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athingofvikings · 3 months

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A Thing Of Vikings Chapter 56: Perils Of Popularity

Chapter 56: Perils Of Popularity

Compared to the drama of dragon-dug underground canals and dragon-forged skyscrapers, the Financial Revolution in the century and a half after Hiccup Haddock's taming of dragons is generally overlooked, but is perhaps even more fundamental to an understanding of the economic structure he left behind. Prior to the taming of dragons, bullion currency was comparatively rare; while gold and silver coins were certainly in circulation, as witnessed by the famous bride price paid for Hiccup's wife Astrid, overall, the Europan economy was cash-starved and functioned primarily on the barter economy at the lower levels. After the taming of dragons, however, an even more scarce commodity currency entered the economy in the form of dragon scales.

As is common knowledge, dragons shed their skins each spring; prior to domestication, they used these materials for the construction of nests for newly hatched young. Under human auspices, however, the shedding amounted to the annual input of pure currency into the economy. Properly treated and cured, dragon leather and dragon scales can last for decades of use before wearing out. While the leather itself acted as a trade commodity, the single scales from hide that wasn't of sufficient quality to be made into leather were not worthless. On the contrary, they functioned as currency, quickly displacing bullion metals as the currency material of choice.

In this role, dragon scales offered numerous advantages, including being nearly impossible to counterfeit or debase, being easy to substantiate as genuine, and naturally removing themselves from the money supply over time as they wore out or were repurposed (such as for industrial use, decoration or even insulation). However, even with this removal, the most productive gold or silver mine could not hope to match the net output of dragon shedding, and the resulting injection of funds into Europa's economy—spread by the effects of the Dragon Mail and the existing trade network—caused rampant inflation, averaging between 3-8% a year over the next century. While this would cause problems to the modern developed economy, in the cash-starved environment at the time, it was an economic blessing, allowing for a rapid shift from the barter economy and feudal taxation system to a market economy and currency taxation system, giving even the peasantry access to funds with which to pay their expenses and taxes and receive payments. Increasing per-person productivity from Haddock's innovations and the agricultural impact of dragon labor pushed urbanization, as demand for labor—human and dragon alike—exceeded the available number of hands and wings for most of the next several centuries…

—The Dragon Millennium, Manna-hata University Press, Ltd.

AO3 Chapter Link

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My Original Fiction | Original Fiction Patreon

#a thing of vikings #httyd #how to train your dragon #alternate history #historical fiction

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mariacallous · 2 months

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The United Nations on Thursday adopted a U.S.-led resolution on artificial intelligence, marking what Washington says is a major step toward establishing a global baseline to regulate the rapidly developing technology.

The resolution, which followed more than three months of negotiations among dozens of countries, calls on U.N. member states to ensure “safe, secure, and trustworthy AI systems” that are developed responsibly and respect human rights and international law.

While the resolution is non-binding and does not include an enforcement mechanism, U.S. officials in a briefing on Wednesday highlighted the significance of its unanimous adoption as an important step in establishing global AI guardrails.

“This first-ever standalone resolution on AI at the United Nations is a consensus resolution—that means that all 193 member states will agree to it, and trust me, that is no easy feat,” a senior Biden administration official said, adding that as of Wednesday afternoon, 97 countries had also co-sponsored the resolution and that number was growing “literally by the hour.”

Debates on how best to regulate AI have dominated bilateral and multilateral forums for more than a year, ranging from the G-7 summit in Japan to the AI Safety Summit hosted by the United Kingdom last November. Several of the world’s most powerful governments have also established their own paths to regulate AI—the European Union earlier this month passed the EU AI Act after nearly two years of deliberations, while authorities in China have cast an ever-expanding, ever-evolving regulatory net to rein in AI technologies.

The Biden administration took its biggest swing last October with an executive order that echoes many of the goals included in the U.N. resolution. “What we’ve done, essentially, is to make sure that the resolution reflects what the administration is already doing with respect to its domestic AI governance,” another senior administration official told reporters.

The United Nations also has multiple other initiatives, including a new AI advisory body and its global standard-setting organization, the International Telecommunication Union. Those efforts will continue, but this week’s resolution may give the conversation more heft. “We view this as complementing other initiatives happening throughout the U.N. system, but it is different,” the second official said. “We think it’s important when all 193 member states agree to a set of global norms.”

That broad agreement is significant, given the diplomatic battles that have played out in the United Nations between Western democracies and allies on the one hand and autocracies on the other. China and Russia, in particular, have increasingly sought to shape the institution toward their worldview and priorities, stalling deliberations over a proposed treaty on crimes against humanity and attempting to impose a contentious treaty on cybercrime. On AI, however, the discussions appear to have been more productive.

“There were lots of heated conversations; that’s not unusual for the United Nations,” the first administration official said. “The fact that 193 countries that often can’t agree on anything at the U.N. were able to agree on this shows that this issue of AI is so transformative—not only from the technology standpoint but in terms of the potential opportunities that people see—that I think it transcended the usual geopolitical divisions that we have here in the United Nations.”

The inclusion of language ensuring AI systems comply with human rights is a particular bright spot of the resolution, according to Daniel Leufer, a senior policy analyst at the digital rights group Access Now. “I wouldn’t take that for granted as a statement,” he said. “Getting the message across that there are uses of AI that are just incompatible with human rights and cannot be permitted was a battle, and it is good to see that enshrined in something at this level with the level of consensus.”

But achieving that consensus also dilutes the impact that the resolution can have, Leufer added, particularly with a lack of enforcement mechanisms built into the U.N. process. “There’s always a risk that what that means effectively is bringing everyone down to the lowest agreeable bar,” he said. “If we limit ourselves to what we can get every state to agree on, we’re not going to get too far.”

One notable absence from the resolution is the potential military use of AI, and that was largely by design. “In looking across the broad sweep of AI considerations in the world, we made a purposeful choice in pursuing a consensus-based U.N. resolution to not include the military uses discussion in this resolution,” one of the officials said, adding that several diplomatic and multilateral conversations about military applications of AI are already ongoing across the U.N. and other forums. “We believed there was an opportunity to talk about safe, secure, and trustworthy AI in a civilian, non-military context, which was very important and deserved and merited its own attention and focus.”

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argumate · 11 months

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Global trade and capital flows were structured very differently in the old specie-standard world than they are in today’s dollar-dominated one. In the former, trade imbalances were limited by the ability of each country to manage specie transfers. No matter how large a country’s economy or how powerful its central bank, its currency could be used to settle trade only to the extent that it was seen as fully exchangeable with specie. As foreign holdings of the country’s currency rose relative to the specie holdings of its central bank, the promise of convertibility would become less and less credible, thereby discouraging the currency’s use.

These limits had important consequences. One was that under a specie standard, trade in each country broadly balanced (with the exception of small imbalances driven by capital flows that funded productive investment). Another, more important consequence was that the process through which trade flows equilibrated—described by the Scottish philosopher and economist David Hume’s model of the price-specie flow mechanism—acted symmetrically on both surplus countries and deficit countries, so that demand contraction in the latter was matched by demand expansion in the former.

The current dollar-based system is very different. In this system, imbalances are limited mainly by the willingness and ability of the United States to import or export claims on its domestic assets—that is, to allow holders of foreign capital to be net sellers or net buyers of American real estate and securities. The result is that countries can run large, persistent surpluses or deficits only because these imbalances are accommodated by opposite imbalances in the United States.

Even worse, the contractionary effect of deficits on the global economy is not offset by expansion in the surplus countries, as it was in pre-dollar systems. At the Bretton Woods conference, in 1944, the British economist John Maynard Keynes strenuously opposed a global trading system in which surpluses or deficits were allowed to persist, but he was overruled by the senior American official at the conference, Harry Dexter White. As a result, deficit countries must absorb the deficient domestic demand of surplus countries while surplus countries avoid adjusting—which would entail either paring back production or redistributing wealth to workers—by accumulating foreign assets and putting permanent downward pressure on global demand.

This adjustment process is not well understood, even among mainstream economists. Surplus countries run surpluses not because they are especially efficient at manufacturing but because their manufacturers enjoy implicit and explicit subsidies that are ultimately paid for by workers and households and so come at the expense of domestic demand. This, as Keynes explained, is how mercantilist policies work—improving international competitiveness by suppressing domestic demand—and is why they are referred to as “beggar thy neighbor” tactics. Rather than converting rising exports into rising imports, they result in persistent trade surpluses.

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zvaigzdelasas · 2 years

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Fracking and drilling for new oil and gas in the North Sea is green and good for the environment, Liz Truss’s new climate minister said on Wednesday.[...]

“Producing [oil and gas] domestically creates only half the emissions around production and transportation than importing it from around the world,” he said. “In terms of the economy and the environment, domestic production is a good thing and we should all get behind it … it is good for the economy, good for jobs and stops us giving money to dubious regimes.”

The committee corrected Stuart on the issue of gas imports. The UK produces 45% of its gas domestically, and imports 38% not from a dubious regime, but from Norway, which has the highest standards in the world for gas extraction and decades ago banned flaring – where the gas is burned off, producing methane emissions and air pollution. Flaring still takes place in North Sea extraction.[...]

Stuart continued, saying he did not understand the point: “How is it contradictory to net zero for us to produce, on that descending scale, some of the greenest oil and gas in the world?”

12 Oct 22

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narrators-journal · 1 year

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hi (: tooth rotting domestic fluff of souyo right meow uwu

Just to get something out, I whipped up these very quick headcanons for ya. I hope they're fluffy enough for you my dear <3

Moving in together took a while, but it was pretty natural.

There were a few growing pains, but Yosuke and Narukami had known eachother for years, so it wasn't too hard to adjust.

Compared to Narukami, Yosuke has the cooking skills of a shoe, so Narukami does a majority of the cooking.

Yosuke makes up for it by cleaning the rest of the house and making sure he doesn't slip back into his old homophobic ways.

Both are in therapy, and they both try to keep one another on track as best they can.

Yosuke sleep talks, which is a mix of horrifying for Narukami, and amusing or adorable. It's a russian roulette each night.

Granted, therapy is a challenge when you can't directly talk about the core of the issue, fist fighting death herself for the sake of humanity, but therapy also helps Narukami communicate his anxieties and work through the abandonment issues his parents gave him.

Narukami jokes he'd be fine being a house husband while Yosuke works a nepotism job at Junes, but Yosuke would still sooner keel over than work in Junes.

Service jobs he's made his peace with, but not Junes. too much time was spent at Junes in inaba.

They live in the city though, so he's got plenty of options.

Yosuke and Narukami might both adore children, but dogs are cheaper, so they have fur babies.

They also both agree that they need a lot of psychological work done before either of them wants to parent another human being that isn't Nanako.

But, until then, outside of their dogs or cats, Nanako is very much the closest they have to a daughter.

Narukami is a bit of a morning person, happy to wake up at 6 am and most productive in those hours, but Yosuke doesn't enjoy waking up early. Especially on his weekends.

Both work, Yosuke in mostly customer service jobs, Narukami probably in something that lets him charm and convince people legally. He would've become a cop for a brief period, like his uncle, but the sheer amount of corruption he heard of from Dojima made him change his mind. His work might not be the best, but at least he's not releasing criminals for money.

Everyone wonders how Yosuke netted Narukami, and he relishes his status and the fact the wildcard loves him as he does. It does wonders for the highschool reunion creds.

#Persona 4 #Persona #Souyo #Narukami x Yosuke #headcanons #ask #slowly writing the bigger ones #Yu Narukami #Yosuke Hanamura #fluff #domestic fluff

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greywolf8725 · 1 month

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Biden has canceled plans to refill America's emergency oil reserve — here's why and what it means for you

The Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced it has axed plans to refill its “oil piggy bank” in August and September due to surging oil prices.

The DOE previously announced in March that it was soliciting 3 million barrels of oil for its Bayou Choctaw site in Louisiana — one of four major storage facilities for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

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The SPR is the world's largest supply of emergency crude oil and was established back in 1975 in case of a severe oil supply crisis or economic disruption.

"We monitor market dynamics to remain nimble and innovative in our successful replenishment approach to protect this critical national security asset," said DOE spokesperson Charisma Troiano, noting the energy department is keeping “the taxpayer’s interest at the forefront.”

Rising prices are halting refills

The Energy Department has been gradually refilling the emergency oil supply after stockpiles hit a historic low last year.

The administration withdrew a record 180 million barrels in 2022 to counter supply issues created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — but Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in March that the strategic oil reserve would be replenished by the end of the year.

The DOE has said it’s aiming to buy back oil for the SPR at $79 per barrel or below, less than the average of about $95 it received for the 2022 sales.

However, amid increasing prices — currently hovering at around $88 per barrel — the DOE has decided to pull back on further purchases until market conditions improve.

The SPR currently holds about 365 million barrels, according to Energy Department data — down from nearly 600 million at the beginning of 2022.

What this means for you

Bob McNally, president of consultant Rapidan Energy Group, who served as an adviser to former President George W. Bush, told Bloomberg he believes domestic crude prices will likely remain high for the rest of the year, which means the refill program could remain paused for a while.

“If pump prices keep rising, the Biden administration will shift gears and reconsider SPR releases, though we currently do not think they are imminent,” McNally says.

But critics have concerns that the depleted oil reserves could put the U.S. at risk, especially in a time of crisis, or if the global supply hits dangerously low levels. It also means prices at the pump could remain high for the foreseeable future.

“It’s pure insanity to watch the Biden administration cut American oil production and then claim they can’t refill our critical reserve because of the price,” Daniel Turner, founder and executive director for energy advocacy organization Power The Future, said in a statement.

“As a result, Americans are paying more at the pump, more at the grocery store and our SPR is less full during a time of rising turmoil in the Middle East.”

#forget tags

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fatehbaz · 2 years

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Do viruses “hijack” the body? “Viruses are more like cone snails than hijackers.” Cone shell venom, weaponized hormones, and predatory insulin overdose. Gila monsters and diabetes treatment. Mimicry. Totally unlike beings contain patches of intimate and detailed sameness. Bodies hold imprints of the other entities’ influence, like a shadow. Where does one creature end and another creature begin?

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In the twentieth century, the word “hijacking” came to typify the explanation of what viruses do to the cells they infect. How commonplace it is to now say: the virus hijacks the host cell’s machinery in order to replicate itself. [...] However, viruses are not like spaceships, and cells are not just like twentieth-century semitrailer trucks, armored vehicles, or passenger jets whose resources can be plundered and whose operators can be coerced into unwanted journeys. [...] It appears to transparently explain things. But is this a good description of a virus and the creatures it is capable of infecting? [...]

Anthropomorphism and personification of microbial entities in the explanation of virology is a understandable tendency; in this way, viral action is domesticated to the human scale.

But maybe it’s time to practice some resolutely non-domesticating conid-amorphism, some conus-centrism, and see what happens if we forge a new avenue for thinking of viruses in terms of venomous cone snails.

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Conidae is the taxonomic name for the family of gastropods known more colloquially as cone snails, or predatory sea snails. “One of the most successful lineages of marine animals,” the hundreds of species of Conidae are characterized by their use of complex venoms to capture prey. Some of these snails prey on worms, some on other snails, and some on fish. In 2015, researchers reported that Conus geographus uses an insulin overdose to disorient and disable its fish prey, releasing the toxin into the water.

Insulin appears to be a component of the nirvana cabal, a toxin combination in these venoms that is released into the water to disorient schools of small fish, making them easier to engulf with the snail’s distended false mouth, which functions as a net. If an entire school of fish simultaneously experiences hypoglycemic shock, this should directly facilitate capture by the predatory snail.

The released insulin does not affect the snail itself, because its venom insulin mimics fish insulin, not its own molluscan variety. Venomous snails that hunt worms in this fashion make a different insulin mimic, specific to worms.

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This may seem like a weird aberration on the part of an obscure life-form, yet cone snails are only one kind of creature that roams the evolutionary space in which one being’s molecules evolve to participate in the physiology of another. There are enough examples of organisms employing these tactics that they are grouped together in scientific reviews of “weaponized hormones.” [...]

For example, the first diabetes therapy drug that works by mimicking the glucagon-like peptide hormone (GLP-1) was discovered by analyzing the venom of the Gila monster. GLP-1 is a hormone released by the gut after eating that stimulates insulin production and slows movement of food through the intestinal tract. The making of a drug that acts like GLP-1 was not a process of exactly copying human GLP-1. For that you wouldn’t need a Gila monster and thousands of years of coevolution between lizards and their prey.

Rather, scientists learned alternative molecular strategies for binding to the hormone’s receptor from the Gila monster venom component.

Perhaps viruses are equally “interested” in glucose control in their own noncognitive way, in that their replication and continued existence is vested in their hosts’ metabolisms. As noted above, they do not possess the means for making the proteins encoded by the genes in their genomes, but rather depend on the cells they infect to do that translation and transcription. [...]

They don’t have their own bodies; they only have their hosts’ bodies.

And bit by bit, through the endless nonillion-fold exploration of evolutionary space -- the space that makes the difference between persisting long enough to be replicated versus falling apart into the wash of biological decay -- it has turned out to be good practice to mimic your host’s cell cycle and metabolic hormones. Different viruses, different hosts, same strategy. [...]

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If viruses are effective because they mimic human hormones or hormone receptors, this will drive the evolution and duplication of hormones over time because it is advantageous for them to change enough to not be good viral targets. Thus, it has been suggested that some features of human hormonal genes in the placenta arise from their function as viral “decoys” in this tit-for-tat of copying and changing.

It is for this reason that viruses could be thought of in terms of venomous cone snails rather than hijackers.

Not all these mimicry techniques target metabolic processes; many viruses famously encode other proteins that allow them to evade immune detection by attempting to look like parts of the immune system rather than its targets. But there is a theme here. The virus takes on some aspects of the shape of the body that ensures its continuity. This gives rise to totally unlike beings containing patches of intimate and detailed sameness, molecules that bear the same precise contours to fit into a particular hormone receptor, yet perhaps bear no common genetic heritage. Viruses, like cone snails, evolve to be more like what sustains them. It is an uncomfortable form of relatedness, this predatory metabolic convergence, but it cannot be denied that it generates amazing patterns of likeness across biological kingdoms without everything having to be descended from the same line of direct genetic inheritance.

Where does hormone end and hormone-like begin?

If the mimic converges on the original, and places the original under evolutionary pressure to diverge, what is left is a seesawing mirrored relationship of competitive difference and similarity, not an original and a mimic. Even if something has evolved to get away from its mimic, it holds the imprint of that entity’s influence in its difference, like a shadow.

In practical terms, looking into cone snails and viral genomes suggests new ways of making drugs, which are human-made mimics that seek to manipulate physiology by augmenting or suppressing the action of the molecule that has been mimicked.

In philosophical terms on the other hand, that cone snail or amphibian venom gets enrolled in the diabetes epidemic by becoming a blood sugar–controlling drug indicates that anthropomorphic concepts such as hijacking may possibly be the least illuminating explanatory tactic for understanding what viruses do, and are, in relation to their bodies. (Yes, their bodies. That means us).

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Text by: Hannah Landecker. “Viruses Are More Like Cone Snails Than Hijackers.” e-flux. October 2022. [Bolded emphasis and italicized first paragraph added by me.]

#sorry this is a long one but a good one #mimicry #multispecies #interspecies

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theculturedmarxist · 7 months

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Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’re already signed up, great! If you’d like to sign up and receive issues over email, you can do so here.

Today, as the U.S. is drawn into wars in Israel and Ukraine, as well as the defense of now-peaceful Taiwan, I’m writing about war. Not the policy choices, or whether U.S. military power is a net force for good or ill, but the actual practical machinery behind the American defense base that produces the weaponry necessary to sustain the military.

As stockpiles dwindle, there is now widespread agreement among policymakers that America must rebuild its capacity to arm itself and its allies. But according to a new scorching government report released this week, that’s mostly just talk. The Pentagon doesn’t bother tracking the guts of defense contracting, which is who owns the mighty firms that build weaponry.

But first, I have a personal announcement. I am going on leave this week, and I’ve hired a colleague named Lee Hepner to take over for BIG while I am out. You are in for a treat. Hepner works with me at the American Economic Liberties Project. He’s a lawyer with over a decade's worth of policy and political experience at the state and local level, and when I have a question on the law or procedure, Hepner’s one of my go-to people. He’s drafted important legislation, and has recently been focusing on the airline industry, labor issues, and a lot of the major antitrust litigation I've written about here, including the trials of the Meta-Within merger, the Microsoft-Activision acquisition and the Google monopolization case. You're in good hands.

And now, let’s talk the defense base. Here’s an exceptionally boring chart that involves all the money in the world. Welcome to the Pentagon.

One of the more important side stories to the recent wars in Ukraine and Israel, and competition with China over Taiwan, is that the U.S. defense industrial base, composed of 200k plus corporations, is being forced to actually build weapons again. Defense is big business, and since the end of the Cold War, the government has allowed Wall Street to determine who owns, builds, and profits from defense spending.

The consequences, as with much of our economic machinery, are predictable. Higher prices, worse quality, lower output. Wall Street and private equity firms prioritize cash out first, and that means a once functioning and nimble industrial base now produces more grift than anything else. As Lucas Kunce and I wrote for the American Conservative in 2019, the U.S. simply can’t build or get the equipment it needs. There are at this point a bevy of interesting reports coming out of the Pentagon. The last one I wrote up earlier this year showed that unlike the mid-20th century defense-industrial base, today government cash goes increasingly to stock buybacks rather than actual armaments. And now, with a dramatic upsurge in need for everything from missiles to artillery shells to bullets, we’re starting to see cracks in the vaunted U.S. military.

The signs are unmistakable. In Ukraine, fighters are rationing shells. Taiwan can’t get weapons it ordered years ago. The Pentagon has put together a secret team to scour stockpiles to find high-precision armaments in demand on every battlefield and potential battlefield. But the problem goes beyond national defense. In Lake City, Missouri, the largest small arms ammunition plant in the world has decided all ammo production is going to the military, meaning that there is going to be a domestic shortage for hunters, sportsmen, and maybe even police. This shortage may look like a story of a sudden surge in demand, but it’s actually, as Elle Ekman wrote in the Prospect in 2021, a story of consolidation and de-industrialization.

Surges due to wars aren’t new, and there’s always some time lag between the build-up and the delivery. But today, the lengths of time are weirdly long. For instance, the Army is awarding contracts to RTX and Lockheed Martin to build new Stinger missiles, which makes sense. But the process will take.. five years. Why? What is new is Wall Street’s role in weaponry. We used to have slack, and productive capacity, but then came private equity and mergers. And now we don’t. The government can’t actually solicit bids from multiple players for most major weapons systems, because there’s just one or two possible bidders. So that means there’s little incentive for firms to expand output, even if there’s more spending. Why not just raise price?

But don’t take my word for it, take that of the Pentagon. In 2022, the DOD reported that “that consolidation of the industrial base reduces competition for DOD contracts and leads DOD to rely on a more limited number of suppliers. This lack of competition may in turn increase the risk of supply chain gaps, price increases, reduced innovation, and other adverse effects.” And that’s why, more than a year into the Ukraine conflict, the ramp-up is still not where it needs to be.

This week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is a Congressional office charged with investigating problems in government and business, explained why. The GAO came out with a report on how the Pentagon is doing essentially zero oversight of Wall Street’s acquisitions of defense contractors. The title is as boring as you’d expect, designed to have few people pay attention, but offering a red-alert to procurement officials.

The report is simply jaw-dropping. Despite all the chatter about consolidation at high levels within the Pentagon, and in Congress, the bureaucracy has made essentially no progress whatsoever. For instance, we have a trillion dollar defense budget, but there are just two people in the Department of Defense who look at mergers in the defense base. You couldn’t staff the morning shift of a small coffee shop with that, and yet two people are supposed to look at the estimated four hundred mergers plus going on every year among defense contractors and subcontractors.

Four hundred mergers every year is a lot, but of course, that’s just an estimate. Why don’t we know how many acquisitions happen in the defense base? As it turns out, it’s an estimate because the Pentagon isn’t tracking defense mergers anymore. To put it in boring GAO-speak, Pentagon“officials could not say with certainty how many defense-related M&A now occur annually because they no longer track or maintain data on all M&A in the defense industrial base.” So the DOD is almost totally blind to the corporate owners of contractors and subcontractors, which might be one reason that, say, Chinese alloys are being discovered in sensitive weapons systems like the state of the art F-35.

It gets worse. There’s no policy or guidance on mergers, and DOD doesn’t even require contractors or subcontractors to tell them that there is new ownership when an acquisition occurs. In fact, the Pentagon relies on public news to learn of mergers. They often do not know that the mergers are going on, or that the Federal Trade Commission is reviewing them. When big mergers happen, even if the Pentagon is concerned, no one tracks what happens after it closes. They do no analysis of industry sectors, as their “M&A office is not collecting robust data or conducting recurring trend analyses that could help them identify M&A in risky areas of consolidation among defense suppliers.”

The Pentagon’s head-in-the-sand approach is why Lockheed now has a chokehold on nuclear missile modernization, since it bought the key supplier of rocket engines and denies those engines to rivals bidding for the contract to upgrade what is known as the nuclear triad.

So how does the U.S. government manage defense base mergers? Well, the Pentagon defers to the antitrust agencies to look solely at competition. “While DOD policy directs Industrial Base Policy and DOD stakeholders to assess other types of risks, such as national security and innovation risks,” wrote the GAO, “they have not routinely done so.” Basically, dealing with their own defense base is someone else’s job.

What I found most useful about the GAO report is the Pentagon’s response, a classic bureaucratic hand wave. The DOD agreed with all the conclusions of the GAO. It should track mergers and what happens afterwards, it should have more personnel doing so, it should consider national security aspects of corporate combinations, and it should have clear policy on mergers. But it doesn’t. The DOD says it will have a better strategy to deal with mergers… by 2024. Basically, you’re right, but it’s not our problem.

Every day, it seems like political leaders and consultants are saying it’s time to really get that arsenal of democracy going, and to re-industrialize for real. It’s quite possible to get a lot done. The FTC and DOJ now have significant amounts of national security-related information on mergers due to a Congressional change in pre-merger notification laws in 2022, so the DOD could easily do a better job of tracking what’s happening in the defense base.

More to the point, the Pentagon is very powerful. The Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks could simply start smashing heads on competition and begin telling contractors that if they don’t shape up, she will start an internal war against them. Or the head of the Armed Services Committees could threaten the cushy cash flow that leads to record stock buybacks among contractors, if the ramp-up doesn’t start. Or they could grant antitrust authority for the DOD straight-up, which would rely on a national security standard that allows widespread corporate restructuring without the long slog of a court case. There are many paths.

But if you actually look at the guts of the bureaucracy, nothing is happening, because doing something about our industrial base means thwarting Wall Street, and that’s generally not something that’s considered on the table among normie policymakers. Giant bureaucracies are hard to change, but they are not immovable. One of the ways that you know a previously non-functional bureaucracy is on the right track is, ironically, if there is bitter infighting and anger among staff, who are being tasked to do things differently. But as the GAO showed this week, that’s just not happening in the Pentagon, or at least, not happening nearly fast enough.

And that’s why America is increasingly out of ammunition.

#military industrial complex #us military #nato #ukraine #israel #capitalism #economics #wall street #finance capitalism #finance capital #lockheed martin

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mapsontheweb · 2 years

Photo

Consumption vs production based CO2 emissions by country

by u/giteam

Source:

Our World in Data

Genuine Impact

Tools:

Tableau, Figma

What is production and consumption based emission and why they matter? According to Our World in Data:

CO2 emissions are typically measured on the basis of ‘production’. This accounting method – which is sometimes referred to as ‘territorial’ emissions – is used when countries report their emissions, and set targets domestically and internationally. In addition to the commonly reported production-based emissions statisticians also calculate ‘consumption-based’ emissions. These emissions are adjusted for trade. To calculate consumption-based emissions we need to track which goods are traded across the world, and whenever a good was imported we need to include all CO2 emissions that were emitted in the production of that good, and vice versa to subtract all CO2 emissions that were emitted in the production of goods that were exported. Consumption-based emissions reflect the consumption and lifestyle choices of a country’s citizens.

Most of Western Europe, the Americas, and many African countries are net importers of emissions whilst most of Eastern Europe and Asia are net exporters.

#maps #giteam #co2 emissions

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brothermanwill · 7 days

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The wild Cliff Nut grows rocky ocean cliffs, intertidal zones, and beaches. It can grow on normal soil but is usually out competed by other plants. Its leaves are similar to succulents. They store filtered fresh water due to the rock they root in being unable to hold onto moisture. While the Cliff Nut can deal with some of the salt from the seawater it uses to survive, anything it cannot naturally process, will be sequestered in the least efficient leaves at the base of the plant which will die off and the salt disposed of. The seedpod of the Cliff Nut has an interesting evolutionary tactic of seed dispersal. Due to the extreme tides of the planet, there are large regions of tidal or shallow beaches that are exposed to the air for a majority of the day. These are picked up by, or are dropping into the water to float along the currents to new land. During its journey, the heavy bottom of the shell keeps a large portion of the nut submerged and cooled by the ocean water. Once it has been deposited by the tide, lack of cooling water begins heating the protein rich interior water of the nut. This causes the fatty proteins in the grain to become simple sugars and the interior water to evaporate. The proteins in the water begin to thicken. These proteins, once exposed to air, will become a sticky, mucous like material that will bind seeds to their new rooting spots. Over the course of about an hour, pressure builds enough to cause an explosion along the pressure seam of the nut, scattering globs of seeds and rooting mucous across wherever the nut has landed. Some land high enough to attach to cliffs which is the safest spot for them to land as they are away from any sea or land based herbivores.

The Wyvara began harvesting these plants for both water and food while their livestock fed on inedible vegetation. Wyvara eventually figured out that instead of allowing these seeds to ferment and explode, they could empty the contents of the nuts into cooking vessels to heat and create a seed paste to smear on cliff faces to grow an exclusive food source as the cliffsides were very inaccessible to most of the threats to the Cliff Nut. The Cliff Nut did not need tending as the ocean waves irrigated the plants without any need for watering. This allowed for a stable, reliable source of food for their next visit on to the island while on their migration circuit. This technique was further refined by hollowing out parts of cliffs into terrace-esque farms. These plant beds were augmented to promote growth by dumping dung of livestock animals fostering a trade between any permanent residents and nomads. The nomads gave fertilizer, meat, and animal products in exchange for tools, food, and grazing rights. The soil is regularly dumped into the sea and replaced to prevent toxic salt buildup and to renew soil nutrients.

From the artificially improved growing conditions and Wyvara influence selection, the Cliff Nut began to grow larger. More stalks for nuts and more nuts per stalk. Several different strains of Cliff Nut are in use today. The glue producing Cliff Nut has very low amount of internal grain and a much higher concentration of congealing proteins in the internal water. They are a renewable source of adhesives for settled communities. Grain Cliff Nuts are bred for the maximum amount of grain. They cannot naturally explode and must be manually opened by Wyvara to disperse seeds due to there being almost no water in their nuts. Salt Cliff Nuts are bred for their salt-sacrifice leaves. They are used in a large amount of Wyvara traditional dishes and barely produce any nuts and when they do they are rather small. They absorb an extreme amount of salt and push it in very high concentrations into leaves. Fig(2) is a late Clan era farm where permanent residents were becoming largely self sufficient and experts at farming. Slowly beginning to domesticate the Cliff Nut into a proper staple food crop.

Nets are often used to ensure minor crop loss from any premature dropping or rogue waves stealing crops. They are also regularly scraped for surplus salt.

#my species #my art #worldbuilding #wyvara

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battleangel · 9 months

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Amerikkka, the beautiful, the land of the free & the home of the...

👁Highest obesity rates

👁Highest gun mortality

👁Highest opioid use, addiction & fatalities

👁Most overprescribed nation on earth

👁One of the highest prescription rates for antidepressants & benzodiazepines

👁One of the highest rates of domestic violence

👁One of the richest countries yet highest incidence of poverty among "advanced democracies" - millions are houseless, food insecure, without medical insurance & lack of a living wage

👁Work hundreds of more hours vs employees in other "developed" countries

👁Excessive environmental abuse (biggest carbon emitter - 3 times worse than China, 2nd in air pollution only to China, water pollution, landfills, food waste, deforestation, natural resource depletion, industrial destruction, destruction of ecosystems, species conservation, deforestation, nuclear accidents, overpopulation, etc.)

👁National obsession with status, consumerism, materialism, overconsumption, fast fashion & addiction to shopping

👁One of the top economies but has a record high of $17.1 trillion in individual debt (student loans, mortgage, auto & credit card)

👁One of the highest costs of living in the world (housing, healthcare, and education)

👁60% of food consumed in US contains additives, preservatives & artificial sweeteners, considerably higher than the rest of the world

👁Tens of thousands of toxic chemicals & synthetics in household, cleaning, body care, makeup products with very little testing, regulations or studies on health and environmental effects

👁Hypersexualized, "pornified" culture that glamorizes sexual objectification, sexual violence & dehumanization while also being sexually repressed, uneducated, unable to establish, determine or decide on boundaries or verbalize when they have been violated, toxic masculinity, rape culture, inability to verbalize desires, inability to discuss sexuality openly and honestly, unhealthy, forced & contrived repression that leads to fetishization, dehumanization, objectification, sex addiction, etc

👁70% of teens & young adults are addicted to social media

👁Over 90% of time in America is spent indoors -- complete & total disconnect with nature

👁Only 7% of Americans practice mindful meditation -- total mind/body disconnect

👁Americans are obessed with "exercise", "the gym", "being fit", "bikini bodies" & "fad diets" yet only 20% work out regularly and the US has the highest obesity rates in the world

👁Dystopian obsession with beauty with the worlds highest plastic surgery rates

👁One of the 10 worst countries for racial equity

👁One of the most paternalistic & patriarchal countries on earth

👁Religious fundamentalism & paternalism is embedded in all aspects of society & culture & wielded as a tool of control

👁Concepts and societal ideals of femininity, motherhood, paternalism, fundamentalism, conservatism, religious dogma, chastity, modesty, purity, the cult of woman as a sacrificial lamb and the mother as a dehumanized symbol of selflessness and sublimation are all used to control and deny women's bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom while poverty is feminized and more women than men in the US live in poverty, work minimum and low wage jobs, are overrepresented in service jobs, make less per dollar than men for the same work and have no access to paid maternity leave or universal childcare yet they are the ones in many states forced to have children they dont want, many as single mothers, with little or no social safety net with no exception depending on the state for rape, abusive partner, coercive partner, mental & physical health of the woman, the woman's childfree or antinatalist beliefs, the woman's employment status, whether she has health care, whether she has a phobia of pregnancy and/or childbirth, whether she would be traumatized being forced to give birth if she doesn't want to be a mother, when it is her livelihood, career, finances, living situation, body, mental and physical health, physical appearance, sexual health affected moving forward if she does give birth yet the choice in many states is taken away from her yet only the woman has to live with the consequences, never the lawmakers taking her choice away

👁Prison industrial, military industrial, psychiatric industrial, pharamaceutical industrial, medical industrial & educational industrial complexes

👁Obsession with graphically violent media (movies, TV shows, videogames) & combat sports (NFL, UFC, etc.) yet boobs, penises & vulvas cant be shown on TV and dropping the F word can get you fined by the FTC

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