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Did you know? Venezuela’s oil became a geopolitical “payment rail”
In the last decade, Venezuela’s state oil system (PDVSA) has been operating through multiple, distinct channels that moved value outward: oil-backed debt repayment, prepayments linked to future supply, subsidized shipments, swap contracts for diluents and fuels, and sanctions-era routing via gold and new intermediaries. (Reuters)
1️⃣China:
When the Watchdog Lost Line-of-Sight
A story about the Fourth Estate, the feed, and the new architecture of persuasion.
I remember the old habit of choice as something physical.
A newspaper had weight. A TV channel had a number. Even the act of turning a page or switching a remote carried a small democratic meaning:
Imports matter more than exports. Right?
Prologue
I remember my first trade class in Paris. Not the city—though the coincidence felt like a public joke at the time—but a lecture hall with chalk dust in the light and a professor who spoke the way people speak when they intend to rearrange your furniture.
She
There’s more debt than money in the world
Debt is referenced as the stock of credit contracts (loans + bonds outstanding). Money (M2) is referenced as the stock of spendable settlement balances (currency + deposits) - “Global M2” here is a USD broad-money proxy, not “all money/wealth” or all financial assets.
The “gap” shows that the world runs on
Canon by Design
How AI turns dominant moral canons into “neutrality” — and what my argument with a model revealed about its architecture
1–2 minute summary
* 🧠 I challenged an AI on an ethical inconsistency: humans get “save lives” (vaccines), animals get “kill lives” (culling).
* ⚖️ The model drifted from my moral question (“is human
Governance, Law, and Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean (7th–17th Century)
China’s Long Squeeze: Demography, Food Security, and the Resilience State
By 2100, China is expected to shrink from 1.4 billion to roughly 633 million people – the largest absolute population loss of any country on earth, according to the UN.
Αν το εισόδημα ανέβηκε, γιατί δεν το νιώθουμε;
Ποιος πήρε την άνοδο των εισοδημάτων;
Η Ελλάδα, η Ευρώπη και το πραγματικό διαθέσιμο εισόδημα 2019–2024
Πρόλογος
Πώς πραγματικά διαβάζεται το «+22% στην ΕΕ, –5% στην Ελλάδα; Τις τελευταίες μέρες η Eurostat έβγαλε ένα στατιστικό που ταιριάζει με το κλίμα ανάμνησης του παρλεθόντος που επικρατεί:
Στην ΕΕ, το πραγματικό
Markets Are Efficient, Information Is Perfect, and AI Will Turbocharge Profitability
Or not.
For decades, the comforting story went like this:
markets are efficient, information is rapidly reflected in prices, and any remaining frictions will be shaved away by technology.
In that story, AI is the final boss of efficiency.
It reads faster than any analyst, digests more documents than any