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Created
Mon, 23/01/2023 - 13:49
Its been around 9 months since the central banks of the world (bar Japan) started to push up interest rates. And still there are no firms signs that a recession is impending. There are some signs of a growth slowdown but that is not uniform across the globe. The US seems to be continuing to grow. While that suggests that monetary policy is less effective than the mainstream economists claim – which is no surprise to non-mainstream economists who have long understood that fiscal policy is the tool of choice for counter-stabilisation, there are other offsetting factors that are at play here. Governments around the world have seriously ramped up their fiscal outlays over 2022 on military procurements as the perceived threat from Russia and China has been magnified by military generals and their mates in the big US weapons corporations, who have taken the opportunity to get make massive extra profits. The power of the military-industrial complex (MIC) is long-standing and well understood. It explains why all the usual disaster scenarios that accompany increasing fiscal outlays by governments haven’t attracted much criticism.
Created
Mon, 23/01/2023 - 12:06

 

Look how these Art degree morons describe the result of this rocket test by Musk… “humiliating explanation!”…



 

Here’s musk:

 "The South African entrepreneur posted: “High entry force & heat breached engine bay & centre engine TVC failed.”  


No biggie… make some adjustments…


That was a few years ago now today:


Created
Mon, 23/01/2023 - 11:30
So sad… It appears that he’s not going to be able to wrap up the nomination the way he expected: Advisers to Donald Trump have blanketed South Carolina Republican officials with pleading phone calls in recent weeks in an effort to drum up endorsements and attendees for the former president’s first campaign swing of the 2024 cycle next week. But the appeals have run headlong into a complicated new reality: Many of the state’s lawmakers and political operatives, and even some of his previous supporters, are not ready to pick a presidential candidate. After raising the debt limit for decades, Republicans in recent years have leveraged it to enact spending cuts while also threatening government default. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post) They find themselves divided between their support for Trump, their desire for a competitive nomination fight in the state and their allegiance to two South Carolina natives, former governor Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, who have taken steps to challenge Trump for the nomination.
Created
Mon, 23/01/2023 - 10:00
This is how right wingers have fun I have no words: Body-camera footage and images of the night Breonna Taylor was killed in 2020 were shown in front of diners at a Kentucky restaurant this week during an event in which a GOP women’s group hosted one of the officers who fired into Taylor’s apartment, according to an NAACP chapter and accounts from patrons. The Republican Women’s Club of South Central Kentucky held a dinner event Tuesday at Anna’s Greek Restaurant in Bowling Green, Ky., for Jonathan Mattingly, a former sergeant with the Louisville Metro Police Department who was among the officers who conducted the botched no-knock raid at Taylor’s Louisville apartment in search of her ex-boyfriend. Mattingly, who was one of the officers who fired into the 26-year-old Black woman’s apartment the night she died, was cleared of wrongdoing in an internal police investigation and retired in 2021 to become a conservative author and pundit.
Created
Mon, 23/01/2023 - 09:23

Given the secrecy typically accorded to the military and the inclination of government officials to skew data to satisfy the preferences of those in power, intelligence failures are anything but unusual in this country’s security affairs. In 2003, for instance, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq based on claims — later found to be baseless — that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was developing or already possessed weapons of mass destruction. Similarly, the instant collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021, when the U.S. completed the withdrawal of its forces from that country, came as a shock only because of wildly optimistic intelligence estimates of that government’s strength. Now, the Department of Defense has delivered another massive intelligence failure, this... Read more

Created
Mon, 23/01/2023 - 09:00
I said to a young friend the other day that this might be the best job market they will ever experience and she looked at me like I was crazy. I get it. When you’re young the experiences you have had limit your understanding of what it’s like when things change. When you are old (like me) you’ve been through some stuff and you have a different outlook. This piece in the NY Times looks at the different ways the generations are experiencing the contraction in the tech sector: When Lyft laid off 13 percent of its workers in November, Kelly Chang was shocked to find herself among the 700 people who lost their jobs at the San Francisco company. “It seemed like tech companies had so much opportunity,” said Ms. Chang, 26. “If you got a job, you made it. It was a sustainable path.” Brian Pulliam, on the other hand, brushed off the news that the crypto exchange Coinbase was eliminating his job. Ever since the 48-year-old engineer was laid off from his first job at the video game company Atari in 2003, he said, he has asked himself once a year: “If I were laid off, what would I do?” The contrast between Ms.
Created
Mon, 23/01/2023 - 09:00

 

I've been reading Walter Kempowski's 2006 novel All for Nothing, the last book in his monumental attempt to record the experience of German people during the Second World War. In a different genre, it has something of the same feel as W. G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, about the effects of the British and American carpet-bombing of German cities. All for Nothing, however, is about what the Germans called the East Front.  Specifically it's about the final stages in East Prussia, when the Red Army at last reached the Reich and three-quarters of a million civilians fled westwards.

 

Created
Mon, 23/01/2023 - 08:44

I made a new video about improvements, modifications, and tweaks I made to my tablets: overlay sheet (Photodon), keyboard tray (Cintweak), a real bug issue under the glasses, and a too-grainy overlay surface for the Intuos Pro Large.

FAQ

I had many interesting question on the Youtube channel, and while answering to them, I thought it would be good to also copy/paste the questions here, as they were good additional information:

Created
Mon, 23/01/2023 - 08:44

I made a new video about improvements, modifications, and tweaks I made to my tablets: overlay sheet (Photodon), keyboard tray (Cintweak), a real bug issue under the glasses, and a too-grainy overlay surface for the Intuos Pro Large.

FAQ

I had many interesting question on the Youtube channel, and while answering to them, I thought it would be good to also copy/paste the questions here, as they were good additional information:

Created
Mon, 23/01/2023 - 08:18
Stephanie Kelton traces the problem to misunderstandings resulting from a poor choice of terms in which to talk about government finance, modeling it conceptually on household and firms finance, even when the former is the monopoly issuer of its currency and all that implies financially and economically, whereas firms and households are users of the currency that must obtain the currency, e.g, to pay taxes, since the government is the sole supplier. Consequently, it's a mess that those in a position to profit from can exploit. She suggests adopting a terminology that fits operational realities based on existing institutional arrangements instead of continuing to use terms that promote a fantasy.

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