Metaverse is a relatively new name for an old idea, explains Matthew Ball, a technology analyst (and occasional contributor to The Economist), in his survey of the topic.

The vision was prescient, but the jargon died.

information superhighway

“The social and public opinion basis in Europe for co-operation and engaging with China is being gradually destroyed,”

many German firms have already accepted the need to reduce dependency on China. “They are more conscious of the risks and they are willing to pay a certain premium” to diversify,

As Germany’s chancellor, she had been at the forefront of eu efforts to keep relations with China from turning sour. In a phone call with her last September, Mr Xi noted a “high level of trust” between their countries.

China hit back wildly, placing sanctions on a wide range of prominent European politicians, scholars and think-tanks. The European Parliament responded by shelving ratification of an agreement on bilateral investment that had been reached between China and the eu in 2020 with much (overblown) fanfare.

Hungary remains strongly pro-China. But in February 2021 six other eu countries in the group failed to send their leaders to a virtual summit with Mr Xi (his first appearance at such an event). In May that year one of them, Lithuania, withdrew entirely: its foreign minister called the group “divisive”. Now the Czech Republic is mulling whether to leave, too. Like Lithuania, it says the group’s economic benefits have failed to match expectations.

Amazon’s $3.9bn purchase this month of One Medical, an American health-care provider, is only the latest maama effort to conquer one of the last remaining under-digitised markets big enough to move the needle for a trillion-dollar firm.

Amazon, for example, is investing heavily in its advertising business, Alphabet’s forte; Alphabet, meanwhile, is spending billions to get a foothold in the cloud, which is Amazon’s.

As they become commonplace, tech offerings are behaving like other staples.

The bigger the payroll the harder it is to replenish, let alone expand.

Barriers are being put up on the internet, too, as places from the European Union to India become more protective of their citizens’ data and of their own digital darlings. That is a worry for Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft, which, outside firewalled China at least, face few barriers to selling their digital services.

A day later Meta said its sales fell year on year, for the first time ever.

Covid-19 may have cramped physical lives, but it enriched digital ones—thereby enriching big tech as never before.

Since 2005 the digital share of American gdp has risen by a third, to 10%.

Google, whose search ads rely less on the sort of tracking Apple has curbed, may have benefited from Meta’s misery, helping offset some of the slowdown.

Ad-sellers are feeling the delayed effect of Apple’s change last year to the privacy settings on iPhones, which stops advertisers from tracking people’s behaviour on its devices, and thus from measuring the effectiveness of digital ads.

When marketing budgets get trimmed, advertisers tend to stick to what they know, says Mark Shmulik of Bernstein, a broker. And they know Google search much better than they do Snap’s experiments with augmented reality.

As the war drags on and casualties mount, the question is whether Mr Putin can mobilise the passive majority or whether they start to grow restive. The elites in the Kremlin, the army and the security services will watch closely.

Even when people have access to information, they “simply ignore it or rationalise it, just to avoid destroying the concept of self, country and power…created by propaganda,” notes Elena Koneva, a sociologist.

Among television viewers—mostly people over 60—more than 80% support the war. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, who get their news from the internet, it is less than half.

“These efforts are driven by the notion that it’s impossible to protect the internal legitimacy of the current leadership and keep citizens loyal if Russia remains relatively open and linked up to the global networked system.”

“disconnective society”

He blocked Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and any remaining independent media, isolated the country from poisonous Western influence and chased anyone who objected to the war out of the country.

As Greg Yudin, a Russian sociologist, argues, they are needed for the ritual of elections that demonstrate the legitimacy of the ruler, but the rest of the time they should be invisible. Mr Yudin calls this attitude “people on call”.

As long as Mr Putin is in power, Russia will build alliances with China, Iran and other anti-liberal countries. It will, as ever, be in the ideological vanguard.

the liberal West, Ukraine and traitors at home.

That same year Ilyin’s body was brought back to Russia from Switzerland, where he had died in exile in 1954.

“to carry out their hostile and ridiculous experiment even in the post-Bolshevik chaos, deceptively presenting it as the supreme triumph of ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘federalism’…German propaganda has invested too much money and effort in Ukrainian separatism (and maybe not only Ukrainian)”.

Ilyin’s book, “Our Tasks”, was recommended by the Kremlin as essential reading to state officials in 2013. It ends with a short essay to a future Russian leader. Western-style democracy and elections would bring ruin to Russia, Ilyin wrote. Only “united and strong state power, dictatorial in scope and state-national in essence” could save it from chaos.

he retained his faith in the fascist idea of national resurgence

Ivan Ilyin

“Our wonderful Stierlitz is the perfect fascist man and the perfect Soviet man at the same time, making transgressive transitions from one to the other with subduing and untraceable ease...He is the harbinger of a new age—a time of mobility and manipulativeness.”

the liberal elite of the 1990s completely rejected the old Soviet values, sweeping away a strong tradition of anti-fascist literature and arts.

Its aim is to disengage people and prevent any form of self-organisation.

Nearly 30% of Russians say torture should be allowed.

“The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” he wrote.

he half-swastika has been painted on the doors of Russian film and theatre critics, promoters of “decadent and degenerate” Western art. Hospital patients and groups of children, some kneeling, have been arranged to form half-swastikas for posting online.

The Kremlin is cultivating and rewarding the lowest instincts in people, provoking hatred and fighting. This hell cannot end peacefully.

the triumph of the will over reason

it feeds on exceptionalism and ressentiment, a mixture of jealousy and frustration born out of humiliation.

Some in the West want a return to business as usual once the war is over, but there can be no true peace with a fascist Russia.

list a hatred of homosexuality, a fixation with the traditional family and a fanatical faith in the power of the state.

a cult of personality around Mr Putin

“People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism,” he wrote recently in the New York Times, “but today’s Russia meets most of the criteria.”

I give you aprobability of the guy paying late, what are we going to do about it?

really need to get into our customers’ heads

t’s a little bit more self-explanatory,because we’re also introducing a template system.

how important a role intuition playsin that process

f I use the DMV’s chatbotand say, “I lost my license” and it says, “Fill out this form and you’ll geta replacement,” well, that’s what I was asking for.

Is it explaining itself sufficiently for the weight ofthe problem?

uncomfortably long pilot periods

Can a human do it?

What problem you’re trying to solve

if you don’t have the data, then you have a problem.

“What data do we have?”

conversions.

classifications.

numeric prediction.

The first ingredient is “yes” and “no” questions.

I like to break it down into ingredients.

They often havean outsized idea of what AI can do, for example.

The FTC said in July it wants to block Meta from acquiring a popular virtual reality dedicated fitness app because Meta has a “virtual reality empire.”

its shift from social media toward a virtual reality ‘metaverse’ business may not escape the government’s wrath either.

Tiktok surpassed Facebook and Instagram in people’s time spent scrolling their platforms back in 2020, according to market research company Insider Intelligence.

Facebook posted its first-ever year-over-year revenue decline in 2022’s second quarter, also marking an unprecedented three straight quarters of shrinking profits, according to MarketWatch.

“Never before in our country’s modern history have so few people wielded such immense power over the dissemination of information, or had the ability to silence their political or ideological opponents.”

the bill would “supercharge harmful content online” by hindering content moderation practices that censor people’s speech.

for Amazon and our selling partners to offer products with Prime’s free two-day shipping (let alone one-day).”

not designed to break up the companies or ban mergers.

online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users or 100,000 U.S.-based monthly active users would be blocked from putting their products and services ahead of a different business if it materially harms competition.

the American Innovation and Choice Online Act.

As Russia moves to make its own diplomatic offer, the EU will need to significantly ramp up its financial support for African states to pay for grain, wheat and energy. The price tag is huge – but there is little alternative.

Many African states view the conflict as an old-fashioned battle between East and West.

more support for Ukraine will be at the cost of cuts in funding for Africa and other states, not to mention cuts to funding programmes within the EU.

Naming China

It is strikingly like the dynamic of Greek tragedy, where power leads to hubris that is injurious to others and therefore ultimately anti-social – and self-destructive in the end.

Other institutions are being designed as China, Russia, Iran, India and their prospective allies represent a large enough critical mass to “go it alone,” based on their own mineral wealth and manufacturing power.

The aim in China in particular is to prevent the rentier Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector from becoming a burdensome overhead whose economic interests differ from those of a socialist government.

European NATO countries are losing not only their export markets but their investment opportunities to gain from the much more rapid growth of Eurasian countries whose government planning and resistance to financialization has proved much more productive than the US/NATO neoliberal model.

Its automotive and other industrial production is being forced to shift away from German and other European brands to its own and Chinese producers. The result is a loss of markets for Western exporters.

Instead, blocking Russian exports has created a worldwide price inflation for oil and gas, sharply increasing Russian export earnings. It exported less gas but earned more – and with dollars and euros blocked, Russia demanded payment for its exports in rubles. Its exchange rate soared instead of collapsing, enabling Russia to reduce its interest rates.

What seems to be so self-destructive about America’s economic sanctions and confiscations of Russian and other foreign reserves is that they are accelerating the demise of this free ride.

the U.S. confiscations have accelerated the end of the U.S. Treasury-bill standard that has governed world finance since the United States went off gold in 1971.

Any nation that follows policies not deemed to be in the interests of the U.S. Government runs the risk of U.S. authorities confiscating its holdings of foreign reserves in U.S. banks or securities.

The aim is to bleed Russia’s armaments inventory, kill enough of its soldiers, and create enough Russian shortages and suffering to not only weaken its ability to help China, but to spur its population to support a regime change, an American-sponsored “color revolution.”

Blocking Russian grain and fertilizer shipping threatens to create a Global South food crisis as well as a European crisis as gas is unavailable to make domestic fertilizer.

Coal is becoming the “fuel of the future.”

The dollar’s exchange rate has soared against the euro, which has plunged to parity with the dollar and looks set to fall further down toward the $0.80 that it was a generation ago. U.S. dominance over Europe is further strengthened by the trade sanctions against Russian oil and gas. The U.S. is an LNG exporter, U.S. companies control the world oil trade, and U.S. firms are the world’s major grain marketers and exporters now that Russia is excluded from many foreign markets.

by shifting planning away from national governments to a cosmopolitan financial sector.

What is euphemized as U.S.-style democracy is a financial oligarchy privatizing basic infrastructure, health and education.

For the first time since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, a critical mass is able to be mutually self-sufficient to start the process of achieving independence from Dollar Diplomacy.

support the policy discussions in the context of the EU-US Trade and Technology Council.

The Irish Consulate General will host the EU officials for the first year until they set up their own office.

De Graaf will move to San Francisco with his policy assistant Joanna Smolinska and hire two local agents.

To a certain extent, he added, litigation might even be beneficial for the regulator to clarify the new legal concepts.

making an example of operating systems that will have to open up to alternative app stores.

the timing indicates the office will play an important in the implementation of the upcoming legislation, as the European Commission will take up the role of the regulator for the EU’s internal market for the first time.

to expand the permanent membership of the Security Council to include India, Brazil, Indonesia, and one or two major African countries known for having an independent stance.

a decisive step as abolishing the UN and creating (if necessary) a new principal international institution

to proceed from the legitimacy that emerged from World War II, during which most modern states simply did not exist.

from the location of its headquarters in New York, to the specifics of appointments to high and middle bureaucratic positions.

Most of the world does so not out of sympathy for Russia, but for their own selfish reasons.

The failure of the attempts to isolate Russia, even though the West relied on formal international law in condemning its actions, clearly demonstrated the refusal of other countries to follow the Western course

for example, in the area of climate change, were not secured by clear benefits for others, but by the use of instruments of direct coercion

a rising self-confidence of a host of relatively new actors in international politics

reduction of the material capabilities of the West,

economic globalization,

Russia’s military assertiveness on the Ukraine issue has helped everyone see that the status quo favored by the West is already a thing of the past. 

Otherwise, the revisionism of Moscow and Beijing would repeat the fate of revolutionary France in the early 19th century, or of Germany and Japan, which rebelled in the second quarter of the previous century against the injustice of the world order of that time.

the UNSC is a way to maintain the monopoly of the US and Western Europe in international politics.

the UNSC is becoming a very sophisticated form of deterrence which is carried out by granting two adversary countries a special status.

there is the practical ability to influence world governance through the control of procedural practices (personnel assignments in the international bureaucracy, for example).

but ‘global containment’ of both Russia and China by maintaining the hegemonic position of the West.

he only ‘institution’ in Russia-US relations is their capacity for mutual assured destruction.

has never dealt with questions of war and peace between its members.

Where they were tactically stronger than the US, it was not because of their formal status

The lesson of the destruction that emerged from Versailles after World War I by an aggrieved Germany and Japan was well learned – in both theory and practice.

“The UN’s ability to really run the world has always remained largely an illusion.”

a new cycle, in which there is little scope for a monopoly position of a narrow group of countries, will have no need for the traditional institutions of international governance at all.

was based not on formal status, but on unique capabilities of power.

o maintain its centrality in international politics.

A ‘Middle Corridor’ that Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkey signed up for this year is an example. “The regional desire is now there to make it work,” he said. “It is already happening.”

“The US needs India more while facing the DragonBear [a reference to the deepening China-Russia coalition] than India needs Washington while facing China in the Indo-Pacific,”

“emerging economies are finally breaking the hegemony of financing structures created by developed countries,”

“Both politically and economically, the stars have finally aligned for the INSTC,”

India’s imports from Russia grew by nearly 272 percent — crossing $5bn in just two months — compared with the same period in 2021.

All of this makes it “extremely important for Russia to develop new supply chains and enhance others,”

India, too, has largely focused on expanding trade with the West, China and Southeast Asia over the past two decades. Western sanctions on Iran further complicated the prospect of investing in the INSTC.

“Most of Russia’s supply chains are built to cater to Europe,”

reduces travel time from 40-60 days to 25-30 days, and cuts costs by 30 percent.

nd by 2030, the INSTC corridor is expected to have the capacity to transport up to nearly 25 million tonnes of freight each year — 75 percent of the total container traffic between Eurasia, South Asia and the Gulf.

the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) — a 7,200-kilometre (4,474-mile) network of railroads, highways and maritime routes that connects Russia and India through Iran — has been little more than a pipe dream.

CrowdTangle

his revolutionary spirit clashing with his Fabian instincts for gradual, non-violent change.

“poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.

“the relentless enemy of all irresponsible authority, especially the irresponsible authority which derives from wealth and exploitation”,

Can a human do it? If they can, okay, maybe AI is a great way to take that task off a human’s plate to free them up for other magical things.

I’ve learned we really need to get into our customers’ heads and express the solution to the problem in terms that they will relate to

to find and use data sets to solve problems

Can a human do it? Most of the time AI can’t do anything that humans can’t do.

What problem you’re trying to solve — that’s the first question you need to answer. Am I trying to prioritize people’s time? Am I trying to automate something new?

Data sets like these are a key source of truth from which to develop an AI-based project.

What concrete problems can I solve with it?

What data do we have?

conversions

classifications.

numeric prediction

We get a lot of mileage out of “yes” or “no” questions.

aligns with their intuition.

nto the things that people use every day

Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment

Declaration on European Digital Rights and Principles

The European Space Programme bolsters the EU Space policy

16thEuropean Union -African Union Summit:

JAPAN-EU DIGITAL PARTNERSHIP

JOINT COMMUNICATION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND THE COUNCIL

Is the new nuclear ban approach going to make a strong contribution to eliminating nuclear weapons, or will it further polarise the “nuclear haves” and “nuclear have-nots”?

After all, France and Germany will obviously have more open discussions about nuclear policy than China or Russia.

A world where Swiss neighbours who help provide regional stability are weakened by nuclear disarmament, but their rivals are not, isn’t in Switzerland’s interests.

a treaty banning nuclear weapons without support from nuclear-armed states may conflict with existing – but greatly stalled – disarmament commitments under the NPT.

Many TPNW proponents justifiably critique the NPT for its lack of fairness in dividing the world into “nuclear haves” and “nuclear have-nots”.

The nuclear-armed states – China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States – and the vast majority of their allied countries protected by “nuclear umbrella” pledges haven’t participated in any of the talks. Most of these countries claimed they would never join and that the treaty wouldn’t eliminate a single bomb or missile.

o work on nuclear disarmament with states inside and outside the treaty

the cautious Swiss position may allow the country to build bridges between TPNW proponents and nuclear-armed states while sorting through its own concerns about the treaty.

the cautious Swiss position may allow the country to build bridges between TPNW proponents and nuclear-armed states while sorting through its own concerns about the treaty.

having Science Diplomats in the member states with the sole objective of providing knowledge support to advance the importance of the strategic use of Science Diplomacy

that the Continent does not have fragmented STI foreign policies

a national Science Diplomacy strategy

an annual Science Diplomacy Summit

by building the institutional and human capacity of its practice and principles.

support local content development, build collaborations, enhance suitable policies that are evidence-based, give opportunity

Most African scientists work in isolated manners with a poor environment that supports partnership and collaboration.

South Africa which tends to have a better framework of Science Diplomacy on the Continent is using the concept to rebuild international relations after the apartheid and to develop its science.

Alden, C. (2007) China in Africa.

on the Chinese agenda in Africa: as a development partner, a neo-colonizer, or as an economic competito

n annual Science Diplomacy Summit

vidence-based STI strategies that promote local content rather than STI plans that are largely products of political assumptions

non-transparent collaboration and partnership in high-tech and emerging technologies due to competition in a fast-changing technological world.

leveraging well-formulated STI foreign policies and informed-bilateral agreements in managing public health