float glass is glass that has been imbued with mystical power to form free-floating orbs
(it's actually glass poured onto metal in such a way that it forms a very level surface, free of distortions, sometimes used in windows)
Portuguese companies doing four-day week cut hours by 13.7%
More than 70% of the companies have adopted organisational changes, such as reducing the number and duration of meetings, creating work blocks or adopting new software, say the study’s coordinators, which indicates that 95% of the companies rate the test positively.
The four-day week also had an impact on workers’ mental health, with the anxiety index decreasing by 21%, fatigue by 23%, insomnia or sleep problems by 19%, depressive states by 21%, tension by 21% and loneliness by 14%.
Levels of exhaustion from work fell by 19%, and the percentage of workers who found it difficult or very difficult to reconcile work and family fell from 46% to 8%. The majority (65%) of workers spent more time with their families after the start of the reduction in working hours.
The report also indicates that 85% of workers “would only agree to move to a company with five-day working hours if they received a salary increase of more than 20%”.
Worse than last year's, better than next year's
Your Thursday Briefing
The World Bank has warned that debt servicing costs are set to soar to crisis levels as high interest rates damage developing economies. If only there was some organization who could do something about this!
COP28 has ended with nearly 200 countries agreeing to transition away from fossil fuels and to triple renewable energy and double energy efficiency. Is it binding or non-binding? You already know the answer to that question. Onwards to a global warming of 2C!
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Poland must offer legal recognition of same-sex marriages. The ECHR cannot force countries to change their laws, but can induce monetary pressure. Under the recently-departed PiS party, they probably would have ignored this, but Donald Tusk's coalition has promised to introduce recognition for same-sex partnerships and has created a position of Minister for Equality in the cabinet; she has welcomed the ECHR's decision.
Xi Jinping has finished up his visit to Vietnam. In September, the US and Vietnam entered into a comprehensive strategic partnership (which China also has with Vietnam, by the way), which prompted western analysts to proclaim that Vietnam was being drawn into the US's orbit. On the contrary, China and Vietnam have just signed 30 agreements covering defense, trade, infrastructure, public security, joint maritime patrols, and supporting each others' path to socialism. In addition, Vietnam signed onto further cooperation in the Belt and Road Initiative, and the Two Corridors, One Belt program. It seems to me that Vietnam is - gasp - following its material interests by not cutting off either of its two single largest trading partners (exporting 28% of total exports to the US and 16% to China; importing 39% of total imports from China and 3% from the US).
China continues to be suffering from success, with overcapacity in the fields of electric vehicles and solar panels being a major challenge to tackle in 2024, and Chinese corporations are trying to sell their excess cheap EVs overseas. China dominates 80% of global supply chains of photovoltaic products and automotive batteries, and over 60% of the world's EVs were made in China. The US has kept these EVs solar panels at bay with tariffs and protectionism, disguised as the whole "democracy vs autocracy" thing. The EU is also unhappy, launching investigations into the EV sector. India has tariffs on Chinese photovoltaics and Turkey has tariffs on Chinese EVs too.
A Chinese banker has been jailed for life in the country's largest ever corruption case in the banking sector; it involved nearly $500 million from 1993 to 2001. The banker had been on the run for 20 years before being extradited from the US in 2021.
Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary has resigned as the political fundraising scandal escalates, in which he was embroiled. He is suspected of receiving the yen equivalent of $70,000 from kickbacks from fundraising events hosted by his party faction. The whole of the LDP has been under heavy scrutiny after its largest faction, Seiwaken, led by the late doohickeyified Shinzo Abe, failed to declare hundreds of millions of yen in fundraising events revenue, possibly pooling secret funds. Several other ministers have resigned, leading to the party's largest faction having no representatives within the Cabinet.
I am always kinda curious about what makes politicians resign. If I heard that a major UK politician or even ex-PM had been embroiled in some scandal - such as one to do with a particular disease - then not only would I not expect them to resign, I would expect them to fail upwards and be promoted.
The Niger-Benin crude pipeline, operated by the China National Petroleum Corporation and launched in November, will enable Niger to sell its crude oil internationally for the first time, hopefully beginning at the start of 2024. Niger will export 90,000 barrels per day and will get 25% of the revenue. Niger produces 110,000 barrels per day, and has a refinery capacity of 20,000 barrels per day. Tchiani plans to build a second refinery with the help of "external partners" to be refine more oil and not rely on crude oil.
The Mississippi river is having to be constantly dredged, removing the sediment to keep the river deep enough for barges to move down it, as 60% of America's exported grain travels the river by barge. This is becoming increasingly difficult as the regional climate swings wildly between rainstorms and droughts as climate change accelerates, and these swings cause sudden deposits of sediment in various chokepoints. All these millions of tons of sandy sediment has to go somewhere, and decades-long agreements on where to put it are running their course, and people don't tend to want a mountain of sand dumped on their farms, so there is growing difficulty in finding new storage.
Kadyrov has said that the Ukraine conflict will end by the spring or summer of 2024. It most definitely will not. He also mused that if Russia had been allowed by Putin to do what Israel has done to Gaza, the war would have been over in three months.
If I was an accelerationist communist in disguise as a reactionary, this is exactly what I would do to create a revolutionary situation
China’s running away with production in strategic industries as US, G7 suffer rapid declines
China’s efforts and investment in advanced industries has paid off as it continues to gain market share from the rest of the world in sectors including computers and electronics, chemicals, basic metals and motor vehicles, according to a report by a US-based technology group.
As of 2020, China was the world’s leading producer in seven of the 10 industries covered by the Information Technology Innovation Foundation (ITIF) report released on Wednesday. According to the “China Is Running Away With Strategic Industries” report, China was the world’s leading producer in computers and electronics; chemicals; machinery and equipment; motor vehicles; basic metals; fabricated metals; and electrical equipment. The United States, meanwhile, was the world’s leading producer in pharmaceuticals, IT and information technology services and other transportation.
"Other transportation" is basically aircraft, which figures I suppose. One wonders how much of the AI and blockchain boondoggles are contributing to US IT services, versus how much is actually meaningful. I also wonder how much pharmaceuticals being hilariously overpriced is inflating US figures there too.
But while the rest of the world outperformed China in just pharmaceuticals and IT and information technology services, the report said, the dominance might not be sustainable as the Chinese government has targeted biopharmaceuticals and artificial intelligence as key industries for development. “China now dominates the strategically important industries in ITIF’s Hamilton Index, producing more than any other nation in absolute terms and more than all but a few others in relative terms,” the ITIF said.
To match the advanced-industry share of China’s economy, US output would have to expand by US$1.5 trillion, or by 69 per cent, which would require doubling output from all 10 industries except for IT and information technology services. “China’s rapid growth in market share across the 10 industries in the Hamilton Index mirrored rapid declines for the United States and for G7 and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations as blocs,” the ITIF said.
“But notwithstanding the passage of the Chips Act, the political will in the United States to implement and fully fund such an agenda appears to be relatively low, especially as neither political party wants to address the massive budget deficit to free up needed funding for such a strategy,” the ITIF said.
EU-China relations: European firms are reluctant to speak up on China as Brussels seeks to de-risk
As the European Union moves forward with plans to de-risk ties with China, it is encountering a familiar problem: getting businesses to go on the record with their gripes about the world’s second largest economy. Fear of retaliation from Beijing and a reluctance to air what could be highly sensitive trade secrets among competitors are combining to give officials a headache when gathering evidence to support Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s economic security strategy.
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Executives see huge risks in speaking out for fear of falling foul of opaque new anti-espionage and foreign relations laws in Beijing. Reports abound of Western companies being raided in China for flouting laws that Western business groups believe are vague and ill-explained. Nor do businesses want to put their heads above the parapet when discussing their own de-risking plans – shorthand for not having all your production and sourcing eggs in a single Chinese basket – lest it endanger their operations in China.
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Some firms that continue to bank big profits in China simply do not see the point in complying with Brussels’ efforts. As the world becomes increasingly bifurcated and supply chain risks proliferate, a common refrain among some corporate executives is: “What’s in it for us?” The chilling effect makes building legislation difficult – but not impossible. Plenty of other companies see what is coming down the road in terms of Chinese industrial overcapacity and are willing to cooperate – but often under certain circumstances.
Survey data suggests that some businesses – perhaps sensing the rocky road ahead – are not waiting around for EU legislation and are autonomously de-risking their own operations. According to a report by Deloitte and the Federation of German Industries this month, around one-fifth of 100 German multinationals plan to “friendshore” their production lines out of China and into other Asian countries. In the words of one major company’s chief executive: “We are de-risking without too much noise”.
But with persistent inflation, recessionary winds and stiff competition from American and Chinese state support, the survey also showed that few of those firms were likely to come back to Europe. “Almost half of responding companies expect the attractiveness of Germany, compared with other industrial locations, to decline from slightly to significantly over the next three years,” read the report.
Russian aluminum producers warn of crisis
Russia’s Aluminium Association has issued a grim warning for the industry as it faces Western sanctions, tariffs and a drop in prices for one of the world’s most widely used metals.
In its latest overview of the current state of the industry, the association has warned that the entire sector is on the verge of a serious crisis, adding that several enterprises of Russian aluminum giant Rusal are at risk of closure.
“A number of Rusal enterprises are already operating on the verge of zero or even negative profitability,” the association said on Monday, adding that further deterioration of the economic situation or an increase in the fiscal burden may lead to the need to shut them down.
It warned that the crisis could affect 5,000 jobs in the sector, while up to 30,000 jobs in related sectors may also be lost. The union highlighted that aluminum prices had dropped to their lowest level since March 2021, while the US and EU markets have been almost entirely closed to Russian exporters.
Oh no! It looks like the state may have to step in and nationalize it! What a tragedy!
The idea that capitalism and central planning have some innate quality that is historically progressive has produced some of the worst twitter arguments ever
Isn't this what the book explicitly argues against?
The whole point of the title is that it's tongue-in-cheek, designed to make you go "What?! How could Walmart be at all described as a People's Republic?!" before it delves into the issue of planning.
From memory, the conclusion is basically "Despite what capitalists claim, planning is used all the time throughout the economy. Companies like Amazon and Walmart are obviously internally planned - they couldn't function if they internally functioned as a market, with different components vying for resources - and this planning is what has made them so successful, to the point where delivery of products within only a couple days is feasible for many products. The problem is that these planned corporations rely on intense worker exploitation to function. Therefore, planning, like markets, can be used both to benefit capitalists or to benefit the working class, and the word "planning" shouldn't cause liberal economists to rev up pro-market arguments like spraying squid ink, but they should instead acknowledge that planning is indeed used all around them, whether they like using that term or not."
This is the exact opposite of saying that planning is historically progressive. It's saying that it can absolutely be used in reactionary ways, and actively is being used around us in reactionary ways on massive scales, all the time.
That being said, the chapter dealing with the USSR might as well have a "Don't worry! We're not pro-Soviet tankies! USSR did genocide and was literally 1984!" warning at the bottom of every page, given how awful they were at actually dealing with it, and the authors themselves appear to have some pretty bad political positions too.
#Tradle #647 2/6
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https://oec.world/en/tradle
spoiler
probably west africa because of "coconuts, brazilnuts, cashews" and gold. beyond that, no idea, so I just managed to get relatively lucky
my geopolitical foot is going up this geopolitical lib's ass