Literally news that open new avenues of thought:
LiDAR analyses in the contiguous Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin, Guatemala: an introduction to new perspectives on regional early Maya socioeconomic and political organization | Ancient Mesoamerica | Cambridge Core
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To put this in perspective, the existence of a vast network of causeways and canals in the Maya Lowlands was a game-changing discovery in the 1980s or early 90s, as the result of aerial surveys (either radar or infrared, I don’t remember which). Similarly, the extent of settlement, organization, and trade has been a growing realization over several decades. What seems to be new here is the detail, the expansion of the number of settlements, the proposed six-tiered organization, and most important, I think, that this work has pushed the date for the network and level of organization much deeper into the Preclassic period.
Coincidently, a close friend of my brother, who was an archeology student at my alma mater, participated in some of the early excavations at El Mirador. We had a couple of interesting conversations about that. Sadly, he was killed in a car accident many years ago.
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This here.
Even I (usually to be found in the bottom left corner on most of these diagrams) am shocked.
In the same context:
Translation by some plugin I use:
There is a lot of talk about private jets for the super-rich. I was interested in the costs.
A chartered private flight across the US costs around $25,000. Sounds like a lot, but for a billionaire that would be just 1/40,000th of the property.
For normal people who have saved maybe €10,000 or €100,000, that would correspond to a proportionate share of €0.25-2.5.
So a private jet across the continent is cheaper for a billionaire than a bus ticket in the city for us.
#climatecrisis
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Article title didn’t go through…
Man beats machine at Go in human victory over AI. Amateur exploited weakness in systems that have otherwise dominated grandmasters.
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rent, rent, rent … I honestly didn’t imagine Australia of all places would have that problem, but it seems that my imagination was severely lacking.
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But look at that lovely window!
This is a very good question, with a very complicated answer and different for each place, but it all boils down to the usual culprit: “there is money to be gained” and the inconvenience of the many (who also happen to be poor or middle class) that get to lose their money is not a bug/problem to be solved, but a feature that is more profitable if it is expanded.
Since there was a rapid urbanisation and people left the countryside and their family houses for “a better future, better jobs” living on top of another in matchboxes within seas of concrete (whoever thinks I am being dramatic, I have a picture on that at the end), the countryside emptied and it is now considered as “no longer viable to return to it”.
This means more demand for the matchboxes which the owners now see that they can actually cut in half and actually still increase the price in rend.
If you own a “three” as it is called here, an apartment for a family with a living room, WC, kitchen and three bedrooms, you can charge 500 euros for it. But if you split in in half you can rent it to two smaller families for 400 euros each, because that’s the situation now and people are desperate.
Why build when you can divide what you already have and make more money?
Meanwhile I am scratching my head in the countryside on why people still choose to leave this place and head to Athens. It made sense in the 80ies and the 90ies, but now it is just madness. 
I know the drill. I’ve lived in a cramped attic when I was at university where my legs hit the wall when I went to sleep and I lived in a one-room semi-basement when I was a soldier. I wouldn’t call them places that I’d aspire to live (though the attic had a mean view of the lake and mountains - I’ll grant it that), so it is a choice that seems odd.
If you go to Athens or some other city where you’d have to rent to live, then that’s at least 400 euros out of your salary for rent and heating and “apartment fees”, not to mention transit. This means that with a normal job that makes you 800 euros, you’d have 400 euros left to eat and pay everything else. At the end of the day you’d need to borrow money from relatives and parents to just break even, so practically it means that would have been better if you had been unemployed and back in the countryside.
Speaking of jobs there, in the countryside it might seem that you make less money, but at least you do not have to pay rent, or fees or tickets or waste hours in transit. That’s a quality of life that cannot be bought/exchanged, unless you are heading to the big city for a big job.
This is Athens as seen from the Acropolis (just 1/8 of the horrible view):
Not the kind of photoshopped pic or marvelous drone shot or “awe inspiring” and “oh how beautiful” which we usually see included in those unfortunate videos that dare add Athens in lists of “great places to visit”
That’s as real as it gets from a distance.
Up close its worse.
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Last week news, close to Samara a pipe blew up and the water froze forming an ice peak. People say it’s ~15m or five stories but maybe it’s exaggerated. And people climbed it.
“We have Everest at home”
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There’s much intellectual tap dancing in that video but it never actually addresses John Mearsheimer’s specific claims which, although inconvenient, are clear and simple: NATO implied an agreement with Russia that Ukraine would not be invited into NATO, they then broke that agreement. Russia warned the Whitehouse that this was the ‘brightest of red lines’, and that they would trash the place rather than allow the encroachment of a foreign power on their border. The warnings of Angela Merkel and the US ambassador to Russia to not call Russia’s bluff were ignored but it turns out they weren’t bluffing. They did the thing they said they’d do; NATO did the thing they said they wouldn’t do.
~10 minutes in to this however…
…it is claimed that no such agreement was made. [where’s Gia’s little shrug icon]
Not trying to be a dissenting voice here, just looking for a place to put all of this in my simple 9 kyu mind.
Also, I’m not religious, but from the Christian bible (Proverbs 18:17):
“Any story sounds true until someone tells the other side and sets the record straight.”
The Western media machine is turned up to 11 as is normal; I just want the facts without “spin” or “narrative”.
The video is not about John Mearsheimer. His picture is in the thumbnail, but I think that is merely intended as a visual representation of Realism, a dominant school of thought in international relations theory for a long time already, to which the video offers a critique.
Also, the video covers a lot more than the war in Ukraine.
As far as I can tell, this agreement has never existed.
Claim: NATO promised Russia it would not expand after the Cold War
Fact: Such an agreement was never made. NATO’s door has been open to new members since it was founded in 1949 – and that has never changed. This “Open Door Policy” is enshrined in Article 10 of NATO’s founding treaty, which says “any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic” can apply for membership. Decisions on membership are taken by consensus among all Allies. No treaty signed by the United States, Europe and Russia included provisions on NATO membership.
The idea of NATO expansion beyond a united Germany was not on the agenda in 1989, particularly as the Warsaw Pact still existed. This was confirmed by Mikhail Gorbachev in an interview in 2014: “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either.”
Declassified White House transcripts also reveal that, in 1997, Bill Clinton consistently refused Boris Yeltsin’s offer of a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ that no former Soviet Republics would enter NATO: “I can’t make commitments on behalf of NATO, and I’m not going to be in the position myself of vetoing NATO expansion with respect to any country, much less letting you or anyone else do so…NATO operates by consensus.”
Do you have a link that confirms it exists (other than Putin claiming it exists)?
[Perhaps I should move a discussion on this video to 2023: “Things change, and they don’t change back.” - #401 by teapoweredrobot] Edit: I just did
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That exact discussion was made 11 months ago at the beginning of the war in last year’s similar topic and the verdict was that:
It is true that no such thing was signed, but at the same time it is also not true that no such thing was ever promised or mentioned.
Here are the data presented there/then from declassified documents from the NSA:
For a summary of the issue:
The former idea about “closer to the Soviet borders” is written down not in treaties but in multiple memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors (Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and others) offering assurances throughout 1990 and into 1991 about protecting Soviet security interests and including the USSR in new European security structures. The two issues were related but not the same. Subsequent analysis sometimes conflated the two and argued that the discussion did not involve all of Europe. The documents published below show clearly that it did.
Anyone that wishes to dive into the details, there are all offered in that link along with sources and 30 declassified documents. I’d say that’s the golden standard of how journalism should look like.
@gennan here is an example from document 2 (I checked a couple of them last year to see the veracity of the article’s quotes and claims and they seem accurate)
Those seem to be important declassified documents, not some prank or propaganda.
Document 6 is titled: “Record of Conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker”, after all and it is amazing to me that we live in the internet era and we can actually read them at our leisure. 
As far as I am concerned, I am not a politician, so things are a bit more simple.
All those talks were made with the assumption that the CCCP would remain a cohesive bulk of significant power that would gradually decay over the years. However, once the CCCP fell abruptly, it was open season for a lot of things and plans to be shelved and other plans to emerge from the new reality.
New data means new plans. That makes sense and it can be argued that in geopolitics there is little margin for playing nice, especially over the span of decades.
But let us not pretend that no such swift in the planing ever took place.
As Sir Humphrey in “Yes Minister” used to say “Never deny something that can be confirmed from elsewhere” or something like that.
But the Soviets were not deliberately misled at the time the assurances were given. If there was an element of bad faith here, it only came into play months later, when U.S. policy shifted and American leaders began to think about bringing the East Europeans into NATO.
To expand my last point, there is an ancient saying here (2300 years old) that goes: “Once a mighty oak falls, every man can put an axe to it” (δρυός πεσούσης πας ανηρ ξυλεύεται) and it means that once a mighty nation or person or institution falls, then everyone around it scrambles to advance their own interests and harvest what they can from the remains.
That’s just how our species is, that’s why that saying will be in use for 2000 years more.
Such things are as they are.
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I was aware of this when I made my post; that the video is a general critique of realism (as per the video title).
The NATO-Russia relations link is the kind of thing I was looking for, thanks. No, I don’t have any links to claims of agreements other than hearing it in a video which I can’t refind.
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NATO takes decisions by consensus. Some presidents may have made oral promises buy they are not NATO. So there is a clear wrong target as NATO never made this promise.
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So it looks like it was Genscher in particular (foreign minister of West Germany at the time) who was negociating with officials of the USSR about Germany’s reunification and East Germany’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact in 1990, when he gave verbal reassurances to the USSR that NATO would not expand eastward to include other Warsaw Pact countries.
It seems like NATO itself was not actually involved in these negociations about Germany’s unification, so I wonder what would have been Genscher’s mandate to make such commitments on NATO’s behalf.
And Gorbachev later says that NATO expansion was not even a topic in those negociations.
Then a year after those negociations, the USSR and the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist and Russia became the continuator of the USSR in regard to international treaties and organisations.
All in all, I suppose there is some room for debate about the degree to which those verbal reassurances made by Genscher to the USSR count as an international treaty to which NATO is bound. At least it explains why NATO claims it never made such a promise. But it also explains why Russian officials claim that NATO broke its promise to Russia. Then again, from what I can find, NATO expansion didn’t seem to be a concern for Russia, until the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine in 2014.
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And Baker apparently. Others too, though, probably being more experienced politicians, they were more circumspect on the issue.
I clicked on that interview link you shared earlier and he seems to clarify later that he believes that the context within which they were talking at the moment was about East Germany and not NATO as a whole.
As you see though, it is a bit hard to ascertain what exactly happened and what exactly was the context, after so many years, since the documents surrounding the matter are ambiguous, as politicians like to talk in generalities, just for such eventualities.
It seems that interpreters where also involved in some cases, so any breakdown in communication or misunderstanding in nuance can actually be used as a valid reason for any slight misconceptions that happened decades ago.
Indeed, and the argument is that while Russia is the continuator of the USSR, the other countries of the former Warsaw Pact are not, ergo even if such a promise was given by NATO in writing, if those countries decided to join on their own free will, there are no legal grounds for anyone to reduce the sovereignty and will of those countries and nations.
So, legally NATO is in the clear. There is no treaty that is being broken and even if there was, it would have been defunct by the dissolusion of the Warsow Pact and the right of sovereignty of the countries that emerged from it.
But, as you said, there is indeed a valid argument/debate to be made on whether those claims made by Russia have any substance on the level of the “marketing” surrounding the conflict. After all, historically, claims of imperialism are easy to make and hard to debunk,
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2022: hold my tea
2023: hold my coffee…
which made me think of this story
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I guess sardines was the idea that came second? Much imagination 
.
Also, they have stripped anything substantial that is not syrupy chemicals from their drinks, but they want to use olive oil? My guess is they will use the worst quality “olive oil” and it will taste like tar. 
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In 2005-10 Chengdu starbucks were mostly an internet hotspot for american expatriate. I never really enjoyed those expensive big cup of water like drink.
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@teapoweredrobot if they add oregano, feta and some tomatoes, the “coffee” might have an even more “unexpected, velvety, buttery flavour” … though “drinkable” will not be among the epithets attached to it 
As if most people can even tell the difference? It will probably be low quality olive oil initially for the hype and in case someone actually checks and then a couple of months later it will be some substitute that will have come from some cheaper source of liquid fat.
If it is not discontinued altogether, by then.
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Let’s see if they move to the coffee with little pieces of pizza to drop in it.
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