Saturday, July 09, 2022

9: Eid Mubarak

Import explosion and trade deficit pushing Nepal into economic crisis Feverish consumption has been a bonanza for the trading sector, but the phenomenon brought disaster to manufacturing and agriculture sectors, experts say........ Experts have described Nepal's current economic situation as the "Dutch disease" because feverish consumption has been a bonanza for the trading sector, but brought disaster to manufacturing and agriculture......... 20 percent of the loans issued by banks have gone to fund trading, which particularly represents wholesale and retail services........ “Remittance is good, but it is hurting the country's competitiveness as all skilled and semi-skilled people are going abroad,” the report said. “The money they send back to the country is not utilised in the productive sector either.” ........ Edible oil imports in the whole of the fiscal year 2018-19 were valued at Rs37.12 billion. ...... Experts say that importing and re-exporting edible oil under zero tariff privilege gives Nepali traders a profit of almost 45 percent, an advantage Nepal receives under the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA). ....... Remittance inflows have risen sharply since 2001, growing by 2 percent to 11 percent annually with political instability playing a major role in driving youths to go abroad to work for lack of jobs in the country.......

There is a mismatch between remittance and job creation indicating that most of the money is going into consumption rather than production or employment creation.

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जन्मसिद्धका सन्तानलाई नागरिकता दिने सहमति जुटेको छ : महतो .

Ukraine’s Implausible Theories of Victory The Fantasy of Russian Defeat and the Case for Diplomacy .......... Russia would disgorge the territorial gains it has made since February. Ukraine would recognize neither the annexation of Crimea nor the secessionist statelets in the Donbas and would continue down the path toward membership in the EU and NATO. ........ With some combination of battlefield gains and economic pressure, the West can convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war—or convince someone in his circle to forcibly replace him. ......... In Ukraine, the Russian army is likely strong enough to defend most of its gains. In Russia, the economy is autonomous enough and Putin’s grip tight enough that the president cannot be coerced into giving up those gains, either. The most likely outcome of the current strategy, then, is not a Ukrainian triumph but a long, bloody, and ultimately indecisive war. A drawn-out conflict would be costly not only in terms of the loss of human life and economic damage but also in terms of escalation—including the potential use of nuclear weapons. ........... Ukraine’s leaders and its backers speak as if victory is just around the corner. But that view increasingly appears to be a fantasy. Ukraine and the West should therefore reconsider their ambitions and shift from a strategy of winning the war toward a more realistic approach: finding a diplomatic compromise that ends the fighting. ........... In April, the British defense ministry estimated that 15,000 Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine. Assuming that the number of wounded was three times as high, which was the average experience during World War II, that would imply that roughly 60,000 Russians had been knocked out of commission. Initial Western estimates put the size of the frontline Russian force in Ukraine at 120 battalion tactical groups, which would total at most 120,000 people. If these casualty estimates were correct, the strength of most Russian combat units would have fallen below 50 percent, a figure that experts suggest renders a combat unit at least temporarily ineffective. .......... Ukraine’s forces could beat the enemy in mechanized warfare, with tanks and accompanying infantry and artillery, just as Israel beat its Arab enemies in the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has sufficient mechanized combat units to densely defend their vast fronts, which means in principle that either side should be vulnerable to rapid, hard-hitting mechanized attacks. ......... Russian forces could find their flanks and supply lines vulnerable to counterattacks—as appears to have occurred on a small scale around Kyiv in the early battles of the war. .......... Ukraine’s recent counterattacks in the Kherson region do not appear to involve much surprise or maneuver. Rather, they seem to look like the kind of slow, grinding offensives that the Russians have themselves mounted in the Donbas. ............. a country’s ability to conduct mechanized warfare correlates with its socioeconomic development. Both technical and managerial skills are needed to keep thousands of machines and electronic devices in working order and to coordinate far-flung, fast-moving combat units in real time. Ukraine and Russia have similarly skilled populations from which to draw their soldiers, so it is unlikely that the former enjoys an advantage in mechanized warfare. ............ Russia enjoys a three-to-one advantage in population and economic output, a gap that even the highest-tech tools would be hard-pressed to close. ......... It is much harder to exploit advanced technology to go on the offense against an adversary that possesses a significant quantitative advantage, because doing so requires overcoming both superior numbers and the tactical advantages of defense. ............. Alternatively, Putin doesn’t see how fast battlefield attrition and economic privation are undercutting his support, but others in his circle do, and in their own naked self-interest, they depose and perhaps even execute him. Once in power, they sue for peace. Either way, Russia concedes defeat. .......... For one thing, Putin is a veteran intelligence professional who presumably knows a lot about conspiracies, including how to defend against them. This alone makes a strategy of regime change suspect, even if there were some in Moscow who were willing to risk their lives to try it. For another thing, squeezing the Russian economy is unlikely to produce sufficient privation to create meaningful political pressure against Putin. The West can make the lives of Russians a bit drabber, and it can deprive Russian weapons manufacturers of sophisticated imported electronic subcomponents. But these achievements seem unlikely to shake Putin or his rule. Russia is a vast and populous country, with ample arable land, plentiful energy supplies, lots of other natural resources, and a big, if dated, industrial base. ........

U.S. President Donald Trump tried and failed to strangle Iran, a much smaller and less developed but equally energy independent country. It is hard to see how the same strategy will work against Russia.

............. Great powers often incur major war losses for years, even for flimsy reasons. The United States did so in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq; the Soviet Union did so in Afghanistan. ........... If mounting casualties require Ukraine to throw ever less prepared troops into a hopeless battle, support for an open-ended war of attrition would erode even further. At the same time, the Russians are likely to have a high tolerance for pain. Putin has so controlled the domestic narrative about his war that many Russian citizens see the fight the same way he does—as a crucial battle for national security. And Russia has more people than Ukraine. ........... Nobody can say with certainty that the Russian army cannot be hit hard enough or cleverly enough to induce its collapse or that Russia cannot be hurt enough to induce Putin to surrender. But these outcomes are highly improbable. At present, the most plausible result after months or years of fighting is a stalemate close to the current battle lines. ........ At some point, then, the two countries will likely find it expedient to negotiate. Both sides will have to recognize that these must be true negotiations, in which each must give up something of value. ............. the West should move toward the negotiating table now. .......... The difference between the two experiments is that diplomacy is cheap. Besides time, airfare, and coffee, its only costs are political. ........... Russia possesses powerful and diverse nuclear forces, and the imminent collapse of its effort in Ukraine might tempt Putin to use them. .......... Ukraine would have to relinquish considerable territory and do so in writing. Russia would need to relinquish some of its battlefield gains and renounce future territorial claims. To prevent a future Russian attack, Ukraine would surely need strong assurances of U.S. and European military support, as well as continuing military aid (but consisting mainly of defensive, not offensive, weapons). Russia would need to acknowledge the legitimacy of such arrangements. The West would need to agree to relax many of the economic sanctions it has placed on Russia. NATO and Russia would need to launch a new set of negotiations to limit the intensity of military deployments and interactions along their respective frontiers. ............. The Ukrainian and Western theories of victory have been built on weak reasoning. At best, they are a costly avenue to a painful stalemate that leaves much Ukrainian territory in Russian hands. If this is the best that can be hoped for after additional months or years of fighting, then there is only one responsible thing to do: seek a diplomatic end to the war now. .



Thinking About the Unthinkable in Ukraine What Happens If Putin Goes Nuclear? ........ “Whoever tries to impede us, let alone create threats for our country and its people, must know that the Russian response will be immediate and lead to the consequences you have never seen in history,” Putin declared in February in the first of many statements warning of a potential nuclear strike. .......... the danger would be greatest if the war were to turn decisively in Ukraine’s favor. ......... The Russians might do this by setting off one or a few tactical nuclear weapons against Ukrainian forces or by triggering a symbolic explosion over an empty area. ........... The United States could opt to rhetorically decry a nuclear detonation but do nothing militarily. It could unleash nuclear weapons of its own. Or it could refrain from a nuclear counterattack but enter the war directly with large-scale conventional airstrikes and the mobilization of ground forces. All those alternatives are bad because no low-risk options exist for coping with the end of the nuclear taboo. A conventional war response is the least bad of the three because it avoids the higher risks of either the weaker or the stronger options. ........ Back then, it was NATO that relied in principle on the option of deliberate escalation—beginning with the limited use of tactical nuclear weapons—as a way to halt a Soviet invasion. This strategy was controversial, but it was adopted because the West believed its conventional forces to be inferior to the Warsaw Pact’s. .......... Today, with the balance of forces reversed since the Cold War, the current Russian doctrine of “escalate to deescalate” mimics NATO’s Cold War “flexible response” concept. ........... He could play the madman and apply nuclear shock as an acceptable risk for ending the war on Russian terms. ....... If a few Russian nuclear weapons do not provoke the United States into direct combat, Moscow will have a green light to use even more such weapons and crush Ukraine quickly. ......... there is a very real possibility that policymakers would wind up with the weakest option: rant about the unthinkable barbarity of the Russian action and implement whatever unused economic sanctions are still available but do nothing militarily. This would signal that Moscow has complete freedom of action militarily, including the further use of nuclear weapons to wipe out Ukrainian defenses, essentially conceding a Russian victory. ......... During the Cold War, strategists critical of relying on tactical nuclear weapons to counter invading Soviet forces quipped, “In Germany, the towns are only two kilotons apart.” Using nuclear weapons instead against targets inside Russia would intensify the danger of triggering unlimited war. .......... would risk unleashing the all-out mutual destruction of the major powers’ homelands. ........... Direct entry into the war at the conventional level would not neutralize panic in the West. But it would mean that Russia would be faced with the prospect of combat against a NATO that was substantially superior in nonnuclear forces, backed by a nuclear retaliatory capability, and less likely to remain restrained if Russia turned its nuclear strikes against U.S. rather than Ukrainian forces. The second important message to emphasize would be that any subsequent Russian nuclear use would trigger American nuclear retaliation. ........ Direct war between the major powers that starts at any level risks escalation to mass destruction. Such a strategy would appear weaker than retaliation in kind and would worsen the Russians’ desperation about losing rather than relieve it, thus leaving their original motive for escalation in place along with the possibility that they would double down and use even more nuclear weapons. ............ So far, Moscow has been buoyed by the refusal of China, India, and other countries to fully join the economic sanctions campaign imposed by the West. These fence sitters, however, have a stake in maintaining the nuclear taboo. They might be persuaded to declare that their continued economic collaboration with Russia is contingent on it refraining from the use of nuclear weapons. As a declaration about a still hypothetical eventuality, the neutral countries could see this as a low-cost gesture, a way to keep the West off their backs by addressing a situation they don’t expect to occur. ........... Russia is utterly vulnerable to nuclear retaliation, and as generations of thinkers and practitioners on both sides have reiterated, a nuclear war has no winner.

Can Putin Survive? The Lessons of the Soviet Collapse

The Beginning of the End for Putin? Dictatorships Look Stable—Until They Aren’t ....... Putin’s attack on Ukraine has been a clarifying moment. Since he came to power in 2000, various Western leaders have tried to cooperate, accommodate, or negotiate with him. But by embarking on a war of choice against a country he claims doesn’t have a right to exist, Putin has forced the international community to see him for what he is: a belligerent leader with a remarkable capacity for destruction.

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Monday, July 04, 2022

4: Netflix

Hitting the road costs $700 a month Even if your car is paid off, it's still costly to drive. Gas prices have reached an average of more than $5 per gallon across the U.S., with states like California seeing prices nearing $10.



RadioShack's 'wild' pivot to crypto



Is the Netflix era nearing its end?



Why execs are here for hybrid work

64% of workers would choose WFH over a $30,000 raise





Netflix Says It’s Business as Usual. Is That Good Enough? Long Hollywood’s leading innovator, the streaming service is staying the course, despite serious challenges to its business and questions about its content. .......... For years, Netflix has been the leading innovator in Hollywood, spearheading a revolution in how people around the world watch movies and television. Now, confronting the loss of subscribers for the first time in a decade — with more losses expected this year — Netflix’s main response seems to be an effort to crack down on password sharing among friends and family members, as well as an introduction of a lower-priced advertising tier. There is some concern in Hollywood and on Wall Street that those moves are not enough. ......... The savior to Netflix is they spend $17 billion on content, and they need more ‘Stranger Things’ and less ‘Space Force.’” ........ Netflix reached more than 221 million subscribers worldwide by taking chances: greenlighting ambitious content, paying for shows it believed in whether or not they featured big names, giving great latitude to famed directors like Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese. ........ In 2019 — when Disney+ and Apple TV+ were just getting started and HBO Max did not exist — Netflix spent $2.6 billion on marketing. In 2021, when competition greatly increased, it spent $2.5 billion.......... the company still intends to spend some $17 billion on content this year. ......... Netflix had fallen from second to fourth place in the firm’s annual streaming customer satisfaction survey, behind HBO Max, Disney+ and Hulu. .......... by the end of 2025 nearly a third of the subscriber base would pay for the cheaper ad-supported model, roughly 100 million users. ......... In the end, though, Netflix’s success will most likely come down to how well it spends its $17 billion content budget.

Updated Covid Shots Are Coming. Will They Be Too Late? The government has greenlit new vaccines to defend against the latest Omicron variants. But the shots won’t arrive until the fall, and cases are rising now. ......... The most evasive forms of Omicron yet, known as BA.4 and BA.5, appear to be driving a fresh surge of cases across much of the United States. The same subvariants have sent hospital admissions climbing in Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium and Israel. ....... In the worst case, epidemiologists have predicted some 200,000 Covid deaths in the United States within the next year. ........ More than half of vaccinated Americans have not received a booster. Three-quarters of those eligible for a second booster have not gotten one. ......... This spring, people age 50 and older who had received a single booster were dying from Covid at four times the rate of those with two booster doses ....... whereas flu viruses typically turn over in the course of years, new coronavirus variants can emerge and then start stampeding across the world within months.

How TikTok Became a Best Seller Machine #BookTok, where enthusiastic readers share reading recommendations, has gone from being a novelty to becoming an anchor in the publishing industry and a dominant driver of fiction sales. ......... Publishers were surprised, authors were surprised, even the readers making those TikTok videos were surprised. ........ A year later, the hashtag #BookTok has become a sustained and powerful force in the world of books, helping to create some of the biggest sellers on the market. ........ Books by the writer Colleen Hoover, for example, became a sensation on TikTok, and Ms. Hoover is now one of the best selling authors in the country. NPD BookScan, which tracks the sale of most printed books in the United States, said that of the ten best selling books so far this year, Ms. Hoover has written four. .........

no other form of social media has ever had this kind of impact on sales

........ BookTok is not dominated by the usual power players in the book world such as authors and publishers but by regular readers, many of them young, who share recommendations and videos of themselves talking about the books they love, sometimes weeping or screaming or tossing a copy across the room. .......... In essence, BookTok supercharges something that’s always been essential to selling a book: word of mouth. ......... “It’s not one video that makes a book explode in sales,” said Ms. Brown from Doubleday. “It’s this grass roots explosion of people creating the videos and then organically, by word of mouth, it grows from there.”

The Best Films of 2022, So Far Here are the movies that our critics say have made the year a strong one onscreen.

The 25 Most Significant New York City Novels From the Last 100 Years Four writers and one bookseller gathered over Zoom to make a list devoted to fiction in which the city is more than mere setting. .......... If anything, New York’s scale and complexity — the diversity of neighborhoods and industries and lives that coexist here — are what make it an inexhaustible and consistently compelling setting. .......... Also, I think there’s a version of New York where people almost never leave their apartments and aren’t that interested in the city, and she’s on that list for me. There’s something hermetic about her work that feels true to New York. ........ “The aim is a realism dilated to deal with the almost surreal state of our everyday American life,” he wrote in response to readers of an early excerpt from the book. “Invisible Man” (1952) tracks the pilgrimage an unnamed narrator — a Black American — takes across the country’s racist underbelly. He begins in the Deep South, with all its attendant humiliations, then joins the Great Migration by moving to Harlem, where he comes across an old couple getting evicted and argues with the authorities on their behalf. His gift for oration makes him useful to the Brotherhood (a stand-in for the Communist Party, with which Ellison grew disenchanted during World War II), but just as the narrator’s profile begins to rise, making it harder for the Brotherhood to order him around, he’s pushed aside. Soon after, he sees an old friend, Brother Clifton, get shot and killed for having the nerve to assert his humanity to a police officer. .......... but in New York, everybody comes from somewhere else, kind of, and the idea that those histories and the national history are also baked into the city is something that doesn’t always come through .......... To what extent is race in America, particularly Blackness, a choice, and to what extent is it an inheritance? What are its various obligations, privileges and betrayals? “Passing” (1929), a classic of the Harlem Renaissance, ripples with the complexity of such questions. Set mostly in 1920s Manhattan, the novella follows Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black society wife, as she reconnects with Clare Kendry, an acquaintance from childhood who has embraced her “white-passing” features, severing nearly all ties to her past and taking a wealthy white husband. .......... At one point, the book alludes to Rhinelander v. Rhinelander, the 1925 divorce trial in which a white man accused his wife of obscuring her mixed-race ancestry. .......... Lutie Johnson, a single mother hellbent on providing a better life for her 8-year-old son, moves into a tiny Harlem apartment on 116th Street, a temporary arrangement that gets her “just one step farther up on the ladder of success,” though she’s hemmed in by a handsy super, a neighbor who’s a madam, a son who unwittingly runs afoul of the law and, of course, various power structures. ..........

Lutie’s son “didn’t have the ghost of a chance on that street. The best you could give him wasn’t good enough.”

......... Sam, for his part, has fallen for the handsome Tracy Bacon, the radio voice of the Escapist, at a time when gay men are routinely rounded up and thrown in jail.

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