Showing posts with label Ukraine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ukraine. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

17: Ukraine

How Do You Get a High-Style House for $600,000? Build It Yourself. One Washington State couple worked side by side with their contractors, doing much of the heavy lifting: “We wanted to do something extraordinary.” ........ in 2018, a new ferry started making the trip from nearby Kingston to downtown Seattle in 39 minutes. Suddenly, the idea of living there full-time seemed feasible. ....... The glass doors can open much of the house to the forest. ........ “There were some times when it was raining and muddy, and we were setting form panels, and I was trying to get a plumb level to hit a spot where a grid line was supposed to be,” Mr. Gentry conceded. ........ Mr. Gentry added: “We were going to honor the land and your grandparents.” .

How Chris Messina Forced Matt Damon to Up His Game in ‘Air’ The “actor’s actor” ad-libbed so many funny threats that the movie star couldn’t keep a straight face and resorted to improvisation to keep up. ...... “Comedy is so hard,” he said in a recent video call from his home in Los Angeles, adding an expletive for emphasis. “It’s hard to land a joke. So I still struggle with that. I’m best when I either don’t know it’s a comedy or don’t play it as a comedy — then you might find me funny.” ........ Messina’s career started on the stage. A “tried and true New York theater actor” from Long Island, as he put it, he plied his trade “mostly Off Broadway, and Off Off Broadway, and sometimes Off Off Off Broadway, in the Bronx and in Queens and on the Lower East Side.” He speaks of those scrappy early days with a nostalgic air, reminiscing about plays “where the actors outnumbered the audience, or where, when it rained, it would leak on the stage,” he said. In short, he loved it. ......... and Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” ....... “I wanted to do ‘Dog Day Afternoon.’ I wanted to do ‘Midnight Cowboy,’” he said. Though he liked the role and Kaling, “I was afraid of it running forever.” And, of course, he was afraid of something else: the genre. “I was afraid of not being able to keep up with them comedically,” he said. “I am afraid of jokes.” .

My Country Has Been a Dictatorship Before. This Feels Worse. I remembered, with a smile, how my sister and I had to push his old Peugeot every morning to get it to start (and to get us to school on time). My father had dedicated his life — as a doctor, human rights activist and politician — to democracy, at great personal cost. And here he was, the first president of a democratic Tunisia. ......... Now we have a president ruling by decree, dismantling the judiciary, fueling hate against Black migrants and attacking opponents, all supported by a supine Parliament. The country’s prisons are filled with journalists, activists and political prisoners — detained unjustly and held in inhumane conditions — and many others have fled the country to avoid the same fate. In little more than a decade, Tunisia has gone from democracy to dictatorship, from hope to terror. ........ The current president, Kais Saied, came to power democratically. After a populist campaign in 2019 in which he presented himself as an outsider who stood for the people against the elite, he was elected with 72 percent of the vote. Systematically, Mr. Saied set about dismantling the country’s democracy. He dissolved Parliament, pushed through a new constitution that gave him enormous powers and repressed those who opposed him. ............ Yet from the outset, I found Mr. Saied’s project terrifying. As a scholar of religion, I paid particular attention to a lecture he gave in September 2018, when he was still a law professor, on the relationship between Islam and the state. His political vision wasn’t just antidemocratic. It was an anti-modern form of nativism, with everything subservient to the ruler. ............. In February, he invoked the great replacement conspiracy theory to accuse the country’s small sub-Saharan migrant population of plotting to remake Tunisia’s identity. His remarks set off a brutal wave of violence against Black people in the country, in which scores were injured, arrested and expelled from their homes. .............. He has methodically targeted the independence of the judiciary, for example, issuing decrees that give him the authority to dismiss judges. In another decree, he ordered the prosecution of dissenting voices that would harm “public security or national defense.” Civil liberties, political opposition and free speech are to be dispensed with, recast as menaces to society. ........ this time around, it feels even worse. The goal is not simply to crush dissent but also to dehumanize political prisoners and their families ............ So here we are, with no freedom, no water and not enough food. The economy is close to collapse, and unemployment is endemic. Rather than confront the crises afflicting the country, Mr. Saied prefers to rant about loyalty and conspiracy. For Tunisia, it is nothing less than a tragedy. .

As Ukrainian Attack Looms, Putin Faces Setbacks and Disunity in Russian Forces The problems that have hindered Russia’s 15-month war are still festering: stretched resources and disunity in the ranks. Still, Mr. Putin’s resolve augurs a willingness to prosecute a long war. ........ Drones have exploded over the Kremlin. Russian military aircraft are crashing before they even reach Ukrainian airspace. A Russian mercenary boss is releasing one profanity-laced tirade after another, claiming that corrupt Russian generals who “all reek of expensive perfume” are sending soldiers to their deaths. ......... the problems that have plagued his 15-month war since its beginning are only worsening: stretched resources, disorganized defenses and disunity in the ranks. .......... The spectacularly public feud between Mr. Prigozhin and the Defense Ministry — and Mr. Putin’s apparent inability or disinclination to stop it — has rekindled doubts about Moscow’s ability to succeed on the battlefield itself, where coordination between disparate units is of critical importance. ......... “One of the ways Putin maintains power is he likes having multiple factions, and he likes having factions compete with one another,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “That might make sense in politics, but it’s very, very harmful in a military operation.” .......... Mr. Prigozhin was making the government look “absolutely ham-fisted and brainless and idiotic — and it increasingly appears that that’s how it really is.” .......

a war that could well last years

......... Prizing loyalty above all else, Mr. Putin appears prepared to stomach sniping among his war leaders as long as it doesn’t threaten him personally. Among Russia’s elite, business leaders appear to have grown accustomed to the idea of a yearslong war and have adapted supply chains — and their own consumption and travel patterns — to Western sanctions. ........ The Russian president remains convinced that he can outlast both Ukraine and the West ......... Patriot missile batteries supplied by the United States are offering better protection against Russian attacks in the Ukrainian capital, and long-range cruise missiles from Britain are enabling Ukrainian forces to strike farther behind Russian lines. ........ No development has drawn more attention in recent days than the inflammatory rhetoric of Mr. Prigozhin, who crossed new lines by appearing to take aim at Mr. Putin before backing off; at one point he suggested that the Russian people could take matters into their own hands if the country’s military leadership doesn’t change. ........ Part of the problem for Mr. Putin stems from disparate battlefield goals. ......... Mr. Prigozhin’s objective, which is to take Bakhmut above all else, differs from the priorities of the Russian Defense Ministry, which must ration its resources and take into consideration other places along the front that may come under pressure from a Ukrainian counteroffensive. ......... It is not clear that regular Russian military units would even come to Wagner’s aid, or vice versa, when facing a Ukrainian onslaught ........ He has trumpeted his private fighting outfit — consisting of mercenaries, veterans and convicts recruited from Russian prisons — as superior to a moribund Russian military hobbled by incompetent leadership. .......... The shock value of his recordings has attracted attention, such as when he raged against Russia’s generals in front of rows of his fighters’ bloodied corpses. So have his comments assailing the Russian military at a time when people across Russia are facing prosecution, fines and imprisonment for speaking negatively about the war or “discrediting” the Russian armed forces......... In one recent video, he said the problem posed by a Russian military led by people who demand nothing but blind fealty would need to be dealt with — “or one day the Russian people will solve it themselves.” ......... In another, he seemed to take aim at Mr. Putin. Echoing a nickname for the Russian leader used by his critics, he asked rhetorically what would become of Russia, if the “grandpa” who believed everything was going well on the battlefield turned out to be a “complete jackass.” He later suggested he was referring to a top Russian general, not Mr. Putin. ........... The Washington Post, citing leaked U.S. intelligence documents, reported on Sunday that the mercenary boss had offered to reveal Russian military positions on the front to Kyiv if Ukraine agreed to withdraw from the area around Bakhmut. Mr. Prigozhin denied the report as a “hoax,” suggesting that powerful people in Russia, jealous of his force’s battlefield achievements, could be spreading false information about him. ......... “They all look at Prigozhin, and they are all in shock,” she said. “For Putin, it’s not a problem.”


Gains Near Bakhmut Raise Ukraine’s Hopes of a Turning Tide The advances have been small, and Russians still hold most of the city, but Ukrainians say they see a meaningful shift in momentum. ....... While the dynamics around Bakhmut are somewhat specific to that battle, Ukrainian commanders say they hope to build on the lessons learned there when they try to attack in other places along the 600-mile front line......... “When you retreat it is very difficult to stop” ...... “When you want to advance, it is very difficult to start.” ......... “Wagner’s men have entered Bakhmut like rats into a mousetrap” ........ Russia was already sending reinforcements to the Bakhmut area, including tank units and fresh fighters, to try to halt Ukrainian advances. ........ there were 36 different “clashes” between the opposing armies around the city over the past two days and cautioned that it was a fluid and dynamic situation. ......... “If you enter Bakhmut, you must know you might not make it out,” said one soldier. Bone-tired and bleary-eyed, he did not offer his name, as he sat under a bus stop near the battered city. His comrade said, “It’s insane to be in Bakhmut now. The shelling never stops.”

Legalizing Marijuana Is a Big Mistake . Of all the ways to win a culture war, the smoothest is to just make the other side seem hopelessly uncool. So it’s been with the march of marijuana legalization: There have been moral arguments about the excesses of the drug war and medical arguments about the potential benefits of pot, but the vibe of the whole debate has pitted the chill against the uptight, the cool against the square, the relaxed future against the Principal Skinners of the past. ....... Marijuana legalization as we’ve done it so far has been a policy failure, a potential social disaster, a clear and evident mistake. ......... cops often use marijuana as a pretext to search someone they suspect of a more serious crime, and they simply substitute some other pretext when the law changes, leaving arrest rates basically unchanged. ............. “legal medical marijuana, particularly when available through retail dispensaries, is associated with higher opioid mortality.” ........... the link between heavy pot use and the onset of schizophrenia in young men. ..........

a form of personal degradation, of lost attention and performance and motivation, that isn’t mortally dangerous in the way of heroin but that can damage or derail an awful lot of human lives

......... around 1‌‌6 million Americans, out of ‌more than 50 million users, now suffering from what ‌‌is termed marijuana use disorder. .......... unlicensed weed can cost as much as 50 percent less than the licensed variety ......... eventually the culture will recognize that under the banner of personal choice, we’re running a general experiment in exploitation — addicting our more vulnerable neighbors to myriad pleasant-seeming vices, handing our children over to the social media dopamine machine and spreading degradation wherever casinos spring up and weed shops flourish.


How an Unconventional Approach to Religion Helped Shape a Divided Nation In “Lincoln’s God,” Joshua Zeitz examines the 16th president’s personal and idiosyncratic brand of Christianity. ......... Anyone who has enjoyed the privilege of examining the Lincoln Bible — on which three presidents to date have taken their oaths of office, including Abraham Lincoln — will know that the pages are immaculate, as if never opened and read. In fact, Lincoln borrowed the book from a Supreme Court clerk for his 1861 swearing-in at the last minute, and the detail is telling, in keeping with Lincoln’s considerable distance from organized religion. ........... As a young man, Lincoln was barely a Christian in the conventional sense. He was skeptical of the Bible’s miracles, read freethinkers like Thomas Paine and may even have been the author of a tract attacking religion. (We don’t exactly know, because if it did exist, a friend burned it.) Had it surfaced in 1860, when Lincoln was first running for president, we might be living in two nations. As it was, he lost the vote of one constituency — only three of Springfield’s 23 ministers voted for him. ............ If not a doctrinaire believer (he never joined a church), he clearly felt a deep connection to the Bible, which he read carefully. He spoke about God, and to God, and his greatest speeches and writings are enriched by a sense that we are listening in on a special conversation between a man and his maker. ........... a complex thinker who deftly merged religious language with political goals and underwent a “spiritual renewal” during the Civil War, especially after the death of his son Willie in 1862. ......... the ways in which soldiers experienced religion in the field; both sides held revival meetings. ......... The Confederacy claimed God’s support in its Constitution and motto (“Deo vindice”). Southern leaders denounced Northerners as “infidels,” a word that was sometimes applied to Lincoln, and claimed that the Bible justified slavery. .......... Lincoln, of course, disagreed with that selective reading, and as he moved decisively against slavery in the final years of the war, he often claimed a spiritual justification. His speeches drew heavily on Scripture, including, in 1858, the “house divided” (Matthew 12:25); then, at Gettysburg, “four score and seven years ago” (paraphrasing Psalm 90); the second Inaugural Address, with its readings from Matthew 18:7 (“woe unto the world because of offenses …”); and Psalm 19 (“the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether”). Frederick Douglass, who was present at the second inauguration, called it “more like a sermon than a state paper.” One scholar estimated that “266 of its 702 words were quoted verbatim from the word of God.” ............ Black Americans, who held views of their own that were often at odds with the tendency to see the United States as a promised land, or Canaan. Instead, they likened it to Egypt. ........... one of the reasons the Lincolns moved from Kentucky to Indiana, as Lincoln himself wrote, was that his father opposed slavery, along with his fellow members of the Little Mount Baptist Church. ............ one of Lincoln’s friends, Jesse Fell, wrote that Lincoln resembled the abolitionist Unitarian clergyman Theodore Parker in his thinking. (Parker wrote about democracy in ways that prefigured the Gettysburg Address.) ........... When he was once asked to define his religious beliefs, Lincoln quoted an old man he had heard say, “When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that’s my religion.”

Pulitzer Prizes



Tuesday, May 09, 2023

9: Ukraine

Nice Guy Meets Iron Man in the First Novel by Tom Hanks Whimsically chronicling the creation of a Marvel-style movie, “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” sags under a deluge of detail. ........... Sidelined by the pandemic, some actors fired up ceramics or sang fragments of “Imagine.” Tom Hanks, one of the most prominent to contract an early case of Covid, bounced back by making a run at the Great American Novel. Alas, it is more Forrest Gump trotting from coast to coast than Sully landing on the Hudson. ......... the vast number of workers required to get stories onscreen: extras, editors, costume and lighting designers, makeup artists, caterers, drivers, gofers, key grips. ....... “Masterpiece” is a loving homage to those workers, a true insiderly ensemble piece in the vein of “The Player” (written by Michael Tolkin in 1988, directed by Robert Altman in 1992), or Quentin Tarantino’s eventually self-novelized “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” .......... Alternate titles: “Hollywood: Busy, Busy Town” or “What Do Movie People Do All Day?” ....... Eve Knight, the alter ego of Knightshade, a heroine who like many modern women has trouble sleeping. ......... “Sure, she wants to make her bed with a decent chap when the time is right, but the time is never right!” Lane tells Johnson’s assistant, Allicia Mac-Teer, anachronistically (Hanksishly). “Nor is the chap.” ......... after years of struggling in the gig economy, a salary that’s “a joke of abundance.” .......... Moviemaking, Hanks would remind us, can be a rising tide, not in the depressing new climate change way, but the old optimistic American lift-all-boats way. ........... The word “coffee” appears, by my count, on 85 pages ........ Highly specific smoothies are fetched; catering tables are lovingly inventoried. ........ Sometimes “Masterpiece” reads like the thank-you speech Hanks, consummate nice guy, would give if granted unlimited time at the Oscars. You might admire its rah-rah spirit, yet still want to press fast-forward. ........... After turning 50 pages more and finding a minor character selling “Royals, Underwoods, Remingtons, Hermes, Olivettis, all in working order,” as if in an Etsy shop, I had to fight a strong urge to close the book, fire up a triple espresso and see if anything was happening in the tiny palace of my iPhone. .

Things in Russia Aren’t as Bad as the Bad Old Soviet Days. ‘They’re Worse.’ In light of what their country is inflicting on Ukraine, it is difficult to speak of Russians as victims. That, in fact, may be one major reason many decent Russians feel that Mr. Putin’s Russia — their Russia — is worse than the Soviet state whose demise he laments. They had thought their nation free of the horrible tyranny of its past, and Mr. Putin is not only reviving that but also bringing shame and alienation to their nation. ......... a Soviet leader probably would not have survived a disastrous decision like the invasion of Ukraine. ......... “We make a distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ societies, but there is also a distinction between ‘openings’ and ‘closings,’” Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist and one of the foremost chroniclers of the collapse of the Soviet empire, told me. “The generation of Soviet people in the 1970s and 1980s lived in a closed society that was opening, discovering that things that had been impossible were becoming possible. Putin’s is a period of radical closings. People are losing things they felt had finally been granted them. Openings led to hope; this system leads to hopelessness.” .......... What he has done, at its heart, is create a system in which everything — the government, the political police, the legislature, the military — depends personally on him. ........ If the most common charge used to imprison dissidents in the last decades of Soviet rule was “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” an omnibus law that at least made clear that the crime was in opposing Soviet rule, Mr. Putin lashes back at his opponents with random weapons, whether it’s his government’s apparent poisoning of Alexei Navalny or the condemnation of Vladimir Kara-Murza to 25 years in prison for treason. Accusing Mr. Gershkovich of espionage may well have been motivated at least in part by fury that someone with a Russian background would dare report the truth about Russia. .......... Ten days into the invasion, the police arrested more than 4,600 demonstrators in Russia, and hundreds of thousands of Russian men have fled the country to avoid being shanghaied into the army. .......... Russian restaurants, including ones that reconceived their menus, struggle to stay open. Stolichnaya vodka has now been rebranded as Stoli. ......... Mr. Putin, in the name of an ephemeral Russian greatness, has done great and lasting harm to his people and their culture.



As Putin Bides His Time, Ukraine Faces a Ticking Clock Ukraine is feeling short-term pressure from its Western backers for success in a looming counteroffensive. Vladimir Putin seems to be operating on a longer timeline. .......... Ukraine is feeling immense short-term pressures from its Western backers, as the United States and its allies treat the counteroffensive as a critical test of whether the weapons, training and ammunition they have rushed to the country in recent months can translate into significant gains. .......... Putin faces his own challenges but is showing signs of operating on a much longer timeline, encumbered by economic and military limitations but free from the domestic political pressures that make continuing Western support for Ukraine so uncertain. ......... Having already mobilized some 300,000 recruits last September, Mr. Putin is laying the groundwork for a possible new round of conscription, having changed the law so Russian authorities can draft men by serving them with a “digital summons” online. .......... and emphasizing that Russia is capable of conscripting as many as 25 million fighting-age men ........... On Friday, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, castigated Russian military leadership over a lack of ammunition and threatened to pull his forces from the fighting in the embattled city of Bakhmut within days. ........“Certainly I think there is a calculation in the Kremlin that Russia is more resilient than the West” ............ If they appear too ambitious, they could stir fears that Russia could respond with a tactical nuclear strike. Appear too modest, in contrast, and criticism arises that billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine has been spent in vain. ........... Ukrainian officials point to the considerable successes they have already achieved: forcing the Russian military to retreat from Kyiv last year; sinking the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva; and recapturing thousands of square miles of territory in two counterattacks last fall. ........... “We have a lot of supporters of Ukraine cheering for us,” he said. “That is why they are waiting for the next match. But for us, it’s not a sports game. For us, it’s a serious challenge. For us, it’s the lives of our soldiers.” .......... Military analysts have pointed to a likely period of probing assaults, feints and long-range strikes in the opening phase of the attack. Degrading the Russian military’s combat abilities will be as important as liberating territory ............... The Ukrainians see their enemy as having expended its offensive ability and as eager for a pause in fighting that could buy time to rearm and attack again. ........... Mr. Trump has criticized Mr. Biden’s support for Ukrainian forces, saying in an interview this year with Fox News that “ultimately,” Mr. Putin “is going to take over all of Ukraine.” ......... “Russia’s hope right now is that the peak of Western military support is going to be around the summer,” and then will dissipate ........... Once wars have gone on for more than a year, they tend to last for more than a decade on average ............. Putin has little incentive to end the war now, unless his hand is forced, because its continuation helps him retain power .......... Any negotiations after a military defeat would look like capitulation and make him more vulnerable at home ........... Only 7 percent of authoritarian leaders with governments like Russia’s have found themselves unseated during a conflict that began on their watch ......... “In polls, the only thing the Russian public was not willing to negotiate over was the status of Crimea” .......... “If Crimea is being bombarded, then it’s a failure. I think that would change things, potentially.” .......... Putin is also likely facing pressures that remain opaque to the outside world. In an authoritarian system, threats to the stability of a government often prove unpredictable. ........ Putin has security, business and political elites he still must keep on his side, noting that “it’s wrong to assume that Putin can just do anything he wants to at this point.” ....... “There are institutions of power and centers of power,” he added, “that you have to manage, control and dominate in some way if you’re going to stay in the game.”

Russian Unease Over Ukraine War Grows Amid Attacks and Leadership Rifts With a Ukrainian offensive looming, explosions in Crimea and inside Russia have rattled Moscow, sparking bureaucratic infighting among military commanders....... With Ukraine stepping up attacks deep inside Russian-controlled territory, there were new signs on Friday of disarray and unease among Russia’s military and political leadership as they brace for a looming Ukrainian offensive, for which their forces may be ill-prepared. ......... Not for the first time, he threatened to pull his fighters out of the long-embattled Ukrainian city of Bakhmut if the Ministry of Defense did not provide more ammunition............. Two explosions rocked the Kremlin in the middle of the night on Wednesday, in what the Russians claimed was a failed drone attack by Ukraine. Denying the accusation, Ukraine said Russia might have done it to try to muster domestic support for a faltering war effort. No matter the culprit, symbolically it seemed to many to signal Kremlin weakness. .......... That came in tandem with attacks on a number of oil storage facilities, igniting huge fires, and train derailments both near the border and well away from the battlefields, all attributed to Ukrainian drones or sabotage. ........ Adding to the building sense of anxiety, the head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, bizarrely accused the United States in an interview of having started the war to seize territory ahead of a supposed cataclysmic explosion of a volcano at Yellowstone National Park, which he said would wipe out life in North America. ........... Ramzan Kadyrov, the pugnacious leader of the Republic of Chechnya inside Russia, chastised Mr. Prigozhin for displaying the corpses of his men to create a public outcry, and offered to deploy his men in place of the Wagner mercenaries to finish the job in Bakhmut. He also chastised the Defense Ministry for logistical and supply issues.

Wednesday, May 03, 2023

3: Ukraine

THE COUNTEROFFENSIVE The future of the democratic world will be determined by whether the Ukrainian military can break a stalemate with Russia and drive the country backwards—perhaps even out of Crimea for good. ....... In march 1774, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the favorite general and sometime lover of Catherine the Great, took control of the anarchic southern frontier of her empire, a region previously ruled by the Mongol Khans, the Cossack hosts, and the Ottoman Turks, among others. As viceroy, Potemkin waged war and founded cities, among them Kherson, the first home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. In 1783, he annexed Crimea and became an avatar of imperial glory. To Vladimir Putin in particular, Potemkin is the Russian nationalist who subdued territory now impudently and illegitimately claimed by Ukraine, a nation that Putin believes does not exist. ......... The rest of the world remembers Potemkin differently, for something that we would now call a disinformation campaign. In 1787, Catherine paid a six-month visit to Crimea and the land then known as New Russia. The story goes that Potemkin built fake villages along her route, populated with fake villagers exuding fake prosperity. These villages probably never existed, but the story has endured for a reason: The sycophantic courtier, creating false images for the empress, is a figure we know from other times and other places. The tale also evokes something we recognize to be true, not just of imperial Russia but of Putin’s Russia, where mind-boggling efforts are made to please the leader—efforts that these days include telling him he is winning a war that he is most definitely not winning. ........ In a bid to restore Potemkin’s cities to Russian suzerainty, Russia occupied Kherson in early March of 2022, at the outset of a campaign to annihilate both Ukraine and the idea of Ukraine. Russian soldiers kidnapped the mayor, tortured city employees, murdered civilians, and stole children. In September, Putin held a ceremony in the Kremlin declaring Kherson and other occupied territories to be part of Russia. But Kherson did not become Russia. Partisans fought back inside the city, with car bombs and sabotage. Even as the occupiers held a ludicrous referendum, designed to show that Ukrainians had chosen Russia, the Russian army was quietly preparing to flee. By October, this new Potemkin village was collapsing, and the resurgent Ukrainian army was approaching the outskirts of Kherson. It was then that the Russians did something particularly strange: They kidnapped the bones of Grigory Potemkin. .

Friday, March 10, 2023

10: News Bulletin

Rewriting the Rules of Audience Targeting
Scientists Just Revealed the Most Detailed Geological Model of Earth’s Past 100 Million Years
Biocomputing With Mini-Brains as Processors Could Be More Powerful Than Silicon-Based AI
Apple and Foxconn win labour reforms to advance Indian production plans Lobbying in Karnataka leads to landmark legislation that anticipates iPhone production in southern state
Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network Is this the Twitter replacement we've been waiting for?

Artificial Intelligence Is Booming—So Is Its Carbon Footprint
ChatGPT is now available in Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service
Reddit is shutting down its Clubhouse clone Reddit Talk
India Impressions (2023)
The VC's Customer