Sunday, July 31, 2022

31: Web 3



Sanctions On Russia

The Russia sanctions bite Sanctions have been effective at crippling the Russian economy. That's the conclusion of a new 118-page paper from Yale's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and 18 c0-authors. ....... "Russian imports have largely collapsed," the paper says — creating massive supply shortages and denying the country crucial parts and technologies. ....... "Russian domestic production has come to a complete standstill." ....... Foreign companies that have left Russia account for 40% of Russian GDP, the author wrote, almost none of which is going to come back any time soon. ......... "Looking ahead, there is no path out of economic oblivion for Russia as long as the allied countries remain unified in maintaining and increasing sanctions pressure." ....... Russia needs Europe to buy its natural gas more than Europe needs Russian natural gas to buy. ........ Because natural gas is "a highly non-fungible commodity," delivered through pipes that take decades to build, Russia has very few alternative export markets for its gas, and 83% of its natural gas exports go to Europe. ...... The economic repercussions of Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine are being felt in all countries. But they're particularly devastating in Russia — with little, if any, future upside so long as sanctions remain in place.

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

27: China

Five months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there remains a startling lack of understanding by many Western policymakers and commentators of the economic dimensions of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion and what it has meant for Russia’s economic positioning both domestically and globally.

Ghana’s ‘Success’ Exposes the West’s Toxic Development Model Standard theories of global progress continue to be largely limited to raw extraction.

Monday, July 25, 2022

25: China



The Man Who Took Modernity to China Some reviews, however, have accused Mr. Vogel of devoting too little space to Deng’s iron-fisted rule, including his 1989 decision to allow the military to use deadly force against demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. ....... But other scholars say that Mr. Vogel’s new volume offers a deeply textured portrait of Deng and the reforms he championed. ....... scholars have begun to conclude that it was Deng (1904-97), Mao’s diminutive and long-suffering lieutenant, who deserves credit for truly reshaping China after Mao’s death. ........ Mr. Vogel, who worked for a decade on this huge biography, spent a year brushing up on his Chinese-language skills with a tutor. (Most of his interviews were conducted in Chinese without an interpreter.) He talked to people close to Deng, including two of his daughters, as well as relatives and aides of Communist leaders like Chen Yun, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, who had worked with Deng. ....... Deng loosened state controls over the lives of ordinary people, opened the door for Chinese to study overseas and, Mr. Vogel explains, he retreated from Maoist doctrine and Communism without ever really saying so. He lured foreign investors to China and tapped outside expertise to jump-start a largely moribund economy, setting the stage for China’s three-decade-long economic boom. .......... Much of this happened, Mr. Vogel explains in minute detail, despite stiff opposition from Communist Party elders, some of whom feared the reforms were too aggressive, and others who viewed them as bourgeois liberalization. ......... “A lot of Americans’ view of Deng is so colored by Tiananmen Square. They think it was horrible. I have the same view. But it’s the responsibility of a scholar to have an objective view.” ...... Vogel said he tried to put Deng’s life in context, to show him as a survivor, obsessed with social and political stability and economic progress. ........ “Who in the 20th century had more influence on more people?” he asked. “He took 300 million people out of poverty. They’d been trying to do it in China for 150 years, and they couldn’t. And he did it.”

Thursday, July 21, 2022

21: Arab Superpower



Facebook unveils TikTok-like update



आरजु र प्रचण्डबीचको चार बुँदे सहमति बाहिरिएपछि अन्तिम समयमा मोदीद्धारा भेट नै रद्ध !

Can Planting a Trillion New Trees Save the World? To fight climate change, companies and nonprofits have been promoting worldwide planting campaigns. Getting to a trillion is easier said than done. ....... the nonprofit was paying residents of Engenho to plant trees because individual and corporate donors, especially in the United States and Europe, wanted people in other parts of the world to plant trees. ....... Many of the companies offer trees at prices well within the reach of the average American or European consumer. One Tree Planted promises to plant one tree for each dollar it receives in donation. So do Earth Day; the National Forest Foundation; Grow Clean Air; ReTree; #TeamTrees; One Dollar, One Tree; and Trees4Trees. Plant-for-the-Planet has 1-euro trees. Just One Tree and (more:trees) each offer 1-pound trees. Trees for the Future will plant a tree for 25 cents, on average. Eden will do it in most places for as little as 15 cents. (The trees being planted in Engenho cost 33 cents apiece.) ......... Then, last year, Eden arrived, offering to pay villagers to plant trees. “It seemed like a dream,” Santos said. “I even joked with them that it sounds too good to be true.” ........

In a world of grasshopperish myopia, planting trees has long been a symbol of antlike forethought.

........... Chinese proverb: “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago; the second-best time is today.” ......... These forest-based credits allowed companies to offset their emissions and provided a continuous revenue stream to the holders of the credits, so long as the carbon remained locked away. ............. the Trillion Tree Campaign. ........ Using a blend of satellite images, artificial intelligence and extrapolation, they estimated that Earth held roughly three trillion trees, about half its total when people first began practicing agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. Furthermore, they concluded something like 15 billion trees were still being cleared each year, for a net loss of about 10 billion trees annually.
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