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zvaigzdelasas · 5 months

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George Beebe, Director of Grand Strategy at QI, highlighted the perils of extrapolating a “stalemate” from the current lack of significant battlefield movements in Ukraine. “Those who believe this war has settled into a long-term stalemate make the mistake of measuring the relative progress of each side with maps. They see that the frontlines have not moved significantly over the last year and conclude that the sides are stalemated,” Beebe told me. “But other metrics, though, paint a different picture. Ukraine is using up its quite limited supplies of men, weapons, and ammunition, and the West cannot provide what Ukraine needs. That is not a formula for stalemate; it's a formula for Ukraine's eventual collapse or capitulation,” he continued. A purely cartographical view of the Ukraine war neglects key military factors, including differentials in manpower and resources, attrition rates, and logistics challenges, that many experts say are not unfolding in Ukraine’s favor. “Despite everything that’s happened, despite all the stuff we have given, the Bradley’s, the M1 [Abrams] tanks, Patriot air defense systems, the Challenger tanks, the Leopard [tanks], all those things, nothing changed at all except the casualty count,” said former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, Senior Fellow and Military Expert at Defense Priorities and host of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive. “While the lines haven’t changed, I don’t call it a stalemate because I think time is continuing to work against Ukraine,” he said in an interview, noting the stark year-on-year decline in U.S. military aid to Ukraine. He added: “Biden is only shooting for $60 [billion dollars] for the whole FY [fiscal year] instead of $113 billion, so even if gets every penny that he’s asking for, it’s going to be half what it was last year, and we’ve given all the excess equipment that we have. Anything we give now comes out of the muscle, out of the bones, and I don’t think we’re going to give up that much more stuff, certainly not at the level they need to replace all their losses” Davis noted that the continued lack of sufficient output in Western ammunition production means that Ukrainian troops will face mounting munitions shortages. “They’re not going to have the ammunition to continue to wage a stalemate,” he added. Davis compared dwindling Ukrainian stocks with Russia’s expanded domestic production of critical munitions and drones. Kyiv’s munitions woes were recently compounded by the diversion of up to tens of thousands of 155mm shells, originally slated for Ukraine, to Israel in the weeks following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War. “The next year, and probably into this winter, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the Ukrainian army, at some point along the front, to actually buckle,” warned Davis.[...]

Recent suggestions in the West of a stalemate and looming “frozen conflict,” though a stark change in tone from the kind of rhetoric that characterized the war as late as the summer of 2023, still does not reflect what experts describe as the severity of challenges facing the Ukrainian war effort.

Right.... "Stalemate" where....that implies an equality in force deployment capacity.....Stalemates are active not passive.....quickest way to decisively end a stalemate is to run out of weapons and ammo....time to either put up [read: full military deployment] or shut up [read: end the war from the position of the weaker combatant]. [27 Nov 23]

#could've listened to fuckinv milley and ended it w a stronger hand

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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A link-clump demands a linkdump

Cometh the weekend, cometh the linkdump. My daily-ish newsletter includes a section called "Hey look at this," with three short links per day, but sometimes those links get backed up and I need to clean house. Here's the eight previous installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

The country code top level domain (ccTLD) for the Caribbean island nation of Anguilla is .ai, and that's turned into millions of dollars worth of royalties as "entrepreneurs" scramble to sprinkle some buzzword-compliant AI stuff on their businesses in the most superficial way possible:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/ai-fever-turns-anguillas-ai-domain-into-a-digital-gold-mine/

All told, .ai domain royalties will account for about ten percent of the country's GDP.

It's actually kind of nice to see Anguilla finding some internet money at long last. Back in the 1990s, when I was a freelance web developer, I got hired to work on the investor website for a publicly traded internet casino based in Anguilla that was a scammy disaster in every conceivable way. The company had been conceived of by people who inherited a modestly successful chain of print-shops and decided to diversify by buying a dormant penny mining stock and relaunching it as an online casino.

But of course, online casinos were illegal nearly everywhere. Not in Anguilla – or at least, that's what the founders told us – which is why they located their servers there, despite the lack of broadband or, indeed, reliable electricity at their data-center. At a certain point, the whole thing started to whiff of a stock swindle, a pump-and-dump where they'd sell off shares in that ex-mining stock to people who knew even less about the internet than they did and skedaddle. I got out, and lost track of them, and a search for their names and business today turns up nothing so I assume that it flamed out before it could ruin any retail investors' lives.

Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory, one of those former British colonies that was drained and then given "independence" by paternalistic imperial administrators half a world away. The country's main industries are tourism and "finance" – which is to say, it's a pearl in the globe-spanning necklace of tax- and corporate-crime-havens the UK established around the world so its most vicious criminals – the hereditary aristocracy – can continue to use Britain's roads and exploit its educated workforce without paying any taxes.

This is the "finance curse," and there are tiny, struggling nations all around the world that live under it. Nick Shaxson dubbed them "Treasure Islands" in his outstanding book of the same name:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780230341722/treasureislands

I can't imagine that the AI bubble will last forever – anything that can't go on forever eventually stops – and when it does, those .ai domain royalties will dry up. But until then, I salute Anguilla, which has at last found the internet riches that I played a small part in bringing to it in the previous century.

The AI bubble is indeed overdue for a popping, but while the market remains gripped by irrational exuberance, there's lots of weird stuff happening around the edges. Take Inject My PDF, which embeds repeating blocks of invisible text into your resume:

https://kai-greshake.de/posts/inject-my-pdf/

The text is tuned to make resume-sorting Large Language Models identify you as the ideal candidate for the job. It'll even trick the summarizer function into spitting out text that does not appear in any human-readable form on your CV.

Embedding weird stuff into resumes is a hacker tradition. I first encountered it at the Chaos Communications Congress in 2012, when Ang Cui used it as an example in his stellar "Print Me If You Dare" talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njVv7J2azY8

Cui figured out that one way to update the software of a printer was to embed an invisible Postscript instruction in a document that basically said, "everything after this is a firmware update." Then he came up with 100 lines of perl that he hid in documents with names like cv.pdf that would flash the printer when they ran, causing it to probe your LAN for vulnerable PCs and take them over, opening a reverse-shell to his command-and-control server in the cloud. Compromised printers would then refuse to apply future updates from their owners, but would pretend to install them and even update their version numbers to give verisimilitude to the ruse. The only way to exorcise these haunted printers was to send 'em to the landfill. Good times!

Printers are still a dumpster fire, and it's not solely about the intrinsic difficulty of computer security. After all, printer manufacturers have devoted enormous resources to hardening their products against their owners, making it progressively harder to use third-party ink. They're super perverse about it, too – they send "security updates" to your printer that update the printer's security against you – run these updates and your printer downgrades itself by refusing to use the ink you chose for it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

It's a reminder that what a monopolist thinks of as "security" isn't what you think of as security. Oftentimes, their security is antithetical to your security. That was the case with Web Environment Integrity, a plan by Google to make your phone rat you out to advertisers' servers, revealing any adblocking modifications you might have installed so that ad-serving companies could refuse to talk to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

WEI is now dead, thanks to a lot of hueing and crying by people like us:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/google_abandons_web_environment_integrity/

But the dream of securing Google against its own users lives on. Youtube has embarked on an aggressive campaign of refusing to show videos to people running ad-blockers, triggering an arms-race of ad-blocker-blockers and ad-blocker-blocker-blockers:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-will-the-ad-versus-ad-blocker-arms-race-end/

The folks behind Ublock Origin are racing to keep up with Google's engineers' countermeasures, and there's a single-serving website called "Is uBlock Origin updated to the last Anti-Adblocker YouTube script?" that will give you a realtime, one-word status update:

https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

One in four web users has an ad-blocker, a stat that Doc Searls pithily summarizes as "the biggest boycott in world history":

https://doc.searls.com/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

Zero app users have ad-blockers. That's not because ad-blocking an app is harder than ad-blocking the web – it's because reverse-engineering an app triggers liability under IP laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which can put you away for 5 years for a first offense. That's what I mean when I say that "IP is anything that lets a company control its customers, critics or competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

I predicted that apps would open up all kinds of opportunities for abusive, monopolistic conduct back in 2010, and I'm experiencing a mix of sadness and smugness (I assume there's a German word for this emotion) at being so thoroughly vindicated by history:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

The more control a company can exert over its customers, the worse it will be tempted to treat them. These systems of control shift the balance of power within companies, making it harder for internal factions that defend product quality and customer interests to win against the enshittifiers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The result has been a Great Enshittening, with platforms of all description shifting value from their customers and users to their shareholders, making everything palpably worse. The only bright side is that this has created the political will to do something about it, sparking a wave of bold, muscular antitrust action all over the world.

The Google antitrust case is certainly the most important corporate lawsuit of the century (so far), but Judge Amit Mehta's deference to Google's demands for secrecy has kept the case out of the headlines. I mean, Sam Bankman-Fried is a psychopathic thief, but even so, his trial does not deserve its vastly greater prominence, though, if you haven't heard yet, he's been convicted and will face decades in prison after he exhausts his appeals:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/sam-bankman-fried-guilty-on-all-charges

The secrecy around Google's trial has relaxed somewhat, and the trickle of revelations emerging from the cracks in the courthouse are fascinating. For the first time, we're able to get a concrete sense of which queries are the most lucrative for Google:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/1/23941766/google-antitrust-trial-search-queries-ad-money

The list comes from 2018, but it's still wild. As David Pierce writes in The Verge, the top twenty includes three iPhone-related terms, five insurance queries, and the rest are overshadowed by searches for customer service info for monopolistic services like Xfinity, Uber and Hulu.

All-in-all, we're living through a hell of a moment for piercing the corporate veil. Maybe it's the problem of maintaining secrecy within large companies, or maybe the the rampant mistreatment of even senior executives has led to more leaks and whistleblowing. Either way, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the anonymous leaker who revealed the unbelievable pettiness of former HBO president of programming Casey Bloys, who ordered his underlings to create an army of sock-puppet Twitter accounts to harass TV and movie critics who panned HBO's shows:

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/hbo-casey-bloys-secret-twitter-trolls-tv-critics-leaked-texts-lawsuit-the-idol-1234867722/

These trolling attempts were pathetic, even by the standards of thick-fingered corporate execs. Like, accusing critics who panned the shitty-ass Perry Mason reboot of disrespecting veterans because the fictional Mason's back-story had him storming the beach on D-Day.

The pushback against corporate bullying is everywhere, and of course, the vanguard is the labor movement. Did you hear that the UAW won their strike against the auto-makers, scoring raises for all workers based on the increases in the companies' CEO pay? The UAW isn't done, either! Their incredible new leader, Shawn Fain, has called for a general strike in 2028:

https://www.404media.co/uaw-calls-on-workers-to-line-up-massive-general-strike-for-2028-to-defeat-billionaire-class/

The massive victory for unionized auto-workers has thrown a spotlight on the terrible working conditions and pay for workers at Tesla, a criminal company that has no compunctions about violating labor law to prevent its workers from exercising their legal rights. Over in Sweden, union workers are teaching Tesla a lesson. After the company tried its illegal union-busting playbook on Tesla service centers, the unionized dock-workers issued an ultimatum: respect your workers or face a blockade at Sweden's ports that would block any Tesla from being unloaded into the EU's fifth largest Tesla market:

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-sweden-strike/

Of course, the real solution to Teslas – and every other kind of car – is to redesign our cities for public transit, walking and cycling, making cars the exception for deliveries, accessibility and other necessities. Transitioning to EVs will make a big dent in the climate emergency, but it won't make our streets any safer – and they keep getting deadlier.

Last summer, my dear old pal Ted Kulczycky got in touch with me to tell me that Talking Heads were going to be all present in public for the first time since the band's breakup, as part of the debut of the newly remastered print of Stop Making Sense, the greatest concert movie of all time. Even better, the show would be in Toronto, my hometown, where Ted and I went to high-school together, at TIFF.

Ted is the only person I know who is more obsessed with Talking Heads than I am, and he started working on tickets for the show while I starting pricing plane tickets. And then, the unthinkable happened: Ted's wife, Serah, got in touch to say that Ted had been run over by a car while getting off of a streetcar, that he was severely injured, and would require multiple surgeries.

But this was Ted, so of course he was still planning to see the show. And he did, getting a day-pass from the hospital and showing up looking like someone from a Kids In The Hall sketch who'd been made up to look like someone who'd been run over by a car:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53182440282/

In his Globe and Mail article about Ted's experience, Brad Wheeler describes how the whole hospital rallied around Ted to make it possible for him to get to the movie:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/article-how-a-talking-heads-superfan-found-healing-with-the-concert-film-stop/

He also mentions that Ted is working on a book and podcast about Stop Making Sense. I visited Ted in the hospital the day after the gig and we talked about the book and it sounds amazing. Also? The movie was incredible. See it in Imax.

That heartwarming tale of healing through big suits is a pretty good place to wrap up this linkdump, but I want to call your attention to just one more thing before I go: Robin Sloan's Snarkmarket piece about blogging and "stock and flow":

https://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890/

Sloan makes the excellent case that for writers, having a "flow" of short, quick posts builds the audience for a "stock" of longer, more synthetic pieces like books. This has certainly been my experience, but I think it's only part of the story – there are good, non-mercenary reasons for writers to do a lot of "flow." As I wrote in my 2021 essay, "The Memex Method," turning your commonplace book into a database – AKA "blogging" – makes you write better notes to yourself because you know others will see them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

This, in turn, creates a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragments that are just waiting to nucleate and crystallize into full-blown novels and nonfiction books and other "stock." That's how I came out of lockdown with nine new books. The next one is The Lost Cause, a hopepunk science fiction novel about the climate whose early fans include Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. It's out on November 14:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/05/variegated/#nein

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barbiechick · 5 months

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Haunt Couture, Midnight Runway, Spectra Vondergeist, Monster High, 2023 ⛓️⚰️👻

My favorite ghost girlie 💜💜💜

Retailed for 75$, shes still in stock on Mattel Creations! Shipping to Europe was 14.95!

Tbh shes so gorgeous in person, the box is a piece of art! For me shes worth every penny! Its a subjective opinion, but she blows og Spectra out of the water, even with plastic chains and all lol! Sorry, not sorry 😂🤷‍♀️

The only issue i had with her was her hair. Its saran, thankfully, but it was matted and gross, so i had to wash it, condition it, then comb it out. Had to soak it in hot water for a couple of minutes, which was annoying ngl 😒 Oh yeah, the "coochie grip" stand...is kinda annoying to lmao.

But over all im so happy with her!!! 💜💜💜

#my dolls #monster high #monster high dolls #monster high collection #haunt couture #haunt couture midnight runway #spectra vondergeist #haunt couture spectra #doll collector #doll collection #collectible dolls

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skippyv20 · 4 months

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Skippy, that video of megs doing the coffe commercia was made in 20222, not 2023. so it’s old. Cause if the girl who is talking says 20222. Don’t know if you knew that already. So why put out an old video from last year now? I believe she is broke and has no money whatsoever, even though articles comes out that she owns this, she owns that. That she has Archewell, which by the way doesnt exist. They claim she has all this money, she owns stocks, she is a shareholder of this and that. I’m sorry but all of it are just plain out lies. She doesn’t own anything, she doesn’t have millions of dollars to spend. Her clothes are cheap, not expensive as the tabloids want you to think. This thing does not have any money at all. She has never been given money from King Charles or the royal family, another big lie that had been told in articles. This woman is broke, broke broke. That’s why she always merching cheap clothes, cheap jewely. I have been wondering if the divorce had already happen and we just don’t know about it yet and she didn’t recieve a penny and that’s why you see her by herself doing things more without Harry now trying to make money. I don’t know I’m just guessing here. Something happen.

They are desperate….everything she does or says she files away, then when she has nothing..she pulls it up and says…this just happened…..😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

#submission

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ssmtbusiness · 7 months

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मात्र ₹24 का स्टॉक खरीदने के लिए लोग हो रहे उतावला

प्रिया निवेदक आज मैं आपको मात्र ₹24 का बेस्ट स्टॉक के बारे में बताने वाला हूं जिसे खरीदने के लिए लोग काफी ज्यादा उत्सुक हैं| और इस कंपनी के शेयर में बड़े इन्वेस्टर भी काफी भारी मात्रा में शेयर की खरीदारी कर रहे हैं| तो आईए जानते हैं आखिर कौन सा है वह स्टॉक लेकिन उससे पहले आपकी जानकारी के लिए बता दूं यदि आपने अभी तक हमें टेलीग्राम और व्हाट्सएप ग्रुप पर फॉलो नहीं किया है तो कृपया नीचे दिए गए लिंक…

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#best penny stocks #best penny stocks 2023 #best penny stocks for 2023 in india #Best Stock 2023 #penny stock

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theculturedmarxist · 6 months

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There have been many scandals associated with covid in the last nearly 4 years.

I want to tell you about another one that has got zero media coverage.

The top-line is this: the UK government gave more than 2.3 million vulnerable and older people a covid vaccine that isn’t matched to the currently dominant covid strains. And they did it to save money.

The dominant covid strains right now are known as the XBBs. They have been dominant since late summer in most places, when they took over from the BA strains of omicron.

But rather than give people the new more effective XBB vaccine, the British government decided to use up their stockpile of the older BA vaccines first.

The worst thing is, those who got the outdated vaccine were those first in line for vaccines, such as older people and people with health conditions.

But they won’t know this.

So 2.3 million vulnerable people in the UK are walking around thinking they are well-protected this winter against covid when they’re not.

The British government didn’t hide why it did this. On the official government webpage it spells it out. In bold are the clues hiding in plain sight.

“The choice of vaccine products for autumn 2023 has been determined based on available data on vaccine safety, effectiveness and immunogenicity, logistical factors, programmatic deliverability and a bespoke cost effective assessment. Other vaccines which may offer similar protection, but which would incur additional costs, are expected to be less cost effective within the bespoke cost-effectiveness assessment compared to pre-procured Omicron-variant mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.”

What they are saying, under the cover of the gross language of ‘bespoke cost effectiveness assessment,’ is that they’d already bought the older vaccines and it was cheaper to use them than buy extra new ones.

They used people’s bodies as asset dumps for old medical stock.

In the UK the booster roll-out began on September 11th. We know that in Scotland they switched over to XBB on September 25th and in England and Wales they switched to the new ones on October 2nd, as confirmed that day by Meaghan Kall, an epidemiologist at the UK’s health security agency responsible for covid.

But by September 29th the British government reported 2.35 million people had been covid boosted. So we know this was largely with the old vaccine (save 4 days in Scotland). In response to my thread on Twitter, many reported receiving the old vaccine. Even now, people are saying they’re still only being offered the old vaccine.

Boosting people with a vaccine not matched to the dominant strains will certainly lead to worse outcomes as an average than if these people had received the updated vaccine. People will die for this penny pinching.

But then the British government has for some time now been relaxed about killing people for austerity.

The Brits are also tightly restricting access to covid vaccines, in contrast to almost every other country. And in a final twist, the Brits are now stockpiling the new XBB vaccines and are almost certainly going to take the same approach to deploying an outdated vaccine next time round.

When I tweeted about this, the Guardian journalist George Monbiot responded and we subsequently exchanged emails. Monbiot did then write a very good column about the ongoing burden of covid in the UK and the various public health failures.

But the article omitted any mention of the millions who were given the older vaccine.

I can’t criticise Monbiot. I wouldn’t be surprised if he included this and it was cut by his editors. And his article stands head and shoulders above almost any other reporting of covid in the mass media, a mass media that has played a key part in normalising the transmission of a virus that has become the leading cause of infectious disease death in the world today.

These lies and misinformation about covid in the mass media continue. Last week was no exception.

The BBC’s health editor Nick Triggle wrote a truly noxious covid story full of half-truths, lies by omission and propaganda. He said covid was less deadly than the flu, that it is becoming a seasonal ‘bug’, that people who were concerned about rising hospitalisations were just anxious. (Nick Triggle’s sister-in-law is a Tory member of parliament, which might explain some things).

In the US, the New York Times interviewed the epidemiologist and long-time covid downplayer Michael Mina who said rates of long covid are drastically falling - without citing a shred of evidence - and said repeated exposure to covid for most people will not be harmful and will build immunity. In the comments below the piece, one person said the “excellent story begs the question as to whether healthy people should take any precautions against covid.” Job done.

Then there was the ‘long cold’ research paper which was amplified across global media.

If you missed it, the thrust was that long colds might be as common as long covid. So far, so fine.

But the findings were stripped of critical context in relation to covid.

It failed to acknowledge that even if long colds do exist, and almost certainly they do, Sars-Cov-2 is a different beast, behaving in a completely different way to other common cold-causing coronaviruses.

And rather than the conclusion here being ‘ok, so if long colds are this common, long covid might be very common too and maybe we should do something about it,’ the stories led us towards the conclusion that long covid itself is nothing to worry about because post-viral illness is nothing new.

All of this would have been bad enough without mentioning the methodology.

The study was conducted in 2020-2021 and relied on people self reporting a respiratory illness that they said wasn’t covid. We know for a fact that far fewer people got a respiratory illness that wasn’t covid in these years, so I expect a good number of these ‘not covids’ leading to ‘long colds’ were, in fact, covids leading to long covid. But again, the media stories failed to provide any of this context. Nick Triggle was one of those who wrote a story.

Triggled twice in two weeks.

Over and over, it seems that those who are concerned about covid come armed with data, and those who aren’t come armed with gut feeling in order to keep business-as-usual ticking over.

It’s 2019 again! Stop worrying!

Normalisation is the most powerful sociological force in the world today. Through a captured media, the ruling class can make us absorb a pandemic, accept climate collapse and shrug at apartheid. Change is unnecessary because nothing is wrong. It is just the natural order, flowing.

We also found out this week that just 2% of Americans have stepped up for the new covid jab, a rate of uptake that can be traced back to the early over-hyping of vaccines and the manufacturing of a narrative that says covid is mild and we’ve all achieved immunity now anyway.

I didn’t know where we’d be nearly four years on from the start of the pandemic, but I didn’t think we’d be here. New waves, millions being infected, thousands dying every week. And a media and public knowledge blackout of Novavax, the most effective vaccine. A vaccine we’ve known is the most effective for over two years.

It is tiring to keep up, to keep bearing witness to these fuck-ups, to this cruelty.

But we have to.

Because to believe in change means documenting the incompetence, the failure, the lies and the indifference that eventually compels that change to come.

#united kingdom #public health #covid 19 #covid vaccines

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georgegraphys · 9 days

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@grbambi63's theory really made me peek into Daimler's 2018, 2019, and 2023 annual report to see the difference between Zetsche's management to Kallenius' management.

Zetsche's objective:

Kallenius had a similar objective on that too but I won't include it for today because we're not talking about the similarity but... the one thing Kallenius had that Zetsche didn't.

2019 & 2023's Kallenius-term annual report objectives:

Lower cost base. Reduction of (...) costs.

This isn't just some move that Kallenius added just because he loved saving some pennies but it might be due to the chaos that happens in his first year as a CEO. I am going to highlight two major events here.

1) Diesel Emission Scandal

In the beginning of 2018 (Zetsche's term), Daimler was accused of having shit devices on their control software for their US products but they denied this allegations. Then it was reported that the US authorities were investigating them for diesel emission cheating scandals.

In June 2019, Daimler had to recall 60,000 Mercedes diesel powered cars in Germany, the model affected is the Mercedes-Benz GLK 220 SUV produced between 2012 and 2015, the car is fitted with software aimed at distorting emissions tests. And during the same year, Daimler was fined 870 million euros in Germany for "negligent violation of supervisory duties" in relation to not fully complying with emissions regulations. In 2020, they had to pay $2.2B in settlement.

The scandal got serious actually as "The Daimler boss is also putting the german federal government in trouble. It has its back against the wall internationally because of the fraud committed by its flagship industry. US President Donald Trump has targeted Daimler in the trade dispute and threatened that he no longer wants to see Mercedes cars on Fifth Avenue in New York" source

This crisis ironically started at Zetsche's management but the peak of the case was handled during Kallenius' early stage of leadership 💀💀💀 (I FELT BAD FOR HIM NGL LMAOOO)

2) COVID 19

Do you think Kallenius' trials decrease after his first year? No. COVID-19 happens. They still profit as they are THEE Mercedes but sales were slow at one point. Kallenius and other executives had to take pay cuts due to COVID and even before, COVID he also had to struggle with Daimler's stocks dropping drastically while having to deal with the lawsuit and satisfying the investors. He also said this: (source)

Looking at how they have interesting differences as CEO. Kallenius is definitely all about cost efficient and maybe this was due to the crisis he felt in 2021 and as a preparation for Daimler's future ventures in focusing more about EQs

Update: Yeah this confirms that he had a pretty rough start to his management year in 2019 due to diesel scandal (source)

And bold of you to think that Zetsche retired from Mercedes with a bang. No he didn't. (source)

AND THE BEEF THICKENS as some board member reportedly are against his rise to be the chairman of the supervisory board (source)

Just a personal thought from me, but what if the reason Kallenius was pissed at LH in 2021 is caused by all these financial wrecks Mercedes are in during these years? They were hit again and again. To add that, Kallenius is very adamant on his cost efficient and cost reduction objectives after these hardships. And at that time, just after 2020, LH demands a raise. A raise from a company who is literally in the trenches fighting for a surplus and good result from all the legal battles they're in and COVID that caused the board members and employees to get paid cuts. Maybe this was what pissed Kallenius off? Because at that time, Mercedes wasn't doing so well and suddenly, LH asked for pay raise to a guy who is very set and clear about saving every pennies 😭😭 That must've pissed the hell out of him. I'm not saying Lewis is wrong but kinda 💀💀 to think that the butterfly effect from that moment of their contract negotiation in 2021 to what is happening rn in 2024 💀💀.

If that is true then Zetsche is the catalyst for the butterfly effect happening rn:

Zetsche diesel scandal>Him retiring>Kallenius' rise to position>Mercedes financial flopification due to dieselgate and covid>LH demanding more salary>Cost efficient and suffering Kallenius, with his hands full on Zetsche's mess, getting pissed at LH>LH and Mercedes fallout>Kallenius using George as a piece in the contract negotiation>Toto Wolff power decrease in Kallenius' era>George to Mercedes>Another contract negotiation problems>Ambassadorial promise getting yeetus deletus-ed>LH pissed>Ferrari move early>George steps forward as team leader

If this is real. If the butterfly effect is real, then it's crazy.

#corporate talks

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the-real-zhora-salome · 6 months

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¡Do Not Panic!

Let them eat old vaccines AND plague

Hybrid cruelty

NATE BEAR

16.10.2023

There have been many scandals associated with covid in the last nearly 4 years.

I want to tell you about another one that has got zero media coverage.

The dominant covid strains right now are known as the XBBs. They have been dominant since late summer in most places, when they took over from the BA strains of omicron.

But rather than give people the new more effective XBB vaccine, the British government decided to use up their stockpile of the older BA vaccines first.

The worst thing is, those who got the outdated vaccine were those first in line for vaccines, such as older people and people with health conditions.

But they won’t know this.

So 2.3 million vulnerable people in the UK are walking around thinking they are well-protected this winter against covid when they’re not.

The British government didn’t hide why it did this. On the official government webpage it spells it out. In bold are the clues hiding in plain sight.

They used people’s bodies as asset dumps for old medical stock.

In the UK the booster roll-out began on September 11th. We know that in Scotland they switched over to XBB on September 25th and in England and Wales they switched to the new ones on October 2nd.

But by September 29th the British government reported 2.35 million people had been covid boosted. So we know this was largely with the old vaccine (save 4 days in Scotland). Even now, people are reporting they are only being offered the old vaccine.

But then the British government has for some time now been relaxed about killing people for austerity.

But the article omitted any mention of the millions who were given the older vaccine.

And the lies and misinformation about covid in the mass media continues. Last week was no exception.

Then there was the ‘long cold’ research paper which was amplified across global media.

If you missed it, the thrust was that long colds might be as common as long covid. So far, so fine.

But the findings were stripped of critical context in relation to covid.

All of this would have been bad enough without mentioning the methodology.

Triggled twice in two weeks.

Over and over, it seems that those who are concerned about covid come armed with data, and those who aren’t come armed with gut feeling in order to keep business-as-usual ticking over.

It’s 2019 again! Stop worrying!

It is tiring to keep up, to keep bearing witness to these fuck-ups, to this cruelty.

But we have to.

Because to believe in change means documenting the incompetence, the failure, the lies and the indifference that eventually compels that change to come.

#covid19

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sacrificialbull · 1 year

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December Hagging Out! Hanukkah, New Years, the Solstice, and La Befana.

Since I was very young, my immediate family's winter celebrations were many, and varied, and all meant very different things to me.

For as long as I can remember, we celebrated Hanukkah, brought to us by one of my mother's dear friends. It wasn't always the first night that we were able to gather everyone together, but we would light the menorah each night before and after, as necessary. When we gathered, it was the family my mother chose for herself that did so. Our aunts, not just of blood but also of friendship. I was welcome to bring friends as well. I helped in the kitchen with latkes when I could. I made my own box for the pennies we used to play dreidel. It has been my favorite holiday for a long, long time. It was a choice my mother made, to say that it was meaningful. And so it became meaningful to me.

My family is not Jewish, and neither am I. I mispronounce the prayers a little, but I do them every night I can during the holiday. I have my own menorah, and when I was on my own for a year, it was important for me to sit in my dining room and watch the candles burn down. To me, Hanukkah has always been about the people you choose to spend time with, the people who you let into your life.

Also as long as I can remember, we have celebrated Christmas, which has become less and less meaningful to me year after year. Christmas was obligatory. It wasn't something we did because we chose to do it. We did it because it was The Thing We Did. And I am secure in my conviction to choose not to, when it is time for me to choose.

I wish I had more to say on the Solstice; it was a work day this year, but I took some time to say my farewells to my Cousin, and to greet my Father. And to begin the wait for my lover, coming slowly and slowly back into the north. It is not a family holiday. Just something for myself.

I have a candle I will light for the New Year. I do not know what we will do, my family. Sometimes we visit with friends. Rarely do we visit with family on the eve. In the perfect world, I would spend the stroke of midnight in a bath, my candle lit & the sun in my chest.

Here is what else we do: wine and bread, marked with the coming year, eaten just after midnight. I am looking forward to it. And an hour past midnight, when it becomes the new year for one of my oldest friends, I will call her from the future, and welcome her to 2023.

I spent midnight in the bath, with my candle & the past, and felt warmth. I called my dear, dear friend, and went to bed looking at the gifts we gave each other, so many years ago.

In the morning, as we always do, we drew our medicine cards. I received Hummingbird, the medicine of Joy. I am glad that joy is with me, but. It is important to me that I remember flesh & blood. That material sensation goes hand in hand with material suffering. That the body is a prism. I hope Hummingbird will help me turn all into light, but I hope it does not steer me away from the world I have so recently come to appreciate wholly.

The medicine cards are another thing from my mother. This year, my sister's partner was with us, and so too drew a card. But it has been, for as long as I can remember, the four of us. Some years the dog drew one as well, but not every year. I think, besides Hanukkah, it is my second favorite thing we do in winter.

The final winter tradition is Little Christmas, the night of La Befana, the Christmas witch. A very Italian tradition, and perhaps the only thing of Christmas I will take with me. This is different from all the others: it is for my mother and my father and my sister and our dog and I. It is not for her family, or his. It isn't even for our friends. It is for each of us, the house. A small thing in a stocking, the witch coming 12 days late. My feelings on Christmas itself are complicated by her, and when I have the time maybe I will look into her more, and ask her why, or if she would mind, terribly, if I celebrated her without the other. The Witch of Christmas granted me a book of new short stories, full of blood & flesh. I shall treasure them.

#hagging out

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