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Russian Wage Growth Hits 16-Year Peak Amid Race to Find Workers (Bloomberg)

THE BELL: Russians have never lived as well as they do today (bne IntelliNews)

Protests against surging mass tourism in Mexico City end in vandalism, harassment of tourists AP

Tension had been mounting in the city since U.S. “digital nomads” flocked to Mexico City in 2020, many to escape coronavirus lockdowns in the U.S. or to take advantage of cheaper rent prices in the Latin American city.

Since then, rents have soared and locals have increasingly gotten pushed out of their neighborhoods, particularly areas like Condesa and Roma, lush areas packed with coffee shops and restaurants.

Michelle Castro, a 19-year-old college student, was among the flocks of people protesting. She said that she’s from the city’s working class city center, and that she’s watched slowly as apartment buildings have been turned into housing for tourists.

“Mexico City is going through a transformation,” she said. “There are a lot of foreigners, namely Americans, coming to live here. Many say it’s xenophobia, but it’s not. It’s just that so many foreigners come here, rents are skyrocketing because of Airbnb. Rents are so high that some people can’t even pay anymore.”

The Mexico City protest follows others in European cities like Barcelona, Madrid, Paris and Rome against mass tourism.

Interesting development. It used to be that developing countries want to attract as many foreigners as possible to stimulate the local economy with their strong currencies, now people are even fed up with American tourists.

Doesn’t look very welcoming for those who want to flee from Trump as well.

If you have a chance to talk to Chinese grad students or postdocs, just ask them about what it’s like back in the country.

Only ～5% of the population (～70 million people, or ~9% of total workforce) have to pay personal income tax, because most people don’t even reach the minimum income needed (5000 yuan/month, or ~$700 USD/month) to qualify for income tax payment. The wealth disparity is huge.

Actually China is already trying to take advantage of the situation and offer positions to American scientists.

But read my comment here - the Chinese academia is way harsher for foreigners to survive the environment and work culture. Most Americans are probably more suited to the more relaxed European academic culture than in China.

Depends on your perspective. It’s great for productivity and overtaking the West, but the entire neijuan (involution, or extreme competition) is already happening at a pace that cannot be easily stopped, even with the government initiative promising to do so.

Think about this: the major tax base of both central and local governments are value-added tax, followed by corporate income tax. Besides, nearly 1/3 of local government revenue comes from land premium. As the property market is imploding, the reliance on the industrial/manufacturing sector becomes even more critical for the local governments, and that means the industries have to work harder to churn out more value-added goods and services to add to the local government tax revenues, without which it could not finance its operating expenditures (the city has to run the subways, rails, various infrastructure and public utilities, and paying the civil servants etc.)

While there may be an intention to stop the extreme competition from happening, there is no incentive for the government to actually do so. You don’t want to be the first one to lose out among your peers, and so it becomes a race to the bottom. The entire system needs to be revamped.

To Understand the Economy, This Fed President Is Ditching His Desk WSJ

When the conversation turned to inflation, the Richmond Fed president extracted an uncomfortably honest answer about how President Trump’s tariffs have some firms thinking about their power to raise prices.

“You can probably appreciate this from your McKinsey background: We’re raising prices where we can,” said Jim Datin, a Chapel Hill-based life-sciences executive and partner at a private-equity firm.

And what convinced Datin his company still had pricing power, Barkin asked, when conventional wisdom said it had evaporated?

“Some of it’s opportunistic with the supply chain right now,” Datin offered.

“In other words, tariffs,” Barkin said, translating the corporate-speak. Then the management consultant-turned-central banker cut to the chase: Are those price increases for tariff-related costs or are his businesses using “tariff noise” as “air cover to raise prices”?

“It’s both,” said Datin. “And I feel a little guilty saying that.” A regional banker chimed in: Some of his customers were reporting the same thing.

It’s this kind of candor that is keeping Barkin on edge—businesses raising prices not because they have to, but because they think they can get away with it. For Fed officials who fought hard to bring inflation down, such admissions make them uneasy.

There you have it, folks. Tariffs are not inherently inflationary, especially since the US runs on a free-floating exchange rate system.

The price hikes come from businesses thinking they can get away with it, not because they have to.

Bold of them to admit it.

Chinese academia is way too competitive and exhausting for your American scientists. How many American grad students and postdocs are willing to work 6-7 days a week and have their lab meeting held on Sunday, which is becoming a common occurrence now?

These are some of the most hardworking people out there (and you can see them carrying their work ethic overseas as grad students and postdocs in Western universities) and churning out top tier scientific publications every year. These are the people you are going to compete against. If you think the “publish or perish” pressure is bad in Western academia, then in China this is ramped up to the next level.

Finally, connections are very important in China, even more so than in America and Europe. Much of the institute’s funding is going to be received by the heads of the departments, who then distribute the funds to the individual labs underneath them. Unless you are already a well-renowned scientist, you are going to be competing against your peers who have actual connections to the senior figures in the department.

Chinese science is very well funded, but the competition is also extreme, just like most industries in China. You don’t publish well, you won’t survive. Europe may be lacking in their funding, but their work culture is also more relaxed and suited to Westerners.

I have several friends with PhD who emigrated to the US and loved it there because, according to them, at least it is nowhere near as exhausting as they had it in China. They actually have the time to enjoy their weekends, a luxury you won’t get in Chinese academia.

What is the range of the F-16s? I suppose they take off from Western Ukraine, and could potentially conduct a very short period bombing run before returning to base? Clearly they cannot do mid-air refueling on the Ukrainian airspace.

To be clear, I don’t disagree with you.

However, you have to understand that China has no permanent allies. Its only two allies are the People’s Liberation Army and the PLA Navy.

China has no problem allying with the imperialist America to destroy the USSR when it perceives itself to be under threat from Soviet encirclement, and it has also no problem with helping Russia but only to the extent of turning Russia into a cannon fodder while distracting the US empire attention away from China itself.

Say whatever you want of China, but the strategy of playing both sides and win has served China very well over the past 50 years, and turned it from one of the poorest countries to one of the wealthiest in the world.

How the heck did the Ukrainian Air Force manage to make a come back? Didn’t Ukraine receive the old F-16 variants and had trouble with their pilot training? How did they manage to evade Russian air defenses?

And there are still Ukrainian MiGs and Sus with their pilots around? I don’t know if that’s an indictment against the Soviet air defenses system (often boasted to be the best in the world) or a commendation to the build quality of Soviet jets.

China doesn’t need Russia lol. But Russia would be useful as a cannon fodder to keep the imperialist attention away from China.

On Chinese internet, a popular phrase is “a half-dead bear is a good bear”. Understand what it means?