Hey there friends. Friday is upon us. The week flew by. One last digest before the weekend. Let’s get to it.
After 16 days of war seems like the parties may be closing the negotiations gaps as this Business Insider article reports. Additionally, this other article from the Jerusalem Post points to the fact that secret negotiations are already taking place. From the article: The real negotiations, according to the sources, are happening directly between Russia and Ukraine and are much more serious than what the West has been saying. Kyiv has not shared with the West what has been going on in the negotiations since they do not want to damper the worldwide sense of emergency.
In the meantime, Russia has started bombing western Ukrainians cities which were spared up to now.
The accusations that the US was developing biological weapons in Ukraine have been growing louder from the Russian Government. It even requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on this topic. The Pentagon firmly denied such allegations saying that it could well be a “false flag” operation by Russia where it tries to justify its imminent use of chemical weapons in Ukraine.
According to this Reuters article, WHO says it advised Ukraine to destroy pathogens in health labs to prevent disease spread.
Here’s the Russian foreign minister Lavrov saying they did not attack Ukraine:
On other news, the Covid-19 death rate in England is now lower than that of the flu according to the Financial Times (if you find yourself behind the FT paywall, try googling the title and access the article from there).
You have probably heard of Ray Dalio. He is an American billionaire hedge fund manager. He has founded the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, in 1975. Dalio's net worth is reported to be around $15.7 billion.
Ray Dalio is also an author. In 2017 he published “Principles: Life & Work”. It was a New York Times #1 bestseller and Amazon's #1 business book of 2017.
The catalyst for the book was a frank memo from his top lieutenants in 1993 about his interpersonal performance as a manager at Bridgewater Associates. Following the harsh but realistic critique, Dalio began to develop a unique company culture based on principles and unadorned feedback.
Today I will talk a bit about his newest book “The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail”, which was published on November 16, 2021.
The main contribution of this book is the synthesis and integration of economic, social, and geopolitical history that presents a holistic view of how countries rise and fall. Ray gives us a way to understand the major forces, cycles, and paradigm shifts that can dramatically change the world around us. Additionally, the quantification of each major nation’s economic, cultural, and geopolitical health, allows Ray to identify the key determinants of a country’s strengths and weaknesses through time, and relative to other countries. Seeing the most important long-term trends in charts provide useful perspectives that are unavailable elsewhere.
Below you can check out an animation of this book narrated by Ray himself.
For the tech fans among you, Apple hosted its “Apple Event” this week, so let’s talk about that for a minute. The main takeaway was the announcement of the iPhone SE, a budget version of its iPhone product line, which starts at $429 and launches March 18. The new iPhone SE includes a 4.7-inch display and support for 5G. It will also use the same processing chip as the iPhone 13, launched last fall. The phone will come in three colors: midnight, starlight and red.
Apple also introduced a new iPad Air, Mac Studio and Mac Studio Display, a superpowered desktop computer aimed at studio creators.
To me the most important product of the event was M1 Ultra processor a.k.a the beast. For comparison, the original ARM1 processor from 1985 would be the size of a pixel in the next M1 Ultra architecture:
Anyways, here is MBHD, the best tech youtuber out there, making a much better job than I in summarizing the event:
Moving on, it’s no secret that electric cars are very good at drag races (straight line, quarter of a mile long) due to their superb acceleration. But most of the time when they are competing against an ICE (internal combustion engine) supercar, after the initial few seconds, the ICE catches up and even manages to win the race. Well, that seems to belong to the past now with the new Tesla X & S Plaid editions. These two models share some alien technology. The acceleration does not stop. The distance with the ICE supercar gets wider and wider. Total madness. See below:
Come on, a family SUV vs. a sport supercar. WTAF.
And here’s the Model X Plaid against a Lambo for those you still in doubt:
And lastly, the usual pics, vids and memes from around the web:
90% of women on Bumble (a Tinder competitor) are looking for 6% of men.
LOL.
Another LOL.
Which one is it?
Poland literally shifted after WWII.
Made me chuckle.
That was it for this week folks. Have a great weekend. See you on Monday.