You Can’t Fight the Market

Even mighty Amazon has finally been forced to submit to the inexorable forces of the market:

Amazon quietly updated its help documentation to state that Kindle devices will start supporting EPUB files.

There’s a catch, though. “Beginning in late 2022, Send to Kindle applications will support EPUB (.EPUB) format,” says the document. This means you’ll be able to send EPUB files to your Kindle via Amazon’s handy Send to Kindle system, which essentially lets you upload documents to your Kindle by emailing them to your Kindle email address. It’s unclear, however, whether Kindles will natively support EPUB files, allowing you to purchase ebooks from Amazon’s library in the EPUB format directly.

This is a big deal for everyone who owns a Kindle and isn’t completely reliant on Amazon’s library. Until now, you had to manually convert EPUB files into MOBI (or another format) to load them onto your Kindle, and this often brought additional issues as the conversion wasn’t always perfect.

Also, the news is notable for the sheer fact that Amazon avoided supporting the otherwise widely supported EPUB format for nearly 15 years (EPUB is an open standard that originally launched in September 2007).

Additionally, Amazon’s document says that – also in late 2022 – its Send to Kindle system will stop supporting MOBI files (ironically, MOBI was Amazon’s long-preferred standard, and the company has its own version of MOBI called AZW).

It certainly took them long enough to accept the inevitable. But it’s a very powerful lesson in learning not to fight the market. It is said that the heart wants what it wants, regardless of what logic dictates, and the same is true of the market. The sooner any entrepreneur or business accepts this reality, the less likely it is to make unnecessary and unforced errors.

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Rumors of Roe v Wade

A draft legal opinion written by Alito that indictes the Supreme Court has decided to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion has reportedly been leaked:

The US Supreme Court looks set to overturn a landmark ruling that effectively legalised abortions across America, handing the power to decide whether or not to permit the procedure back to individual states.

A draft legal opinion, which was leaked to Politico, reveals a majority of the court’s nine judges are in agreement on the issue which would be enough to force a change in the law – though their decision is not final until the ruling is officially published.

In the document, Justice Samuel Alito writes that Roe v Wade – the 1973 Supreme Court ruling which found that excessive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional – was ‘egregiously wrong from the start’ and ‘must be overruled’.

If the ruling is overturned, it would give individual states the power to decide on whether to ban abortion. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research group, has said that 26 states are ‘certain or likely’ to ban abortion if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

Alito, who was nominated to the court in 2006 by George W Bush, also takes aim at another 1992 case – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – which upheld Roe’s findings.

He argues that Roe’s ‘reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. Far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.’

If the leak proves to be genuine – and the Supreme Court has not denied that it is – it would mark the first time that a draft opinion has ever appeared in public before being officially published, a move expected within the next two months.

This may or may not be legitimate, but I tend to suspect it is, because it’s exactly the sort of document some idiotic female clerk would feel justified in leaking in a desperate attempt to somehow prevent the decision from being published.

And the leak it’s real, it’s long past time to get rid of the evil, idiotic, and fictional “emanations and penumbras” that were invented by the Warren Court. It’s certainly going to be difficult for anyone to convincingly make the “my body, my choice” argument any longer after two years of vaccine mandates. The overturning of Roe v Wade would also prove, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Donald Trump was the best U.S. president since Andrew Jackson.

Next, do “posterity”.

UPDATE: Based on the reactions of former Supreme Court staff, it sounds as if the leak is real.

Just spoke with former Supreme Court clerk. They are horrified. This is a quote:

“This leak has to come from a clerk or Justice themselves. It is intended to blow up the court. Criminal investigation needs to happen now.”

They suggest Sotomayor has most radical leftist staff.

UPDATE: It wasn’t a woman, it was a Fake American.

Amit Jain, a clerk for Justice Sotomayor, is reported to be the individual responsible for leaking Justice Alito’s draft opinion.

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You Don’t Say

The former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO says the quiet part out loud.

“I think we are in a proxy war with Russia. We are using the Ukrainians as our proxy forces.”

Philip Breedlove, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO

Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Minister let a little something slip out too.

“So what if Zelenskyy is Jewish? The fact does not negate the Nazi elements in Ukraine. I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood. It means absolutely nothing. The wise Jewish people said that the most ardent antisemites are usually Jews.”

Wait, what?

Oh, that’s right. Of course Hitler is Jewish. After all, we’re all one race, the human race.

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China Prepares for Decoupling

Recent Chinese actions on the financial front make it appear stage two of the Great Bifurcation is incoming, and it looks as if it’s going to be on a scale much larger than most observers of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict were prepared to believe.

The Chinese government reportedly held an internal conference with officials from foreign and local banks as the nation seeks to protect overseas assets from US sanctions over potential military tensions in Taiwan. The meeting between officials from China’s Central Bank and Finance Ministry, as well as executives from foreign and domestic lenders, was held on April 22, FT reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the discussion.

“If China attacks Taiwan, decoupling of the Chinese and western economies will be far more severe than [decoupling with] Russia, because China’s economic footprint touches every part of the world,” one of the people briefed on the meeting told the media.

Chinese officials are reportedly worried that penalties similar to those imposed on Russia over the military operation in Ukraine could be introduced against China in the event of a regional military conflict or other crisis.

China summons banks over sanctions fears, 1 May 2022

I very much doubt that the Chinese officials are worried in the slightest. They have clearly intended the break with the neo-liberal financial system for at least a decade, it’s only the preferred timing that is unknown. For me, the only serious question here is whether the Chinese will wait for the neo-liberal financial order to make a partial break in reaction to something, as per the article, or whether they prefer to make a preemptive break themselves. The evidence of prior Chinese behavior, including the erection of the Great Firewall of China, tends to indicate the latter, especially since their ability to choose the timing of the decoupling would permit the Chinese to create maximum disruption in the West while minimizing the disruption to the East.

Furthermore, the delicacy of the Russians in pursuing the moral and rhetorical high ground has gone mostly unrewarded, so there isn’t much tangible benefit to the Chinese in being able to proclaim that they are being further victimized by the imperialist colonial forces. A preemptive move would not only be materially beneficial, but would also be a powerful psychological blow to a Western elite that perceives itself to be dictating reality by calling all the shots.

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The Russians are Doomed Again

Obviously, I’m very skeptical of the pro-NATO interpretation of events, but since I believe it’s important to always pay attention to what those with different perspectives think, this is one of the more relevant anti-Russian arguments presented, given that it focuses on the perceived logistics issues faced by the Russians in their special military operation. As it is said: “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.”

Of course, on social media, amateurs talk tactics, strategy, logistics, and geopolitics, and all of it is nonsense. And the incessant, and ever-nonsensical propaganda from the so-called “military experts” on Fox News and CNN doesn’t help. But this logistical analysis comes with a concrete prediction, so it is worth noting.

This tweet in the thread talks about Russian Army units being tied to supply dumps closer & closer to the front lines. This is consistent & expected with high levels of attrition, both combat & operational, in the Russian Army tactical truck fleet. As the Russian tactical truck fleet diminishes, the depth of Russian break-ins gets shallower & the chance of any sort of breakthrough followed by mobile operations disappears.

“Still-continued logistics problems” boils down to not enough tactical trucks, efficiently used. The pace of operation the Putin regime insists upon means Russia simply cannot change over non-mech to mechanized logistics in the middle of the Ukraine war.

At the start of the war Russian had MTLB tracked fighting vehicles being used as ambulances. Now they are using unmarked civilian cars with a sunroof for the same role. This is the bleeding out of Russian Army vehicle fleet & the Russian economy too. These symptoms are consistent with my “Russian truck fleet dead from Operational Attrition in six-to-eight weeks” prediction.

It doesn’t look like Russia’s current rates of loss will get to ‘immobilization from a lack of trucks level’. 1701 trucks isn’t even 50% of 4,000. This is part of the issue of making prediction based on straight line projections. The people you are predicting about will make changes in their operations to avoid that predicted disaster.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to be wrong at the middle-May end date of my projection, but doing a straight line projection from now says I will be. Call it a less than 25% possible outcome. We shall see in two weeks.

The fundamental problem with this truck-based analysis is that it is predicated on the same assumption that every single pro-NATO analysis I have seen contains: the idea that the Russians have thrown 100 percent of their military assets into the Ukrainian battle. This has always struck me as highly unlikely, given that even Russia’s Chinese allies are aware that the real conflict is with NATO and the neocons, that the Russians have utilized significantly fewer BTGs than originally reported, and there has been very little use of the Russian Air Force in either tactical or strategic operations.

If mobility logistics are the limiting factor, then one presumes the Russians can figure out how to obtain vehicles from their primary ally, who happens to produce 48 percent of all the heavy trucks manufactured in the world.

My assumption is that the Russian strategists are smarter and better-informed than I am. Most of the so-called “expert” analysis I have seem appears to be predicated on the idea that the Russian strategists are ill-informed and too stupid to recognize the obvious. Time will tell whose position is closer to the truth.

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