Fire Marshal Flynn said a tenant in the apartment where the fire erupted ran a business repairing e-bikes and scooters. Charging e-bike or micro-mobility device batteries are blamed in nearly 200 apartment fires so far this year, he said…
Fires sparked by lithium-ion batteries are responsible for six deaths so far this year, Flynn said.
There have been twice as many e-bike and e-scooter battery fires so far this year than in all of 2021, the Fire Department says. Last year, 104 fires were sparked by lithium-ion batteries, resulting in 79 injuries and four deaths.
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“We’re talking about the territories taken away from Poland by Stalin after the Second World War. We have to admit it. Large areas were seized by the Soviets in Romania and Hungary,” the dictator said, apparently projecting Kremlin geopolitical ambitions onto other states.
Presumably Putin includes Moldova and Transdnistria in that territory. Is Putin OK with Romania annexing those?
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Schadenfreude for you in free states:
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Romania rejects Putin’s false statements that the country has ‘territorial…
Eh? Here’s the quote from President Putin: “We’re talking about the territories taken away from Poland by Stalin after the Second World War. We have to admit it. Large areas were seized by the Soviets in Romania and Hungary,”
Boundary shifts by the Soviets which moved territory from the domain of Poland to the domain of Romania? And somehow or other, the Romanian Political Class interprets that to mean that they are accused of having ambitions to take over part of the failing state of the Ukraine? At least, according to the original source of the article – “The New Voice of Ukraine”
Maybe something got lost in translation, or maybe reports from the Ukraine are as real as the Ghost of Kiev.
The fact remains that boundaries in Europe have ALWAYS been fluid. Even the United Kingdom, while still ruling the Empire on which the Sun Never Set, lost about a third of its land area in the 20th Century when most of the Irish walked away.
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The borders of most of the countries neighboring Western Ukraine have been remade during and after the second World War. Galicia, which makes up most of Western Ukraine used to be part of old Poland for hundreds of years.
Other parts of western Ukraine used to be part of the Austrian Hungarian empire, for instance Romania used to include Northern Bukovina and a few smaller pieces of land in the area.
It’s interesting to observe that the current European Union allowed some secessions (Czech Republic and Slovakia and presumably Scotland, but prevented Catalunya) however is not at all interested in unification.
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Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Soviet Union were federations that came together voluntarily and secession was typically a part of the constitution.
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I’ve been talking about this “debt cross” as coming for some time. Well, it’s almost here.
The blue line is current U.S. expenditures on interest on all debts. The red line is expenditure on “national defense”, in 2012 constant dollars (this time series only goes back to 2002). For much of the 2000s, interest payments were running around half the defence budget, but with the huge bulge in debt during the COVID panic and interest rates now returning to something closer to their long-term mean values, the gap has dramatically shrunk and the trend seems to be for the lines to cross before long.
This is a chart of the mean time to maturity (blue lines, years) and average interest rate (yellow line, %) on the total U.S. “marketable debt”.
The average interest rate on the current outstanding debt is still less than 2%, and its average maturity is a tad more than six years (the Treasury has been stretching out maturities over the last two years to try to lock in low rates). But with interest on the benchmark 10 year Treasury bond now over 4%, as this debt rolls over, the average interest rate will inexorably rise higher. If defence spending remains constant and debt does not increase, at the point the average interest rate reaches 4%, the U.S. will be spending more than twice as much servicing its existing debt as it does on “defence”. If the debt continues to grow, this factor will increase accordingly.
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Look on the bright side! If China does not decide to sell most of its US debt and instead rolls that debt over at increasing interest rates, then China will effectively be able to transfer even more of its own “defence” costs to the struggling US taxpayer.
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30 day t-bill is at 3.6%.
There will be a HUGE flow into t-bills and by taking dollars out of circulation, will be a factor in reducing inflation.
U.S. Debt is A DISGRACE. U.S. can sell off its many land assets though…
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In December, 2008 I took a look at this in a Gnome-o-gram, “Are the U.S. bankrupt?”.
One of the great lacunæ in accounting for Federal finances in the U.S. is that they have no concept of a capital budget: everything is treated as expensed in the current fiscal year. Consequently, the vast capital assets held by the Federal government are not offset against current and future liabilities. Assets? Well, consider the 432 million acres of land, mostly in the Western U.S., held as “federal land” under the Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management. This does not include National Parks—we aren’t talking about turning them over to Disney here, although as a flaming libertarian I’d expect such a move to eventually render them less expensive, cleaner, safer, and more satisfying to the majority of visitors.
I crunched the numbers for BLM and Forest Service land and it came up—hopeless. If we take the total out-year obligations of the Federal government (US$56.4 trillion) and divide them by the acres held by the Forest Service and the BLM, you’d have to realise US$130,000 per acre to pay off all current obligations. I think that even if you threw in the national parks and all of the District of Columbia, you’d come up laughably short.
This does not bode well for the dollar.
“How much are we bid for this aircraft carrier group?”
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With U.S. “progressive” governance since your calculating that number, in 2022 the price is higher …
But I hear there is a “fire” sale at Meta (the corp. formerly known as FB)-- so if you throw in these “virtual” acres you’ll find there is PLENTY to pay for debt AND LINE THE POCKETS FOR THE LAWYERS THAT DRAFT IT!
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It might be worth noting that they have no concept of any kind of budget – the kind the rest of us work with where there has to be a balance over some period of time between incoming & outgoing.
On the capital side, FedGov and its sidekicks have lots of other assets in addition to vacant land in the Western US (where the limited availability of water puts a low cap on the value of that land). There are national labs, freeways, airports, etc. The problem might be finding someone who has the required $30 Million Milion to pay for all that.
Realistically, the US debt will be expunged by inflation (here today), changes in the law (coming to government pensions and Social Security some day), and outright theft (ask Russia about that one). And then, after the dust settles in a generation or three, the cycle of official borrowings leading to disaster will start all over again, as it has for thousands of years.
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That’s moving in the wrong direction. Thank god Ivan has no ability to detect a supermassive hangar.
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“The project, he says, costs €500,000,000.”
That would pay for a lot of gas – or coal, or oil – for chilly Europeans this winter. Wonder what freezing Euros think about paying for a vanity aircraft for the Ukraine instead of winter fuel for themselves?
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Coincidentally, NBC just deleted a story announcing that Hunter Biden had won the Powerball jackpot.
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Note that Hunter was a partner of Whitey Bulger’s nephew.
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The Democrats raised the number of votes or signatures needed to get on the ballot.
The Republicans challenged Larry Sharpe’s signatures.
They’re both scared of having Larry on the ballot.
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