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elsaclack · 1 month ago

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Yeah okay so like I said in the tags of the last post I’m rising from my tumblr grave to say that the ban on TikTok is symptomatic of a MUCH larger and more terrifying problem. Because yes, on its surface it’s silly dances and asmr and cooking videos and whatever, but in truth and at its core, TikTok single-handedly revolutionized the way 170 million Americans communicated with each other AND the rest of the world. Non-Americans love to point out how America-centric Americans are, but fail to realize that we are purposefully raised in an isolated, insulated environment where we are told from basically day 1 that America Is The Best and not to even bother taking a look around because it’s all downhill from outside of here. TikTok has, for MANY Americans, single-handedly destroyed that notion and allowed them (us!!) to broaden our world-view and realize that actually, things are better in other countries, and it did so in a kind, empathetic, and compassionate way.

And yeah most people wake up to the truth of that on their own as they get older, but holy shit!! The VAST majority of the Americans on TikTok are millennials and gen z (and even some older gen alpha)!! People who are becoming disillusioned with “The American Dream” (said with the HEAVIEST sarcasm) while they’re still school-aged or are just entering young-adulthood!! People who are entering - or TRYING to enter - the American workforce who suddenly have an unfiltered window into non-American lives and are wondering why tf we’re struggling and penny-pinching and toeing the line of poverty while our rich elected officials sit around and fight and argue over everything that actually matters to the citizens they supposedly represent and get richer all the while. THAT is why they’re banning the app, and that fact alone should terrify every single American citizen.

Not to mention the precedent it sets for other social media platforms!! You think some nebulous, unproven, and unfounded “threat to national security” will stop with TikTok?? They’ve already censored Adult Material on tumblr, who’s gonna stop them from coming back and doing it again or getting rid of it altogether for the exact same reason? It’s a blatant act of censorship and a direct attack on the American first amendment right to free speech.

NOTHING radicalized me the way tiktok did. I watched people in my life who were STAUNCH Trump supporters in 2016 AND 2020 wake up to the truth and vote blue for the first time in their lives BECAUSE OF TIKTOK, and did so with al the nuanced understanding that even Democrats are severely failing this country, but are at least better than the alternative. That level of awareness and presence in the average US citizen scares American politicians.

The fact that the vast majority of them - including the ones loudly opposing the ban!! - bought stock in Meta BEFORE the ban was legalized/upheld by the Supreme Court?? That Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk were legally allowed to lobby congress to ban TikTok when BOTH stood to DIRECTLY financially gain from their biggest competitor being banned in the US and are guilty of unethically gathering data and selling it to MULTIPLE third parties?? The fact that Trump is now teasing that he may or may not intervene to save TikTok when he was the one who talked about banning it in the first place AND ALSO OWNS HIS OWN COMPETING SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM??

It’s the burning of Alexandria. It’s the loss of a significant chunk of culture. It’s the sharp and sudden loss of contact with the rest of the world for more than half of all American citizens. It’s the loss of $240 BILLION dollars in the GDP when the country is already TRILLIONS of dollars in debt. And on an individualistic level, it’s the loss of millions of small businesses and primary income streams for so many individuals and families who found their primary audience on TikTok. Is the app perfect? HELL no. Are there significant changes needed to make it a safe environment for all users? ABSOLUTELY. But that can also be said of ANY social media platform. TikTok openly fostered connection and communication and creativity and compassion that is completely unique to that platform! It made so many people - myself included!! - feel less alone. I get the feeling I know what the general consensus is about TikTok on this site, but the ban on this app should scare the shit out of everyone.

#TikTok ban #TikTok #mark zuckerberg #elon musk #donald trump #I’ve been gone for like 3 years at this point but I can’t say quiet about this #and as this is the only sort-of platform I’ve got #if you want to do something to help #delete ALL meta apps off your phone #not your accounts just the apps themselves #Facebook #Instagram #facebook messenger #WhatsApp #all of them #this + the fact that I traveled outside the US for the first time in my life last year has really fundamentally changed who I am #I’m just honestly so infuriated #as are most people on TikTok #anyway back to tagging senators ro khana and ed markey in every tiktok I scroll past byeeeeeee

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reasonsforhope · 8 months ago

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is, by some measures, the most popular leader in the world. Prior to the 2024 election, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) held an outright majority in the Lok Sabha (India’s Parliament) — one that was widely projected to grow after the vote count. The party regularly boasted that it would win 400 Lok Sabha seats, easily enough to amend India’s constitution along the party's preferred Hindu nationalist lines.

But when the results were announced on Tuesday, the BJP held just 240 seats. They not only underperformed expectations, they actually lost their parliamentary majority. While Modi will remain prime minister, he will do so at the helm of a coalition government — meaning that he will depend on other parties to stay in office, making it harder to continue his ongoing assault on Indian democracy.

So what happened? Why did Indian voters deal a devastating blow to a prime minister who, by all measures, they mostly seem to like?

India is a massive country — the most populous in the world — and one of the most diverse, making its internal politics exceedingly complicated. A definitive assessment of the election would require granular data on voter breakdown across caste, class, linguistic, religious, age, and gender divides. At present, those numbers don’t exist in sufficient detail.

But after looking at the information that is available and speaking with several leading experts on Indian politics, there are at least three conclusions that I’m comfortable drawing.

First, voters punished Modi for putting his Hindu nationalist agenda ahead of fixing India’s unequal economy. Second, Indian voters had some real concerns about the decline of liberal democracy under BJP rule. Third, the opposition parties waged a smart campaign that took advantage of Modi’s vulnerabilities on the economy and democracy.

Understanding these factors isn’t just important for Indians. The country’s election has some universal lessons for how to beat a would-be authoritarian — ones that Americans especially might want to heed heading into its election in November.

-via Vox, June 7, 2024. Article continues below.

A new (and unequal) economy

Modi’s biggest and most surprising losses came in India’s two most populous states: Uttar Pradesh in the north and Maharashtra in the west. Both states had previously been BJP strongholds — places where the party’s core tactic of pitting the Hindu majority against the Muslim minority had seemingly cemented Hindu support for Modi and his allies.

One prominent Indian analyst, Yogendra Yadav, saw the cracks in advance. Swimming against the tide of Indian media, he correctly predicted that the BJP would fall short of a governing majority.

Traveling through the country, but especially rural Uttar Pradesh, he prophesied “the return of normal politics”: that Indian voters were no longer held spellbound by Modi’s charismatic nationalist appeals and were instead starting to worry about the way politics was affecting their lives.

Yadav’s conclusions derived in no small part from hearing voters’ concerns about the economy. The issue wasn’t GDP growth — India’s is the fastest-growing economy in the world — but rather the distribution of growth’s fruits. While some of Modi’s top allies struck it rich, many ordinary Indians suffered. Nearly half of all Indians between 20 and 24 are unemployed; Indian farmers have repeatedly protested Modi policies that they felt hurt their livelihoods.

“Everyone was talking about price rise, unemployment, the state of public services, the plight of farmers, [and] the struggles of labor,” Yadav wrote...

“We know for sure that Modi’s strongman image and brassy self-confidence were not as popular with voters as the BJP assumed,” says Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies India.

The lesson here isn’t that the pocketbook concerns trump identity-based appeals everywhere; recent evidence in wealthier democracies suggests the opposite is true. Rather, it’s that even entrenched reputations of populist leaders are not unshakeable. When they make errors, even some time ago, it’s possible to get voters to remember these mistakes and prioritize them over whatever culture war the populist is peddling at the moment.

Liberalism strikes back

The Indian constitution is a liberal document: It guarantees equality of all citizens and enshrines measures designed to enshrine said equality into law. The signature goal of Modi’s time in power has been to rip this liberal edifice down and replace it with a Hindu nationalist model that pushes non-Hindus to the social margins. In pursuit of this agenda, the BJP has concentrated power in Modi’s hands and undermined key pillars of Indian democracy (like a free press and independent judiciary).

Prior to the election, there was a sense that Indian voters either didn’t much care about the assault on liberal democracy or mostly agreed with it. But the BJP’s surprising underperformance suggests otherwise.

The Hindu, a leading Indian newspaper, published an essential post-election data analysis breaking down what we know about the results. One of the more striking findings is that the opposition parties surged in parliamentary seats reserved for members of “scheduled castes” — the legal term for Dalits, the lowest caste grouping in the Hindu hierarchy.

Caste has long been an essential cleavage in Indian politics, with Dalits typically favoring the left-wing Congress party over the BJP (long seen as an upper-caste party). Under Modi, the BJP had seemingly tamped down on the salience of class by elevating all Hindus — including Dalits — over Muslims. Yet now it’s looking like Dalits were flocking back to Congress and its allies. Why?

According to experts, Dalit voters feared the consequences of a BJP landslide. If Modi’s party achieved its 400-seat target, they’d have more than enough votes to amend India’s constitution. Since the constitution contains several protections designed to promote Dalit equality — including a first-in-the-world affirmative action system — that seemed like a serious threat to the community. It seems, at least based on preliminary data, that they voted accordingly.

The Dalit vote is but one example of the ways in which Modi’s brazen willingness to assail Indian institutions likely alienated voters.

Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s largest and most electorally important state, was the site of a major BJP anti-Muslim campaign. It unofficially kicked off its campaign in the UP city of Ayodhya earlier this year, during a ceremony celebrating one of Modi’s crowning achievements: the construction of a Hindu temple on the site of a former mosque that had been torn down by Hindu nationalists in 1992.

Yet not only did the BJP lose UP, it specifically lost the constituency — the city of Faizabad — in which the Ayodhya temple is located. It’s as direct an electoral rebuke to BJP ideology as one can imagine.

In Maharashtra, the second largest state, the BJP made a tactical alliance with a local politician, Ajit Pawar, facing serious corruption charges. Voters seemingly punished Modi’s party for turning a blind eye to Pawar’s offenses against the public trust. Across the country, Muslim voters turned out for the opposition to defend their rights against Modi’s attacks.

The global lesson here is clear: Even popular authoritarians can overreach.

By turning “400 seats” into a campaign slogan, an all-but-open signal that he intended to remake the Indian state in his illiberal image, Modi practically rang an alarm bell for constituencies worried about the consequences. So they turned out to stop him en masse.

The BJP’s electoral underperformance is, in no small part, the direct result of their leader’s zealotry going too far.

Return of the Gandhis?

Of course, Modi’s mistakes might not have mattered had his rivals failed to capitalize. The Indian opposition, however, was far more effective than most observers anticipated.

Perhaps most importantly, the many opposition parties coordinated with each other. Forming a united bloc called INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance), they worked to make sure they weren’t stealing votes from each other in critical constituencies, positioning INDIA coalition candidates to win straight fights against BJP rivals.

The leading party in the opposition bloc — Congress — was also more put together than people thought. Its most prominent leader, Rahul Gandhi, was widely dismissed as a dilettante nepo baby: a pale imitation of his father Rajiv and grandmother Indira, both former Congress prime ministers. Now his critics are rethinking things.

“I owe Rahul Gandhi an apology because I seriously underestimated him,” says Manjari Miller, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Miller singled out Gandhi’s yatras (marches) across India as a particularly canny tactic. These physically grueling voyages across the length and breadth of India showed that he wasn’t just a privileged son of Indian political royalty, but a politician willing to take risks and meet ordinary Indians where they were. During the yatras, he would meet directly with voters from marginalized groups and rail against Modi’s politics of hate.

“The persona he’s developed — as somebody kind, caring, inclusive, [and] resolute in the face of bullying — has really worked and captured the imagination of younger India,” says Suryanarayan. “If you’ve spent any time on Instagram Reels, [you’ll see] an entire generation now waking up to Rahul Gandhi’s very appealing videos.”

This, too, has a lesson for the rest of the world: Tactical innovation from the opposition matters even in an unfair electoral context.

There is no doubt that, in the past 10 years, the BJP stacked the political deck against its opponents. They consolidated control over large chunks of the national media, changed campaign finance law to favor themselves, suborned the famously independent Indian Electoral Commission, and even intimidated the Supreme Court into letting them get away with it.

The opposition, though, managed to find ways to compete even under unfair circumstances. Strategic coordination between them helped consolidate resources and ameliorate the BJP cash advantage. Direct voter outreach like the yatra helped circumvent BJP dominance in the national media.

To be clear, the opposition still did not win a majority. Modi will have a third term in office, likely thanks in large part to the ways he rigged the system in his favor.

Yet there is no doubt that the opposition deserves to celebrate. Modi’s power has been constrained and the myth of his invincibility wounded, perhaps mortally. Indian voters, like those in Brazil and Poland before them, have dealt a major blow to their homegrown authoritarian faction.

And that is something worth celebrating.

-via Vox, June 7, 2024.

#india #narendra modi #pm modi #modi #bjp #lok sabha elections #rahul gandhi #democracy #2024 elections #authoritarianism #anti authoritarian #good news #hope

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probablyasocialecologist · 10 months ago

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In international development circles, most people are familiar with the World Bank’s data showing that extreme poverty has declined dramatically over the past several decades, from 43 per cent of the world’s population in 1981 to less than 10 per cent today. This narrative is based on the World Bank’s method of calculating the share of people who live on less than $1.90 per day (in 2011 “PPP” terms). But a growing body of literature argues that the World Bank’s PPP-based method suffers from a major empirical limitation, in that it does not account for the cost of meeting basic needs in any given context (see here, here and here). Having more than $1.90 PPP does not guarantee that a person can afford the specific goods and services that are necessary for survival. In recent years, scholars have developed a more accurate method for measuring extreme poverty, by comparing people’s incomes to the prices of essential goods in each country (specifically food, shelter, clothing and fuel). This approach is known as the “basic needs poverty line” (BNPL), and it more closely approximates what the original concept of “extreme poverty” was intended to measure.

[...]

Extreme poverty is not a natural condition, but a sign of severe dislocation. Historical data on real wages since the 15th century indicates that under normal conditions, across different societies and eras, people are generally able to meet their subsistence needs except during periods of severe social displacement, such as famines, wars, and institutionalised dispossession, particularly under European colonialism. What is more, BNPL data shows that many countries have managed to keep extreme poverty very close to zero, even with low levels of GDP per capita, by using strategies such as public provisioning and price controls for basic essentials. In other words, extreme poverty can be prevented much more easily than most people assume. Indeed, it need not exist at all. The fact that it persists at such high levels today indicates that severe dislocation is institutionalised in the world economy – and that markets have failed to meet the basic needs of much of humanity. To address this problem, and to end extreme poverty – the first objective of the Sustainable Development Goals – will require public planning to prioritise the production of, and guarantee access to, the specific goods and services that people need to live decent lives.

#poverty #extreme poverty #world bank #food security #capitalism

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communist-ojou-sama · 6 days ago

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China’s PPP GDP is only 25% larger than that of the US? Come on people… who are we kidding? Last year, China generated twice as much electricity as the US, produced 12.6 times as much steel and 22 times as much cement. China’s shipyards accounted for over 50% of the world’s output while US production was negligible. In 2023, China produced 30.2 million vehicles, almost three times more than the 10.6 million made in the US. On the demand side, 26 million vehicles were sold in China last year, 68% more than the 15.5 million sold in the US. Chinese consumers bought 434 million smartphones, three times the 144 million sold in the US. As a country, China consumes twice as much meat and eight times as much seafood as the US. Chinese shoppers spent twice as much on luxury goods as American shoppers. With the exception of luxury goods, all of the above are volume or unit measurements and need to be adjusted for quality/features to be comparable apple-to-apples. It would be highly presumptuous of us to discount the 16,000 shop visits conducted by the World Bank and accuse them of grossly lowballing China’s PPP GDP. But that is exactly what we are going to do. It is prima facie ridiculous that China’s production and consumption, at multiples of US levels, can be realistically discounted for lower quality/features to arrive at a mere 125% of US PPP GDP. It’s not that we think the World Bank has done a bad job. It’s that we believe China’s NBS, contrary to popular opinion, has been lowballing GDP for decades and the World Bank has to work within the confines of the NBS’s reported data. This was politically important decades ago for WTO concessions and it is politically important today to maintain developing economy status as China makes a play for leadership of the Global South. We believe China’s GDP and PPP GDP are lowballed by an incomplete transition from the Material Product System (MPS) of national accounts, which excludes services by design. The World Bank is likely dutifully doing its sums with goods consumption in China multiples of the US but measuring services consumption as a fraction of the US.

...

China’s NBS stood its ground on a conceptual level. Rightly or wrongly, the Leninist MPS considers services necessary costs of material production rather than real value creation. In China’s first attempt at converting MPS to SNA in 1985, it tacked on a ludicrously low 13% to the MPS number and called it China’s services GDP.

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metamatar · 1 year ago

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One of the world’s top arms exporters, Israel exports annually as much as $7 billion worth of military technology, or 2.2 percent of its Gross Domestic Product. An additional 1.35 percent of GDP is dedicated to military research and development, and 6.7 percent is spent on its defense budget— the world’s second largest military budget as a percentage of GDP after Saudi Arabia. All told, 10.25 percent of the Israeli economy is involved directly in arms. Comparatively, for the United States, the world’s top weapons exporter, arms account for around 3.7 percent of its economy. Israel is actually the world’s largest arms supplier per capita, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the World Bank, at ninety-eight dollars; it is followed by a distant Russia at fifty-eight dollars, and Sweden at fifty-three dollars.

These figures do not include the contribution from natural resources exploited under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.50 They do not factor in the service sector’s revenue or general industry and construction taking place in the West Bank. Such figures are difficult to quantify, since many companies operate in the West Bank but have offices in Tel Aviv to obscure where operations take place. Nor does this account for Israeli exports into the Occupied Territories, which are 72 percent of Palestinian imports and 0.16 percent of Israeli GDP. All told, the Israeli economy is deeply involved in a web of expenditure and profit around the ongoing occupation and expansion of settlements.

American military aid supplanting open-ended government grants has had the effect of increasing arms production and diminishing the overall economic reach of the state. No longer is foreign aid and imperialist incentive directly invested in the working class. Israeli workers are now rewarded through the arms economy. This is why, despite the lack of social mobility and the economic degradation of neoliberalism, the working class remains committed as ever to Zionism.

The working class has become dependent on the education, housing, and career opportunities that their participation in the IDF affords them. They have found routes for advancement in the military-fueled high-tech industry, with over 9 percent of workers concentrated in high-tech. And as pensions and real wages are eroded, the cheaper cost of settlement living in the Occupied Territories has become essential.

#war economy #israel

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fairuzfan · 2 months ago

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I was looking at gdp per capita of countries cuz I saw an author say "if your country has a gdp per capita less than $10000 then go ahead and pirate my book" so I was interested to see what common gdps are-- of course I looked at the middle east and compared israel and surrounding countries and this is ridiculous.

Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon have somewhat similar gdppcs, with Jordan being the highest at $4455.

Syria has the lowest ( but it's also an estimate from 2022) at $1,051:

Israel gdp in 2023 according to the world bank public data is $52,542!!!!!! That's so much!!! Not to mention, all this is gathered towards the Israeli jews rather than any Palestinians!

For context that's more than half of the gdp of the US and even bigger gdp than the uae and united kingdom!

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centrally-unplanned · 5 days ago

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Let's do a "Tepid Critique" of Tanner Greer's latest piece around America's new turn away from the European security alliance. It is a quick one, generally outlining how generational churn has resulted in a cultural shift around the value of NATO+ amoung a new wave of people who weren't around for the Cold War. And he outlines this as a response to the material realities of the US/Euro funding split, citing a 2011 speech by Sec Def Robert Gates:

Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders—those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me—may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.

I do not think this is a false statement, but I think we are confusing the mechanism here. There is not in the US much of a "new generation" of people who now hate NATO or Europe. All of that polls very well!

The actual Ukraine war tested it, sure, (live wars do that) but it didn't shift it much at all - except amoung a minority faction. And note, Ukraine...isn't in NATO? Like that isn't a NATO thing! The US also tired of supporting South Vietnam, this just happens in all wars - we are cheapskates, news at eleven. The idea that Greer & Gates outlines of a next generation "atrophying" away this alliance is not really shown in the data.

And that makes sense because, while Europe underfunding their military is bad for Europe, it really isn't a huge deal for the US. The only real NATO war fought since the end of the Cold War was against an attack on the US! I guess you can count the Serbian bombings, but that is incredibly small bore. And to widen from NATO, dozens of European allies helped the US in Afghanistan and Iraq and the War on Terror, and meanwhile almost none of those countries have had any real conflicts that we have had to commit to. Whatever they spend on military is general "bonus" for the US. There are wider problems here, sure, that isn't my point - my point is that the current US population has not, materially, felt at all the "burden" of supporting Europe. There is not yet such a thing.

Now ofc there is a large minority faction that is pretty passionate about all this isolationism stuff! Which is a valid mechanism for change even if the "silent majority" is unmoved. But I think this group is a bit misunderstood because they have looong roots in the US. Many who have written about this will mention the isolationist parties of Charles Lindbergh and the America First movement; this did not vanish during the Cold War by any means! It just didn't win elections. My perennial go-to Trump precursor Ross Perot was a globalist-skeptic, and in 1992 - one year after the USSR fell! - he won ~20% of the vote as an independent. Not saying that was his Big Issue, it wasn't...but it wasn't Trump's either. The turn to isolation in the current administration wasn't fought at the ballot box, it was fought in the shadows of the back rooms and the trenches of Twitter. Those are far more contingent battles and "generational churn" is too simplistic to use for them.

And let's look at some of those fighters! Remember the whole North Carolina hurricane thing last year? That was a big one for the anti-Ukraine movement, lots of shit like this:

Now I want you to remember Greer's point, that European "free-riding" created the conditions for their intellectual discarding. Take that, and imagine a world where Europe spends 3% of its GDP on defense. A world where Europe, instead of giving 40% of all military aid to Ukraine like it currently does, gives 70%

In that world does a single word of this tweet change?

Obviously it doesn't! It is actually insane to think it would, no one does. These tweets are from fucking liars, they don't care about the actual quantity of aid flows to Ukraine. If Trump was president when the aid was given they would never said a word! It is partisan bullshit from top to bottom. The actual, material realities of the US-European security relationship are a bit player in this ideological reshift. It is just domestic politics picking out partisan victims.

The simple reality of America's currently realignment on this issue is that is not a grand shift in public opinion so much as a collapse in the elite structure of the Republican Party. They failed to gatekeep candidates due to a bad primary system, failed to anticipate the growing importance of immigration, and were too stubborn to just lie to voters and pivot to the center on things like middle class welfare. And that faction, for mercurial reasons, also hates Europe. This is not some inevitable trendline by any means.

Now, I said this was a tepid critique, and I meant it. I think this framing is wrong, it didn't happen the way Gates implied. An extant minority wing hijacked by an outsider strongman executed an entryist takeover of an existing party structure and started winning just enough online culture war battles to grow into dominance. But it is the case that, while that happened, the Republican Party is still pro-life despite Trump not caring about that in the slightest. Because when he took over the party, the pro-life faction was strong, and he could not simply discard them, and so he accommodated them (and other reasons ofc, just gotta focus).

Foreign policy, unlike domestic policy, never has a large domestic voting base, so it was easy to discard. But also, while traditional Republican support amoung party elites for the globalist strategy was consensus, the faith in it had been dinged by European weakness. Few really wanted to die on this hill the way that during the Cold War they would have, and Gates is correctly outlining something that happened within this elite subfaction (as opposed to the "establishment" as a whole, where it did not happen). So when push came to shove on this topic they balked, over and over - while at the same time hard-pushing tax cuts and welfare reductions, the things they have strong faith in.

I do think a world where Europe was seen by these elites as "doing their part", pushback would have been stronger. Enough to make a difference? Eh, who knows. But still worth pointing out and exploring.

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feminist-space · 2 years ago

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Wear a mask (respirators like N95s or KN95s or KF94s), especially in healthcare settings, in public transportation, in crowded places. Long covid has severe consequences that, coupled with the dystopian nightmare that is everything else, can be devastating. It's worth it to at least try to take steps to stay safe by wearing a mask. For ourselves and for the people around us.

If you need help getting masks, there are mask blocs throughout the country that you can reach out to. And Project N95 also has resources for those who cannot afford N95 etc respirators.

Excerpts from article:

"About one in four Covid patients experience long-term symptoms weeks or months after getting infected, according to multiple studies published last year."

"A May study from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that both unvaccinated and vaccinated people are at risk of long Covid. The risk is higher for the unvaccinated, but the study suggested that vaccines only reduce the risk of long Covid by 15%."

"The report estimates that 2 million to 4 million of those people are currently out of work due to long Covid."

"If 4 million long Covid patients are out of work, the lost earnings could be as high as $230 billion, the report says.

That’s nearly 1% of the country’s current-dollar gross domestic product (GDP) of $24.88 trillion."

"The condition can undeniably impact a patient’s life, work and health. Last year, the Americans with Disabilities Act labeled long Covid a disability because of how it can limit the major life activities of patients.

A July 2021 study from the Patient-Led Research Collaborative measured the condition’s effect on patients’ work over the course of seven months. Only about 27% of long Covid patients worked as many hours as they did before failing ill. Roughly 23% weren’t working at all, as a direct result of long Covid. That included being on sick leave, disability leave, quitting, being fired or being unable to find a job that would accommodate them."

#wear a mask #long covid #please wear a mask #covid

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mariacallous · 6 months ago

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MYKOLAIV, UKRAINE—Kateryna Nahorna is getting ready to find trouble.

Part of an all-female team of dog handlers, the 22-year-old is training Ukraine’s technical survey dogs—Belgian Malinois that have learned to sniff out explosives.

The job is huge. Ukraine is now estimated to be the most heavily mined country on Earth. Deminers must survey every area that saw sustained fighting for unexploded mines, missiles, artillery shells, bombs, and a host of other ordnance—almost 25 percent of the country, according to government estimates.

The dogs can cover 1,500 square meters a day. In contrast, human deminers cover 10 square meters a day on average—by quickly narrowing down the areas that manual deminers will need to tackle, the dogs save valuable time.

“This job allows me to be a warrior for my country … but without having to kill anyone,” said Nahorna. “Our men protect us at war, and we do this to protect them at home.”

A highly practical reason drove the women’s recruitment. The specialized dog training was done in Cambodia, by the nonprofit Apopo, and military-aged men are currently not allowed to leave Ukraine.

War has shaken up gender dynamics in the Ukrainian economy, with women taking up jobs traditionally held by men, such as driving trucks or welding. Now, as mobilization ramps up once more, women are becoming increasingly important in roles that are critical for national security.

In Mykolaiv, in the industrial east, Nahorna and her dogs will soon take on one of the biggest targets of Russia’s military strategy when they start to demine the country’s energy infrastructure. Here, women have been stepping in to work in large numbers in steel mills, factories, and railways serving the front line.

It’s a big shift for Ukraine. Before the war, only 48 percent of women over age 15 took part in the workforce — one of the lowest rates in Europe. War has made collecting data on the gender composition of the workforce impossible, but today, 50,000 women serve in the Ukrainian army, compared to 30,000 before the war.

The catalyst came in 2017, years before the current war began. As conflict escalated with Russia in Crimea, the Ukrainian government overturned a Soviet-era law that had previously banned women from 450 occupations.

But obstacles still remain; for example, women are not allowed jobs the government deems too physically demanding. These barriers continue to be chipped away—most recently, women have been cleared to work in underground mines, something they were prevented from doing before.

Viktoriia Avramchuk never thought she would follow her father and husband into the coal mines for DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company.

Her lifelong fear of elevators was a big factor—but there was also the fact that it was illegal for women to work underground.

Her previous job working as a nanny in a local kindergarten disappeared overnight when schools were forced to close at the beginning of the war. After a year of being unemployed, she found that she had few other options.

“I would never have taken the job if I could have afforded not to,” Avramchuk said from her home in Pokrovsk. “But I also wanted to do something to help secure victory, and this was needed.”

The demining work that Nahorna does is urgent in part because more than 55 percent of the country is farmed.

Often called “the breadbasket of Europe,” Ukraine is one of the world’s top exporters of grain. The U.K.-based Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which has been advising the Ukrainian government on demining technology, estimates that landmines have resulted in annual GDP losses of $11 billion.

“Farmers feel the pressure to plow, which is dangerous,” said Jon Cunliffe, the Ukraine country director of Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a British nonprofit. “So we need to do as much surveying as possible to reduce the size of the possible contamination.”

The dogs can quickly clear an area of heavy vegetation, which greatly speeds up the process of releasing noncontaminated lands back to farmers. If the area is found to be unsafe, human deminers step in to clear the field manually.

“I’m not brave enough to be on the front line,” 29-year-old Iryna Manzevyta said as she slowly and diligently hovered a metal detector over a patch of farmland. “But I had to do something to help, and this seemed like a good alternative to make a difference.”

Groups like MAG are increasingly targeting women. With skilled male deminers regularly being picked up by military recruiters, recruiting women reduces the chances that expensive and time-consuming training will be invested in people who could be drafted to the front line at a moment’s notice. The demining work is expected to take decades, and women, unlike men, cannot be conscripted in Ukraine.

This urgency to recruit women is accelerating a gender shift already underway in the demining sector. Organizations like MAG have looked to recruit women as a way to empower them in local communities. Demining was once a heavily male-dominated sector, but women now make up 30 percent of workers in Vietnam and Colombia, around 40 percent in Cambodia, and more than 50 percent in Myanmar.

In Ukraine, the idea is to make demining an enterprise with “very little expat footprint,” and Cunliffe said that will only be possible by recruiting more women.

“We should not be here in 10 years. Not like in Iraq or South Sudan, where we have been for 30 years, or Vietnam, or Laos,” Cunliffe said. “It’s common sense that we bring in as many women as we can to do that. In five to 10 years, a lot of these women are going to end up being technical field managers, the jobs that are currently being done by old former British military guys, and it will change the face of demining worldwide because they can take those skills across the world.”

Manzevyta is one of the many women whose new job has turned her family dynamics on their head. She has handed over her previous life, running a small online beauty retail site, to her husband, who—though he gripes—stays at home while she is out demining.

“Life is completely different now,” she said, giggling. “I had to teach him how to use the washing machine, which settings to use, everything around the house because I’m mostly absent now.”

More seriously, Manzevyta said that the war has likely changed many women’s career trajectories.

“I can’t imagine people who have done work like this going back and working as florists once the war is over,” she laughed.

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