What's keeping the economic situation from freefalling even deeper into the abyss, is the money of the diaspora. Expats send back money to support their families. That's the lifeline, without which there would be famine.
What's keeping the economic situation from coming back up, is exactly what brought it down in the first place:
It's the complete failure of the state, with a political system that is rotten with power-hungry warlords, old and new, who won't let go. A people who remains divided because every few decades a faction decides it's so powerful now that it's its prerogative to hijack the country's destiny by use of force... And some big countries with huge influences (follower factions), using Lebanon as a card on their negotiating tables - some even see the situation as "chemothraphy to remove a cancer", and don't mind it staying. (Pardon the vagueness; the politics is quite complicated and not possible to give a clearer picture than this in a brief comment).
If with a magic wand all of those problems disappeared, and a new government materializes with full support from everyone to start fixes and reforms, it is estimated that it would take at least 10 years to bring the economy back to a healthy state.
But 3 years into the crisis and the governments since then still have not provided a single plan to come out of it. Just grandstanding, mutual accusations, deadlocks, hindering investigations, etc.
They always hope that some rich country would want to help and make big investments. But those countries, and world organizations, rightfully, do not trust the country's consecutive governments anymore because no reforms have been made and it's still the wild west of corruption.
The biggest problem is that those 3 years have witnessed the largest brain drain in the history of the country. Most doctors and nurses left; engineers, technicians, scientists, students, you name it. Resilient people who had seen everything and stayed, but there's always an edge too far.
>The Commission voted 3-2 to publish the notice in the Federal Register. Chair Khan, Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya issued separate statements. Commissioners Noah Joshua Phillips and Christine S. Wilson voted no and issued dissenting statements.
>The data practices of today’s surveillance economy can create and exacerbate deep
asymmetries of information—exacerbating, in turn, imbalances of power. And the expanding
contexts in which users’ personal data is used—from health care and housing to employment and
education—mean that what’s at stake with unlawful collection, use, retention, or disclosure is not
just one’s subjective preference for privacy, but one’s access to opportunities in our economy
and society, as well as core civil liberties and civil rights.
The fact that current data practices can have such consequential effects heightens both the
importance of wielding the full set of tools that Congress has given us, as well as the
responsibility we have to do so. In particular, Section 18 of the FTC Act grants us clear authority to issue rules that identify specific business practices that are unlawful by virtue of being
“unfair” or “deceptive.”10 Doing so could provide firms with greater clarity about the scope of
their legal obligations. It could also strengthen our ability to deter lawbreaking, given that firsttime violators of duly promulgated trade regulation rules—unlike most first-time violators of the
FTC Act11—are subject to civil penalties. This would also help dispense with competitive
advantages enjoyed by firms that break the law: all companies would be on the hook for civil
penalties for law violations, not just those that are repeat offenders.
Today’s action marks the beginning of the rulemaking proceeding. In issuing an Advance
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR), the Commission is seeking comments from the public
on the extent and effects of various commercial surveillance and data security practices, as well
as on various approaches to crafting rules to govern these practices and the attendant tradeoffs.
Our goal at this stage is to begin building a rich public record to inform whether rulemaking is
worthwhile and the form that potential proposed rules should take. Robust public engagement
will be critical—particularly for documenting specific harmful business practices and their
prevalence, the magnitude and extent of the resulting consumer harm, the efficacy or
shortcomings of rules pursued in other jurisdictions, and how to assess which areas are or are not
fruitful for FTC rulemaking. ... At minimum, the record we will build through issuing this ANPR and seeking public
comment can serve as a resource to policymakers across the board as legislative efforts continue. ... [categories include (Procedural protections, Administrability, Business models and incentives, Discrimination based on protected categories, Workplace surveillance)]
>Conclusion
The path the Commission is heading down by opening this rulemaking process is not an
easy one. But it is a necessary one. The worst outcome, as I said three years ago, is not that we
get started and then Congress passes a law; it is that we never get started and Congress never
passes a law. People have made it clear that they find this status quo unacceptable.46 Consumers
and businesses alike deserve to know, with real clarity, how our Section 5 authority applies in the
data economy. Using the tools we have available benefits the whole of the Commission’s
mission; well-supported rules could facilitate competition, improve respect for and compliance
with the law, and relieve our enforcement burdens.
I have an open mind about this process and no certainty about where our inquiry will lead
or what rules the record will support, as I believe is my obligation. But I do know that it is past
time for us to begin asking these questions and to follow the facts and evidence where they lead
us. I expect that the Commission will take this opportunity to think deeply about people’s
experiences in this market and about how to ensure that the benefits of progress are not built on
an exploitative foundation. Clear rules have the potential for making the data economy more fair
and more equitable for consumers, workers, businesses, and potential competitors alike.
I am grateful to the Commission staff for their extensive work leading up to the issuance
>Our nation is the world’s unquestioned leader on technology. We are the world’s
unquestioned leader in the data economy. And yet we are almost alone in our lack of meaningful
protections for this infrastructure. We lack a modern data security law. We lack a baseline
consumer privacy rule. We lack civil rights protections suitable for the digital age. This is a
landscape ripe for abuse.
Now it is time to act. Today, we are beginning the hard work of considering new rules to
protect people from unfair or deceptive commercial surveillance and data security practices.
My friend Commissioner Phillips argues that this Advance Notice of Proposed
Rulemaking (“ANPR”) “recast[s] the Commission as a legislature,” and “reaches outside the
jurisdiction of the FTC.”1 I respectfully disagree. Today, we’re just asking questions, exactly as
Congress has directed us to do.2 At this most preliminary step, breadth is a feature, not a bug. We
need a diverse range of public comments to help us discern whether and how to proceed with
Notices of Proposed Rulemaking. There is much more process to come.
>Legislating comprehensive national rules for consumer data privacy and security is a
complicated undertaking. Any law our nation adopts will have vast economic significance. It will
impact many thousands of companies, millions of citizens, and billions upon billions of dollars in
commerce. It will involve real trade-offs between, for example, innovation, jobs, and economic
growth on the one hand and protection from privacy harms on the other. (It will also require
some level of social consensus about which harms the law can and should address.) Like most
regulations, comprehensive rules for data privacy and security will likely displace some amount
of competition. Reducing the ability of companies to use data about consumers, which today
facilitates the provision of free services, may result in higher prices—an effect that policymakers
would be remiss not to consider in our current inflationary environment.1
>Throughout my tenure as an FTC Commissioner, I have encouraged Congress to pass
comprehensive privacy legislation.1 While I have great faith in markets to produce the best
results for consumers, Econ 101 teaches that the prerequisites of healthy competition are
sometimes absent. Markets do not operate efficiently, for example, when consumers do not have
complete and accurate information about the characteristics of the products and services they are
evaluating.
2 Neither do markets operate efficiently when the costs and benefits of a product are
not fully borne by its producer and consumers – in other words, when a product creates what
economists call externalities.3 Both of these shortcomings are on display in the areas of privacy
and data security. In the language of economists, both information asymmetries and the presence
of externalities lead to inefficient outcomes with respect to privacy and data security.
I am really, really excited for the day we are able to augment or manipulate the immune system in a large and meaningful way.
For anyone who likes to visualize the whole kit and kaboodle of current human knowledge check out the virtual metabolic human database. They display an updated map on human metabolism
The Quanta overview basically answered this - they consider the ration of the black hole's angular momentum to its mass. A "slow" black hole is one where this ratio is much less than one. How much less than one it has to be, the paper's authors apparently don't derive.
tl;dr: gravitational waves do hard-to-calculate things inside a strong ergoregion around a fast-spinning black hole, and may do hard-to-calculate things to the black hole, and those calculations are outside the scope of the paper.
> [how to define] 'slowly rotating' [might be] pretty cool
It's for a pretty cool reason. Bear in mind that I am not a superhuman so have not read the 900-page document rather than scanning through the most interesting bits. Also, forgive me, I got a bit lazy and have left in a bunch of redundancy below rather than trimming it out or reorganizing it.
The question in a nutshell is to whether any setup of initial conditions that are reasonably similar to a Kerr spacetime will settle into another set of conditions reasonably similar to Kerr spacetime eventually. The conditions are roughly (eternal!) Kerr black hole in the distant distant past plus a bunch of gravitational radiation to it's "left" travelling rightwards. The "present" is the collision of the waves and the black hole. The far far future is the remnants of the gravitational waves waaay to the black hole's right, plus the original black hole (albeit with a slightly different spin or mass). There is never anything but gravitational waves and the black hole. How do we know from the mathematics of General Relativity that the far-future black hole still spins at all? Or that it hasn't self-destructed? Does this hold up even as we add more gravitational waves coming from different directions? That's what the authors set out to show.
Lumpy, slowly rotating noncompact (i.e. entirely outside of their Kerr horizons) self-gravitating objects see their surfaces smooth out over time through various processes. Stars find themselves in hydrostatic equilibrium even as things fall into them. Planets are defined as being in hydrostatic equilibrium: their lumpiness and tumbling fades away and tends towards being nearly spherical and spinning around a single axis, even though rocks or ice might fall onto them from time to time.
A "peaceful" black hole horizon is highly analogous to the surface of a body in hydrostatic equilibrium. There are some differences here: we can throw "too much" at a rocky planet or star, totally disrupting them. You can't break apart a black hole in the setting under consideration (and likely not at all). You can "bounce" a rock with a glancing blow off a rocky planet, maybe turning the planet into something like Earth-Moon. Again, you can't split a black hole, and you can't bounce something off a black hole's event horizon. You can throw too much at a star and create a supernova. You can't explode a black hole that way. So we want to restrict our analogizing to the case where a relatively small body lands on (but does not destroy or blow chunks out of) a rocky body or star.
Also, while we can spin a star or planet so fast that it disintegrates, we can't do that to a black hole. A glancing blow interaction might speed up the spin of a star or planet, possibly making it spin so fast it rips apart. Spinning a black hole as fast as you can does weird things in the immediate neighbourhood of a black hole, but should not rip the black hole apart. The paper sets out to prove that.
The Kerr stability conjecture that is central to this paper considers the case where the Kerr black hole is perturbed by gravitational radiation "thrown" at it. The black hole relaxes back into Kerr (this is "stability for Cauchy data"). The paper also considers the case where if you are sufficiently far from the perturbed black hole you only see Kerr anyway when light-speed news of the event catches up to your gravitational-wave observatory (this is "stability for scattering data")).
More colloquially, if you start with a slowly-spinning black hole and a (relatively distant) "mess" of gravitational waves, do you eventually end up with a slowly-spinning black hole (or something very close to it) or do you destroy your black hole?
Going from "of course the remains of this sort of interaction must include a spinning black hole, because linearizations of General Relativity show that to be the case for black hole mergers" ("smash two black holes together, you get one bigger black hole and a bunch of gravitational radiation and we can see all of this at LIGO/VIRGO and other telescopes") to "here's a rigorous mathematical description in the full non-linearized theory of General Relativity that is good up to arbitrarily large incoming gravitational radiation: you always get a bigger (slowly spinning) black hole" is roughly the subject of the long paper discussed at the Quanta link and found at <https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14808>.
The size of a Kerr ergosphere -- the region outside the outer event horizon where things cannot remain still relative to the distant universe -- is determined by a combination of the black hole's mass and its spin angular momentum. If the mass/spin ratio is very high, then mass effectively determines the ergoregion's volume. A low spin also means the variation from the pole (where the ergo-effects are zero) to the equator (where they are strongest) is small.
With a low mass/spin ratio (fast spin), the larger ergoregion can "hold" more gravitational radiation, and the strong ergo-effect leads to a stronger interaction between the Kerr black hole and any gravitational wave inside its ergoregion. This is even harder to calculate than the hardest equations in the paper. It is conceivable that the "held" gravitational radiation could be concentrated while within the ergoregion, and that if the ergoregion were large and strong enough, and the incoming gravitational radiation were "just so", a second black hole could form in the ergoregion from the collapse of the concentrated gravitational waves. In which case [a] would it be flung away to the far reaches of the universe [b] crash into the Kerr black hole merger-style or [c] hang around in a stable orbit near the black hole? [a] and [b], no problem, we have an "asymptotic" Kerr spacetime. [c]: big problem, because the spacetime is now like a barbell, and that sheds gravitational waves. (A single rotating black hole does not shed gravitational waves).
These authors don't seem to say this outright, but they do cite an abundance of papers where the reasons proofs are harder as mass/spin approaches 1:1 are set out by their respective authors.
I find those much more difficult and frustrating than a traditional recipe. I don’t like having to pause or scrub through videos to figure out what the steps are. I like having a list of ingredients, so I can do some basic mise en place and figure out if I need to go to the grocery store or choose a different recipe.
