For countries in the global South, Zelensky's pro-Israel stance looks totally cynical, and justifies a neutral stance in the Ukraine-Russia war.
cyd
joined 2 years ago
Shouldn't be assassinating people in other countries, whether it's a consulate or embassy...
Chinese companies do business with whoever pays them. Ukraine, for example, is heavily reliant on Chinese drones and has been buying over half the global supply of DJI's Mavic quadcopters.
And Chinese companies aren't alone in this. Lots of developing economies don't feel they gave a stake in the conflict and have continued to do business. Most of Russia's oil exports have been going through India. The fact that the US has been so muted in its response to this, because they feel like India is "on-side" in the confrontation against China, makes the singling out of China seem hypocritical.
You can tell this is written by an American because it keeps bringing up the war for no reason.
We can argue actuarial tables all day, but the point is that replacing Sotomayor with a younger liberal justice has zero downside. It's as close to a free lunch as one can get in politics.
I hope so, they're in it for the long haul. The Vietnamese basically sacrificed two generations to beat back the US; Ukraine will need a similar level of long term commitment. The recent wobbling over mobilization is not a good sign in this respect.
The most likely best case scenario is a frozen conflict. But Zelensky doesn't want this because such an outcome would call into question everything he did politically up to now. As for Putin, I'm not sure.
I think there's a widespread implicit hope among Western policy makers that if they keep propping Ukraine up, and get Ukrainians to hold out long enough, Russia will suffer a sudden internal collapse and be forced to withdraw. That may be, but it seems equally (more?) probable that Ukraine will be the one that suffers a collapse.
This cloud-brightening stuff seems finicky compared to stratospheric aerosol injection. Clouds are hard for climate models to handle as it is, so it would be hard to predict the impact on climate change ahead of time. If you want to do geoengineering, this seems pretty far down on the list of alternatives.
At one point, one of the six attendees showed Biden printed photos of malnourished Palestinian children, according to NBC News. The president said that he had seen the pictures before, but that was unlikely: The attendee, a doctor, said the photos were from her own phone.
Oof.
If someone sent me to Martha's Vineyard, I'd sue too.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
This is a really neat technology that Noda (the author of the article) has been plugging away at for decades. The main problem, from my understanding, is that people haven't been able to find applications.
We already have conventional laser diodes that work extremely well, they're not that bright but bright enough to make laser pointers, disc read/write heads, etc., which are applications where miniaturization is important.
On the other hand, in industrial applications like cutting steel, we have fiber lasers. Those are about the size of a briefcase, compared to the photonic crystal lasers in this article which about a centimeter. But they can reach incredible brightness, about 1000x the output power of the photonic crystal lasers (and about 1,000,000 times that of ordinary laser diodes). And in industrial applications you don't really need the laser to be miniaturized (especially since the power source itself will be a chonky piece of equipment).
So somehow, right now this neat tech is falling into the cracks. One day, I'm sure someone will find the perfect application for it, though.
Edit: the potential application that people are most hopeful about is lidar; if, in the future, lidar gets integrated into consumer electronic devices like cellphones, then photonic crystal lasers will probably prove their usefulness.