Good morning friends. It’s Wednesday. Right before you get down to work, time to find out what is going on in the world these days.
News Briefing
•After the peace talks yesterday in Istanbul, Russia said that it would be reducing its military operations around Kyiv, and around the northern city of Chernihiv. A month into the invasion, Russia declared its main goal was the "liberation of Donbas".
The pledge was met with skepticism by the Ukrainians citing past Russian promises that were never materialized. Military analysts believe that the Russians are trying to sell their military setbacks in trying to capture Kyiv as part of the overall invasion strategy.
•There was an explosion in Belgorod, Russia yesterday, very close to the Ukrainian border. If this was done by the Ukrainian military, it would be the first time since the war started that the Russian territory has been hit.
•In other news, here’s Joe Rogan’s take on the whole Will Smith-Chris Rock drama. Joe is a comedian himself and I think he makes good points.
•Wind and solar generated 10% of global electricity for the first time in 2021, a new analysis shows. Fifty countries get more than a tenth of their power from wind and solar sources. Furthermore, the growth in the need for electricity last year was the equivalent of adding a new India to the world's grid. More on this here.
•Hackers stole nearly $650 million from the Ronin Network, which is used as a bridge between the widely popular game Axie Infinity and Ethereum essentially to transfer cryptocurrency in and out of the game. The attackers left with 173,600 ether and 25.5 million USDC. The attack, which happened March 23, was only discovered Tuesday morning. The Ronin bridge is a 5-of-9 validator bridge, meaning the funds are secured by a set of 9 secret keys, any 5 of which can be used to move money around. It looks like 5 of the keys were compromised via a backdoor in the Ronin bridge node.
Omicron in China
The BA.2 model of the omicron variant of the Sars-CoV-2 virus is faster, quieter and 30 per cent more prolific. There is no chance of stopping it with lockdowns, mass testing or social distancing – even in Xi Jinping’s China.
The only remedy is vaccination, which won’t stop infection but will moderate the symptoms enough to save a lot of lives, as it has done in the West. But, having invented its own second-rate vaccines and then failed to get them into the arms of many of the oldest and most vulnerable people, the Chinese government is now almost certainly facing a big rise in deaths. Omicron may be milder than delta, but it can still kill the old and ill – as we have seen in Hong Kong.
But for the time being seems like China is doubling down on its zero-Covid policy. The authorities in Shanghai have begun a strict lockdown, half of the city at a time. For five days in each half, Shanghai residents will have to stay at home and undergo mass testing. Those who test positive will be quarantined, even if they are asymptomatic. Here’s a robodog enforcing the lockdown:
Ultimately though China will need a strategy to exit zero-Covid and live with the virus. Currently, more than 130mn Chinese aged 60 and above are not fully vaccinated, according to FT analysis of Chinese vaccination data. Fixing that is essential for the next phase.
Hunter Biden and Biolabs in Ukraine (part 2)
Emails show Hunter was also particularly involved in Metabiota's operations in Ukraine. Hunter's pitches to investors claimed that they not only organized funding for the firm, they also helped it 'get new customers' including 'government agencies'.
Metabiota vice president Mary Guttieri wrote a memo to Hunter outlining how they could 'assert Ukraine's cultural and economic independence from Russia'. 'As promised, I've prepared the attached memo, which provides an overview of Metabiota, our engagement in Ukraine, and how we can potentially leverage our team, networks, and concepts to assert Ukraine's cultural and economic independence from Russia and continued integration into Western society.'
In another sign of the deep ties between Metabiota and the Department of Defense, Hunter's RSTP business partner Rob Walker said he would 'have a friend reach out to DoD on the down low', in order to prove the company's bona fides to top prospective investors Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in October 2014.
Russia's Defense Ministry last week put out a diagram with arrows connecting Biden, Soros and the Democratic Party to Ukrainian biolabs.
There is an obvious Russian propaganda attempt to take advantage of this. But it doesn't change the fact that there does seem to be something that needs to be explored here. Why is Hunter Biden - the disgraced son of the vice president in charge of relations with Ukraine, the guy with no discernible skills and a cocaine habit - at the heart of all this? (Source: Daily Mail)
Monogamy and Modern Mating
In the United States, about 5% of the population is currently in a consensually non-monogamous relationship. Marriage rates are declining, with only 50% of U.S. adults having ever been married. This change, largely driven by young Millennials and Gen Z cohorts, is reflected in the high rates of singledom in the US: 31% of adults are single, and 41% of adults under 30 are single—and half of them aren’t looking to partner up any time soon. Finally, the U.S. tops the world in having the highest percentage of single-parent households at 23 percent.
Let’s take a look at our evolutionary history for some insights. Only 3-5% of mammals are monogamous. Among primates, however, upwards of 20% of primate species are monogamous. Benefits to humans mating monogamously across our evolutionary history include: men are relatively very strong and offer protection to women and their offspring; a woman pairing up with a man gives him greater certainty that the offspring he is caring for are genetically his; women can up their reproductive output over the course of their reproductive lifespan with the support of a partner (there is evidence to suggest that partnered women can reduce breast feeding duration, which in turn reduces the spacing between births and results in more children overtime).
Despite this compelling evidence for monogamy in humans, it’s less intuitive how this connects to the diversity of relationship arrangements we see across the world. What determines whether we participate in monogamous relationships is a cognitive cost-benefit calculation of whether investing resources (time, energy, our genetic material) outweighs the costs of dissolving the partnership. In pre-civilization ancestral times, this calculation was likely more often on the side of staying in a monogamous relationship for at lest some long period of time, before maybe moving on to another monogamous relationship. But in today’s modern societies, women (and men) have far more flexibility in this cognitive calculation than ever before, resulting in many of the relationship (or lack thereof) patterns we observe today. (Source: ifstudies.org)
Pics, vids & memes
Here’s a video when Biden and Putin used to talk to each other:
Ever wondered how the Romans build their roads? Probably not, but here it is anyway:
Here’s the President of the United States:
And yes, it’s a cheatsheet:
And his predecessor:
Here’s Jon Stewart bashing Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram back in the day. This did not age too well:
A lot of hindsight bias regarding Facebook's acquisition of Instagram. Today, everyone thinks it was obvious that Instagram was going to become a huge business. But that's not what people were saying back in 2012 when Instagram had 30 million users and zero revenue.The mandarin duck, the most beautiful duck out there:
Sassy little girl
That was it for today folks. Enjoy the rest of your day. Till tomorrow, peace.