July
23, “the bilateral relationship between the United States and Bolivia”
is “strained. Despite these challenges, the United States maintains a
strong and respectful relationship with the Bolivian people, with whom
we work to advance human rights, entrepreneurship, and cultural and
educational initiatives…However, the United States remains concerned by
anti-democratic actions and the politicization of the legal system.”
This is how the lithium war is starting.
Washington’s version of the world’s lithium table looks like this:
WORLD LITHIUM PRODUCTION AND RESERVES, ACCORDING TO THE US GEOLOGICAL SERVICE
In its footnote to the table, the USGS adds: “identified lithium
resources in other countries have been revised to 86 million tons.
Identified lithium resources are distributed as follows: Bolivia, 21
million tons; Argentina, 20 million tons; Chile, 11 million tons;
Australia, 7.9 million tons; China, 6.8 million tons; Germany, 3.2
million tons; Congo (Kinshasa), 3 million tons; Canada, 2.9 million
tons; Mexico, 1.7 million tons; Czechia, 1.3 million tons; Serbia, 1.2
million tons; Russia, 1 million tons; Peru, 880,000 tons; Mali, 840,000
tons; Brazil, 730,000 tons; Zimbabwe, 690,000 tons; Spain, 320,000 tons;
Portugal, 270,000 tons; Namibia; 230,000 tons; Ghana, 180,000 tons;
Finland, 68,000 tons; Austria, 60,000 tons; and Kazakhstan, 50,000
tons.”
The US is the only country in the table to try to keep secret its
production of lithium. “W” in the table, according to the USGS, stands
for “withheld to avoid disclosing company proprietary data. — Zero.” In
fact, there are at least three publicly listed US lithium miners, and
they are required by law to report their lithium results several times
each year.
Albemarle Corporation, for example, sells its shares on the New York
Stock Exchange on release of quarterly production and financial reports
from the company’s lithium projects in the US (Silver Peak, Nevada, and
Kings Mountain, North Carolina), and in Australia, Chile, and China. For
example, in 2022 the company reports it produced 34,000 tons of lithium
carbonate equivalent (LCE); but just 2,000 tons of this aggregate were
mined in the US. Because US lithium consumption is so heavily dependent
on foreign imports, Albemarle has just announced Pentagon funding for
mining equipment to reopen the mothballed Kings Mountain mine in North Carolina.
This follows a US Energy Department grant of a year ago to construct a
lithium concentration plant at the mine. Altogether, US Government
funding to revive Kings Mountain currently exceeds a quarter of a
billion dollars.
According to Vygon Consulting, a Moscow analytical company
specializing in rare metals, Russia’s reserves are far greater,
exceeding Australia, the US, and China on the USGS table, with a cost
of production for ore deposits that is lower than the Australian and
North American mines, and a brine extraction cost comparable to the
South Americans. By 2040, Vygon is projecting annual Russian production
of 600,000 tonnes of lithium – a volume which will turn into exports to
the global demand market of roughly half the deficit between supply and
demand estimated by then.
This means that for Russia, the strategic defence and security
requirement for lithium can be met quickly so that import dependence can
be ended by 2025. On the other hand, for the longer term in economic
war planning against the US and Australia, there is domestic competition
for state support of new projects between the established state
combines like Rosatom, Gazprom, and Rosneft; the established oligarch
miners like Norilsk Nickel and Alrosa; new commercial enterprises; and
between regions from Dagestan in the west to Murmansk in the north and
Irkutsk and Yakutia in the east.
Confidence in defeating the Americans is an open secret in Moscow;
who will benefit domestically between the state companies and the
oligarchs is a closed secret because it has yet to be decided.
There has been no lithium mining in Russia since 1997 when mining at
the Zavitinsky deposit in Krasnoyarsk stopped. The reason is that there
has been no demand at a price for the metal to make mining of proven
reserves and develop fresh resources profitable enough. Imports were
cheap and supply reliable until 2022. Chile and Argentina then stopped
exporting to Russia; several African states halted exports of the raw
mineral and required processing plants to be established instead.
Lithium is a rare metal, not because it is scarce but because it is
widely distributed at low concentrations in various mineral compounds
and salts in
the earth’s crust, in seawater, and in oil and gas fields. Because
Russia dominates the world in the last of these, its potential capacity
for extracting lithium is considerable. Russia’s oil and gas producers
have worked this out. So has the US Government.
Low concentration usually means high cost of production. The abrupt
surge in price to peak at about $90,000 per tonne in 2022 reflected the
dramatic change in international supply, demand and mine profitability
calculations. Although the latest investment bank forecasts and stock
market projections indicate
the price in global trade will continue to decline, the cost of
production will remain at a level at which new investment in lithium
source extraction will be profitable.
The sanctions war against Russia, both to cut off imports and stop
exports, leaves no choice for Russia but to restart domestic lithium
deposits; create new ones; protect the security and stability of supply
from traditional import sources in South America; and develop new
methods for trade and price control to defeat US sanctions....
The Albanian prime minister Edi Rama told the following joke
at an international conference: “Russia is considering unifying its
time zones because there is a nine-hour difference between one side of
the country and the other. Then the Russian Prime Minister went to
Vladimir Putin and said: ‘There is a problem. My family was on vacation
and I called them to say good night and it was morning and they were at
the beach. I called Olaf Scholz to wish him a happy birthday, but he
said they would be there the next day. I called Xi Jinping to wish him a
Happy New Year, but he replied that they still had the old one…’ Putin
replied: ‘Yes, it happened to me too. I called Yevgeny Prigozhin’s
family to express my condolences, but his plane has not taken off yet.’”
This joke brings us directly to our topic, namely the problem of
simultaneity, in which Putin obviously thinks he lives in a block
universe where the future (of the bomb exploding on Prigozhin’s plane)
already exists now for him as a privileged observer.
It is well known how special relativity theory relativizes the notion
of simultaneity of two events: “That no inherent meaning can be
assigned to the simultaneity of distant events is the single most
important lesson to be learned from relativity.”[i]
The basic idea is clear: there is no absolute position in spacetime;
every movement is a movement with regard to a certain observer;
something moves with regard to the position of this observer. Since
there are dozens of sites explaining the paradox this thesis involves,
let’s quote a popular description of Einstein’s thought experiment
consisting of a moving train with one observer midway in the train and
another observer midway on the platform as the train moves past:
“A flash of light is given off at the center of the train just when
the two observers pass each other. The observer on the train sees the
front and back of the train at fixed distances away from the source of
the light flash (since the front, back, and train observer are all in
the same inertial frame). According to this observer, the light flashes
reach the front and back of the train at precisely the same instant of
time—that is, simultaneously. On the other hand, the observer on the
platform sees the back of the train moving toward the point at which the
flash was given off, and the front of the train moving away from it.
This means that the light flash going toward the back of the train will
have less distance to cover than the light flash going to the front. As
the speed of light is finite, and the same in any direction relative to
the platform (regardless of the motion of its source), the flashes will
not strike the ends of the train simultaneously. /…/ For both observers,
the speed at which the light traveled is constant, but the distance
traveled (and thus the time consumed in covering the distance) varies
depending on the relative motion of the observer.”
Can we then decide if one observer is right and the other wrong? The
conclusion that imposes itself is that “neither one can be shown wrong,
and that a simultaneity in one inertial frame need not be true outside
that frame.”[ii] Sabina Hossenfelder draws the general ontological consequence of this paradox....
The writer of this piece is Slavoj Žižek, about whom I once wrote:
Sometimes Žižek's writing can be so dense as to be almost impenetrable and because of that we've only had one post on a fairly interesting guy. From 2011 an antipasto, and then the main course...
...Zizek encouraged the protesters to think about the work ahead of them
and not be misled by the festive atmosphere in the park.
Saying that he supported George
Soros, he compared the billionaire to a chocolate laxative, as he
exhibited an internal contradiction. "First, they take billions from
you, then they give back half. And that makes them the world's greatest
humanitarians," said Zizek.
He advised the protesters to take the money, but keep fighting against the system....
In 1913, Henry Ford’s moving assembly line transformed carmaking.
Ford’s groundbreaking innovation drastically reduced the time it took to
assemble a car, enabling mass production and slashing vehicle prices.
More than a century later, carmaking is undergoing a similarly seismic shift. Only this time, Ford Motor Company (F) is scrambling to catch up, rather than leading the charge.
Electric
vehicles represent a fundamental shift in the technologies and
manufacturing processes that have turned Ford and rivals such as Toyota (TM) and Volkswagen into the biggest car companies on the planet.
Established automakers have been racing to adapt at an enormous financial cost, but are still miles behind Tesla (TSLA) and a crop of new Chinese competitors, including BYD and Xpeng (XPEV).
The
world needs affordable EVs more than ever as electric cars will play a
big role in hcelping countries cut planet-heating pollution. But can
automakers in Europe and the United States — where governments are
already planning to ban or limit the sale of new gas and diesel cars —
deliver them?
“Ultimately, some of these car companies that have been the cornerstone
of how we’ve thought about cars for the last 100 years will be a
fraction of their size in future,” said Gene Munster, a managing partner
at Deepwater Asset Management.
The EV gap between legacy carmakers and newer rivals is vast. In
2022, Tesla delivered 1.31 million battery EVs. BYD tripled sales from
the previous year to reach more than 900,000 (a figure that climbs to
almost 1.86 million when plug-in hybrid vehicles are included).
By comparison, the Volkswagen Group, including Audi and Porsche, sold 572,100 battery electric vehicles, while Stellantis (STLA), which makes Chrysler and Jeep, came in at 288,000. Toyota, Ford and General Motors (GM) are even further behind.
New
entrants have the jump on technology and the rising Chinese brands
boast lower production costs, allowing them to charge lower prices—
a huge advantage given that affordability is a major barrier to
widespread EV adoption, according to a 2021 survey of EV companies by
the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Falling behind
In
the EV race reshaping the global auto industry, China is speeding ahead.
Japan, South Korea, Europe and the United States — the dominant players
for decades — are lagging behind....
All is proceeding according to plan. You will own nothing and be happy. In other words: "Hop on the bus, Gus," "Make a new plan, Stan...."(apologies to Paul Simon)
The
strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW) may succeed in forcing the Big
Three automakers—GM, Ford, and Stellantis—to agree in part or in whole
to the union’s demands, and comes at a time when the militancy of
organized labor is greater than it has been in decades. But even if the
union were to triumph on every one of those issues, it would still not
be enough to reverse the decline of organized labor in the American
private sector. That is a tragedy for the country, because if private
sector unionism cannot thwart the unrelenting efforts of employers to
drive down wages, the American middle class will become extinct, with
the exception perhaps of unionized public employees.
It
is no coincidence that the “30 glorious years” of mass prosperity that
followed World War II coincided with the high point of trade union
membership and pro-union government policies, in Western Europe as well
as the U.S. The U.S. had the bloodiest labor violence of any Western
country between the Civil War and the New Deal, with the National Guard,
Army, or private detectives commonly used to crush railroad, mine, and
factory workers on behalf of corporations. In American courts,
meanwhile, unions were often treated as illegal conspiracies.
The
prosperity of American industrial workers of the 1950s like those in
the automobile industry was not the result of radical technological
change. Work on the assembly line was not that different in 1950 than it
had been in the 1920s. What workers had in the 1950s that they lacked a
generation before was power—the collective power of trade unions,
without which isolated individual workers have no leverage in
negotiations with giant corporations over wages, hours, and benefits.
Between the 1950s, when a third of the American workforce was unionized,
and the 1970s, productivity growth was translated into widespread wage
growth because unions forced employers to share more of their profits
with workers, along with managers and shareholders.
Today,
however, only around 6% of the private sector workforce is unionized in
the United States. The decline of unions in industries like meatpacking
has meant the return of low wages and conditions like those exposed in
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1904). Service sector industries
like fast food, which can provide decent jobs when they are unionized in
other countries, offer poverty wages in America. Low wages and unstable
schedules undermine stable family formation and community involvement
in sports leagues and religious congregations among America’s
21st-century proletariat, just as they did in the 1800s and early 1900s.
Unable to join the middle class through work alone, many workers in
post-union America, like those of the pre-union era, work several jobs
or turn for income to part-time gigs, which include not only stints for
Uber or Lyft but also crime and prostitution (in its high-tech legal
form as OnlyFans).
The
decline of unions also changes our politics. Without the massed power
of organized labor to counterbalance the influence of organized business
in politics, the two parties serve rival business lobbies and affluent
households. Corporations and banks and wealthy donors, along with
nonprofits and the universities that they bankroll, celebrate race and
gender characteristics which divide the working class while opposing
unionization efforts that transcend those divisions.
Whether
most American workers in the private sector in the future become
prosperous middle-class citizens or struggling, insecure serfs will
depend largely on the power of unions. Unfortunately, a revival of
organized labor in the private market faces numerous obstacles,
including inadequate federal labor law, transfers of production to
American “right-to-work” states or foreign countries, and high levels of
unskilled immigration.
Labor Law and Workers’ Rights
The
major obstacle to a revival of private sector unionism is American
labor law itself. With the exception of rail, transit, and airline
employees covered by the Railway Labor Act of 1926, American workers
seeking to join a union are governed by the National Labor Relations Act
of 1936—the Wagner Act, named after Robert F. Wagner, a U.S. senator
from New York. The Wagner Act was actually the second attempt by
Congress during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to promote
collective bargaining. It was passed in 1935 when the Supreme Court
struck down most of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933
as an unconstitutional delegation of power from Congress to the
presidency.
The
NIRA and the National Recovery Administration (NRA) that enforced it
were not “fascist,” as libertarian propagandists often claim. Rather,
the NIRA quite sensibly sought to avoid one-size-fits-all rules for
business and labor regulation imposed by government, in favor of a high
degree of self-regulation by business associations, which under
government supervision would set codes of fair competition. Such
self-regulation by industry with a government veto exists to this day
with state bar associations, the American Medical Association, and
various university accrediting agencies. The NIRA system, in which the
government’s role was limited to ratifying sectoral codes, envisioned a
more flexible system than the alternative, in which authorities in
Washington engage in top-down regulation of all industries and all labor
markets.
The
most controversial part of the NIRA proved to be Section 7a, a
provision guaranteeing workers the right to bargain collectively for
wages, benefits, and working conditions....
Like their Silicon Valley tech confreres 700 miles to the south, unionization is the very last thing that Amazon wants. And like Franklin Delano Roosevelt (he said modestly) I don't think public sector unions are an overall positive for the citizenry,* but as to the private sector, have at it....
From Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, September 19:
It seems like anything is possible with generative AI right now. But how will companies profit from those big ideas? Andy Wu breaks down the potentially painful tradeoffs that tech firms might face as artificial intelligence enters its next phase.
The dizzying explosion of generative
artificial intelligence platforms has been the big business story of
the past year, but how they’ll make money and how smart companies can
use them wisely are the questions that will dominate the next 12 months.
“Students and executives are no
longer asking whether we should adopt AI—but rather, when and how to do
so,” says Andy Wu, the Arjun and Minoo Melwani Family Associate
Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
Wu’s recent case study and background note, AI Wars and the Generative AI Value Chain,
offer a crash course in ChatGPT, Bard, and other AI chatbots—as well as
the dueling tech titans behind them—and probe the strategic dilemmas
ahead for innovators and users. The public's fascination with the
human-like aspects of chatbots may be overshadowing more fundamental
questions about how companies can profit from AI, Wu says.
“I think the basic economics of a generative AI are being overlooked.”
In an interview, Wu discusses the
challenging economics of AI, how business models are likely to differ
from traditional software models, and some of the potentially painful
tradeoffs ahead for companies such as Google, Microsoft, and others. Wu
collaborated on the case study with HBS research associate Matt Higgins;
HBS doctoral student Miaomiao Zhang; and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology doctoral student Hang Jiang.
Ben Rand: What did you find most surprising in preparing this case and why?
Andy Wu: I think
the basic economics of a generative AI are being overlooked. There are
significant unanswered questions in terms of how people will actually
make money with this technology. Google and OpenAI and others can't lose
money in perpetuity. But it’s not yet obvious to anyone exactly how
this will be monetized. At minimum, I can tell you that we are going to
need new business models, and the integration of generative AI is going
to transform how we monetize software and the business model.
Rand: How so?
Wu: Our notions of
fixed cost and variable costs are different here than they were for any
other form of computing we've lived through in the past. The key insight
is that the variable cost of delivering generative AI to an end user is
not zero… which means we can't necessarily be handing out future
software-as-a-service applications containing generative AI for free to
anyone or even as a paid subscription without usage limits as we are
used to today. Usage pricing is going to be much more important.
A second distinction is that a
significant portion of the core technology is open source, and a lot of
the data being used to train these models is public data and may be
copyrighted but is publicly available online. The barriers to entry for
AI are not as high as it may seem. So many companies will be in the
game, at least for specific vertical AI models and applications....
From Reuters via U.S. News & World Report, September 29:
Japan is no longer in deflation but
policymakers need to ensure prices do not slide back into contraction,
economy minister Yoshitaka Shindo said on Friday, suggesting authorities
are still concerned about soggy consumer demand.
Policymakers
must closely watch key indicators including the output gap and labour
costs before they declare a complete end to deflation, Shindo said....
I blame David Cameron.
Also assorted Americans.
Maybe a resident of the Élysée, or two.
The events of 2011, across the MENA from Libya to Syria, have yet to play out.
And the history of the U.S. and UK meddling has yet to be written.
I don't think "We came, we saw, he died" is going to be the final word.
From Chris Hedges' substack, The Chris Hedges Report, September 16, 2023:
NATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011, which overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, resulted in a chaotic and murderous failed state. Libyans pay a horrific price for this catastrophe.
“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped
when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was
overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet.
But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die. Libya, once the most
prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa, a country
with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a
home, subsidized electricity, water and gasoline, along with the lowest
infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy on the continent,
along with one of the highest literacy rates, swiftly fragmented into
warring factions. There are currently two rival regimes battling for
control in Libya, along with an array of rogue militias.
The
chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country’s
arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such
as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists
captured images of migrants from Nigeria, Senegal and Eritrea being beaten
and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya’s
infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and
dams, fell into disrepair. And when the torrential rains from Storm Daniel
— the climate crisis being another gift to Africa from the
industrialized world — overwhelmed two decrepit dams, walls of water 20
feet high raced down to flood the port of Derna and Benghazi, leaving up to 20,000 dead according to Abdulmenam Al-Gaiti, Mayor of Derna, and some 10,000 missing.
“The
fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster
response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure,
exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a
driver of risk,” said Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.
Taalas told
reporters last Thursday that “most of the human casualties” would have
been avoided if there had been a “normally operating meteorological
service” which “would have issued the [necessary] warnings and also the
emergency management of this would have been able to carry out
evacuations of the people.”
Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the doctrine of R2P
(Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya - as it did Iraq - as a
unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of
thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our “humanitarian intervention,”
which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for
Libya’s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in
the name of saving its persecuted — regardless of whether they are being
persecuted or not — we forget they exist.
Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned
against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost
always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed
with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale
destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures
in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle
the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that
are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous
utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.
Libya,
like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by
humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben
Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed
an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S.
Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to
alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an
understandable backlash on social media....
The events of 2011, across the MENA from Libya to Syria, have yet to play out. And the history of the U.S. and UK meddling has yet to be written. I don't think "We came, we saw, he died" is going to be the final word.
May 2020 "Turkey warns Libya's Haftar of military escalation" What the hell is Turkey doing in Libya? I seem to recall something about "We came, We saw, He died" And a U.S. Predator drone hitting Gaddafi's escaping convoy and then the French Air Force came screaming in. And then the British SAS-advised NTC rebels caught Gaddafi and sodomized him with a bayonet and Leading from Behind jokes made the rounds in D.C. and David Cameron joined the Council on Foreign Relations and tried to raise a $1 billion UK-China fund but proved he's no Tony Blair in the money game but What the hell is Turkey doing in Libya?
The next trick to tinier transistors is high-numerical-aperture EUV lithography
Over the last half-century, we’ve come to think of Moore’s Law—the
roughly biennial doubling of the number of transistors in a given area
of silicon, the gains that drive computing forward—as something that
just happens, as though it were a natural, inevitable process, akin to
evolution or aging. The reality, of course, is much different. Keeping
pace with Moore’s Law requires almost unimaginable expenditures of time,
energy, and human ingenuity—thousands of people on multiple continents
and endless acres of some of the most complex machinery on the planet.
Perhaps the most essential of these machines performs
extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) photolithography.
EUV lithography, the product of decades of R&D, is now the driving
technology behind the past two generations of cutting-edge chips, used
in every top-end smartphone, tablet, laptop, and server in the last
three years. Yet Moore’s Law must march on, and chipmakers continue to
advance their road maps, meaning they’ll need to shrink device
geometries even further....
We normally don't relay this type of mining company news because the employees, the companies and probably most importantly the national governments, have huge incentives to keep the product flowing.
In this case however, the copper market is so finely balanced on the supply/demand knife-edge that the reality and the perception of the reality will have an impact on prices.
From Reuters via Yahoo Finance, September 29:
The union of supervisors at Chile's Escondida mine is gearing up to
strike at the world's largest copper deposit and is almost certain to
reject a contract offer from mine owner BHP, the union's president said
on Friday.
Though the sprawling Escondida mine could continue to
operate even if supervisors walked off the job, a strike could lead to
production bottlenecks or slowdowns.
"I
have no doubt that the strike will win," union head Alexis Barrera said
in an interview, adding that nearly all members have already cast their
votes.
Voting on a proposal from BHP, a multinational miner, closes on Friday afternoon. There was no immediate comment from BHP.
The
government could launch a five-day mediation process that can be
extended another five days if the parties come close to reaching a deal....
Those with compromised immune systems should filter or boil water before drinking, officials said
Low levels of the
parasite Cryptosporidium were discovered in Druid Lake Reservoir, one of
two open-air reservoirs that feed into the water supply for parts of
Baltimore City and Baltimore County, as well as Howard County, the city
Department of Public Works informed the public Thursday.
Cryptosporidium,
or crypto for short, is known to cause gastrointestinal problems,
especially among those with compromised immune systems, as well as the
elderly and children, according to a release from the department.
Those with weakened immune systems and “other sensitive populations” are
advised to drink bottled water, boil water for one minute before using,
or filter tap water. People should discuss with their health care
provider whether children and older adults should take these same
precautions if they have concerns, said Dr. Tamara Green, chief medical
officer for the Baltimore City Health Department.
According to Baltimore
City’s advisory, people with compromised immune systems include those
with HIV/AIDS, inherited diseases that affect the immune system, or
cancer, and organ transplant patients who are taking certain
immunosuppressive drugs.
Green
said the current low level of contamination in the water supply means
the risk of developing symptoms of cryptosporidiosis — the disease
caused by acrypto infection — is low for the general population
with healthy immune systems. The most common symptom of
cryptosporidiosis is watery diarrhea. Other symptoms include stomach
cramps, dehydration, nausea, vomiting, fever or weight loss. People who
are infected may not experience symptoms....
Maintaining a clean safe water supply is one of the basic functions of municipal government. And it is pretty important; there was a cryptosporidiosis outbreak in Milwaukee (thanks to the all-knowing one, Wikipedia) that killed 69 people and cost over a half-billion dollars to ameliorate.
6.
Be it further enacted, That if any white person, for pay or
compensation, shall assemble with any slaves for the purpose of
teaching, and shall teach any slave to read or write, such person, or
any white person or persons contracting with such teacher so to act, who
shall offend as aforesaid, shall, for each offence, be fined at the
discretion of a jury, in a sum not less than ten, nor exceeding one
hundred dollars, to be recovered on an information or indictment.
Whereas,
the having slaves taught to write, or suffering them to be employed in
writing, may be attended with great inconveniences; Be it enacted, that
all and every person and persons whatsoever, who shall hereafter teach
or cause any slave or slaves to be taught to write, or shall use or
employ any slave as a scribe, in any manner of writing whatsoever,
hereafter taught to write, every such person or persons shall, for every
such offense, forfeit the sum of one hundred pounds, current money”
According to state and local development sources, Zoox plans to invest
$12,000,000.00 to build out new space in Hayward. The company plans to
occupy the new space at 25810 Clawiter Rd in Hayward, on or about July
1, 2024. According to the company website Zoox was founded to make
personal transportation safer, cleaner, and more enjoyable for everyone.
To achieve that goal, the team created a whole new form of
transportation. Zoox will provide mobility-as-a-service in dense urban
environments...
...Among Hayward Exchange’s other tenants is Amazon Web Services, which pre-leased some 275,000 square feet of space there for a data center in 2022....
Black employees were subjected to repeated and pervasive racial slurs and racist imagery while working at Tesla, a civil rights agency claims in its lawsuit.
Tesla
subjected Black employees at its California factory to “severe or
pervasive racial harassment” and helped perpetuate a hostile work
environment for employees of color, according to a lawsuit filed by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Racist
slurs and epithets and race-based stereotyping “permeated Tesla’s
Fremont Factory subjecting Black employees to racial hostility and
offenses,” the agency alleges. Black employees were also fired or
subject to retaliation after raising complaints about their treatment,
the lawsuit says.
The
lawsuit includes a lot of the language that was alleged to be used at
Tesla’s factory and has also been echoed by former Black employees of
the company in their own lawsuits. The EEOC said:
Slurs
were used casually and openly in high-traffic areas and at worker hubs.
Black employees regularly encountered graffiti, including variations of
the N-word, swastikas, threats, and nooses, on desks and other
equipment, in bathroom stalls, within elevators, and even on new
vehicles rolling off the production line.
Black
employees described the prevalence of racist imagery as “frequent,”
“constant,” “a regular thing,” and occurring “too many times to count,”
according to the lawsuit.
The EEOC’s lawsuit seeks “compensatory and punitive damages, and back
pay for the affected workers, as well as injunctive relief designed to
reform Tesla’s employment practices to prevent such discrimination in
the future.”....
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss secretly withdrew more than $280 million
held by their crypto company’s bank — mere months before the firm’s
collapse left the twins’ customers unable to access their deposits, The Post has learned.
The Winklevoss twins, best known for their bitter feud with former
Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg over control of Facebook, have lately
been embroiled in another nasty legal battle — this time with
billionaire Barry Silbert, whose company Digital Currency Group owns the
now-bankrupt crypto bank Genesis.
The twins are cofounders of Gemini, a once-rising digital currency exchange that has been plagued this year by layoffs and plunging trading volume.
Some $900 million in Gemini customer deposits
were frozen last Nov. 16, after Genesis was exposed to the meltdown of
disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX empire and forced to suspend
withdrawals.
The feud between the Winklevoss twins and Silbert is centered around
Gemini Earn — an interest-bearing account program that they billed to
customers as a way to earn 8% annual interest on their digital currency
deposits....
US District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s comments came just before he denied the 31-year-old former billionaire’s request to be released from jail temporarily during the trial to better help his lawyers mount his defense case. Kaplan said Bankman-Fried was a flight risk.
“Your client in the event of conviction could be looking at a very
long sentence,” Kaplan said in a hearing in Manhattan federal court. “If
things begin to look bleak … maybe the time would come when he would
seek to flee.”....
Nvidia’s France offices were raided by the country’s competition authority over concerns about anti-competitive practices, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Nvidia’s France offices were raided by the country’s competition authority this week, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. While the French agency doesn’t mention Nvidia by name, it confirms it carried out a raid over concerns about anti-competitive practices in the graphics cards industry.
Sources tell the WSJ
that French authorities specifically targeted Nvidia, which has seen
demand for its chips skyrocket in recent months. Several companies,
including Microsoft and OpenAI, have purchased thousands of the company’s high-end AI chips to power large language models.
The tycoon plans a future research lab to be located in Paris
His cloud group partners with Nvidia for supercomputing power
Billionaire Xavier Niel is investing €200 million ($212 million) in artificial intelligence, split between a future research lab to be located in Paris, cloud supercomputing capabilities powered by Nvidia Corp. hardware, and funding for startups.
The effort aims to lure top French AI engineers — who left to work for big tech firms — back to their home country, where they can build AI products to rival the likes of OpenAI, Niel said in an interview.
The race for AI dominance has intensified geopolitical rivalries as countries seek to harness the technology’s potential for economic growth and influence. Policymakers have rushed to intervene to ensure that their countries aren’t sidelined in the process.
“We don’t want our cloud and AI to be based on algorithms or machines localized in other countries,” Niel said. The danger is being dominated by American or Chinese technology “because they have the means,” he said.
The telecom tycoon believes there is still room for disruption coming from Europe in the AI space. “When you get rich and big, you’re slow, and that’s why startups always kill big companies,” he said.
Half of the investment will be allocated to an independent research lab in Paris, run by a nonprofit foundation. Codenamed “Sphere,” it will bring together top AI researchers and will be supported in part by Niel’s telecommunications group Iliad, parent of cloud-computing firm Scaleway, according to people familiar with the plan.
“When you go to any AI lab in the world, you’ll find that there are always researchers from French schools,” such as top universities Polytechnique and ENS, Niel said. “Our challenge is how to make them stay here, or come back if they are abroad.”....
"‘The Disruptors’ — Unique insight into Europe’s 1,600 AI startups (Part 2)" I was about to headline this link "The 1600 AI Startups you must know" to play off the "672 thought leaders you must follow on Twitter" or the "37,000 young people who want to take your job" articles but then realized our wary-yet-intrigued readers are not the type of people who respond well to someone saying they 'must' do anything.
Slowly
but surely, the market is waking up to a jarring realization: the price
of oil is now higher than where it was a year ago, and also where it
was right before the start of the Ukraine war, but in the meantime the Biden administration has drained 240 million barrels of oil in pursuit of short-term popularity gains. Alas, those gains are now all gone, as are the oil price declines, but the SPR is down to half of where it was at its peak.
What happens next is even less pleasant.
As JPM discussed last week when
it predicted the return of the oil "supercycle", crude is about to rise
much higher as a result of what JPM sees as a staggering 7mmb/d deficit
by 2030...
... but also other factors as follows:
higher for longer rates tempering the flow of capital into new supply,
higher
cost of equity driving elevated Cash Breakevens of >$75/bbl Brent
(post buybacks) as companies return structurally more cash to
shareholders, in turn, pushing the marginal cost of oil higher,
Institutional
and policy led pressures driving an accelerated transition away from
hydrocarbons and peak demand fears. Taken together, their corollary is a
self-reinforcing ‘higher-for-longer’ energy macro outlook as the
industry struggles to justify large investments beyond 2030.
JPM also upgraded global energy equities to overweight for the following reasons:
More positive macro outlook (preference is oil over gas owing to the former’s structurally positive characteristics and lower OPEC-mitigated volatility),
in-the-money corporate cash breakevens (vs the forward strip), implying ~12% ‘24 FCF yields rising to ~15% at $100/bbl,
Upside risks to EPS (we are ~10% higher than the street in 2024 (on MTM basis) having been ~10% below in January),
Attractive valuations relative to the market underpinned by cash return yields >30%,
In
the event that global inventories continue to fall and a rising oil
price environment, OPEC is likely to add in the next 12 months. Historically,
this has been supportive for energy equities as it typically indicates
improving underlying fundamentals (demand) – we show energy equities
tend to outperform and positively decouple to oil on production adds (we
note that although oil prices are up 30% since June when Saudi
initiated the 1mb/d cut, equities have lagged, only up ~10% i.e.
negatively decoupled).
While there was much more in the full note (read here), the bank's thesis could be summarized in a simple price target: $150 oil. But the largest US bank is not the only one expecting oil to soar by more than 50% from its current price.
Continental
Resources, the shale driller controlled by billionaire Harold Hamm,
agrees that oil is headed as high as $150 a barrel unless the US
government does more to encourage exploration,
Crude
output in the Permian Basin will one day peak as it already has in
rival shale regions such as the Bakken region of North Dakota and the
Eagle Ford in Texas, Continental Chief Executive Officer Doug Lawler
said during an interview with Bloomberg TV. Without new production, “you’re going to see $120 to $150” oil, he said.
“That’s
going to send a shock through the system,” he said. Without policies
encouraging new drilling, “you’re going to see more pressure on price.”....
....So, with that rather longer than usual introduction we see this brief little note at Reuters, October 17, 2022:
Founder Harold Hamm clinches deal to take shale producer Continental private
Continental Resources Inc (CLR.N)
said on Monday it had agreed to a sweetened offer from founder Harold
Hamm to take the U.S. shale oil producer private at a valuation of about
$27 billion.
Hamm, a legendary oilman who once called the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries a "toothless tiger," said in June that he wanted to take the company private because public markets have not supported the oil and gas industry.....
![[Black man reading newspaper by candlelight]](https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/ds/16100/16192r.jpg)
This seems to be part of a move to unpick the BRICS and India is a natural target. They also had a go at one of the new members of BRICS – the United Arab Emirate – but that seems to have fizzled out. So Trudeau’s attack was a shot across the bows and Blinken bringing up this assassination with India is to let them know that Trudeau’s attack was done with Washington’s backing. I suppose that you can say that the US is telling India that either ‘they are with us or against us.’ India was been all over the place between aligning with the west and aligning with the BRICS as Modi is as erratic as Erdogan. Truth be told, aligning with the west would be extremely dangerous for India because in the long term they would be pushed into a fight with China as a proxy. But India has seen how well that is working out for the Ukraine and the wealth that they would have to give up abandoning the BRICS would never be made up for by what the west has to for India – unless it is in weapons.