Crocodiles of the Arctic

Good news from America, as a banana republic: as we look with different eyes on the integrity of our legal system, will we become less desirable as an immigrant destination?

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China: Private capital investment in real productive assets, which typically amounts to half the country’s total, has slowed from a growth rate of over 23 percent in 2013, before all the talk of “new eras” began, to 10 percent in 2015, to 5 percent in 2019, to an outright, if small decline last year.

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While more than half of students in their internal-medicine, family-medicine, emergency-medicine, or pediatrics rotations had failed tests in those subjects at one point during the 2022–23 academic year—and those struggles led many trainees to postpone taking their national licensing exams. “I don’t know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors,” one unnamed UCLA professor told him. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”--Atlantic

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Crocodiles of the Arctic

From The Horse by Wendy Williams, writing on the temperature increase during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) of 56 million years ago, in which global temperatures rose at least 5°C and stayed there for 200,000 years: "It's hard for us to imagine in our twenty-first-century world, where we accept the cruel reality of sweltering summers and freezing winters, but for a good deal of Earth's history, including most of the Eocene, the planet enjoyed fairly uniform temperatures. For example, during the Eocene, the world north of the Arctic Circle was so warm that crocodiles flourished there. There were no ice caps, of course, and so much freshwater flowed into the Arctic Ocean that a layer of fresh­water sat like a lens over the salt water. The freshwater Azolla fern was plentiful. Forests of redwoods and walnut trees grew there. Pale­ontologists have found the remains of giant ants usually associated with the tropics."

So is global warming mainly a risk for real estate prices?