james22

Seems Prigozhin was being pushed out by Shoigu and so had to take his shot. Once he found he didn't have air support and so couldn't advance on Moscow, he then had to take the deal offered (Shoigu dealt with, Wagner amnesty, and exile). Putin actually may come out pretty well if he can now blame the war on Shoigu and Prigozhin out of the picture.

I would have guessed a fake coup as equally likely, but nope: President Vladimir V. Putin on Saturday pledged “decisive actions” to quell what he called a treasonous, armed rebellion by his erstwhile ally, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, as he addressed the nation for the first time since the uprising started to unfold the day before. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/24/world/russia-ukraine-news#putin-strikes-a-tough-tone-in-his-first-address-since-the-uprising-started

Shoigu may not be suicidal, but seems he's the fall guy if this is a fake coup.

Because so much of what happens in Russia, is elaborate state-sponsored theater meant to distract attention from actual problems, it is not completely unreasonable to suspect that the currents events may not be a real coup. Here's a possible alternative explanation. According to one version of the "fake coup" theory, Russia is losing the war slowly but surely, Ukraine is poised to liberate large swathes of land, but Putin needs an internal off-ramp, a way to place the blame on anyone except himself. For months, Prigozhin ruthlessly criticized the Russian military something that Putin cannot publicly do, fomenting what appears to be a conflict between Wagner & the Russian military. But, he doesn't criticize Putin, who is the one ultimately responsible for Russian losses. One of the hallmarks of Putin's reign has been interfactional fighting. The country is controlled by competing clans who control and get rich off of various parts of the state budget, while Putin remains safely above the fray, making sure that no clans gets too powerful. The real or fake conflict between Wagner and the Russian military gives Putin a few options, one of which is to say that Russia is facing internal turmoil and he needs to withdraw troops from Ukraine to protect Russia. That way a military retreat can be covered up. In addition, any staged turmoil inside Russia can be used as an excuse to tighten control over society, by limiting Internet access for example (there are signs of this already). Tightening the screws may be necessary for Putin to remain in power in the wake of a military defeat. Both Prigozhin (formerly Putin's chef) and defense minister Shoigu are close to Putin and they're not suicidal. Whether there is an actual coup taking place in Russia or Kabuki theater remains to be seen. Either way, Putin's regime is as weak as it has ever been.

Prigozhin now says that the Russian military has ordered air strikes on Wagner convoys inside Russia, but thanked Russian air force pilots for refusing to obey those orders. In the latest update, Prigozhin says that Wagner has entered Rostov and was warmly welcomed by Russian border guards. He said that 18-year-old conscripts were deployed to stop them, but that they let Wagner pass through. He says that Wagner will not stop.

Russian state news has just confirmed that Wagner is attempting a coup d'état in Russia. Russian sources say that the Russian 45th Brigade (VDV/paratroopers) have refused orders to deploy against Wagner. It's important to note that Russian soldiers generally respect Prigozhin and Wagner more than their own senior commanders whom they see as cowardly and corrupt. More and more Russian generals are appealing to Wagner to stop the coup attempt. Here, the 1st deputy head of the GRU (military intelligence), General Alekseev says that the Russian military neither attacked nor plans to use force against Wagner and begs them to stop. The Russian military is deploying troops, including special forces in Moscow and barricading the center of the city as it prepares for what looks more and more like a coup. Russian general Surovikin says that the Russian Ministry of Defense ordered him to return from the front and he appeals to Wagner to obey Putin's orders and to stop their armed convoys. He says that Wagner fighters are comrades in arms and that what they're doing helps the enemy. Russian sources report that 2 Wagner military convoys that are each dozens of kilometers long are heading into Rostov from Russian-occupied Ukraine (Donetsk). Russian border guards are letting them through even though the border was ordered closed. Turmoil in Russia: -some Russian TV channels have shown Prigozhin's anti-MoD speech. -state of emergency in Rostov-on-Don (possibly Moscow) with heavy military/MVD presence; checkpoints on road to Moscow. -Border between Rostov region and Russian-occupied Donetsk has been closed. There are reports (not yet officially confirmed) that Moscow is being put into a high state of emergency, known as plan "Fortress." This would be done when there is a serious security threat such as violent riots, terrorism, or a coup attempt. Prigozhin accuses Russian defense minister Shoigu of coming to Rostov-on-Don to oversee a military operation that was supposed to destroy PMC Wagner and that the helicopter pilots and artillerymen who were involved were kept in the dark about the real target of the operation. Prigozhin says that 25,000 of his men are on a mission to take on the Russian Ministry of Defense and to restore justice, but says this is not a military coup and the actions of Wagner will not affect Russian troops. He says anyone can join them on their justice crusade. Prigozhin has just announced that after the attacks on his men by the Ministry of Defence, Wagner will clean house, punishing those responsible. He says they will kill anyone that gets in their way and restore justice to the army and all of Russia. Just in: Prigozhin's channels release video, claiming rocket strikes on Wagner PMC camps. Reports of numerous casualties. Eyewitnesses suggest the attack came from the rear, implicating Russian military forces. https://twitter.com/StateOfUkraine

Prigozhin, whose Wagner troops have pulled back from Bakhmut, also attacked Russia’s current war efforts in the face of Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Directly contradicting Putin’s claims that Moscow has fended off Kyiv’s counterattack, Prigozhin also accused the Russian military leadership of lying to the public about the scale of its losses and setbacks in Ukraine. “The Russian army is retreating in all directions and shedding a lot of blood … What they tell us is the deepest deception.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/23/wagner-chief-accuses-russias-military-of-attack-and-says-evil-leadership-must-be-stopped

Conflicting data out there. This as of 2020: $5M = top 3% Top 1% = $11M https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-states/

Coup?

Last year India surpassed China as the world’s most populous nation. That might be a marginal consideration until specifics are examined. The fact is, China’s population fell for the first time in 60 years, and China is now the fastest-aging nation in human history. As most know, the population replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman. China’s 2011-2020 census (as far as CCP numbers can be trusted) shows their replacement rate is 1.3 at best. Peter Zeihan has reported the replacement rate of women in highly populated urban areas like Shanghai is 0.7! Replacement rates, and these charts, tell us that China’s demographic collapse will occur within one generation – within a human lifetime! China’s worker-age population peaked in the last decade, and by 2050 will be less than half of what it was in 2020. The population collapse of China is not just starting, it is happening right now! https://andmagazine.substack.com/p/china-is-a-dying-paper-dragon

Create a BTC ETF and the next high will be later that day.

Frailty, thy name is SEC.

I have to imagine a number of those who've held off to date might put ~5% into a BTC ETF once available. I might myself.

We have been writing a lot about forecasting failures. We came across a wonderful recent story that should have deserved more attention. Admitted, it did in the narrow world of machine learning and artificial intelligence. It is about the Makridakis forecasting model competition, named after a professor from Cyprus, the latest version of which focused on the stock market. The headline news is that a new generation of modern forecasting tools has gradually been emerging as the most successful over the years. Of the 163 entries, the winner is a model based on a very new method, called meta-learning, which one can translate as learning how to learn. They don't have a method, they pick a method. The second-placed entry follows last year's trend that showed the power of another approach, which goes by the name of gradient boosting. We would like the organisers to go for an economic forecasting competition next time, though we doubt that the central banks and other official forecasters would willingly participate in a competition that risks highlighting their failures. Our hypothesis is that modern machine learning methods would outperform them, and do so by a wide margin. This is quite astonishing because there is absolutely no economics input in those new forecasting methods. The winner of the stock market competition was totally ignorant of financial economics. The main reason for the relative success of the new generation of forecasting models is lack of bias. Forecasting is very difficult. It is hard to beat the dart-throwing monkey dumb forecast. In the machine learning competition, the dumb forecast occupied 12th place out of 163. Another old-school model, that simply used implied prices from the options market, came eighth. You can think of this as the efficient-market-hypothesis entry. That raises the question of whether the top seven are merely there because of luck. After all, more than 150 entrants were not so lucky. Another important point raised by one of the competitors who did well with a new-generation method is that the big money in stock markets is not made through forecasting, but through deep understanding: market intelligence. Those players are unlikely to take part in any competition. That would be our main conclusion too. Forecasting is, to a very large extent, a mug's game, and that applies to the new world of AI as well. For us, models have some limited value, not because they can predict the future but help us understand the past, and throw up connections that we would otherwise not have made. But if forecasting is your thing, then you are about to get a lot of competition. https://www.eurointelligence.com/

Sure. There's more than one spoke on the Wellness Wheel.

60 this Fall. At present there is absolutely no solid evidence that strength training—or any other exercise or dietary program—will substantially prolong our life spans. But the preponderance of the scientific evidence, flawed as it is, strongly indicates that we can change the trajectory of decline. We can recover functional years that would otherwise have been lost. There is much talk in the aging studies community about “compression of morbidity,” a shortening of the dysfunctional phase of the death process. Instead of slowly getting weaker and sicker and circling the drain in a protracted, painful descent that can take hellish years or even decades, we can squeeze our dying into a tiny sliver of our life cycle. Instead of slowly dwindling into an atrophic puddle of sick fat, our death can be like a failed last rep at the end of a final set of heavy squats. We can remain strong and vital well into our last years, before succumbing rapidly to whatever kills us. Strong to the end. https://startingstrength.com/article/barbell_training_is_big_medicine https://www.amazon.com/Barbell-Prescription-Strength-Training-After/dp/0982522770/

How Much Money Does it Take to Feel Wealthy? https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/06/how-much-money-does-it-take-to-feel-wealthy/

I've a friend who just graduated from NE who'd argue there's no better ROI than PA.

I'm only grateful I'm not a professional. It's been painful enough being a factor investor the last decade-and-a-half. Imagine being a DFA advisor. Yeesh.

But unlike sports, investing doesn't reward talent and hard work. And your competition is an index fund. Investing is like gambling - except you've the option of taking the house's side. I can't give it up myself, but I don't kid myself I'm getting paid.