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Showing posts from January, 2023

Why the Kremlin Invaded Ukraine

   https://ridl.io/why-the-kremlin-invaded-ukraine/ The Russian government’s decision to launch a «special military operation» in Ukraine was astoundingly pernicious. For most Russia watchers, it was also extremely unexpected; even those who had warned of further deterioration of the situation the day before could hardly have imagined such a catastrophic spiral. This will bring dire consequences for Ukraine, Russia and the whole world for years to come. And already, as this conflict unfolds further, experts will now face the question of why the Russian leadership made such a decision. To date, very little is known by outsiders about the mechanisms for making strategic decisions in the Kremlin. That inevitably means many of the current assessments and assumptions may turn out to be wrong. Even so, political science has accumulated considerable experience in   studying the adoption   of foreign policy decisions in different states in different eras. This experience seems to be useful for

Negotiations? Putin’s word in peace talks would be worthless

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/negotiations-putin-peace-talks-worthless-moscow-kyiv Negotiations? Putin’s word in peace talks would be worthless There are no “differences” for Kyiv and Moscow to settle in this war. One nation has tried to eliminate and subjugate another Can any negotiations truly bring us closer to peace in Ukraine? Those arguing that Russia and Ukraine should get around a table often complain about the lack of will to negotiate on both sides. In their logic, the west should put pressure on Ukraine to make certain concessions to Russia because, in return, Russia would accept those concessions and cease hostilities.  The prospect of peace does not depend on whether or not both sides of the conflict are willing to sit at the negotiating table. It hinges on Russia’s credibility as a treaty party, and on the signal that any ceasefire agreement would send to other dictatorial powers who harbour ambitions to control the territories of their nei

Covid di China 2023

   Sumber: https://m.weibo.cn/detail/4860354171766047   This year is the first Spring Festival after China’s optimized prevention and control plan. Most of those who have not returned home for the New Year They all chose to go home for the New Year.   According to estimates by relevant departments, during the Spring Festival this year, there will be about 5 billion tourists visiting relatives and friends.   Everyone may be very concerned about the large flow of people and the new crown epidemic that is still in the epidemic stage. 1. During the Spring Festival and the recent epidemic After optimizing the prevention and control plan, the new crown epidemic has spread rapidly across the country.   At present, the country as a whole has passed the peak period of the epidemic, and the large, medium and small cities and counties in the country are basically in the stage of epidemic decline. This wave of new crown epidemics in my country is mainly caused by multiple subtypes or evolutionary

Raspberry Pi Pico Priority Inversion

  https://kentindell.github.io/2021/03/05/pico-priority-inversion/   We have written before about priority inversion , how it happened on Mars, and how it happens on CAN bus if the CAN controller and drivers aren’t designed carefully. But we have been bitten by priority inversion while writing code for the new Raspberry Pi Pico so we are writing about it again - because the consequences can be just as severe as they were on Mars. First, some background to the Pico. It’s a $4 microcontroller board from the Raspberry Pi Foundation that uses a new microcontroller they designed from scratch: the RP2040 . This is a dual core Arm Cortex M0+ device that has several unusual features. It runs the Cortex M0 very quickly (defaults to 125MHz), it has two cores, and it doesn’t have any flash memory. This last feature is rapidly becoming a trend in microcontrollers: flash memory is slow and even on slow Cortex M0 cores running at 48MHz it generally can’t keep up (the Atmel SAMD series, for exampl

Russia at risk of becoming failed state, say foreign policy experts

    https://www.ft.com/content/6ceb6331-07a0-4b1f-b777-3034b288a3be Nearly half of top foreign policy experts think Russia will become a failed state or break up by 2033, while a large majority expects China to try to take Taiwan by force, according to a new survey by the Atlantic Council that points to a decade of global tumult ahead. Forty-six per cent of the 167 experts responding to the think-tank said Russia’s failure or break-up could happen in the next 10 years. In a separate question, 40 per cent pointed to Russia as a country they expected to break up for reasons including “revolution, civil war or political disintegration” over that time. “Ukraine clearly highlights the possibility of internal problems for Russia, and the possibility that the war itself might have boomerang effects for not only its leadership, but for the country as a whole,” said Peter Engelke, the Atlantic Council’s deputy director of foresight who helped to design and interpret the survey. We

The War in Ukraine Will Be Long. Is the West Ready?

  https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-war-long-west-ready-11673571215 The war in Ukraine, it’s clear by now, won’t end soon. The bet in Moscow—and the fear in Kyiv—is that the West will lose stamina before Russia suffers a decisive defeat. So far, Russia’s expectations of discord among Ukraine’s backers haven’t materialized. Europe has severed its dependence on Russian energy with limited pain and no political cataclysms. As all major Western economies grew in 2022 despite the disruptions, the consensus behind supplying weapons to Kyiv has only solidified. Yet, with Russia announcing a mobilization of hundreds of thousands of soldiers in September and switching its economy to a war footing, time could be on Moscow’s side. So far, neither the U.S. nor Europe has made the adjustments, especially in military production, that are necessary for sustaining Ukraine in a war that could potentially drag on for several years. Neither are they immune to pain from further energy sho