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Full article: https://imgur.com/a/SwMitsV

A bipartisan group of US senators hopes to meet President Xi Jinping in China next week, as a flurry of diplomacy bolsters expectations of a leaders meeting between the two superpowers. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his Republican colleague Senator Mike Crapo will raise the issue of Micron Technology Corp.’s ability to do business in the country during their trip, according to people familiar with the preparations. The company faces an ongoing probe by the Chinese government’s cybersecurity administration.

The senators also plan to meet with the US business community in Shanghai, among other groups, and discuss concerns about the investment climate for US companies, the people said, asking not to be identified to discuss details of the visit that aren’t yet public.

“The purpose is for us to engage with them, just like you’ve seen some of the senior administration officials, on the broad array of issues that we have,” Crapo said in an interview, declining to comment on specific matters the senators will discuss. “We really believe that the more engagement we have, the more opportunity and potential there is to resolve conflict.”

He added that the group is seeking a meeting with Xi, but noted such an engagement hasn’t been confirmed. While Xi did meet with congress leaders in 2015 during a state visit to the US, typically senior American officials sit down with Chinese ministers on trips to Beijing rather than the president.

The senators’ trip follows several China visits by high-level officials in President Joe Biden’s administration seeking to smooth ties after months of escalating tensions. The US is hoping to open the door to a potential November meeting between Biden and Xi at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco. Beijing hasn’t confirmed whether the Chinese leader will attend.

The White House is aware of the senators’ trip plans and encouraged them to go, people familiar with the matter said. A spokeswoman for the National Security Council didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Micron, headquartered in Boise, Idaho, is currently building a major chip-fabrication plant in upstate New York, making its business issues home-state concerns for both Crapo and Schumer, who represent those states. Micron has said the cyber probe has put half of its China sales at risk.

Schumer’s office has previously confirmed that he was planning a trip to China, South Korea and Japan but hasn’t released details. A Micron spokesperson declined to comment on the trip.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo raised issues on behalf of Micron and other American firms when she visited China in August.

TFA: The plane, a Cessna 177 Cardinal, “experienced an emergency after takeoff” and attempted to return to the airport but failed to reach the runway

Wikipedia: The Cessna 177 Cardinal is a light single-engine, high-wing general aviation aircraft produced by Cessna. It was intended to replace the Cessna 172 Skyhawk. First announced in 1967, it was produced from 1968 to 1978.

A 45+ year old general aviation single engine aircraft

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’

Comrade Trump shitting on the Great Satan's imperialist military.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231002071157/https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20230803/fema-and-fcc-plan-nationwide-emergency-alert-test-oct-4-2023

New preamble:

Palestinian resistance groups have launched an operation in and around Gaza to fight the genocidal settler state oppressing them. Thousands of rockets have been launched towards the so-called state of Israel, overwhelming the Iron Dome. Settlers and the troops protecting them are being killed in the settlements surrounding Gaza, with many caught by surprise in the first few hours of the operation.

Palestinians are taking many Israeli settlers and soldiers hostage and bringing them back to Gaza. An Israeli general, Nimrod Aloni, has been confirmed captured. Palestinians are also taking military and civilian equipment back. Drones and MANPADS appear to be in use, and a number of Merkava tanks have been destroyed/disabled and their occupants removed and taken hostage. Palestinian forces appear to be heading in two main directions so far: southeast in the direction of Be'er Sheva, and along the coast in the direction of Ashkelon, but settlements all around Gaza have been assaulted and taken. It is obviously unknown how far they intend to go, or what their intermediate goals are.

Israel is bombing the Gaza Strip with aircraft, destroying buildings. It appears that their intelligence on the location of Palestinian forces outside of Gaza is very poor, and haven't been able to meaningfully strike them. Netanyahu has given a statement declaring that Israel is in a state of war. Iran has issued statements in support of the uprising, and Israel has responded with hostility to those comments. In all, the IDF appears to still be in a shockingly bad state hours after the assault began.

Old preamble on Antarctica:

The Country of the Week is Syria! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.

The weekly update is here!

They are looking to charge him with terrorism. But dude looks beyond proud of himself and I am happy for him. lol

1. Men abuse women

2. Women avoid men and give up in general

3. Men: "Maybe abusing them harder will work?"

I fucking hate misogyny

🔥 🇰🇷 🔥

The guy who put behind bars is now a convict himself. My how the turn tables.

This is what losing looks like.

The British are seeking to establish tripwires in western Ukraine and the Black Sea.

Best case scenario:

The British foresee that this war is going to drag on for years to come and they are seeking to expedite the training of new recruits while reducing the cost.

Mediocre scenario:

The British foresee the risk of Ukraine losing ground and they are seeking to establish redlines in Western Ukraine to prevent Russia from taking the entire country.

Worst case scenario:

The British are seeking to station forces on Ukrainian soil and in the Black Sea to use as a pretext for declaring war on Russia in the case that a British serviceperson or vessel inevitably cops a wayward Russian projectile.

Ukraine aid not included in the bill. Republicans are once again broken clocks.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/731180

So the shooter was originally planning to kill dozens of people, but his shitty pistol jammed after he shot the dude.

The Albanese government released its employment white paper last week.

It presented the document as a major piece of work, comparable to white papers from past eras.

It outlined the government's ambition to fix major problems in our labour market, and it contained a new definition of "full employment."

But was it ground-breaking? Will it lead to cultural change?

The scourge of involuntary unemployment

Let's start with some positives.

The government says the concept of "full employment," as the Reserve Bank defines it these days, is inadequate.

It says what the RBA considers full employment has co-existed with a large amount of "involuntary unemployment" in the economy, and it wants to change that.

This is important.

The debate about involuntary unemployment stretches back more than 80 years and it's really interesting to see the government resurrecting it.

I'll show you what I mean.

In 1936, British economist John Maynard Keynes published an influential book called The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

It inspired a wave of "full employment" policies that washed across the democratic world in the 1940s and 50s.

Keynes showed, in that book, that the traditional way of thinking about unemployment was ignorant and damaging.

He said orthodox economists assumed there were only two types of unemployment: frictional and voluntary unemployment.

But there was actually a third type — involuntary unemployment — that described the reality of millions of people who wanted to work but couldn't get work because there wasn't enough demand for their labour.

He said "full employment" would only exist when involuntary unemployment disappeared (leaving only frictional and voluntary unemployment).

And his book opened peoples' eyes.

It inspired policymakers in countries like Australia to deliberately stimulate economic activity to create enough demand for labour so involuntary unemployment would collapse as a category.

See the graph below.

It shows what happened to Australia's unemployment rate in that post-war era of full employment policy.

Full employment and unemployment average

Now, fast forward to today.

The government's Employment White Paper is clearly drawing on some of that thinking.

It says the modern definition of "full employment" used by the RBA is far too narrow, and our conversations about full employment have to admit the reality of involuntary unemployment and high levels of under-utilisation of Australian workers in the modern era.

It's also revived some wisdom from older conceptions of full employment by reminding us that genuine full employment has qualitative aspects too.

What does that mean?

It means the quality of a job is also important for people, and jobs should pay fair wages and be reasonably located. And if someone's unemployed, it should never take them so long to find a job that it starts to demoralise them.

Those qualitative aspects of full employment were emphasised by William Beveridge in 1944, in his landmark work "Full Employment in a Free Society", which I wrote about a few months ago.

According to Beveridge, if full employment meant anything it meant an abundance of jobs that paid decent wages, where unemployed people don't languish in unemployment, and where labour markets slightly favour workers, not employers.

So, the Albanese government is drawing our attention back to the scourge of involuntary unemployment, and it's emphasising the qualitative aspects of abundant work, to say that that's what full employment really is.

So that's all really interesting.

A bit of courage, but not too much

Strangely, after building the case for a "new" definition of full employment, the government's white paper feels like it melts away.

It doesn't promise to use a muscular set of policies to drive involuntary unemployment out of the system quickly.

Instead, it uses a lot of words (the paper has 264 pages) to explain something meek, which is: it doesn't actually want to be too disruptive.

So, the paper says the Reserve Bank will continue to use its too-narrow concept of full employment to make decisions about monetary policy, but the government will try very hard to remove supply-side barriers to employment to help structural unemployment decline over time.

That way, it says, if things go according to plan, the RBA should eventually be able to sustain a much lower level of unemployment than it has for decades, with much lower rates of labour under-utilisation.

Does that sound revolutionary to you?

It doesn't to me. It sounds like the same ambition successive governments have had for 30 years, ever since the Reserve Bank began targeting inflation in the early 1990s.

And in a moment of cognitive dissonance, the white paper even criticises the outcomes of that familiar policy approach.

"Despite its many successes, the Australian economy has rarely achieved full employment for extended periods and there have been prolonged periods when the available labour force was under-utilised to a much greater extent than it is today," it says.

So, it's hard to avoid the feeling that this white paper is slightly confused, or is saying a lot about not very much.

But then, maybe that's unfair.

Maybe it does have a big ambition but it's obscured by verbiage. Or maybe it's deliberately obtuse, and we'll have to wait to see what type of legislation the government tries to pass through parliament before we understand what its ultimate agenda is.

Would it survive a change of government?

So where does it leave us?

Would it be easier to be enthusiastic about the white paper if its vision was clearer and its ambition bolder?

On that score, it does compare unfavourably to the 1945 White Paper on Full Employment.

That 1945 paper was much smaller (it only contained 131 paragraphs), was written in the simplest language, and it had a major impact.

It declared its intentions from the start: it wanted to change Australia.

When John Dedman, the minister for Post-War Reconstruction, presented the paper to parliament on 30 May 1945, he didn't mince his words:

"I believe that this white paper constitutes a charter for a new social order.

"The old order of the inter-war years had as its prime objective rigid adherence to a certain financial policy. If this entailed 30 per cent unemployment and dwindling world trade, then, according to the pundits of that day, these were necessary evils.

"What a miserable social structure they built on their own false foundation."

He explained clearly how the white paper was structured:

"First, it sets forth boldly and unequivocally the government's intention to secure full employment for the people of Australia after the war.

"Secondly, it outlines the method by which the government proposes to achieve this aim.

"Thirdly, it examines the special problems which will face the Australian economy in the transition from war to peace."

And he said Commonwealth and State governments had to accept responsibility for stimulating spending on goods and services to the extent necessary to sustain full employment, because the welfare of everyone depended on it:

"The policy of full employment is the government's positive contribution to the security of the individual. Full employment spells opportunity, and opportunity opens the way for achievement [...]

"This white paper is an affirmation by the government of Australia that it intends to pursue that policy with the utmost energy and determination."

Clear and digestible. There was no guessing what the policy was or what the government planned for the country.

And when the government lost power four years later (for a variety of reasons), that full employment policy was popular enough to survive the change.

In fact, the victorious Liberal Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, adopted it as his own and pursued full employment for the next 16 years.

Can we see that happening with this white paper?