I was curious about this too, but digging around on the internet doesn’t seem to give a definitive answer to this question. The “breaking Android application compatibility” story is real, see this Technode article.
What I think seems to be happening is that Huawei is developing HarmonyOS the way GNU/Linux came out of Unix, replacing bits and pieces at a time. They started out using many prominent Android components which led to some commentators dismissing it as just an AOSP fork, but over time they’re diverging into a genuine third mobile operating system, including their own ABI and development toolchain.
From Germany and France to Poland and Spain, the far-right made inroads into the youth vote in key states in this EU election - as a generation that has grown up amid constant crises seeks new answers and follows politicians fluent in TikTok and YouTube....
This is a fairly predictable consequence of economic stagnation. France is still below its pre-Covid level of GDP per capita, while Germany only caught up. Both countries, and most other countries in Europe, seem to be permanently stuck at a GDP per capita level 20-30 percent below the US.
There are lots of excuses for Europe’s lower economic dynamism relative to the US, about how it’s a trade-off for improved quality of life (more vacations, etc). But young people benefit disproportionately from dynamism, because they’re the ones working their way up. If young people want economic opportunities and the economy doesn’t give it to them, you’ll see the frustration appearing at the ballot box.
Yes, the world was a lot hotter in the distant past, but that’s because the carbon in the biosphere was gradually sequestered by natural geologic processes, leading to a gradual cooling over hundreds of millions of years. We’re now partially undoing that, by pumping and digging the stuff back up and burning it.
If fossil fuels hadn’t come along, it’s possible that the long-term cooling of the Earth would have been a problem, eventually. Nobody wants another Ice Age. But we’ve gone waaaay past in the opposite direction now. We really, really don’t want to see an “age of the dinosaurs” climate, with its pole-to-pole super-hurricanes, continent sized mega droughts, and other forms of extreme weather that human civilization has zero experience coping with.
“Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has announced that he is dissolving the national assembly, and calling for legislative elections on June 30 and July 7....
The recent success of the European far right is precisely because they’ve revised their image to get rid of the freakshow aspects. The days when you could dismiss these people just by calling them “absolute freaks” are over.
Half of this article’s word count seems to be the writer snarking about how he doesn’t care about these games and doesn’t know much about them. I guess it’s good to show contempt for your audience…
Italy has announced it will restore funding for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) months after it suspended aid to the agency over Israeli allegations linking UN staff to the deadly October 7 attack....
Italy’s far-right government has taken the honorable step of reinstating UNRWA funding, yet the UK and US are still sending thoughts and prayers (or maybe not even those).
For the US to invade Saudi Arabia, where Mecca and Medina are located, would have turned the entire Muslim world against it for generations. It would have been Afghanistan+Iraq times a hundred.
From the FT story about this, it appears the Israeli far right is going to respond with more repression:
Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, on Wednesday wrote to Netanyahu, demanding “punitive steps” be against the Palestinian Authority in response to the European decisions and other Palestinian moves on the international stage, including seeking action against the Jewish state by the ICC.
Smotrich called for a series of measures including a major expansion of Jewish settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, the establishment of a new settlement for every country that recognises Palestinian statehood, and the freezing of Israeli tax transfers to the PA.
What’s interesting is that before the war, China and Ukraine had excellent relations, to the point where Russia was worried about Chinese influence in Ukraine. There’s some remnant of these ties, like how China has never recognised Russia’s annexations of Ukrainian territory.
But the thing is, China’s overwhelming interest at this point is for Russia not to lose. A Russian humiliation at the hands of the West – or worse still a Russian collapse leading to a reduced state that could be dominated by the West – would leave China geopolitically isolated, and give the US the freedom to squeeze China with no further distractions.
At the end of the day, Xi Jinping has blundered his way into a strategic cul-de-sac. The Russia-Ukraine war is a geopolitical disaster for China, and Xi’s dumb bromance with Putin was a key reason it happened. Strategically, he’s the worst Chinese leader in at least a century.
Well said. One thing I’d add is that it wasn’t only Putin going all in, but Xi’s own strategic impatience. China needed at least another generation to grow into its strengths as a world power, but Xi had, for various reasons, convinced himself that he, not his successors, would be the one to see it all through. By finishing the job Mao had started, Xi would be the one lauded by history as the one inheriting Mao’s mantle.
Xi likes to wax poetic about geostrategic “changes not seen in a century”. Ironically, his own ego and hamfistedness has given the West a once in a century opportunity to kneecap China and prevent it from consolidating into a true world power.
Always weird to me how France is so insistent on clinging to its colonial empire, two decades into the 21st century, despite the headaches that causes.
The US closing off its market was totally predictable and has been priced in. You’ll notice that no Chinese EV makers made any plans to export directly into the US, even as they were selling around the world.
The US market is significant, sure, but the US car industry could easily end up where its shipbuilding industry is: hanging around thanks to government protection, catering to the domestic market, but a bit of a joke by global standards.
There are rules concerning how to determine the country of origin, involving how much value is added at each step. Final assembly doesn’t make the cut if the amount of work is too trivial. (The rules can be gamed somewhat but I’m sure the Biden administration will be putting this under a microscope.)
What is more problematic for Biden is that Chinese EV companies are building whole factories and supply chains in Mexico, so the product will be unambiguously Mexican and allowed to enter the US under the USMCA. If the US government feels strongly enough about keeping Chinese firms out simply on the basis of being Chinese, they will probably resort to threatening Mexico to strongarm them into shutting down those factories. The US has a long history of running roughshod over Mexico, so this seems pretty likely to me.
Georgia has been warned by the US not to become an adversary of the west by falling back in line with Moscow, as its parliament defied mass street protests to pass a “Kremlin-inspired” law....
There’s irony here. Europe went along with the US push to block Chinese access to semiconductors. China turns to domestic chip manufacturing, and the obvious first step is to get into mature nodes, the segment of the semiconductor industry where European firms have been successful. European Commission: shocked Pikachu face.
Inflation is a macroeconomic phenomenon. It’s silly to attack grocery stores for an economy-wide rise in the price level. As if Walmart wasn’t greedy during the 2010s when inflation was quiescent, and suddenly became greedy now, just because.
What actually caused inflation was the big spending by both Trump and Biden, not funded by tax increases. The US federal budget deficit is now over 6 percent of GDP, and is projected to keep ramping up. And the Federal Reserve has been slow to raise interest rates to sterilize various federal spending increases, like the Covid spending packages and the Inflation Reduction Act. These are classic ingredients for inflation.
So, plenty of blame to go around, but it’s mostly in Washington, not individual companies here and there.
Left to their own devices, companies want to raise prices and always have. You need a way to explain why they didn’t hike prices in the 2010s, when they were presumably just as greedy as they are now.
Put another way, inflation is about the loss of value of money itself, not individual prices going up. That’s a matter of macroeconomics: government spending, money supply, trade, etc.
So, why didn’t all these companies collude to fix prices before? Were they virtuous before? Did their turn to the dark side just happen to coincide with a large unfunded fiscal expansion?
So your story is that when all other prices happen to go up, lots of greedy companies conspire to up their prices. But why do the initial prices start going up to kick this off? Cosmic coincidence? Or is it conspiracy embedded in conspiracy?
In macroeconomics, the motivations of individual firms don’t matter, or at least we just assume all firm behave as self-interestedly as they can get away with. This was as true in the 2010s, when inflation was low, as today when inflation is high. What matters are things like fiscal policy, monetary policy, inflation expectations, etc. Not how greedy companies are – we can assume they always are greedy.
So companies in all markets in all countries attained this market concentration at the same time, triggering this? And it just happened to coincide with a big expansion in the money supply, but the expansion in money supply had nothing to do with the inflation?
No, interest rate hikes significantly postdated the inflation. Fed started hiking in March 2022, and by that time annualized CPI inflation rate had reached 8 percent. Average over 2021 was 4.7 percent. In any case, interest rates increases are to combat inflation, they are not a cause of inflation
Moreover, wages did go up. US median personal income went from $35.8k in 2020 to $40.5k in 2022. Maybe it didn’t go up as much as other prices, but there’s nothing that says all prices have to rise by exactly the same amount during an inflationary episode.
When an economy undergoes inflation, not all prices rise by the same amount. That’s one of the reasons high inflation can be so disruptive. For example, wages (the price of labor) often rise some time after other prices, to the detriment of some wage earners.
It’s pretty believable that grocery store chains have acquired enough market power that they’re able to pass on all their cost increases to customers, and more, thereby increasing their profit rate. But the fact that individual companies and sectors are well placed to cope with inflation doesn’t explain the economy-wide and world-wide inflation.
We can also look at the “companies have market power” explanation using the overall labour share, which measures how much income is going to labor vs capital, economy wide. It doesn’t seem to have shifted much during the recent bout of inflation. But again, individual wage earners have seen huge disparities, including some who have been made much worse off by the inflation.
The idea of prices going up and down by the same amount is based on an equilibrium situation. This isn’t ruled out; it could very well be that the high profits of grocery companies is transient (or “transitory” as they say). But in the short run, prices don’t move in lockstep.
Aside from market power or collusion, there are other reasons prices could shift more quickly for some sectors than others (even as all prices are going upward). For example, does the industry rely on long term contracts or short term contracts? Is inflation hedging widely available for the goods and services in question? Is the activity more or less sensitive to interest rates?
But these are questions about relative prices. Instead of playing a game of whack a mole, better not to set off inflation in the first place.
In the past three days, Russian troops, backed by fighter jets, artillery and lethal drones, have poured across Ukraine’s northeastern border and seized at least nine villages and settlements, and more territory per day than at almost any other point in the war, save the very beginning.
From what I’ve read, this is mainly a distraction. Russia hasn’t committed enough troops for a serious invasion of Kharkiv oblast; their objectives is to tie up Ukraine’s reserves and keep them away from the fighting in the east.
This is an unserious proposal. Germany spends about 1.5 percent of its GDP(*) on defence, much of it wasted, and increasing it to even 2 percent has involved painful and extended political wrangling. If the country collectively cannot find the will to tweak its budget to fund a modest increase in defence spending, it is not going to countenance universal conscription.
But the point remains: 2% of GDP is the NATO target, getting even to that point for Germany has been like pulling teeth, and a serious implementation of universal conscription would be a much bigger ask.
Eh, I think this is excusing too much. There’s a lot of territory between “writing blank checks with no oversight and reporting” and “a process so anal, only 7 EV chargers are built nationwide over two years”.
Once an economic powerhouse that was the envy of much of the world, there is deep concern in Tokyo that the economies of China and Germany have already surpassed Japan’s — and that India’s will do so next year....
It’s nothing to do with Japan, really. It’s about India and its economy slowly clawing its way up from its historically low base. Note that India’s GDP per capita is still well below the global average (and Japan’s is well above).
Irrelevant. Because of India’s population, the only way for it not to eventually surpass Japan in total GDP is for India to remain perpetually mired in backwardness. Since the 1990s, India has undergone successive rounds of economic liberalization, thereby achieving catch-up growth. All that stuff with Japanese demographics, bad management, etc. are secondary factors. Even if all the factors for Japan had been more favorable, it would only have postponed the day of overtake by a few years.
US worded its statements carefully. They’ll still provide support for all the other parts of Israel’s military operations, just not for the Rafah invasion. Israel is free to shuffle things around so that it won’t make a difference.
Just like all the other things Biden has done in this conflict, this is merely a symbolic gesture to say “don’t blame us if Israel flattens Rafah”.
The US has already provided huge amounts of unconditional military aid to Israel, and remains committed to continuing to do so. So Israel is free to shuffle around their ample resources internally to reach the same outcome.
Israel has launched a major military offensive against Hamas forces in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, seizing control of a key border crossing and cutting off most aid into the territory a day before indirect talks on a ceasefire deal are due to restart....
Russia has opened a criminal case against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and put him on a wanted list, the state news agency TASS reported on Saturday, an announcement Ukraine dismissed as evidence of Moscow’s “desperation”....
This is an absurd abuse of government power, which “small government” Republicans are going along with because the AM radio listening audience skews right. By the same logic, I suppose the next step is to force homeowners to subscribe to a landline and cable TV.
Then people living in rural areas, who need AM radio, can spend a bit more to get it as an optional package. Or like 5 bucks to get a stand-alone radio. Why force everyone else to get it?
I wonder how much of the aid to Ukraine shows up as money that Ukraine can decide for itself how to spend, as opposed to money that U-turns straight back into pre-determined US defence contracts.
Vietnam is a pretty darn poor example for them to be bringing up. A much poorer country fights for its independence against bigger countries with seemingly insurmountable advantages (first France, and then the USA). And by dint of sheer national sacrifice, sustained over 20+ years of fighting, manages to outlast the enemy. Don’t forget also that the Vietnamese started from a vastly poorer and more backward position compared to the Ukrainians.
America’s assassination attempt on Huawei is backfiring (www.economist.com)
Archive link: archive.is/vGKin
How the far-right gained traction with Europe's youth (www.reuters.com)
From Germany and France to Poland and Spain, the far-right made inroads into the youth vote in key states in this EU election - as a generation that has grown up amid constant crises seeks new answers and follows politicians fluent in TikTok and YouTube....
India under its longest-ever heatwave, with worse to come (www.straitstimes.com)
Starfield's latest update draws player ire by sticking a bounty hunting quest behind the Creation Club paywall (www.vg247.com)
EU elections 2024 live: Emmanuel Macron dissolves French parliament and calls snap elections after huge far-right gains (www.theguardian.com)
“Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has announced that he is dissolving the national assembly, and calling for legislative elections on June 30 and July 7....
Israeli strike on Gaza school kills more than 30 people. Military claims it was being used by Hamas (www.nbcnewyork.com)
While the US and EU are putting up barriers to Chinese cars, Australians are buying them at record levels (www.abc.net.au)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/16322892...
Israel has offered a plan for 6 week Gaza cease-fire and hostage release, Biden says (www.usatoday.com)
Zenless Zone Zero gets a release date of July 4th, plus a trailer with lots of kicking (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
'You have to shed the tears': Justice shares that she cries after some Supreme Court cases (www.usatoday.com)
Italy to resume UNRWA funding as Gaza faces humanitarian crisis (www.aljazeera.com)
Italy has announced it will restore funding for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) months after it suspended aid to the agency over Israeli allegations linking UN staff to the deadly October 7 attack....
Macron hits Putin for rejecting truce with Ukraine during Olympics (thehill.com)
New 9/11 Evidence Points to Deep Saudi Complicity (www.theatlantic.com)
Two decades of U.S. policy appear to be rooted in a mistaken understanding of what happened that day. archive
Spain, Norway and Ireland will recognize a Palestinian state | CNN (edition.cnn.com)
This is quite big! Kudos to them.
Biden celebrates Black leadership while navigating Gaza crisis tensions at HBCU commencement (www.motherjones.com)
Zelensky wants China at Ukraine peace talks, cites ‘influence on Russia’ | CNN (www.cnn.com)
France imposes state of emergency in New Caledonia as unrest continues (www.npr.org)
Always weird to me how France is so insistent on clinging to its colonial empire, two decades into the 21st century, despite the headaches that causes.
China Isn’t Scared Of Biden’s Big Bad EV Tariffs (jalopnik.com)
Biden's new China tariff wall faces leakage via Mexico, Vietnam | Reuters (www.reuters.com)
US warns Georgia not to side with Moscow against the west (www.theguardian.com)
Georgia has been warned by the US not to become an adversary of the west by falling back in line with Moscow, as its parliament defied mass street protests to pass a “Kremlin-inspired” law....
Europe eyes car chips as next battleground with China (www.politico.eu)
Commission will start questioning its industry about competition with China and others on older-generation microchips....
Google accidentally deleted a $125 billion pension fund's account (qz.com)
Democrats Ask Biden to Investigate Grocery Store Price-Fixing (time.com)
Russian forces push deeper into northern Ukraine (www.bangkokpost.com)
In the past three days, Russian troops, backed by fighter jets, artillery and lethal drones, have poured across Ukraine’s northeastern border and seized at least nine villages and settlements, and more territory per day than at almost any other point in the war, save the very beginning.
Germany may introduce conscription for all 18-year-olds (www.telegraph.co.uk)
The US planned to install thousands of EV chargers. Only 7 have been built. - The Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com)
web.archive.org/…/ev-charging-stations-slow-rollo…
Japanese angst as India set to become 4th largest economy (www.dw.com)
Once an economic powerhouse that was the envy of much of the world, there is deep concern in Tokyo that the economies of China and Germany have already surpassed Japan’s — and that India’s will do so next year....
Biden says US won't supply weapons for Israel to attack Rafah, in warning to ally (apnews.com)
Israel launches Rafah offensive it says is start of mission to ‘eliminate’ Hamas (www.theguardian.com)
Israel has launched a major military offensive against Hamas forces in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, seizing control of a key border crossing and cutting off most aid into the territory a day before indirect talks on a ceasefire deal are due to restart....
Just How Dangerous Is Europe’s Rising Far Right? (www.nytimes.com)
Russia puts Ukraine's Zelenskiy on wanted list (www.reuters.com)
Russia has opened a criminal case against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and put him on a wanted list, the state news agency TASS reported on Saturday, an announcement Ukraine dismissed as evidence of Moscow’s “desperation”....
Automakers Want AM Radios Out of Cars. Congress Is About to Require Them (www.wired.com)
US preparing to announce $6B in weapons contracts for Ukraine (www.politico.com)
Russia says US support for Ukraine will end as ‘humiliating fiasco’ like ‘Vietnam and Afghanistan’ (thehill.com)