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‘Things Will Only Get Worse.’ Putin’s War Sends Russians Into Exile.

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Lone Candle

“While the exodus of about 2.7 million Ukrainians from their war-torn country has focused the world on a burgeoning humanitarian crisis, the descent of Russia into new depths of authoritarianism has many Russians despairing of their future. That has created a flight — though much smaller than in Ukraine”

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“Some who have fled are bloggers, journalists or activists who feared arrest under Russia’s draconian new law criminalizing what the state deems “false information” about the war.
Others are musicians and artists who see no future for their crafts in Russia. And there are workers in tech, law and other industries who saw the prospect of comfortable, middle-class lives — let alone any possibility for moral acceptance of their government — dissipate overnight.

They left behind jobs and family and money stuck in Russian bank accounts that they can no longer access. They fear being tarred as Russians abroad as the West isolates the country for its deadly invasion, and they reel over the loss of a positive Russian identity.

“They didn’t just take away our future,” Polina Borodina, a Moscow playwright, said of her government’s war in Ukraine. “They took away our past.”

The speed and scale of the flight reflect the tectonic shift the invasion touched off inside Russia. For all of President Vladimir Putin’s repression, Russia until last month remained a place with extensive travel connections to the rest of the world, a mostly uncensored internet giving a platform to independent media, a thriving tech industry and a world-class arts scene. Slices of Western middle-class life — Ikea, Starbucks, affordable foreign cars — were widely available.

But when they woke up Feb. 24, many Russians knew that all that was over. Dmitry Aleshkovsky, a journalist who spent years promoting Russia’s emerging culture of charitable giving, got in his car the next day and drove to Latvia.”

The International Space Station isn’t above global politics

Posted on April 10, 2022 by Lone Candle

https://www.vox.com/recode/22960170/iss-international-space-station-politics-russia-ukraine-war

Tax the land

Posted on April 10, 2022 by Lone Candle

“One of the most straightforward solutions a land tax offers is to America’s housing crisis. That crisis is caused, in part, by the failure to appropriately use valuable in-demand land for its best purpose. Millions of people want to live in New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, or Seattle, but local tax regimes actually punish people for investing in their property. When people improve their property — either by adding a new room or building an entirely new structure like a multi-story apartment building, they’ll pay higher property taxes.

But this isn’t just a big-city problem. In small towns, vacant lots contribute to decline — and if there’s no valuable structure on a property, its delinquent landlords likely only pay a nominal property tax. This both lowers tax revenue and hurts neighborhood quality for everyone else.

Here’s where a land value tax can come into play.

Taxing land value means separating out what land is worth without any of the improvements sitting on it (like homes or industrial plants). Most Americans are familiar with property taxes that tax the value of their homes and the land they sit on as one. As New York University economist Arpit Gupta explains, part of what makes land taxes so attractive is that “there should be no economic inefficiency” if you are able to tax “true land rents.”

A land tax can’t disincentivize anything — land will continue to exist regardless of any taxation scheme.

“Land doesn’t move,” University of Illinois economist David Albouy explained. “It doesn’t disappear — so you can lower taxes on things that do go away.””

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“Taxing land reduces the profit that comes from just owning a piece of property. Instead, you are incentivized to put that land to work. Let’s take a plot of land near Times Square. That land is so valuable, basically anything you do with it will turn a massive profit so no need to develop it for its most valuable use.

However, if a land tax were to be levied, the owner of that land would need to make sure that the property on that land was actually profitable since the government is taxing away some or all of the land rents that could be charged.”

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“beyond the political issues, there are also technical concerns: Firstly, valuing land separately from the improvements to it is not so simple, though proponents argue it can be done. Secondly, implementing a land tax right now, while fair in the medium and long term, could feel drastically unfair in the short term to property owners who paid a premium for their lots because of the value of the land only to see it depreciate in value as a new tax gets implemented.

So why is this meme becoming so popular (at least among some online communities)? Lars Doucet, a prominent land value tax proponent, explains that a big part of the reason is that for a long time the automobile made sprawling suburban development possible. That meant people could still access valuable labor markets even if they couldn’t afford to live near their jobs (as long as they were willing to suffer long commutes, that is).

“Now we’ve run out of suburbs,” Doucet argued. “We can’t push any further through expansion.”

Remote work is a new development, which could buy us some more time, since it could allow many people to live even further away from city centers, but as rents skyrocket, people are desperately searching for radical solutions to America’s housing crisis.”

An expert on the dismal state of nuclear treaties

Posted on April 10, 2022 by Lone Candle

“When the [second] Bush administration came in, they actually used the withdrawal provision to get the country out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that had been in place since 1972. That limited what kind of missile defenses both sides could deploy. [The administration] didn’t want to see any limits at all anymore. And ironically, to this day, we have not deployed defenses that are substantially in excess of those limits. In fact, I think with very slight modifications to the treaty — deployment locations, things like that — we could still be inside it. But the point was more to get rid of the treaties, in my view, than it was to actually deploy a working defense.”

We have the best view yet of Covid-19’s origins. What should we do about it?

Posted on April 9, 2022 by Lone Candle

“In two February preprint papers, first reported by the New York Times, researchers traced the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the pathogen that causes Covid-19, in 2019 in Wuhan. One study looked at initial infections at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the first cases were detected. The other examined the genomes of the earliest strains of the virus. Around the same time, researchers from the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published their own findings from virus samples they collected from animals and the environment around the market in early 2020.

In addition to seafood, vendors at the market sold live animals, including those collected from remote wilderness areas.

Together, the studies connect the dots of transmission at the epicenter of the pandemic, observing that the virus likely made the leap from animals to humans more than once. “Once you understand that there were infected animals in the market, then multiple spillovers are not just a possibility, they’re what you would expect at that point,” Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University and a co-author on both papers, told Vox.

The studies’ conclusions contradict some early reports that the Huanan market was not the original locus of Covid-19. The results also echo how scientists think the first SARS virus spread to humans in 2002. According to Garry, they make the possibility that the outbreak began with a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology much less plausible.”

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“while researchers have narrowed down the location in the market where the outbreak likely began and have identified several potential animal hosts, they still haven’t found the specific animals that were infected. And though scientists have found several related viruses in the wild, they haven’t found one yet that they think could have directly spawned SARS-CoV-2.”

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“it may not be possible to find out since the specific infected animals were likely culled. “You’d have to be a time traveler or something like that to go back and see,” Garry said.”

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“The lab leak hypothesis holds that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a facility roughly eight miles from the Huanan market. Proponents of the theory point to several factors. Researchers there were known to be studying bat coronaviruses. Specifically, they documented a bat coronavirus called RaTG13. Discovered in 2013, it has a genetic sequence with 96 percent overlap with SARS-CoV-2.

Scientists at the Wuhan Institute were also conducting experiments under lower safety conditions than most scientists would recommend for respiratory viruses. Some researchers argue that the types of experiments they were conducting constitute gain of function, where a virus is engineered to become more infectious.

Circumstantially, pathogens have escaped from Chinese laboratories before. And the Chinese government’s actions have added to the suspicions. They may have covered up the extent of the original outbreak, and international investigators have complained that the Chinese government still has not been fully transparent with what happened during the early days of the outbreak.

However, there appears to be no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology had an actual isolated sample of SARS-CoV-2, nor did they have any live ancestor to the virus, including RaTG13. They only recorded the genetic sequence.

The latest studies show also that the earliest clusters of the virus were concentrated in a specific area of the Huanan market. If the virus were introduced by a person from outside the market, environmental samples testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 would likely have been spread out more through the building.

In addition, the fact that two distinct lineages emerged in the early outbreak would require that someone from the lab would have had to introduce two different versions of the virus to the lab on two separate occasions.

“The simplest explanation is that infected animals infected people,” Garry said. “You have to go through quite a bit of mental gymnastics to go ‘it came from the lab to the market,’ and you have to believe that happened twice.””