Drug shortages, Mongolia's climate cataclysm, South Sudan's pipeline crisis & McCarthy on the reification of thought.
Great links, images and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
Basoeki Abdullah, Labour, 1950s Source: National Gallery Singapore
“In this painting … Basoeki Abdullah depicted his aspirations for the Third World at a time when much of Southeast Asia was contemplating a post-colonial era driven by the labours of the common people … This artwork was presented as a gift (circa 1965) by former Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik to his Singaporean counterpart S. Rajaratnam … and was for many years displayed prominently at the main stairway of this City Hall building where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, together with many key government departments such as the Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry of Culture, were housed.”[i]
Cited by Manish Melwani in Singapore Unbound
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Drug shortages are multiplying around the world
While big pharma companies focus on developing innovative drugs that they can sell under patent and at high margins, recouping research and development costs, off-patent generic medicines such as methotrexate make up the backbone of pharmaceutical care. Ninety-one per cent of drugs prescribed in the US and 70 per cent in Europe are generics and biosimilars, a more complex off-patent drug. Despite their essential role in global healthcare, manufacturing issues, weak supply chains and low pricing have combined to create a “broken market” for these medicines that makes them unattractive to produce and vulnerable to supply shocks, quality defects or surges in demand, say industry leaders and analysts.
Source: FT
China’s trade rebalancing towards ASEAN since the 2010s has been dramatic.
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China-made EV’s will likely push towards 25 percent of the EU market this year.
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Double Dzud: The Worst Climate Disaster You Haven’t Heard
When Mongolia’s extreme weather killed 700,000 livestock in 2018, it was a record. This year, that number is 5.2 million — and could soon quadruple. In Mongolia , where nearly a third of the population still lives as nomadic herders, a winter so cold that livestock either freeze to death or starve as snow and ice make grazing impossible is called a “dzud.” These extreme seasons used to come once a decade. With climate change destabilizing the landlocked Asian country’s weather pattern, the dzud has haunted Mongolia for six of the last 10 years. In 2018, when a dzud wiped out roughly 700,000 livestock, it was a devastating record. Last month, the death toll for this winter eclipsed 2 million, as HuffPost reported at the time. Weeks later, that figure has nearly tripled. As of this week, at least 5.2 million animals have died since winter began, a particularly brutal event that combined the effects of two different types of dzud. … This is still just the start of the catastrophe, as the die-off is expected to reach its peak sometime in early May. The final death toll could reach 20 million, the United Nations told HuffPost on Tuesday. It’s the worst winter in at least 50 years, according to the International Foundation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which warned last week that at least 75% of herding families were affected. As the extent of this year’s dzud became clear, the U.S. government pledged another $200,000 in assistance last month. On March 4, the U.S. Embassy in Ulaanbaatar announced another $700,000 in aid. … Mongolia is now bracing for an influx of internal refugees as nomads who lose much or all of their animals face financial decimation and migrate to Ulaanbaatar in search of work in construction or security. Since herders’ homes are already mobile, nomads moving to the city typically find an open plot on the outskirts and hunker down. The permanent new homes don’t have running water or hookups to the electrical grid. Instead, the herders dig pit latrines that sometimes flood and spread raw sewage over densely populated urban neighborhoods and burn coal indoors. Combined with what spews from the smokestacks of the city’s coal-fired power plants, the resulting air pollution has rendered Ulaanbaatar the most dangerous capital in the world to breathe. In October, when HuffPost visited Mongolia to report on the plight of nomads dealing with climate change, the country’s top climate official said a major priority was creating an early warning system that can deliver timely weather forecasts to people across a nation more than twice the size of Texas, with a population slightly larger than Houston. Mongolia was still working to get “the right software, the right system,” and “the right computers, which are extremely sophisticated issues,” Dimovska said.
Source: Huffington Post
South Sudan’s pipelines cut
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Snacking on sushi served on someone’s semi-naked body at a crypto bash … irresistible!
Source: FT
The olive oil polycrisis comes to the ECB
What you write down becomes fixed
“What you write down becomes fixed. It takes on the constraints of any tangible entity. It collapses into a reality estranged from the realm of its creation. It’s a marker. A roadsign. You have stopped to get your bearings, but at a price. You’ll never know where it might have gone if you’d left it alone to go there. In any conjecture you’re always looking for weaknesses. But sometimes you have the sense that you should hold off. Be patient. Have a little faith. You really want to see what the conjecture itself is going to drag up out of the murk. I don’t know how one does mathematics. I don’t know that there is a way. The idea is always struggling against its own realization. Ideas come with an innate skepticism, they don’t go barreling ahead. And these doubts have their origin in the same world as the idea itself. And that’s not something you really have access to. So the reservations that you yourself in the your world of struggle bring to the table may actually be alien to the path of these emerging structures. Their own intrinsic doubts are steering-mechanisms while yours are more like brakes. Of course the idea is going to come to an end anyway. Once a mathematical conjecture is formalized into a theory it may have a certain luster to it but with rare exceptions you can no longer entertain the illusion that it holds some deep insights into the core of reality. It has in fact begun to look like a tool.”
―Cormac McCarthy,The Passenger
Basoeki Abdullah, The Proclaimer of Independence (Sukarno)
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