Russia was always Turkey’s number one geopolitical antagonist; even in the best of times, a dangerous frenemy. Now, Turkey is probably the number one beneficiary of Putin’s botched war. Its main antagonist is defanged, maybe permanently, and it’s become a geopolitically indispensible regional power that the US and Europe desperately need to keep onside. It can dick around with stuff like hosting Putin visits, just to flaunt its own importance. Everything is coming up Erdogan.

Shutting down polluting businesses, relocating others away from where people live, and traffic congestion control are all valid approaches to air pollution control, used not only in China but around the world. Not sure why you need to put scare quotes around the word “solved”.

I know this upsets a lot of people, but the ruling isn’t without justification. $450B++ in government spending should not be accomplished through a legal loophole. (Quite aside from the fact that fiscal stimulus is the last thing the economy needs right now.)

This is a deliberately obtuse take by the Telegraph. Central banks are literally empowered to create or destroy money; the profits and losses they themselves make are accounting fictions.

There’s a saying in developmental economics. There are four kinds of economies in the world: developed, undeveloped, Japan, and Argentina.

It’s really mind-boggling how Argentina’s economic troubles never end, under socialist governments and neoliberal ones, with a pegged exchange rate and a floating one, under high global interest rates and low ones.

Taking a quick look, it seems that South Africa went for the Pfizer-BioNTech and J&J vaccines. If vaccine supply was the issue, they should have bought Indian and Chinese vaccines. Those vaccines were actually the best bang for the buck for the global South at the time: their marginally lower efficacy was more than compensated for by their far better availability. It seems like the problem for SA, ironically, is that it stuck too close to the West and did not think independently enough.

Given TikTok’s precarious situation, it’s no surprise they’re going out of their way to bend to the whims of US politics. Face it, there are a lot of Republicans ready to justify banning TikTok by pointing to teenagers getting abortion advice from the platform.

Sure, just like you can run an SMTP server that blocks incoming connections from Gmail. It’s not illegal, obviously, but it goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.

To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. If you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone using the protocol as intended.

By a similar token, if you run a mail server, you should accept SMTP connections as far as possible. Yes, you can ban spam, but you should not ban connections from Gmail even if Gmail is a privacy-destroying bad idea. By all means, allow individual users to set up their own block lists, but this should not be done at the server level.

I’m just surprised Elon Musk didn’t find a way to inject himself into this story somehow, like he did with the Thai cave rescue.

This isn’t true, though; politics is in the driver’s seat, and capital is at the mercy of government. We can see this even in the US where the Biden administration is pushing decoupling/deglobalization for geopolitical and domestic reasons, to the discomfort of US-based multinationals. On the other side of the aisle, the business-friendly cosmopolitan arm of the Republican party has lost ground to the Trumpian populist wing. You see a similar story elsewhere in the world. In the case of Russia, a lot of people thought that Putin was a tool of the oligarchs, so you can change his behavior by putting pressure on the oligarchs. Surprise, it turned out that the oligarchs have to do what Putin tells them, not the other way round.

Shouldn’t it have been the Odyssey? By the time you unsubscribe, ten years have passed, nobody recognizes you, and your wife is fending off suitors.

Now they get to organize dives to view the wreckage of the Titan. Twice the business!

The counter argument is that standardized open protocols are important. So if a big corporation moves to adopt a standardized open protocol, it’s a good thing for everyone, even if said corporation is sketchy, evil, or whatever.

It’s kind of like Microsoft’s adoption of XML for Office save files. Yes, they had ulterior motives, and the result isn’t completely satisfactory for third parties who want to parse the save data. But it’s still miles better than the previous situation where things were completely closed off.

How was syncing done in Usenet? It has a very similar decentralized model, and I don’t recall there being problems of data loss due to desyncing between servers.

That’s Microsoft’s playbook. If you don’t offer a better product than your competitor, pull out every dirty trick in the book to undermine them.

It’s a calculated insult and a challenge.

Occam’s Razor says that Biden, a famously gaffe-prone politician, simply made a gaffe.

International commentators can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that Modi’s BJP is having so much success because Indians, on the whole, like them and think they’re doing a pretty good job.

Americans in particular tend to think that if you don’t have two equally strong parties duking it out over 50/50 nailbiter elections, it’s not democracy. But plenty of postwar and postcolonial democracies end up with dominant parties, without falling into dictatorship. In Japan, for example, the LDP has held power for something like 95% of the time since WWII, and it’s a pretty healthy democracy.

Spez won’t agree to the API demand, because it’s a matter of ego and credibility for him now. His whole big shot tech-bro CEO shtick depends on ramming this through, like his hero Elon.

So I guess we’ll see if there’s anything interesting in the corp data…

They’re okay for niche applications, but the use case is pretty narrow: situations where you want high efficiency solar harvesting, but only for a limited period (because the material degrades). Oh, and you can’t use them for (say) cheap solar powered kids’ trinkets, because they contain lead.