Politics

Lagos matches your Kansas July daily high pretty well 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Plus our humidity is higher. And yet I've grown habituated to it and can manage mainly without aircon albeit at the cost of an occasional outbreak of prickly heat (solution = cold showers). My pool hall (Tipsy Bar, Bodore Road, Ajah) has no aircon, but a two foot gap between the walls and the ceiling stop it from becoming too stifling. I can't help thinking that the OP is asking the wrong question. It assumes as a given that the OP has a right to enoy optimal comfort in a location where the ambient conditions are beyond his comfort zone. Relax that assumption and ask why the major…

Is there any such thing as a totally free market worldwide? For it to be totally free, surely there would have to be no import or export restrictions anywhere, and no immigration or emigration controls. If so, what would such a world look like? Sounds like the employees of the world would be constantly moving around following the highest wages/ lowest living costs, and corporations would be constantly migrating to where there's the highest profits/ lowest outgoings. There would be no community and no more nation states. Is this accurate? 🤔 🥴🤯 Cheerz GIAN🙂x

According to City Hall Conservatives Sadiq Khan's organisation tried to bribe a Scientific institution into lying about their research because the conclusion reached by the Scientific institution did not support the requirement for a ULEZ expansion. The claim is made at a London Assembly in the video below. Please watch the clip and give your Scientific opinions on whether or not Science supports Sadiq Khan or not. Claim made by Sadiq Khan's Scientific research team - Despite these improvements in air quality there was no evidence of a reduction in the proportion of children with small lungs or Asthma symptoms over this period. (This is referring to the ULE…

Reports circulating on Twitter and Reddit say that Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov had his Deputy Prime Minister and former Minister of Health Elkham Elkhan Suleymanov buried alive on suspicion of poisoning him. Suleymanov has neither been seen nor heard from since October 2022. https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1700800571920228402 According to the VchK-OGPU Telegram channel, Kadyrov’s health deteriorated sharply not long after Suleymanov had personally administered certain injections to him. The Chechen government then unexpectedly published a decree on 25 October 2022 stating that Suleymanov had been ‘released’ from his position as Deputy Chairman of the …

Back in December last year to much western media trumpeting the G7 nations imposed a price cap of $60/bbl on Russian crude oil exports to be policed by the once all-powerful shipping insurers Lloyds of London (see here). Today I notice on https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/urals-oil that Urals Crude - Russia's flagship product - is quietly trading at $73.26/bbl yet we hear not a whisper of indignation or explanation from the powers that be (ie Rupert Murdoch). Why suddenly so shy about such a bold inspirational policy.

Canada and some other countries have a smaller population in relation to the area it occupies compared to other countries, therefore below are a few ideas that are useful for Canada and those countries. 1. In Canada people pay the same for long distance phone calls and short distance phone calls, that is not good. Beacuse of that distance betwen people lost an importance and the people change in a negative direction (the desire to become rich is lost). Correct is that long distance phone calls should be more expensive than short distance phone calls. For example: phone call distance 100 miles =0,1 $ Phone call distance 1000 miles=1 $ Phone call distance 10000 …

Will, I think, fail because no man can step in the same river twice, which is what they are trying to do. Do people think this carries any weight? The quote I'm drawing from is, apparently, from Heraclitus.

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I wrote this little tidbit up for a side project... Enjoy. Any feedback / comments welcome. My related background: 15 years of accounting drudgery preparing monthly financial statements for the CEO, and studying Business Administration (and thus economics) at CSU East Bay. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ As most people are probably aware, wealth inequality is a big problem around the globe. On the one hand, we have centi-billionaires who can fly off to space at a whim; on the other, we have masses of financially disadvantaged people with few opportunities to impr…

FWIW… US capacity to project power against such opponents on their home turf is rather limited. Moreover, only a madman would suggest a direct conflict between nuclear armed superpowers. Even at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, with all the tension involved, this much was realized. This explains our strategy in Ukraine, and suggests what we should do proactively in Taiwan: make them a nuclear armed (relative for their size) superpower. Can they handle that responsibility? One can never be sure. However, clearly it would be trivial for them to build nuclear weapons from a technical standpoint; they simply choose not to. That suggests the kind of peo…

Socialism is a thorny topic for many people. What comes to your mind when I mention the word? Some might think of horrendously mismanaged nations like Venezuela or Cuba. Others might leap to the idea of wealth redistribution. But what is socialism? Fundamentally, it is a system in which the means of production (factories, farms, etc.) are controlled by society at large (i.e., government), as opposed to being privately owned. Ultimately, this means what to produce, and how much of a given thing to produce is managed centrally. The first obvious question is, how do central planners make these decisions? For a socialism on a national scale, the question of how much to pro…

Arizona House Legislature Passes Unconstitutional Bill... Arizona House Legislature approve bill to restrict "who can film police officers" and "when and where." (ref. 1) The people who took video of police killing George Floyd and Eric Garner would have faced criminal charges in Arizona under legislation that passed approval in the Arizona state House of Representatives with only partisan support. A bill proposed would make it "unlawful for someone to film police from up to 15 feet away" while officers are engaged in "law enforcement activity." Constitutional experts and Civil Rights advocates say the proposed law would be blatantly unconstitutional. …

The West just cant not win, it lost all wars and all trade wars, and will lose all tech wars. 1) in WWII, Russia killed 5 million Nazi soldiers and took 4.5 Nazi soldiers as POWs. --- East Front, WW2, wiki. France last 6 weeks and lost 2.2 million soldiers. 2) In WWII, Russia defeated 600,000 Japanese soldiers in Manchuria and lost 10,000 soldiers. The battle of Singapore, The battle of Hong Kong, The battle of Philippines, the battle of Indonesia are jokes. 3) The West lost all trade wars, if you talk about the really GDP - buying power, China is No 1, India will be No 2 in 2050, Indonesia will be one of the top 5, Japan is No 3 now…

Mine are: Aljazeera, BBC, Reuters, The Intercept, Kyiv Post, Institute for the Study of War, Moscow Times, UK Defence Journal, Associated Press and Politico. I like to try and get varied perspectives as seen from different countries on similar subjects that interest me. I have noted that AP and ISoW are cited by the others listed quite a lot.

It seems those in power tend to be greedy and not very inclined toward science. I often wonder if this is simply human nature. It seems that in order to attain a position of power you require certain inclinations and mindsets that tend to include a certain level of greed, among other things. I suspect It's far more complicated. Positions of power often involve stepping on eggshells and trying to please several parties (or at least not offending some parties). But I also feel a lot of it is related to greed and lack of empathy for other people. If this trend continues, and corruption along with it, where are we heading? How can we solve this problem? I feel lik…

With the release of ChatGPT 4 and the development of numerous other generative A.i. platforms, the A.i (re)/(de)volution is clearly upon us. Mass unemployment is one many potential upheavals A.i. could bring. A report from the World Economic Forum in 2021 projected when A.i will take over various sectors: For me, the structural changes A.i. will bring to practically every sector of the economy demand a fundamental rethinking of how our economy is structured. In alignment with the current dialogue catalyzed by Geoffrey Hinton regarding the dangers of A.i. should be a universal discussion on what benefits A.i. must legally afford human society. Su…

Those of you who publish original research may find the following interesting, and suggesting of an 'agenda' not backed up by science ( wish BeeCee was still here; he was passionate about this sort of thing, and had great respect for L Krauss ) Lawrence Krauss: Whiteboards are racist because woke physics journal says so (msn.com) What do you guys think; tempest in a teapot, or the unravelling of society as we know it ?

Well, she isn't a Dem now, so she's got to get the 2024 campaign cash from somewhere... hasn't she?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/new-study-finds-a-high-minimum-wage-creates-jobs.html The assertion in a 2010 op-ed was that higher minimum wage meant “Say goodbye to entry level jobs and hello to permanent double digit unemployment.” “Over the next thirteen years, a long list of cities and states enacted minimum wage increases of unprecedented size. Between 2014 and 2022, California increased its minimum wage by 56 percent in inflation-adjusted terms. Over a similar time period, New York raised its wage floor by 72 percent. Permanent double digit unemployment did not ensue. In fact, not only did these historically large minimum wage hikes fail…

Because money is directly involved in the patient-doctor relationship, do you think it pushes the scale of the problem upwards? When medicine becomes self-funded, I think the dynamic changes between doctor and patient, and they possibly are more likely to succumb to the patient's wishes, rather than advise what's best for them. About 9 people died every hour last year from opioids (cdc).

Classified Documents According to Reuters, the WP is reporting that the FBI search at Mar-a_Lago was prompted by concerns at the DOJ that the remaining 12 crates of White House documents unlawfully taken there by Donald Trump contained classified documents about nuclear weapons. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-attorney-general-garland-confirms-fbi-investigating-trump-2022-08-11/ A Twitter thread posted by Mark Hertling offers an overview of federal document classification systems in the US: https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1557911337468133377 Briefly, the sequence in ascending order of sensitivity is Confidential Secret…

Given that he is using 'Nazi-like' symbolism, but only really alludes to it as a fascist example, is Germany going over the top? Waters album has been around since '79. Rogers is many things, but I don't think he's fascist. It's obvious to me as a long time fan of PF, but may look different to others. It's ironic that they let him hold a massive concert near the Brandenberg Gate (Ithink) when it toppled. He wasn't seen as a fascist then, when he used the same work.

Pakistan politics is very hard to understand I don't knew why they remove Imran Khan.....

Don't Americans make far too much of all that "Birth of a Nation" bullshit? Canada and Australia did just fine without a war of independence, and anyway, the true motives for the war are being airbrushed out of existence. From my reading, the British government had put huge money into establishing the colony, and protecting the colonials, but the colonials didn't want to pay any share of it. And the other bone of contention was that the British wanted to expand westwards into the Indian lands more peacefully, by treaty etc, whereas the colonials wanted to drive the Indian nations off their lands by force and try to exterminate them. As they subsequently did. …

From Politico today: The Supreme Court on Thursday significantly shrank the reach of federal clean water protections, dealing a major blow to President Joe Biden’s efforts to restore protections to millions of acres of wetlands and delivering a victory to multiple powerful industries. The ruling from the court’s conservative majority vastly narrowing the federal government’s authority over marshes and bogs is a win for industries such as homebuilding and oil and gas, which must seek Clean Water Act permits to damage federally protected wetlands. Those industries have fought for decades to limit the law’s reach. …