"Inside Walmart’s Warehouse of the Future" (WMT)

From the Wall Street Journal, July 28:

Robots handle many functions at Florida facility, from unloading trucks and scanning boxes to building and shrink-wrapping pallets for delivery

BROOKSVILLE, Fla.—Inside a sprawling Walmart warehouse here, hundreds of jobs slinging boxes are changing into roles managing robotic arms, conveyor belts and screens.

The central Florida warehouse, surrounded by cow pastures and housing developments, has been one of this county’s largest private employers since it opened in 1991, say local officials. By the end of the year, it will be the first U.S. Walmart warehouse of its kind to use automation to handle most products.

“Welcome to the future,” said José Molina, who has worked in the Brooksville warehouse for 25 years. Three months ago he became an autonomous forklift operator in the facility after years unloading semi trucks the manual way with a pallet jack.

“Now I’m watching the robots unload the truck. I’m behind the robot taking care of the issues,” said Molina, 51. “It’s a big change.” The work is less manual, there is more software knowledge involved, and he has more energy at the end of a shift, he said. Workers who make the leap to automated jobs generally don’t earn higher pay. Walmart’s supply-chain workers earn an average of $25.50 an hour.

Intake
Walmart plans to automate or partially automate many of its hundred-plus U.S. warehouses in the coming years. The shift means Walmart can use fewer people to process more goods and make stocking shelves at stores more efficient. To keep their jobs, many of the company’s tens of thousands of warehouse workers need to retrain for new roles. Some will leave. Warehouses will also need to hire people with new skills, such as technicians.

Large companies such as Walmart and Amazon that rely on massive warehousing networks have worked for years to automate more of their supply chains to increase the volume of packages they can process and reduce labor costs. Because of Walmart’s scale, its plan to make automation standard in more of its supply chain is likely to affect how smaller competitors invest in their own facilities and what a U.S. warehouse job becomes.

“What this technology does for us is increases capacity, increases the accuracy of our loads, increases the speed of the supply chain and lowers cost,” said David Guggina, executive vice president of supply chain for Walmart. It is “also completely reshaping the way that our associates work within the distribution center.”

At the Brooksville warehouse, some workers who made the leap to new automated roles say they like doing less manual labor than in their previous jobs and their typical shift includes more mental stimulation. Workers and supply-chain experts say some prefer the simplicity of the traditional warehouse job.

Processing/sorting
In Brooksville, as sections of robotic arms and screens are gradually installed across the more than 1–million–square-foot facility, some of its roughly 900 workers say they are skeptical about transitioning to new roles that require different skills.

Jose Vargas, 49, who has worked at the Brooksville warehouse for 20 years and transitioned to an automated role about two years ago, said some of his co-workers on the yet-to-be automated side of the building are hesitant to make the leap....

....MUCH MORE

"How Quantum Physicists Explained Earth’s Oscillating Weather Patterns"

We are still a long way from understanding turbulence and fluid dynamics but getting closer.*

From Quanta Magazine, July 18: 

By treating Earth as a topological insulator — a state of quantum matter — physicists found a powerful explanation for the movements of the planet’s air and seas.

While much of our planet’s air and seas are stirred at a tempest’s whim, some features are far more regular. At the equator, thousand-kilometer-long waves persist amid the chaos.

In both the ocean and the atmosphere, these gargantuan waves, called Kelvin waves, always travel eastward. And they fuel oscillating weather patterns such as El Niño, a periodic warming of ocean temperatures that returns every few years.

Geophysicists have leaned on a mathematical explanation for equatorial Kelvin waves since the 1960s, but for some, that explanation wasn’t entirely satisfying. These scientists wanted a more intuitive, physical explanation for the waves’ existence; they wanted to understand the phenomenon in terms of basic principles and to answer questions like: What’s so special about the equator that permits a Kelvin wave to circulate there? And “why the heck does it always travel east?” said Joseph Biello, an applied mathematician at the University of California, Davis.

In 2017, a trio of physicists applied a different type of thinking to the problem. They began by imagining our planet as a quantum system, and they ended up making an unlikely connection between meteorology and quantum physics. As it turns out, Earth’s rotation deflects the flow of fluids in a way that’s analogous to how magnetic fields twist the paths of electrons moving through quantum materials called topological insulators. If you imagine the planet as a giant topological insulator, they said, you can explain the origin of the equatorial Kelvin waves.

But even though the theory worked, it was still only theoretical. No one had directly observationally verified it. Now, in a new preprint, a team of scientists describes the direct measurement of twisting atmospheric waves — the exact kind of evidence needed to bolster the topological theory. The work has already helped scientists to use the language of topology to describe other systems, and it could lead to new insights about waves and weather patterns on Earth.

“This is a direct confirmation of these topological ideas, gleaned from actual observations,” said Brad Marston, a physicist at Brown University and an author of the new paper. “We’re actually living inside of a topological insulator.”

Geoffrey Vallis, an applied mathematician at the University of Exeter in the U.K. who was not involved in the work, said the new result is a significant advance that will provide a “foundational understanding” of Earth’s fluid systems.

The Shape of Water

There are two ways to begin this story. The first is all about water, and it starts with William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin. In 1879, he noticed that the tides in the English Channel were stronger along the French coastline than on the English side. Thomson realized that this observation could be explained by the Earth’s rotation. As the planet spins, it generates a force, called the Coriolis force, that causes fluids in each hemisphere to swirl in different directions: clockwise in the north, counterclockwise in the south. This phenomenon pushes the water in the English Channel up against the French shoreline, forcing waves to flow along its coast. Now known as coastal Kelvin waves, these waves have since been observed all over the world, flowing clockwise around landmasses (with the coastline on the right side of the wave) in the northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere....

....MUCH MORE

*As noted in the introduction to 2021's "Fluid Dynamics (and the filth on your phone)":

This is one of those fields of study that are so mind-bogglingly complex that, short of having a supercomputer close to hand, we can only approximate as to the details. See also weather, markets, and any other complex/chaotic system you can think of.

So anyone who can get a handle on what is actually going on with this stuff gives a whole 'nother meaning to the concept of smart....

And more recently:

June 13, 2023
Figure This Out And Make A Million Bucks: Now With Penguins
First up, the penguins, from Chalkdust, (A Magazine For The Mathematically Curious)....

June 14, 2023
Follow-up To "Figure This Out And Make A Million Bucks..."

There is a lot more money involved than just the million dollars from the Millennium Prize for understanding fluid dynamics and turbulence. In the climate arena the coupled climate models are still not all that skillful when trying to comprehend the interactions of the sea and the atmosphere, a huge and extraordinarily complex part of the whole picture and not that well understood.

On a much smaller scale, understanding turbulence can be worth hundreds of millions to billions of dollars when siting turbines on a wind farm.....

Chips: "Microsoft Emphasizes Importance of GPU Supply for AI"

From PYMNTS.com, July 28:

Microsoft has told investors that the supply of graphics processing units (GPUs) is a key resource — and risk factor — for the company’s growing cloud business.

The tech giant included three passages about the GPUs needed for its data centers in its annual report for the 2023 fiscal year, emphasizing the importance of having access to this hardware, CNBC reported Friday (July 28). In the previous year’s report, Microsoft didn’t mention GPUs at all.

“We continue to identify and evaluate opportunities to expand our data center locations and increase our server capacity to meet the evolving needs of our customers, particularly given the growing demand for AI services,” Microsoft said in its annual report. “Our data centers depend on the availability of permitted and buildable land, predictable energy, networking supplies and servers, including graphics processing units … and other components.”

Microsoft is taking its cloud business to the next level by relying heavily on GPUs to provide the hardware necessary for advanced artificial intelligence (AI), according to the CNBC report.

The company’s partnership with OpenAI provides it with access to ChatGPT and AI models to improve existing products, such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word, the report said.

In order to secure enough GPU capacity, Microsoft has signed an agreement with CoreWeave, a company backed by Nvidia, per the report. Going forward, the company plans to increase its capital expenditures to pay for the necessary data centers, central processing units, networking hardware and GPUs....

....MUCH MORE

MSFT is going to spend A LOT of money which is one of the reasons the stock was spanked for twenty bucks in the two days after reporting earnings. It gained back $7.65 on Friday.

If interested see July 26's: ""Microsoft Vs. Alphabet Post-Earnings Showdown: Cloud, AI to Shape H2 Performance" (MSFT; GOOG)"

"How to Sharpen a Scythe"

Alternative title: "Why I am not a writer."

This is so smooth that you don't even notice when he drops it into gear and sets off.

From The Yale Review:

Is paying attention good in itself?

From "Distraction and Attention," a folio of responses to Caleb Smith's Thoreau's Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture. To read the entire folio, click here.

To get a scythe to whisper through whatever needs trimming, it is not enough to hone its blade. The edge also needs to be tissue-thin and all but frictionless. To accomplish this, you will need not a sharpening stone but a triangular anvil and a hammer with a flat face. With these tools you will peen the blade, precisely hitting its very edge, repeatedly, with force enough to thin the metal and restraint enough to keep it from tearing.

Peening is a finicky job; it takes discipline and close attention so that you neither smash your fingers nor crumple the blade’s edge while bringing your hammer down, centimeter by centimeter, along the length of the blade as it lies atop the vertex of your anvil. One hundred and fifty overlapping blows should complete one pass of the blade’s length. It will take just a few minutes. If you can avoid distraction and do the job well, the blade will be so thin that it will ripple when you run your thumbnail beneath it.

You can mow your lawn with a scythe blade peened like this.

The first few passes are always a bit stiff, but soon your body familiarizes itself to the rhythm the scythe demands, as the tool adjusts itself to the personality of the ground over which it rides. At some point, with a thinly peened blade, the scythe will begin working so well that you no longer pay much attention to it. You might instead notice the fresh-cut smell in whose wake you stand, the sounds of the bees and the breeze, the ravens overhead, and the bluets and purple thyme at your feet.

If you are of a literary bent, you may imagine yourself in the shoes of Leo Tolstoy’s Konstantin Levin, who flees the confusion and unfulfillment of daily life—in Levin’s case, an argument with his brother over what aristocrats like themselves owe the peasants who work their land—and takes to the scythe as therapy:

The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.

You may find yourself agreeing with Wendell Berry that working with a scythe is a categorical good, carrying “the force of a parable,” or with Paul Kingsnorth that “using a scythe properly is a meditation. . . . Everything is connected to everything else.” You may find yourself nodding along with Robin Wall Kimmerer: “The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world.”

Or perhaps you will stand with Henry David Thoreau: “The scythe that cuts will cut our legs,” he wrote. “We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice.”

An intellect can be scythe-like, scary-sharp in its ability to dissect what many might consider to be settled convention, as Caleb Smith does in Thoreau’s Axe: what could be safer ground than to affirm that paying attention is good in itself? Teachers, employers, and yoga instructors implore us to pay attention to our homework, spreadsheets, and breathing. We are supposed to pay attention to the news in order to save democracy, to Twitter in order to save culture, to our diets in order to save our health, and to the natural world in order to save the planet.....

....MUCH MORE

"Former Special Forces engineer says Russian minefields are unlike anything he has ever seen and battling these hidden death traps is 'exhausting'"

This.

This is what was meant by defense-in-depth in our June 5 post "Oh My God, What Are The Ukrainian Generals Doing?". Reprised in July 15's NYT: "After Suffering Heavy Losses, Ukrainians Paused to Rethink Strategy":

There is a video taken by a Ukrainian drone showing exactly the hell the generals sent their men to. It is horrific, not so much in the war-porn gore sense but in the godawful situation these recruits are being forced into. The drone watches a small squad of soldiers who have been dismounted from their armored vehicle in a minefield to take cover in a low ditch.

 

About a minute into the video, one of the vehicle crewmen attempts to re-board the vehicle and carefully approaches. He steps on a mine.

Scrambling onto the vehicle he begins maneuvering the vehicle toward his buddies stuck in the low ditch.

Somehow a half dozen of the Ukrainians manage to board the armored vehicle,

A bit later another of the soldiers attempts a return from the vehicle toward a wounded buddy in the ditch and he steps on a mine and has a foot/lower leg blown to pieces. 

And he applies a field tourniquet. And that's when I turned it off with a couple minutes left....

And from Business Insider, July 20:

• Ryan Hendrickson has been working to clear heavily mined areas in Ukraine.
• The former US Special Forces engineer says the overwhelming numbers of land mines is wildly different from anything he saw in Afghanistan.
• "How do you clear all of this out?" Hendrickson asked in an online interview with a Ukrainian YouTube channel.

A decorated former US Army Special Forces engineer who cleared out improvised explosives in Afghanistan and has since been tackling threats in Ukraine says the monstrous minefields Russia is laying down are unlike anything he has ever seen.

"The biggest difference is the sheer number of mines," Ryan Hendrickson, who previously served in Afghanistan with the Green Berets and is now removing deadly mines as a volunteer in Ukraine, told Ukrainian Toronto Television. "There are millions and millions of mines in Ukraine," many put down by the Ukrainians, but significantly more by the Russians.

In one field, for instance, Hendrickson and his team found over 700 anti-tank mines, though they estimated there may have been thousands in total. That was just one field.

The Russians have "the capability to lay millions and millions of land mines, and they do," he said, stressing that "the biggest shaping factor of this war is land mines."

"Everything is landmined," he said in the interview, explaining that in Ukraine right now "all the farm fields are landmined, all the routes are landmined," and, in sectors along the front, "if the routes aren't landmined, then artillery has target reference points along the routes."

Hendrickson is involved with the Tip of the Spear initiative, his crowdfunded organization focused on removing land mines and booby traps in areas in the rear, areas where civilians are most at risk of being hurt or killed. In the field, he said, he and his team have encountered complex schemes where the minelayers intended to trap and maim or kill the de-mining crews, which are out in it working primarily on foot using man-portable mine-clearing tools....

....MUCH MORE

Just figuring out how to deal with this sort of defense when not under fire is very, very difficult. When the Ukrainian conscripts are trying to do so while getting machine-gunned and bombed by aircraft and artillery is damn near impossible.

And all the while the forever war grinds on.

If interested, here is a snip from a speech and part of a 20-page booklet from retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler.

At the time of his death the General was the most decorated Marine in history with a Marine Corps Brevet Medal - awarded for "Extreme gallantry and risk of life in actual combat with an armed enemy force" and two Congressional Medals of Honor, two Distinguished Service Medals (one step higher in precedence than the Silver Star) with a chestful of lower-ranking awards and medals.

Via the Federation of American Scientists:

-- Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

And from the booklet 

War is just a racket.

CHAPTER ONE: War Is A Racket

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations....

....MUCH MORE (10 page PDF)

 

Wikimedia Commons and OldMagazineArticles

"Why South Africa Is on the Brink of Chaos"

From Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance, July 20:

On a recent sunny afternoon, Joshua Radebe patted down asphalt into a neatly filled pothole on a busy Johannesburg street as a motorist tooted and waved to him. Radebe works not for the government but for insurance company Discovery Ltd.’s “Pothole Patrol.”

Like Discovery, which also pays for some of the fire engines in the South African commercial capital, precious metals producer Sibanye-Stillwater Ltd. ensures that water near its mines is safe to drink and roads are maintained and well lit; it upgrades schools and clinics. Food producer Tiger Brands secures water supply for the town that’s home to its fruit-processing business, and Investec Plc powers a traffic light near its offices during blackouts in Johannesburg. Glencore Plc, Anglo American Plc spinoff Thungela Resources Ltd. and other owners of an export terminal spend about $1 million a month to protect trains transporting their coal from cable thieves.

“It’s not altruism,” said Lungisa Fuzile, chief executive officer of the South African unit of Standard Bank Group Ltd., the continent’s biggest lender. “You can’t run a successful private business in a sea of chaos.”

Government incompetence, corruption and policy paralysis have left critical infrastructure in Africa’s most-industrialized nation in tatters, forcing companies to step into areas that are within the purview of the state in most countries.

Power cuts of as many as 12 hours a day have driven schools, hospitals and businesses to generators. Water in some communities is unsafe to drink. A dilapidated sanitation system triggered a recent cholera outbreak near the capital, Pretoria. Outside of some national highways, paved streets have more potholes than road. Poorly maintained state schools are keeping a whole generation from access to a decent education. Theft of everything from copper cables to solar panels are common, and crime has soared to such an extent that the private security industry now employs more people than the police force and military put together.

“We are indeed, as many have said, running the risk of becoming a failed state because we’re already on borrowed time,” Daniel Mminele, chairman of Nedbank Group Ltd. and a former deputy central bank governor, said in April....

....MUCH MORE

If interested see also Bloomberg June 16:  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-06-16/south-africa-s-crime-chaos-and-corruption-make-it-look-like-a-failed-state

It sounds like San Francisco.

"AI and the paperclip problem"

From VoxEU - CEPR, June 10, 2018:

Philosophers have speculated that an AI tasked with a task such as creating paperclips might cause an apocalypse by learning to divert ever-increasing resources to the task, and then learning how to resist our attempts to turn it off. But this column argues that, to do this, the paperclip-making AI would need to create another AI that could acquire power both over humans and over itself, and so it would self-regulate to prevent this outcome. Humans who create AIs with the goal of acquiring power may be a greater existential threat.

The notion that artificial intelligence (AI) may lead the world into a paperclip apocalypse has received a surprising amount of attention. It motivated Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk to express concern about the existential threat of AI. It has even led to a popular iPhone game explaining the concept. 

The concern isn’t about paperclips per se. Instead it is that, at some point, switching on an AI may lead to destruction of everything, and that this destruction would both be easy and arise from a trivial or innocuous initial intent.

The underlying ideas behind the notion that we could lose control over an AI are profoundly economic. But, to date, economists have not paid much attention to them. Instead, their focus has been on the more mundane, recent improvements in machine learning (Agrawal et.al. 2018). Taking a more future-bound perspective, my research (Gans 2017) shows that for a paperclip apocalypse to occur, we must make important underlying assumptions. This gives me reason to believe that it's less likely than non-economists believe that the world will end this way.

What is the paperclip apocalypse?
The notion arises from a thought experiment by Nick Bostrom (2014), a philosopher at the University of Oxford. Bostrom was examining the 'control problem': how can humans control a super-intelligent AI even when the AI is orders of magnitude smarter. Bostrom's thought experiment goes like this: suppose that someone programs and switches on an AI that has the goal of producing paperclips. The AI is given the ability to learn, so that it can invent ways to achieve its goal better. As the AI is super-intelligent, if there is a way of turning something into paperclips, it will find it. It will want to secure resources for that purpose. The AI is single-minded and more ingenious than any person, so it will appropriate resources from all other activities. Soon, the world will be inundated with paperclips.

It gets worse. We might want to stop this AI. But it is single-minded and would realise that this would subvert its goal. Consequently, the AI would become focussed on its own survival. It is fighting humans for resources, but now it will want to fight humans because they are a threat (think The Terminator). 

This AI is much smarter than us, so it is likely to win that battle. We have a situation in which an engineer has switched on an AI for a simple task but, because the AI expanded its capabilities through its capacity for self-improvement, it has innovated to better produce paperclips, and developed power to appropriate the resources it needs, and ultimately to preserve its own existence.

Bostrom argues that it would be difficult to control a super-intelligent AI – in essence, better intelligence beats weaker intelligence....

....MUCH MORE

Possibly related, July 7, 2023:

Puny Human, I Scoff At Your AI, Soon You Will Know The Power Of Artificial 'Super' Intelligence. Tremble and Weep
[insert 'Bwa Ha Ha' here, if desired]

"...Who Was Behind History's Biggest Bank Heist?"

From The Economist's 1843 Magazine, July 27:

Criminals stole $2,5bn from Iraq's largest state bank in broad daylight. Nicholas Pelham follows their trail.

 On a scorching September day last year, Hussein Kanber Agha reached the front door of his house in central Baghdad. He had got in the habit of scanning the street for anything out of the ordinary before turning the key. In his free hand he clutched a tattered brown leather briefcase. There was a chance someone might kill him for its contents.

Kanber wasn’t used to acting as though he were in a spy film. A 49-year-old consultant with a passion for digital banking, he was born in Iraq but had spent much of his adulthood in Stockholm. He led a quiet, orderly life there: working, going to the gym and drinking coffee. Then, last summer, Iraq’s finance minister asked him to return to Baghdad and investigate rumours about a theft at Rafidain, the country’s largest state-owned bank.

One particular account at Rafidain presented a tempting target to those in the know. Oil companies (and other firms operating in Iraq) are obliged to pay tax in advance when they receive a contract. The tax authority keeps these deposits in Account 60032. Firms can claim a rebate if they end up making less profit than expected but the bureaucratic hurdles are extensive. Unclaimed rebates hang around for five years before reverting to the treasury. Over time hundreds of millions of dollars accumulated in Account 60032, where they sat, alluringly. Then in mid-2022 word trickled out that huge amounts of this money were being withdrawn.

In theory the finance minister could have asked one of the country’s half-dozen oversight bodies to investigate. But Iraq is home to powerful militias, each with its own political wing and business empire. They are known collectively as the factions, and they exert vast influence over every aspect of government. Bribery is rampant. Those who cannot be bought are threatened (“You will leave Iraq horizontal,” an official recalls being told when she refused to do one faction’s bidding). A political outsider was needed. 

The accountants told Kanber they didn’t want anything more to do with the investigation. They were afraid of the consequences

 Kanber – thin, slightly stooped, the kind of man who drove an old Kia – seemed the perfect choice. He came from one of Baghdad’s old merchant families, and had fled Iraq in 1992 at the age of 19 after Saddam Hussein’s thugs detained him at a checkpoint. He moved to Sweden, where he earned a master’s degree at the Stockholm School of Economics and worked for a Swedish bank. He was on track for a conventional life as a European businessman until America overthrew the Iraqi regime in 2003.

Like many in the diaspora, Kanber was excited at the prospect of living in a free Iraq. He quit his job and moved to Baghdad to set up a mobile-payment system. But over the next five years the city was ravaged by sectarian violence. At one point 40 bodies were turning up on the streets every day. Eventually Kanber gave up and returned to Sweden.

In 2021 he was back in Iraq working on a banking-reform project for USAID, America’s international development agency. While there he heard rumours that the tax authority’s account at Rafidain was being plundered. When the finance minister asked him to investigate in August 2022, Kanber, by then back in Stockholm, didn’t relish the prospect, but he felt a duty to see that the inquiry was done “properly”. Also, he was curious: “Wouldn’t you want to know, if there was a huge theft like this?”

Kanber suggested that the finance minister discreetly assemble a team of trusted lawyers and accountants, then flew to Baghdad to join them. When they met he told the group to go to Rafidain immediately with a letter from the minister requesting copies of Account 60032’s statements. He knew that convenient fires often break out in Iraqi record departments when investigations begin. 

 The next day the team gathered in a conference room at the ministry of finance to examine the stack of print-outs. One of the accountants quickly spotted the two most important pieces of information: the balance at the start of the year and the most recent one. Account 60032 had been almost completely emptied.

The team called everyone they knew at the bank. Within a few hours their sources provided the names of five companies to whom the money had supposedly been transferred. None of them was a big oil firm. In fact, no one had even heard of them before.

At that point the lawyers and accountants told Kanber they didn’t want anything more to do with the investigation. It looked like looting on a huge scale, which meant at least one of Iraq’s murderous factions was likely to be involved. If Kanber wanted to dig further, he would have to do so alone.

First he had to prove that a theft had actually taken place. The tax authority, the nominal victim of the crime, denied that anything untoward had happened. Its balance sheets showed that all its money was still there, because technically no rebates had been claimed. Kanber needed to find out how and why the money had worked its way into the five companies’ accounts.

Iraqi state institutions, Kanber later told me, are profoundly opaque places. Records are incomplete; many officials have their own agenda. Yet there are some people working within them who simply want to do their job well. Kanber thought he could spot them by the way they dressed – if they didn’t wear brash clothes, they might be worth approaching. He had neither rewards nor threats to wield. But he believed some people might simply want to do the right thing.

“Your life is going to be threatened anyway, so you might as well be corrupt and make money”

To avoid attracting attention, Kanber met these middle managers in coffee shops and restaurants rather than at their offices. About a week into his investigation, one of his contacts sent Kanber a message saying that they had received a delivery that might be of interest. At the finance ministry the brown briefcase was waiting for him.

Kanber opened the briefcase when he got home. Copies of 247 cheques made out from Account 60032 to the five companies spread across the table and onto the floor. He spent hours sorting them into chronological order, the first dated September 2021 and the last August 2022. The document haul wasn’t proof of a fraud (though the amounts were often suspiciously round numbers), but it did irrefutably show where the missing funds had gone. Around $2.5bn, an amount comparable to the country’s entire health-care budget, had been diverted. It later transpired that it had been carried off in trucks in broad daylight. And the withdrawals had been approved by some of the highest officials in the land....

....MUCH MORE, one helluva story. 

When New Money Meets Old Bloodlines: The American Experience In France

Though the stories of impoverished British aristos marrying American heiresses are more famous, the French stories are probably more interesting. Except maybe the one about Jennie Jerome. The Lady got around. And she had a couple kids.

The author of this article, Caroline Weber, is a white woman living in the U.S.A. in the 3rd decade of the 21st century, a Professor at Barnard College (Columbia University partner institution and what Grandmother used to call one of the Seven Sisters) and holds outside Fellowships (including a Guggenheim) and appointments. She received her B.A. (literature) from Harvard, and her PhD from Yale. She is married to NYU Professor Paul Romer who, despite his Nobel Prize, is possibly the lesser light of the duo.

Ms Weber understands privilege and because of all of the above is herself one of the 1/10th of 1% most privileged human beings who have ever lived. Because she is brilliant she is granted great leeway in her choices of academic pursuits and interests.

From Literary Hub:

When New Money Meets Old Bloodlines: On America’s Gilded Age Dollar Princesses

Caroline Weber Maps the Intersecting Lives of Robber Barons and Floundering French Aristocrats 

To talk about privilege is to make assumptions, stated or otherwise, about what advantages that word denotes. In contemporary discussions, its meanings are many and ever expanding. Whiteness. Maleness. Equality under the law. Freedom from harassment. A vote that counts. A life that matters.

I have spent much of my career writing about “privileged” people in French history, from statesmen to socialites and famous authors to infamous queens; and I have been struck by both the complexity and the mutability that term has evinced over time. Currently I am working on a social history of the Parisian nobility during the Belle Époque (1889-1914).

This period saw intense social change in France and America alike, as old elites who derived their authority from hidebound notions of pedigree and decorum came under siege by an emergent group lacking those benefits but armed with a potent alternative: unprecedented wealth.

In the first part of this essay, I would like to look at these rival contingents and at the curious social phenomenon—that of the transatlantic “dollar princess” marriage—to which the tensions between them gave rise. In the second part, I will tell the story of an American heiress and a French prince who defied social convention to assert still another form of privilege, one arguably more compelling than either title or treasure alone: fulfillment.

On February 12th, 1892, the New York Times gave a new name to an old social stratum: “Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred.” This designation referred to the ladies and gentlemen whom New York’s reigning grande dame, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, had deemed worthy to dance in her ballroom. A follow-up piece on February 16th listed the elect by name, scions for the most part of the city’s old-line Knickerbocker families or similarly blue-blooded clans in Newport, Boston, and Virginia.

Conspicuously absent from the list were the so-called robber barons, typically natives of hardscrabble regions far from the genteel East Coast who since the end of the Civil War had reaped millions from ventures thought too grubby for gentlemen: railroads, manufacturing, lumber, oil. To Mrs. Astor, these upstarts lacked the polished manners and ingrained respect for tradition that only generations of superior breeding could produce.

As for the upstarts, the Times reports merely confirmed something many of them had already discovered on their own: the American social establishment did not welcome their nouveau fortunes and families.

Surely not all the tycoons barred from Mrs. Astor’s ballroom subscribed to her belief in the supremacy of Mayflower over Midwestern bloodlines, or of old money over new. Yet a number of them actually did. Toward their anointed betters, these men and their families bore much the same blend of reluctant admiration, simmering status envy, and desperate yearning to belong that the fictional Jay Gatsby (né Jimmy Gatz of North Dakota) would come to typify a few decades later.

In this sense, they unknowingly replicated a dynamic from the old court aristocracies of Europe. When a sovereign “elevated” a nobleman or woman to a given place in the royal retinue, his or her standing at court rose appreciably. The work such appointments entailed was ceremonial and often menial. Nonetheless, the nobility prized them because the monarch who defined the social hierarchy had cast them as signal honors. (At Louis XIV’s Versailles, noblemen vied bitterly for the right to take off the king’s riding boots each day, even though his hygiene regimen involved only one bath a year.)

The admiration, envy, and longing a plum assignment generated among courtiers less favored imbued it with a palpable social reality, obscuring the flimsy reasoning at its root: the post was desirable because His or Her Majesty said so. The prestige of Mrs. Astor’s invitations was founded on the same spurious logic....

....MUCH MORE

Mass Panic As Jim Cramer Predicts Giant Bug Mutants Will NOT Attack Earth Next Tuesday At 2:17 PM

From the Babylon Bee:

The nations of Earth have descended into a mass panic this week after Mad Money host Jim Cramer announced that giant mutant bugs will definitely not attack the Earth next Tuesday at 2:17 pm. "I'm absolutely, 100% sure about this," proclaimed Cramer confidently as his TV crew fled the studio in terror. "There is absolutely NO CHANCE a race of man-eating mutant insects controlled by a hive-mind from the planet Arachtoid VI will enter Earth's atmosphere at noon next Tuesday and begin destroying all major cities at 2:17. I know what I'm talking about, folks!....

....MORE

Things are bad when the non-financial media are mocking your predictive skills.

If You Watch Inflation Professionally, This May Be Of Interest

From Phoenix Capital Research via ZeroHedge, originally published under the headline:

If You’re Worried About Inflation, You Need to Read This

A headline we wouldn't use because a) most of our readers don't "worry" about much of anything and b) the day I begin to tell people they "need" to do something is the day I should probably check-in to the Arrogant Narcissists Home & Spa.

From ZH, July 24:

Inflation has very likely bottomed for 2023. 

The inflation data published in the U.S. is based on year over year comparisons. When the Consumer Price Index (CPI) comes out at 5%, what it’s really stating is that a basket of goods and services costs ~5% more currently than it did a year ago.

This is called the base effect: a comparison between two data points in which the current one is expressed as a ratio of the older one. And it can result in some pretty strange circumstances if you’re not careful.

Situations like the one we’re in today.

For most of the first half of 2023, inflation, as measured by the year over year comparison for the CPI has been trending down. However, as I’ve noted repeatedly, the only part of the inflationary data that is declining is energy prices (well that and used car prices).

See for yourself.

I mention this, because it is increasingly looking as though oil prices have bottomed.

Oil has spent much of the last 18 months in a downtrend. But that downtrend is about to be broken. 

If oil prices rip higher from here, then the inflationary data will begin to turn back upwards. Remember, energy prices are the ONLY part of the CPI that are DOWN. The price of everything else continues to RISE, albeit a slower rate....

....MORE

Here's the action in WTI and Brent via FinViz futures over the last three months (also on blogroll at right:

Related, yesterday: 

Gasoline Is Surging All Over the World in Fresh Inflation Blow

And this morning:

PCE Inflation Up 0.2% in June, Up 3.0% Year-over-Year

There was a fleeting chance for a rapprochement with the Saudis in that long ago first week of June:

June 4, 2023

"Oil Surges After Saudis Make Additional 1 Million Bpd Voluntary Production Cut"

President Biden should immediately, right now, today, make some sort of agreement with Saudi Arabia to refill the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the next six or eight months, coincidentally an implied rate of around 1mm Bpd .

But he and his handlers probably won't see the opportunity and our Energy Secretary is an energy moron and much like the Transportation Secretary, was promoted far past her/his abilities, so who's left to push for the prize and seize the opportunity?....

Emphasis added.

Those Are Some Fancy Cars That Are Burning

No, not the French arson/riots. Those were the vehicles of everyday people, many old enough that the owners didn't even have full coverage insurance policies any more. No, these are the cars burning off the coast of The Netherlands:

1,117 Porsches, 189 Bentleys, 85 Lamborghinis 

From Asia Times, July 27:

Tanks and ship-borne cars: Fire can wipe out both
In the Yom Kippur War, tanks, but in the lithium battery age it’s 1,117 Porsches, 189 Bentleys, 85 Lamborghinis 

In the Yom Kippur war in 1973, the last big armor battles before Ukraine, Israeli tanks encountered two enemies.

 One was the new weapon Egypt used to destroy tanks, a wire-guided ground launched missile called the AT-3 Sagger (previously the 9M14 Malyuta). It was the first man-portable guided anti-tank missile. It was set up on the battlefield so the shooter was separated by some yards from the launcher, giving the shooter a better chance of survival against counter-fire.  

The Sagger was teamed up with the RPG-7. a rocket propelled grenade with a shaped-charge warhead.  The RPG-7 was carried by an individual foot soldier who had to get close to the target he was trying to destroy, making the RPG-7 operator vulnerable once he was discovered.

These two weapons did a lot of damage to Israeli tanks. At that time the Israeli tank force was made up of US M-60 and M48 tanks, British Centurions, and T-55 Russian tanks that had been captured in 1967 and refurbished and modernized by Israel’s tank shop located south of Tel Aviv. Israel lost over 1,000 tanks, either destroyed or damaged.

The other enemy was the one tank with the worst reputation in the 1973 War: the US M-60 Patton tank. Many M-60’s mysteriously caught fire and burned, often incinerating tank crews in the process. At first it was thought the fires were caused by enemy fire and shrapnel, but when tanks started going up in flames where there was no immediate enemy activity, the Israelis began looking for the cause.

Israeli technicians discovered that as the tank operated in a hot, dry, desert environment, like that in the Sinai, significant amounts of sand accumulated inside the tank. At the same time, a lot of oil and other lubricants leaked onto the tank’s floorboards and accumulated in gaps in the tank chassis.

When the leaked oil mixed with the sand and got wedged in between the tank hull and the fuel tank, the sand-oil mixture and metals formed a sort of battery. In the heat and when sparks inside the tank were leaping around as the tank moved along the combat line, the “battery” could set off leaked oil and fuel that reached the fuel tank, causing a major fire.

Just after the war the Israelis found a solution: coating the fuel tank with insulating foam so that the battery-like fires could not happen. That brilliant solution was passed on to the Pentagon. The US Army was not interested, mostly because the US expected to fight a war in Europe where there wasn’t any sand and where the weather tended to be much cooler and with more moisture than in the Middle East. On the other hand even back then there was no guarantee that the US would fight only in Europe, and it sold its tanks to many foreign customers.

Late this month a Dutch container ship, the Fremantle Highway, caught fire off the coast of the Netherlands, in full view of the shore. The 18,500 ton ship was carrying 3,000 cars from Germany to Egypt. At least 25 of the cars on board were electric.  At least one of the electric cars caught fire and started a blaze that, at the time I was preparing this article, was consuming the ship....

....MUCH MORE

The latest figures on the number of EV's is much higher. From the Japanese car carrier via TradeWinds, July 28:

K Line reveals close to 500 electric vehicles on fire-ravaged car carrier Fremantle Highway
The number of electric cars is higher than first thought and could explain the North Sea casualty

HT on the update: ZH  

Porsche in particular seems to rack-up the insurance claims when being shipped. From a 2019 post:

When the "Grande America" Sank On March 12 It Took Some Very Valuable Automobiles to the Bottom

Or maybe it's just a behavioral bias in noticing the big numbers.

PCE Inflation Up 0.2% in June, Up 3.0% Year-over-Year

That's the headline number. Year-over-year excluding food and energy was up 4.1%.

From the Bureau of Economic Analysis, July 28:

Personal income increased $69.5 billion (0.3 percent at a monthly rate) in June, according to estimates released today by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (table 3 and table 5). Disposable personal income (DPI), personal income less personal current taxes, increased $67.5 billion (0.3 percent) and personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $100.4 billion (0.5 percent).

The PCE price index increased 0.2 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index also increased 0.2 percent (table 9). Real DPI increased 0.2 percent in June and real PCE increased 0.4 percent; goods increased 0.9 percent and services increased 0.1 percent (tables 5 and 7).

	2023
	Feb.	Mar.	Apr.	May	June
	Percent change from preceding month
Personal income:
Current dollars	0.4	0.4	0.3	0.5	0.3
Disposable personal income:
Current dollars	0.6	0.5	0.3	0.5	0.3
Chained (2012) dollars	0.3	0.3	0.0	0.4	0.2
Personal consumption expenditures (PCE):
Current dollars	0.3	0.1	0.6	0.2	0.5
Chained (2012) dollars	0.0	0.0	0.3	0.1	0.4
Price indexes:
PCE	0.3	0.1	0.3	0.1	0.2
PCE, excluding food and energy	0.3	0.3	0.4	0.3	0.2
Price indexes:	Percent change from month one year ago
PCE	5.0	4.2	4.3	3.8	3.0
PCE, excluding food and energy	4.7	4.6	4.6	4.6	4.1

The increase in current-dollar personal income in June primarily reflected an increase in compensation that was partly offset by a decrease in personal income receipts on assets (table 3)....

....MUCH MORE

"Are you going to let Sam Altman’s crypto project scan your eyeballs or not?"

Well, when you put it like that...

From TechCrunch, July 27:

Worldcoin's Orb tour has spread across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia

Earlier this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s audacious eyeball-scanning crypto startup Tools for Humanity started the global rollout of its Worldcoin product. The company wants to help build a reliable solution for “distinguishing humans from AI online,” enable “global democratic processes” and “drastically increase economic opportunity” the company said in a release.

The startup, which raised about $250 million altogether from backers like Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Reid Hoffman, said it’s rolling out its identity technology as well as its token internationally.

The project gives eligible participants 25 Worldcoin (WLD) tokens, currently worth about $55, for onboarding. During its trial phase, more than 2 million people signed up and scanned their eyes for the startup’s biometric database.

With that said, not everyone is excited about this endeavor and find the 25 tokens a nominal tradeoff for some of their biological data. Some people are also arguing that Worldcoin is exploitative for initially recruiting participants through poorer countries.

In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania acknowledged there was some “friction,” with the startup, but attributed it to the fact that the company was still in its early phases....

....MUCH MORE

The Technology Review link is the "through poorer countries" hyperlink:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/  

Which includes:

Worldcoin's full 25-page response to MIT Technology Review questions, provided on Mar 31, 2022. As noted in email, "responses in this pdf document are on the record and can be attributed to a Worldcoin spokesperson."

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21578921-worldcoin-responses-to-mittr

Virgin Island's Attorneys Now Claim JP Morgan Not Only Facilitated Sex Trafficking But “Actively Participated in Epstein’s Sex-Trafficking Venture” (JPM)

 From Wall Street on Parade, who seem to be reading all the case filings. July 27:

The Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands, armed with highly effective legal talent from the law firm, MotleyRice – which stakes its reputation on its “boldness” – has filed new documents in its federal lawsuit against the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase. The new documents are, indeed, breathtakingly bold.

The U.S. Virgin Islands’ attorneys have clarified to the court that they plan to show in a trial scheduled for October that JPMorgan Chase not only facilitated the sex trafficking of underage girls by Jeffrey Epstein but that the bank “actively participated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture from 2006 until 2019.”

That is a very explosive assertion. For starters, it throws up a giant red flare as to why the American public has heard nothing from the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice about a criminal case against the bank for laundering money for Epstein. The case brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands is a civil case.

The U.S. Virgin Islands filed hundreds of pages of new court documents on Monday and Tuesday. Most of the exhibits have been filed under seal. A Memorandum of Law arguing for partial summary judgment in the case, however, is only lightly redacted and makes the following points:

“Even if participation requires active engagement…there is no genuine dispute that JPMorgan actively participated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture from 2006 until 2019. The Court found allegations that the Bank allowed Epstein to use its accounts to send dozens of payments to then-known co-conspirators [redacted] provided excessive and unusual amounts of cash to Epstein; and structured cash withdrawals so that those withdrawals would not appear suspicious ‘went well beyond merely providing their usual [banking] services to Jeffrey Epstein and his affiliated entities’ and were sufficient to allege active engagement.”

The U.S. Virgin Islands has previously alerted the court to the unfathomable sums of hard cash that Epstein was able to take from the accounts he maintained at JPMorgan Chase without the bank filing the legally mandated Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to law enforcement. In the new filing, it has tallied up the giant pile of cash, writing as follows:...

....MUCH MORE

I did not know that, as reported by Business Insider a couple days ago, JPM has in-house human trafficking experts. 

BIG If Scalable: "New material is a game changer in radiative cooling"

Materials science baby!

From Advanced Science News, September 28, 2022:

A new coating designed for sub-ambient radiative cooling could help combat global warming by curbing energy use.

Global warming is one of the most serious challenges currently facing civilization. Every year, it results in severe floods, extreme heat, wildfires, melting glaciers, intense storms, and many other natural phenomena and disasters that threaten humanity.

The scientific community has proposed many ways to help minimize the effects of the climate crisis, including a research team led by Jian-Guo Dai at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, which has recently reported a breakthrough in radiative cooling.

The study, published in the journal EcoMat, builds on an idea initially developed by scientists at Stanford University in 2014, which sought to mitigate the effects of global warming by coating buildings and other man-made objects with materials that have the ability to cool them below ambient air temperature.

Radiative cooling does not require energy, the consumption of which is already growing due to industry and the growth of the world’s population. This is different from cooling rooms with air conditioners, which heat the air outside and emit greenhouse gases, which we will discuss below.

“All the objects with a cooling need under the sunlight exposure can be covered by sub-ambient cooling materials,” said Dai in an e-mail. “Besides the building roofs, building walls, windows, pavements, oil tanks, containers, textiles, solar panels, and so on can all be covered with these materials to create a cooler city and built environment.”

Physics of global warming
The main driver of global warming is the greenhouse effect — a warming process that occurs when gases in the Earth’s atmosphere trap the Sun’s heat. The Sun, which has a surface temperature of almost 6,000 degrees, radiates energy mainly in the form of visible and infrared light, which is absorbed by the planet’s surface.

As a heated body, the Earth then re-emits some of this radiation. However, the gases that make up the Earth’s atmosphere — both natural and greenhouse gases — prevent this heat from being radiated back into space. This is because this radiation is emitted at wavelengths that get trapped by the atmosphere.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human activity has increased the concentration of carbon dioxide — one of the main contributing gases to the greenhouse effect — in the atmosphere by more than 50%.

Sub-ambient cooling
Understanding this, the Stanford researchers proposed coating objects with a material that not only reflects sunlight back into space, but also re-emits some of the thermal radiation it had absorbed within a wavelength range that does not become trapped in the atmosphere.

Since this original idea was put forward, many materials have been studied for such purposes, but they all have had various disadvantages, limiting their widespread use. For example, most materials rely on organic molecules as their components, which originate mostly from non-renewable fossil resources and age poorly under various environmental and climatic conditions.

To overcome these drawbacks, Dai and colleagues synthesized a new type of sub-ambient cooling material....

....MUCH MORE

Thanks to a friend.

Gasoline Is Surging All Over the World in Fresh Inflation Blow

No kidding, here are RBOB futures via FinViz (also on blogroll at right):

And from Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance, July 26:

The price of gasoline is starting to surge everywhere, an inflationary omen for central banks and governments the world over.

Futures just soared to a nine-month high in New York, sending shock waves through to the pump, while prices have also been rising in Asia. Markets for the motor fuel have tightened worldwide due to a combination of unexpected refinery outages plus lower-than-normal stockpiles in key storage hubs such as the US Gulf Coast and Singapore for this time of the year.

In global energy markets, it’s telling that while crude oil futures are little changed year-to-date, US gasoline contracts have rallied by more than 20%. The resurgence in gasoline potentially poses a headache for central banks including the US Federal Reserve as policymakers grapple with the problem of how much more monetary tightening, if any, is needed to bring inflation to heel.

Gasoline prices are often a topic of contention as those costs can be an essential daily expense for many, alongside food and rent. Energy prices are one of the many factors that have contributed to surging inflation globally. In the US, reining in prices at the pump will also be a crucial issue for President Joe Biden with the next election just over a year away, especially after he ordered the sale of a huge chunk of the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve last summer.

“Higher energy costs may push up consumer prices and lead to renewed goods inflation — a sector where price increases have slowed,” said Andrew Hollenhorst, chief US economist at Citigroup Inc.

For perspective, a one-cent rise in a gallon of gasoline in the US takes away about $1.15 billion annualized spending power, according to Brett Ryan, senior economist at Deutsche Bank AG. That means the $1.30 a gallon drop in the second quarter saved consumers $150 billion, and that’s money they could spend on other goods and services. Now, this tailwind could turn into a headwind and drag on spending should prices continue to rise materially, Ryan said.

Global Strength
Low inventories and high demand across key regions are driving prices higher around the world. In Europe, gasoline prices are rising faster than crude, although this trend has yet to fully translate to higher costs at the pump. Meanwhile, conditions in the Singapore market, a key Asian hub, have also firmed on lower-than-expected Chinese exports. In many emerging markets, that translates into a heavier burden for governments given many have fuel subsidies in place to buffer costs for poorer citizens....

....MUCH MORE 

That makes three uses of "soar" or "soared" today, I think we have a trend.

"S&P Futures Soar To 2023 High After Dovish Fed, Meta Earnings"

From ZeroHedge, July 27:

US futures and global stocks soared, and the dollar slumped as investors wagered that the Fed has reached the end of its 16-month long policy-tightening cycle. A barrage of earnings beats (sorry Mike Wilson) from high-profile companies added to the bullish momentum, propelling the Stoxx Europe 600 index 1% higher to a two-month high, while US futures pointed to a strong Wall Street session after Fed Chair Powell failed to dent market optimism during his press conference. At 7:30am Nasdaq 100 futures were up 1.3%, led by an 9% premarket surge in Facebook parent Meta Platforms which reported blowout guidance for Q3; S&P futures rose 0.6% to a fresh 2023 high at 4,623. Treasury yields dropped on the short end, while the dollar pushed lower. Oil and gold prices are up. Iron ore, meanwhile, is trading lower. Today, we will receive a slew of growth and inflation data. As Fed staff now dropped US recession forecast, today’s growth data will be important to assess the soft-landing scenario. Keep an eye on banks stocks as Fed will hold meeting at 1pm ET today to implement Basel 3 endgame agreement.

In premarket trading, megacap techs are higher led by META which has soared 9% post earnings after the Facebook parent gave a revenue forecast ahead of consensus, driven by a recovery in advertising sales. Analysts note that AI-powered tools are boosting engagement and advertiser return, with several upping their price targets. Chipmakers also advanced, led by Micron Technology which highlighted its development of high-bandwidth memory products. Here are some other notable premarket movers....

....MUCH MORE

Related:

May 15's "U.S. Equities: Time For An Old-Fashioned Blow-Off Top"

July 18's "Why Does The U.S. Economy Need $154 Billion-737 Million In Stimulus PER MONTH?".

Our best advice [keep on dancing]

"Poland’s Blooming Relationship With South Korea"

From Emerging Europe, July 17:

According to South Korea’s president, Poland is a gateway for Korean companies to enter Europe and a strategic logistics hub. ‘It is our most important cooperation partner in Central and Eastern Europe.’ 

Poland’s relationship with South Korea is blossoming. Ahead of a visit to Warsaw last week by the South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, national airline LOT announced plans to start a weekly, direct flight from Wrocław to Seoul in November, complementing its four direct flights per week to the Korean capital from Warsaw. 

Launch of the route is not as random or surprising as it first appears. Wrocław is home to Korean-owned LG Energy Solution Wrocław, Europe’s largest producer of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, employing almost 10,000 people. It is one of many strategic South Korean investments in Poland, which also includes a Hyundai polypropylene plant in Szczecin, where production began in June. 

Poland’s privately-owned energy firm ZE PAK, which currently produces energy at four plants mainly from coal, and state-owned energy giant PGE, last year joined forces with Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (KHNP) to assess the viability of building four 1,400-megawatt nuclear reactors in Pątnów, using South Korean technology 

Seoul’s Incheon Airport – where those flights from Wrocław will land – is an advisor to Poland’s Solidarity Hub, or CPK, an integrated air, rail and road transport hub the Warsaw government wants to build in the centre of the country. In addition to being the largest airport in Central and Eastern Europe, CPK is also intended to deliver roughly 2,000 kilometres of new, largely high-speed railway lines linking Warsaw to Poland’s regions and beyond.....

....MUCH MORE

And tanks. Some of the best tanks in the world. Tanks designed to withstand a North Korean onslaught:

These aren't just any tanks. From the introduction to September's "Poland Will Have a Large and Modern Tank Army" 

One of the odder comments on Russia's war against Ukraine was making the rounds last week, to the effect that Russia buying munitions from North Korea was a sign of weakness.

It is more likely a sign that North Korea's war plans are very similar to Russia's, lots, and I mean lots of artillery, and the shells to go with them. It actually seems natural.

In the same vein, Poland's joint venture with South Korea to secure a whole bunch of tanks seems very smart. These are the tanks Seoul developed to hold back the North Koreans and they are reputed to be among the best in the world....

There is much more than just buying arms and armaments going on here. Because of the hostility toward Poland's government from Brussels, and the possibility that at some point in the future NATO's Article 5 will be invoked by Poland only to be met with reluctant mobilization on the part of the other NATO members or, worse, silence, Poland wants at minimum to have the capability to slow-down any future attack. Memories are long in that part of the world and everyone remembers what happened to Czechoslovakia in 1938, what with the 'Peace for our time' and all. 

This attitude on the part of the Poles is exactly the same as their reasoning on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, February 2018: "Polish PM: Nord Stream II Would Make Russia Free to act Against Ukraine, So Must Not be Built".

When Germany and the EU decided to go ahead with the pipeline, despite a half-decade of warnings* from Poland, the Poles bought themselves a geopolitical insurance policy, the President Lech Kaczyński LNG facility in Świnoujście, about eight feet from the German border on the Baltic. Which they expanded. And expanded again while offering Germany some of the gas if Germany would just think twice about Nord Stream 2.

The thing to know about insurance policies is you have to pay the premium up front and it can be a very visible cost. Which will only seem prudent should something bad happen.

But there are some things you can't measure in zlotys alone.
(or rubles or euros or krone or...) 

—the outro from November 2022's "Saab Signs Contract for Two SIGINT ships for Poland" (plus some other stuff)

"The EU-Indonesia Fight Over Nickel and Who Gets to Own the Clean Energy Future"

From naked capitalism, July 26:

Indonesia boasts some of the world’s richest mineral deposits, but it has long focused on digging them up and shipping them to other countries for processing.

The government in Jakarta has been trying to change that, but is facing fierce resistance from the West. Raw nickel exports have been banned since December 2020 and Indonesia is instead trying to force foreign buyers to invest in smelters in Indonesia in order to access the country’s vast deposits. According to Asia Times, that plan has been working as “the mineral’s value-added increased from US$1.1 billion to $20.8 billion in 2021 alone.” The same restrictions were put in place on bauxite shipments on June 10. Tin and copper bans are scheduled to come next.

The EU and the US need the nickel to power their clean tech futures. The problem is they produce little of it themselves. More from the Peterson Institute for International Economics:

Nickel is one of the mineral lynchpins of the industrial sector because it is used in stainless steel, lithium-ion batteries to power EVs, and other renewable energy technologies. It is also a mineral produced in only small quantities in the US (0.5 percent of global production) and the EU—albeit thousands of miles from Europe in France’s New Caledonia territory in the South Pacific. Accordingly, the US and EU have designated nickel a critical mineral/raw material.

The EU and US are worried that if Indonesia develops manufacturing capability they won’t have control over clean tech. The EU is asking businesses to take countermeasures (what these are remain unclear) against Indonesia’s nickel ore export ban as a battle between Brussels and Jakarta plays out before the World Trade Organization. Jakarta has appealed a WTO ruling against its protective mineral policy and has maintained the export ban in the meantime. More from The Jakarta Post:

The Trade Ministry’s international trade negotiations director general, Djatmiko Bris Witjaksono, told The Jakarta Post on Thursday that the EU had placed “antidumping and antisubsidy” measures on Indonesian steel products.

Hikmahanto Juwana, an international law professor at the University of Indonesia, called the EU measures an “unfair contravention”, because the WTO’s ruling through the Dispute Settlement Body had yet to become legally binding, as Jakarta was appealing with the Appellate Body.He urged Jakarta to “fight back” by stopping all ongoing negotiations on international trade.

“The EU has brought the law of the jungle back into human society: The stronger one wins.”

The battle playing out between the EU and Indonesia is indicative of the larger struggle over who gets to own the clean energy future, and the critical minerals needed in everything from car batteries to windmills. From Down To Earth:

[Rob Davies, former minister of trade for South Africa] says for developing countries being able to use tools like localisation is critical. Minerals needed for green technologies, such as bauxite and copper ore used in wind turbines, or lithium and nickel ore used in electric vehicle battery, are concentrated in a few countries many of which are developing economies. Indonesia, for example, supplies 40 per cent of the world’s nickel ore, as per the International Energy Agency (iea). Since 2014, Indonesian has instituted a ban on the export of nickel ore and requires it to be processed domestically for export. As a result, its share of global refined nickel output rose from 1 per cent in 2013 to 30 per cent in 2021. The EU took the issue to wto claiming that the ban violated trade rules; wto agreed. Indonesian President Joko Widodo now plans to appeal the ruling. He may now ban export of bauxite in 2023 (it holds 3.75 per cent of the world’s reserves). Paul Butarbutar, co-founder of Indonesia Research Institute for Decarbonization, says: “When one company sets up a nickel smelter to process the nickel, it employs more than 12,000 people and local and central governments earn revenue. So, this protectionism helps our local eco- nomic development.”

WTO panelists suggested that Indonesia could only block exports in acute crises like mass starvation—and not in response to the needs of economic development, writes Todd N Tucker, director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, US, in The Washington Post. This suggests wto would not leave much room for countries to manage economic transitions for the benefit of their own workers and producers, he adds.....

....MUCH MORE

It's all about power and money.

It was always about power and money.