Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded to the outgoing US administration’s efforts to provoke conflict through new sanctions in what some are calling the “most embarrassing” way possible for US President Barack Obama.…Sputnik International
There are four Russian intelligence agencies which are publicly known, though there are certainly others. These are the GRU (“Main Intelligence Directorate”), the FSB (“Federal Security Service”), the SVR (“Foreign Intelligence Service”) and the FSO (“Federal Protective Service”), which incorporates Spetssvyaz (“Special Communications Service”), which is Russia’s equivalent to the NSA.
Contrary to some claims, I am sure all four of these intelligence agencies undertake electronic and signals intelligence, certainly up to the level needed to carry out the DNC and Podesta hacks. However given the large claims that are being made about the hacking – extending all the way to President Putin’s personal involvement – I would have thought that of Russia’s four intelligence agencies the GRU and the FSB are the two least likely to have carried the hacking out.…
The key point about the GRU is however that it is the intelligence agency of the General Staff of Russia’s Armed Forces. It is therefore a military intelligence agency whose personnel are serving officers of the Russian military. Its closest approximate US equivalent is the Defense Intelligence Agency (“DIA”).…
As for the FSB, its primary roles as an intelligence agency are supposed to be counter-espionage and counter-terrorism carried out on the territory of Russia, though it is sometimes claimed to have a foreign intelligence role in the other countries that were formerly part of the USSR such as Ukraine.…
Not only do both the SVR and Spetssvyaz specialise in foreign political intelligence of precisely the sort involved in the DNC and Podesta leaks, but since Russia is accused of electronic hacking, this would seem to fall squarely within Spetssvyaz’s remit...
… I can’t escape the feeling that the reason the Obama administration and the Western media have latched on to the FSB and the GRU as the two agencies they accuse of the hacking is because of all of Russia’s intelligence agencies they are by the far best known and most notorious, having been the subject of countless media stories and spy thrillers, including in the case of the FSB a James Bond film, and in the case of the GRU countless thrillers extending all the way back into the Cold War....
By contrast to the Western public the names SVR and especially Spetssvyaz mean little....The Duran
Of 111,000 displaced fr east Aleppo, 74,951 or 2/3 went to Gov-controlled areas, & 36,086 to reb areas. v @aronlund https://t.co/TCBC0JxZUv(https://twitter.com/joshua_landis/status/814557370659569664?s=09)….Angry Arab News Service
"According to a poll by the Yuri Levada Analytical Center last December, just 14 percent of Russians saw the country’s first president as a positive figure. The Levada Center has published other polls that suggest that a majority of Russians regret the fall of the Soviet Union, think that it could have been avoided and feel as though the Yeltsin years brought more harm than good."Meanwhile, the US believes that regime change in Russia would bring another Western puppet to power.
FTSE 100 closes at an all-time high to end the trading year https://t.co/GPMTlhiG5Z pic.twitter.com/bRW0ZJ1rIU
— Bloomberg (@business) December 30, 2016
The acquisition of German companies by Chinese investors has reached record levels. According to financial consulting firm Ernst & Young, investors from mainland China and its financial hub Hong Kong have purchased 58 German companies in the first ten months of 2016, which is 19 more than the total purchased a year earlier....
There's another nuance, according to Spiegel. German companies doing business in China are often forced to disclose their technologies, "their products immediately copied without the intervention of the authorities."
Russian business journal Expert Magazine notes that "this fall, Berlin's patience finally seems to have snapped. German regulators' decision to prohibit Chinese investment fund Fujian Grand Chip Investment Fund LP from buying German microchip maker Aixtron SE for 670 million euros resulted in a scandal."...
German Economy Minister and SPD chairman Sigmar Gabriel has since sent a proposal to the European Commission which aims at empowering European Union member governments to block the acquisition of companies and assets in strategically important industries by investors outside Europe....Sputnik International
(2)Ownership.—Each highway, bridge, tunnel, or approach to the highway, bridge, or tunnel constructed under this subsection shall—
(A) be publicly owned; or
(B) be privately owned if the public authority with jurisdiction over the highway, bridge, tunnel, or approach has entered into a contract with 1 or more private persons to design, finance, construct, and operate the facility and the public authority will be responsible for complying with all applicable requirements of this title with respect to the facility.
#Trump may become the first president in modern history not to submit a budget in order to defer popular criticism. https://t.co/YDqVkgYv07— Dario Navarro (@darionavarro111) December 4, 2016
The outspoken president of the Philippines has lashed out at the former US ambassador to the country, who reportedly left a ‘blueprint to destabilize’ the country’s government when leaving his post in November.
President Rodrigo Duterte said all ambassadors play a part in their respective countries' spying operations, but American ambassadors have a "forte" for undermining the government of their host countries.
"Most of the ambassadors of the United States, but not all, are not really professional ambassadors. At the same time they are spying, they are connected with the CIA," Duterte said in an interview with CNN Philippines.
Duterte was commenting on a Tuesday report in the Manila Times, which claimed that Philip Goldberg, who resigned in November his position as the US ambassador to the Pacific nation, has left behind a detailed plan on how to undermine the Philippines government and oust its president....
Duterte has been on bad terms with Goldberg for quite some time. On one occasion he infamously called the American envoy a "gay son of a bitch" for interfering with Philippines politics.…Harsh.
What happens when retaliatory systems are locked, loaded and targeted 24/7. Over time there are bound to be "accidents." Fortunately, all of them have been detected and aborted before launch — so far.
Harsh political rhetoric, combined with the vulnerability of the nuclear command-and-control system, has made the risk of global catastrophe greater than ever.
.. in order to stay relevant, statisticians will have to get out of the purist position of fitting models that are based solely on direct historical data, and to enrich their models with recent data from similar domains that could better capture current trends.
This is known as Transfer Learning, a field that helps to solve these problems by offering a set of algorithms that identify the areas of knowledge which are “transferable” to the target domain. This broader set of data can then be used to help “train” the model. These algorithms identify the commonalities between the target task, recent tasks, previous tasks, and similar-but-not-the-same tasks. Thus, they help guide the algorithm to learn only from the relevant parts of the data.
Theories of Military Keynesianism and the Military-Industrial Complex became popular after the Second World War, and perhaps for a good reason. The prospect of military demobilization, particularly in the United States, seemed alarming. The U.S. elite remembered vividly how soaring military spending had pulled the world out of the Great Depression, and it feared that falling military budgets would reverse this process. If that were to happen, the expectation was that business would tumble, unemployment would soar, and the legitimacy of free-market capitalism would again be called into question.Since then the US is addicted to military spending to support the domestic economy and exports. Military spending is so endemic to the economy and so politically entrenched since it is dispersed through so many congressional districts as to be impossible to address rationally. The US economy is now dependent on "military Keynesianism."
Seeking to avert this prospect, in 1950 the U.S. National Security Council drafted a top-secret document, NSC-68. The document, which was declassified only in 1977, all but explicitly called on the government to use higher military spending as a way of preventing such an outcome.…
The regular commentator who goes by the internet handle TheDudeDiogenes writes: “I have been wrestling with the concept of exploitation/surplus labor for a while now; my issue is, if the Labor Theory of Value is false (as you hold, and I think so do I, though perhaps based on misunderstanding), then what, precisely, does exploitation consist in? How can surplus labor be extracted from the laborer if the LTV is false?”
When I replied by referring to a paper in which I answer the question mathematically, he said, “I am neither good at nor fond of maths (though I value highly those who do understand them), and my intellectual interests are often more "big picture", but if you could write a post for a humanities semi-expert but mathematical novice, I would surely appreciate it!”
This request was seconded by two other readers, which in my rather parochial world constitutes a tsunami of demand, so I shall make an attempt. There are two ways in which I can respond.
The first way, which is most natural to me, is to render my mathematical treatment of this question in plain English, leaving the formal proofs for the cognoscenti. This way has the great virtue of preserving one of Marx’s deepest insights, the mystified character of capitalist relations of production, which in my judgment is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of modern social theory.
The second way is to justify the use of the concept of exploitation to characterize capitalism without referring either to Marx or to the Labor theory of Value. This way has the virtue of circumventing the sectarian squabbles that have absorbed so much of the energy and time of those who proclaim themselves Marxists – no labor/labor power distinction, no tendency of the rate of profit to fall, no negative labor values with positive prices [pace Ian Steedman], and all rest. [I say this, of course, as one who wrote an entire book offering my take on these urgent issues.][I have broken up the paragraphing for online readability.]
After some reflection [not aided by a morning walk – rain today], I have decided to adopt the second course first. If, when I have finished, anyone has the stomach for more Marx shtick, I will attempt the first. With that said, let me begin.
Mainstream economics, with its technologically determined marginal productivity theory, seems to be difficult to reconcile with reality. Although card-carrying neoclassical apologetics like Greg Mankiw want to recall John Bates Clark’s (1899) argument that marginal productivity results in an ethically just distribution, that is not something – even if it were true – we could confirm empirically, since it is impossible realiter to separate out what is the marginal contribution of any factor of production. The hypothetical ceteris paribus addition of only one factor in a production process is often heard of in textbooks, but never seen in reality.
When reading mainstream economists like Mankiw who argue for the ‘just desert’ of the 0.1 %, one gets a strong feeling that they are ultimately trying to argue that a market economy is some kind of moral free zone where, if left undisturbed, people get what they ‘deserve.’ To most social scientists that probably smacks more of being an evasive action trying to explain away a very disturbing structural ‘regime shift’ that has taken place in our societies. A shift that has very little to do with ‘stochastic returns to education.’ Those were in place also 30 or 40 years ago. At that time they meant that perhaps a top corporate manager earned 10–20 times more than ‘ordinary’ people earned. Today it means that they earn 100–200 times more than ‘ordinary’ people earn. A question of education? Hardly. It is probably more a question of greed and a lost sense of a common project of building a sustainable society.Conventional economics as apologetics for ideology.
Holiday shoppers abandoned their early reluctance and boosted spending as the season wore on, pushing U.S. sales to the biggest increase in more than a decade, according to research firm Customer Growth Partners
On Tuesday, the firm raised its holiday sales estimate to a 4.9 percent gain over last year to $637 billion. That would be the biggest increase since 2005.
Holiday sales may have jumped 4.9% in biggest gain since 2005 https://t.co/SpPlumJeUE pic.twitter.com/UVvnzFDzue— Blimling&Associates (@Blimling) December 29, 2016
A declassified secret US government document obtained by the conservative public interest law firm, Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad.
The document reveals that in coordination with the Gulf states and Turkey, the West intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad, and that these “supporting powers” desired the emergence of a “Salafist Principality” in Syria to “isolate the Syrian regime.”
According to the newly declassified US document, the Pentagon foresaw the likely rise of the ‘Islamic State’ as a direct consequence of this strategy, and warned that it could destabilize Iraq. Despite anticipating that Western, Gulf state and Turkish support for the “Syrian opposition” — which included al-Qaeda in Iraq — could lead to the emergence of an ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the document provides no indication of any decision to reverse the policy of support to the Syrian rebels. On the contrary, the emergence of an al-Qaeda affiliated “Salafist Principality” as a result is described as a strategic opportunity to isolate Assad....Hey, Osama Bin Laden's "freedom fighters" worked so well in Afghanistan, what could go wrong?
Now, Germany is considering imposing a legal regime that would allow fining social networks such as Facebook up to 500,000 euros ($522,000) for each day the platform leaves a “fake news” story up without deleting it. Governments have finally found a vehicle to get citizens to allow them to curtail or chill speech — ironically in the name of facilitating “real news” or “truth.” It is perfectly Orwellian and Merkel’s latest contribution to the erosion of free speech in the West.The "fake news" button is on the way.
Few companies will risk such crippling fines, resulting in self-censorship from the chilling effect of the law. The bill would require companies to flag “fake news” and impose civil liability on companies. Germany’s parliamentary chief of the Social Democrat party, Thomas Oppermann is quoted as saying “If after the relevant checks Facebook does not immediately, within 24 hours, delete the offending post then [it] must reckon with severe penalties of up to 500,000 euros.”
Other lawmakers are reportedly moving toward criminalizing anything the government deems to be “fake news.”
The left appears to be leading this crusade for greater government censorship in both Europe and the United States.
This type of research is fraught with difficulties, and causality is very hard to determine, so it’s important not to read too much into this. But one conclusion seems clear -- if we want to increase business investment, policies to promote access to capital seem more promising than policies to reduce interest rates. The latter approach has been tried, and it didn’t work. We might want to give the former a chance. That would mean encouraging venture capital, small-business lending and more effort on the part of banks to seek out promising borrowers -- basically, an effort to get more businesses inside the gated community of capital abundance."Causality is very hard to determine."
The Australian labour market has been characterised over the last 12 to 24 months by the dominance of part-time employment creation with full-time employment contracting. Over the last 12 months, Australia has produced only 84.9 thousand (net) jobs with 107.2 thousand of them being part-time jobs. In other words, full-time employment has fallen by 22.2 thousand jobs over the same period. This status as the nation of part-time employment growth carries many attendant negative consequences – poor income growth, precarious work, lack of skill development to name just a few disadvantages. Further, underemployment has escalated since the early 1990s and now standard at 8.3 per cent of the labour force. On average, the underemployed part-time workers desire around 14.5 extra hours of work per week.
If we look at the US labour force survey data quite a different picture emerges, which is interesting in itself. Does this suggest that the US labour market has been delivering superior outcomes. In one sense, the answer is yes. But recent research based on non-labour force survey data (private sampling) suggests otherwise. That research finds that “all of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements.” That is, non-standard jobs have disappeared and are being replaced by more precarious, contract and other types of alternative working arrangements. The trend in the US has not been driven by supply-side factors (such as worker preference) but reflects a deficiency in overall spending. Not a good message at all.Deconstructing the narrative that the US economy has returned to or is closely approaching "full employment."
Classes take place online, typically for two or three 25-minute sessions each week. Mi is capitalizing on an alluring arbitrage opportunity. In China, there are hundreds of millions of kids whose parents are willing to pay up if they can get high-quality education. In the US and Canada, teachers are often underpaid－and many have quit the profession because they couldn't make a decent living.
Growth has been explosive. The three-year-old company started this year with 200 teachers and has grown to 5,000, now working with 50,000 children. Next year, Mi anticipates she'll expand to 25,000 teachers and 200,000 children.The scale is huge. Online and offline tutoring is already big in the US. It's a simple step to take it global.
It starts with the idea that children must be trained early to prevail over robots in the workforce. Then it snowballs from there－$3,000 a year for tuition, $350 for a Lego robotics set, and $7,300 to test the newly acquired engineering skills at a competition in the United States.
That's what Zhuo Yu is spending on her 10-year-old son for a so-called STEM education in China－a problem-based approach to learning that combines knowledge in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
The concept created in the US is now stirring a craze across China, where about 10 million students are being fast-tracked for STEM success.
That number is poised to swell to 50 million by 2020 as parents seek to give their children a head start in computer coding and robotics, according to consultant JMD Education. It predicts the demand will create a $15 billion STEM-learning industry in China that's already attracted companies such as text-book publisher Pearson Plc, Lego Group, and Sony Corp.
"I don't have a cap on my budget," said Zhuo, who works in the internet industry in the eastern city of Hangzhou. "Yes, I'm investing a lot in his robotics education right now, but you have to take a long-term perspective and look at what opportunities it can bring him after he turns 18."
Her son, Wang Yizhuo, will enter one of the most competitive job markets on the planet after he finishes college. By 2030, China is predicted to have as many as 200 million graduates－more than the entire US workforce. As it is now, 40 percent of tertiary students in China obtain a STEM qualification, compared with less than 20 percent in the US and France.…Parents mired by hefty costs for tech-focused education
"Brexit is a God-given opportunity to steal business away from UK."
"I recommend that Cyprus should adopt and immediately announce even more liberal financial service policies than it already has so that it can try to take advantage of the inevitable relocations that will occur during the period of confusion,"
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| Wilbur Ross is an elf |
At the end of his classic treatise The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek added a postscript entitled “Why I am not a Conservative.” Like everything he wrote, what Hayek has to say about the weaknesses of conservatism can be read with profit even by those who disagree with his arguments. The following passage, for a number of reasons, seems especially apt and relevant now, some 55 years after it was written.…Uneasy Money
I have no sympathy for Trump’s repulsive disregard for facts, truth, and legitimate expertise. Yet he was canny in identifying how both parties’ technocratic mindset — their approaching every problem with a five-point plan designed to produce evidence-based deliverables — had left democracy vulnerable. Trump knew that if he waged a war on democratic values, the technocrats who now monopolize the country’s political elite would be incapable of fighting back.
Technocrats have always shown little interest in fights over fundamental values. Their work proceeds from the assumption that everyone — or at least all the people who truly matter — already share the same enlightened commitment to democratic values. The only debate they are concerned about is over evidence on “what works” among policy inputs to produce the desired measurable outputs, like higher wages and GDP, less poverty, less crime and terrorism, or less war.
The problem occurs when some people turn out not to share those enlightened values and insist on challenging them. Technocrats, in these situations, don’t know what to say because they can’t rely on evidence to make their case. So when technocrats are all we have to defend democracy, fights over fundamental values become embarrassingly one-sided....In the first place, the author conflates a liberal democracy as rule of, by and for the people with a modern republic, which is rule by a technocratic elite that is more an oligarchic plutonomy than a liberal democracy.
