The Spanish case shows how tricky it is to sell your gold. Suddenly other countries found out that Spain had money from liquidating its gold and milked it dry.
Given Spain’s history it is incredible that the gold collected over centuries was spent in a few years.
The wiki article is very carefully tip toeing that there is no evidence that the Soviets defrauded or abused the Spanish, but it is hard to believe that 72% of the world’s gold reserves were visibly spent in a few years.
I did not investigate further but I understood the documents are not completely public, and my conspiracy hat tells me that is because it is a national humiliation.
At the time the Soviet Union had the Spanish government over a barrel because they were the only people who could/would supply significant quantities of desperately needed weapons (the opposing Nationalists were better equipped for reasons I'm not entirely sure of).
This also contributed significantly to the Communist (Stalinist) faction winning the internecine struggle on the left against the Anarchists and Trotskyists, but the quid pro quo was loyalty to the Soviet Union.
In hindsight we know they lost anyway, so this seems really silly, but at the time everyone involved believed they were in a completely existential struggle against fascism that was more important than literally anything else.
For anyone interested Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is an excellent book although it's just one man's perspective and may not be entirely historically accurate
Not sure from the page but I rode one coal powered steam train in Poland for “fun” and i wish i never did. It was an open carriage trip in koszalin and the pollution it did was such that coal particles rained on everyone. It was awful and I don’t get the nostalgia of riding such an obsolete vehicle. I was so outraged about it I told my wife the experience was like trying to experience a big pre industrial city without sewage system and finding it nostalgic.
Coal or ash in the smoke means they didn't operate the engine correctly. The smoke is supposed to be quite minimal (in particular relative to the massive amount of exhaust steam) and free from significant solids. Ash is dumped in special areas in daily maintenance.
We rode a birch log powered narrow gauge steam train and it was absolutely splendid. There was some smoke but it was nice and adding to the experience. Mostly it was steam clouds. Open and closed carriages were available. It was very slow mind you.
My sympathies; I did the same elsewhere once (during sporadic rain, so the ash stuck!) and had an absolute ball. The novelty was fantastic but I am however under no illusions that I'd ever want to live during a period where that was the prevailing technology.
It is amazing the failure rate and how people working in these endeavours keep on working and do not step in to intervene deeper. The statistics are what matters even if whole days are wasted because some leopard or lion ate the work done. These are not cute animal lovers, they are the real deal. Much luck!
P2P inference sounds really nice and it would bring us back to the 2000s culture if not for the fact inference is already so cheap. Even so it is an insurance policy if the cloud providers or governments have ideas of further censoring and monitoring chats.
On the movie Dolemite by Eddy Murphy, they go over the fact that black people absorb light and white people reflect, and how that changes the motion picture shooting process totally. Also how one size does not fit all. Cool project! I am not much into the humanities part of the project. For me this is as natural as having a localization framework, just in this case for skin tones.
Actually history shows that despotism or power in one single figure is a concept that waned with the increasing complexity of the world. One single despot could govern easily over matters of a small tribe or kingdom, but as states became more complex power was delegated to court, bureaucracy and even the bourgeoise. As the sovereign demanded ever more power it eventually needed to distribute power to the people, so it could tap its numbers. Napoleon’s schools for the peasants were so he could have a better and more numerous corps of officers than his rivals, which had a smaller pool of recruitment.
The same way programmers gave power to AI as a tool, so they could be more powerful in effecting automation, politicians that do not give up power to AI will be at a disadvantage to those who use AI to achieve more complex and effective power. The only problem might be the despot no longer shares power with those pesky humans but with a god in a machine, which in theory is in a box and does not have conflicting interests with the despot.
With this [0] I find i read 2 pages and I fall asleep consistently and really with a will to sleep. My mind wanders into far away lands and empires and says, "I take it from here".
The whole Petraeus affair[1] is a wiki 'telenovela'. The only things missing are references to Corintian leather. I will share gossip tomorrow, even if old news.
For me personally, I never was so sick in my life as when my children were between starting nursery school and 3. It was not just respiratory diseases: It was also the time in my life I and my wife had frequent digestive infections. Ohh my...How many times I could not move for 2 days. It felt like I was 80 years old, mixed with the hardest symptoms of food poisoning.
I got sick so often it limited a lot my general life: I stopped practicing sports regularly and started being very careful with sleep(sleep deprivation likely increased the chance of infection), because I knew if I did not lead a perfectly balanced lifestyle I would get sick. I am quite upset I stopped running 15km per week, even with snow. I never fully went back to it, due to fear of getting sick, and having to take care of toddlers while being feverish or nauseated.
In those years I think I was not disease free more than 3 months at a time. In a year where many people decide to not have children, it does not help the cause of having children seeing other parents suffer so much, in those early years. I have non parent friends that get sick after meeting us, resenting meeting us and asking if we are sick, because they spent all the night in the bathroom or with fever. Fortunately it feels we are already immune because we are not sick very often anymore.
Running requires resting for me, and I often do not have time to rest longer with the kids. Meals still need to be prepared, and kids need to be minded. Kids have a strict time to go to kinder garten so I still need to get up at 7.00 or 7.30AM. I don't have grandparents around, just me and my wife.
So if I am exhausted of a run and cannot rest or sleep, it is almost sure I get sick soon after. Just my experience.
Given Spain’s history it is incredible that the gold collected over centuries was spent in a few years.
The wiki article is very carefully tip toeing that there is no evidence that the Soviets defrauded or abused the Spanish, but it is hard to believe that 72% of the world’s gold reserves were visibly spent in a few years.
I did not investigate further but I understood the documents are not completely public, and my conspiracy hat tells me that is because it is a national humiliation.
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