Faculty senate of Emory college calls for no-confidence vote for president

So did the US just dissolve the prestige of the USD for $6 billion?

Seems... Short-sighted?

Is power consumption a leading metric for economic growth? China notched 7.4% electricity consumption growth in March YoY. They've been fairly correlated in the past, with the caveat that growth in services generally leads to contraction in electricity consumption.

I'm notching up my GDP growth estimates for this year from barely above 5% to a healthy 5.5%+. There's a lot of internal development that's not getting reflected, and so something is clearly happening in China. But what?

996 is a tech thing. It's unsurprising that, in fields where China is widely recognized as lagging behind the US, more work and longer hours are valued over workers' rights.

China’s economy grew 5.3% in the first quarter, beating expectations

Real estate continues deleveraging, and yet 5.3% GDP growth YoY.

Retail sales growth continues to be sluggish (3.1% vs. 4.6% predicted) and CPI is coming in cool (0.1% vs. 0.3% predicted). My theory for this is that China is actually seeing costs drop more quickly than CPI metrics can keep up. Traditional big-ticket household spending categories are housing, transportation, and education. Housing prices are obviously on the decline, but transportation costs are also decreasing due to the combination of cheaper EVs and an expanding HSR network. Education costs have been clamped down on after the crackdown on private tutoring, while average education outcomes have been raised by the crackdown on gaming. Meanwhile, traditional recurring costs like food and energy have been pushed downward by increasing trade with Russia as well as the rise of cheap solar.

It may be time to revisit the notion of ever-increasing consumption value as being important for economic growth. In this case, you can get the same quality of life with substantially less money. Why spend more to pad the top line retail sales number?

A shower thought on "Chinese vassalage":

The DPRK, whose dependence on China is extensive and extremely well-documented, still has an absurd amount of flexibility, self-determination, and independence from Chinese policy. It's essentially the "worst case scenario" in terms of Chinese influence... And the DPRK was still allowed to develop it's own nuclear weapons despite Chinese opposition. What are the odds that Canada would be allowed to develop an independent nuclear weapons program today? Cuba? Mexico?

Zero.

I don't understand why everyone is so obsessed with "China manufacturing overcapacity."

This isn't new. We saw the same thing with Japan, and the solution was simply to deflate the value of the USD/EUR relative to the Yen. Do the same thing relative to the RMB and you would solve all of these overcapacity issues.

Of course, the West likes the benefits of having a strong currency without appreciating the costs.

‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza

During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.

Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

I actually think I'm going to throw up

The US saw the end of the war in Europe, saw the Soviets make quick work of Japan's occupation in Japan, and realized that getting bogged down in an island-hopping campaign for another few years would give the Soviets enough time to consolidate, rebuild, and challenge the US globally.

I have zero faith in the idea that the US nuked Japan to "save American lives." The entirety of WW2 can be summarized as "Western powers fear communism, fucked around and found out." That's the single prevailing theme throughout.

Why did the British and French not acknowledge the fascist threat? Because they were more afraid of the communists. Why did the US prop up Japan's war economy for years? Because they were more afraid of the communists.

The average person often doesn't care either way tbh

A big part of the Western idea of communism is that everyone ends up in the same place and thus there is no motivation to succeed.

This, of course, makes it rather confusing when Kamala Harris espouses the idea of equity being "we all end up at the same place." An equality of outcomes?

!Broadcasting equipment was the giveaway for me !<