Listening to certain “experts” is like watching a very bleak comedy, French style. They seem bent on negating anything that proves a crisis is coming. The employment rate is going strong, the housing market will soon rise again, Riksbanken (the central bank) won’t increase the interest rate further… If you borrow too much money, one day you’ll have to pay.
Democracies in time
Russian authorities are trying hard to foil Swedish plans to join NATO, and try to vie “experts” to argue for the sake of Russia. I still assert democracies should help Russia lose on the battlefield. No one should even consided abandoning Ukraine. You stand by your promise, by your friends.
Book review: Quantum Supremacy
Lately, I’ve become interested in quantum computing and wrote a short paper on the subject, combining the search for quantum computers and equality. As a brief introduction I bought Michio Kaku’s new book.After some initially wild assertions Michio Kaku delves into the real stuff: quantum theory and quantum mechanics and it gets exciting!
Book review: Weapons of math destruction
Cathy O’Neil is a computer scientist and mathematician, who left the academic life for the financial industry in the early 2000’s, working with computers, for companies making lots of money. There she discovered what is now called Big Data and later became troubled by the purposes and intents of algorithms. After realising the even more troublesome side effects on society, she thus wrote this book, with the secondary title How Big Data increases inequality and threatens democracy.
Studies proceeding
Since roughly one month I’ve been attending the master programme in political science, first semester, and I must admit it’s delightful.
Book review: The creativity code
Marcus du Sautoy is a British mathematician, who’s published several books on mathematics, appeared on TV and is highly regarded as an educator. He released a book in 2018 called The creativity code: How AI is learning to write, paint and think (du Sautoy is very fond of the word code in general, like in human code and creativity code), where he writes and ponders on the meaning of artificial intelligence and its implications for culture.
Book review: The Russo-Ukrainian War
This is the second book of Serhii Ploky I review, a very contemporary, and initially, personal account of The Russo-Ukrainian War, beginning a few days prior to the full-scale invasion and war. The book provides historical insights, and retrospect accounts of Ukraine’s position in the Soviet Union, the aftermath of the Cold War and the beginning of the 2000’s, with the Orange Revolution, EuroMaidan and first invasion of 2014-2015 at its focus. All this, puts the war into a context and provides the reader with a coherent comprehension of what has happened prior to the war beginning last war and why Ukraine is attacked by Russia.
The debate on refugee espionage
Refugee espionage, according to Swedish law, is when a person unlawfully, secretly and systematically, over time, gathers information about someone else in order to provide a foreign power this information. It’s been part of Swedish law since the 1940’s and Sweden is one of the few countries to actually prohibit this action. How does the Swedish parliament and media debate refugee espionage since 2014, when the law was revised?
The emperor is all but draped in paper
When Prigozhin’s Wagner troops began their sprint towards Moscow on Friday/Saturday, they were 25.000, 5.000 of them being a vanguard. Vladimir Putin is said to have a security apparatus of hundreds of thousands of men. But yesterday, we witnessed boys with weapons and police officers in Moscow. Not security forces. Perhaps they were unseen. Perhaps they were not, because it’s a sham, a paper machier construction.
Sustainable war or Pandora’s Box in Russia?
Ukraine has proved to be a very tough opponent for Russia. The Ukrainians have been able to kill and injure hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers. They’ve also proved to be adept at using the Russian propaganda toolkit against the Russians themselves. It might be that Vladimir Putin opened the Pandora’s Box with this war: a sustainable war he cannot end and cannot limit.