November 15 2024

1. Smugglers Tell Migrants to Rush to U.S. Before Trump Takes Power
2. 75% of U.S. Adults Overweight, Global Diabetes Rates Double
3. Bluesky Surges Post-Election
4. Trump Transition Diary
5. Ukraine Update
November 15, 1867: First stock ticker debuts

See the new Ad Astra Podcast! Released on Apple and Spotify around 10a CST.

1. Smugglers Tell Migrants to Rush to U.S. Before Trump Takes Power

From the dense jungle connecting Panama and Colombia to the banks of the Rio Grande, human smugglers are spreading a message to U.S.-bound migrants: Hurry up and sneak in before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.  Trump’s second term is creating an incentive for migrants to try to reach U.S. soil before the Jan. 20 inauguration, because many anticipate the president-elect will dismantle legal pathways to entry. Those paths include a U.S. government app that allows people to apply for U.S. asylum while in Mexico and then cross legally when they have an appointment—a system created last year that some migrants think will be upended by Trump.

Article Source: WSJ

2. 75% of U.S. Adults Overweight, Global Diabetes Rates Double

A. 75% of U.S. adults overweight   

Nearly three quarters of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, according to a sweeping new study. The findings have wide-reaching implications for the nation’s health and medical costs as it faces a growing burden of weight-related diseases. The study, published on Thursday in The Lancet, reveals the striking rise of obesity rates nationwide since 1990 — when just over half of adults were overweight or obese — and shows how more people are becoming overweight or obese at younger ages than in the past. Both conditions can raise the risk of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, and shorten life expectancy. 

B. Global rate of disease doubles  

Global diabetes rates have doubled over the past 30 years, with many middle- and low-income countries failing to provide sufferers with sufficient access to treatment, according to an international study. The report published in The Lancet on Wednesday evening found that rates of diabetes in adults rose from 7 per cent to 14 per cent between 1990 and 2022 across 200 countries and territories.

Article Source: NYT, FT

3. Bluesky Surges Post-Election

Elon Musk’s X drew more web traffic on the day Donald Trump won the presidential election than on any other day so far this year, the analytics firm Similarweb estimates. It also broke its 2024 record for users lost in a single day.  With Musk taking on a central advisory role to Trump’s administration after leveraging X and his personal fortune to boost Trump’s campaign, U.S. liberals and others disenchanted with the site are once again scurrying to friendlier pastures.  the upstart social network Bluesky is surging. It has more than doubled in size in the past three months. And in the eight days since the election, it has added more than 1.25 million users, bringing its total to more than 15 million as it topped Apple’s App Store rankings on Wednesday. Of those, some 8.5 million have logged in within the past month, spokesperson Emily Liu said Wednesday.  

Editors note: these are tiny numbers, will fail, and is the opposite of what America needs

Article Source: WaPo

4. Trump Transition Diary

Editors note: Trump II is barely underway and already an unbelievable amount of stuff is happening. I am going to have a temporary section in my newsletter that covers the Trump transition. For those of you interested in the very consequential things that are happening in American political life, I will cover it there. And for those of you that are already fatigued by everything Trump, you can skip it.  

A. A STUNNING VICTORY has crowned Donald Trump the most consequential American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. After defeating Kamala Harris—and not just narrowly, but by a wide margin—America’s 45th president will become its 47th. The fact that Mr Trump will be the first to win non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland in 1892 does not start to do justice to his achievement. He has defined a new political era, for America and the world. 

 Trump Administration roles 

Robert F. Kennedy offered Health and Human Services Secretary 

Doug Burgum offered Interior Secretary 

Doug Collins offered Veterans Affairs Services Secretary  

A. A former top Uber executive to head the Department of Transportation. A former top aide to Peter Thiel to head the Department of Health and Human Services. And a cadre of other tech executives to join Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency. Such was the wish list for the elite of Silicon Valley at the dawn of the Trump administration. Behind closed doors over the last week, a range of tech leaders have put forth their own brethren in coordinated efforts to try to leave a distinctly Silicon Valley imprint on a cabinet lineup that appears to be open to persuasion. Much of that power of persuasion has been trained on Mr. Musk. While the world’s richest man is not technically on Mr. Trump’s transition committee, he has become a de facto official of the incoming administration. Vice President-elect JD Vance, who formally serves on the transition committee, also has deep Silicon Valley ties from his former career as a venture capitalist.   

B. Elon Musk, a close adviser to President-elect Donald J. Trump, met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations on Monday in New York in a session that two Iranian officials described as a discussion of how to defuse tensions between Iran and the United States.  

C. Iran offered written assurances to the Biden administration last month that it wouldn’t seek to kill Donald Trump, U.S. officials said, a secret exchange meant to cool tensions between Tehran and Washington—as the Republican prepares for his White House return. The Iranian message, delivered on Oct. 14 and not previously reported, came in response to a private written American warning sent to Tehran in September. U.S. officials said it reflected the administration’s public message that it considered the threats against Trump a top-tier national security issue and that any attempt on his life would be treated as an act of war.

Article Source: NYT, WSJ

5. Ukraine Update

A. Trump-Putin call  

President-elect Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, the first phone conversation between the two men since Trump won the election, said several people familiar with the matter. During the call, which Trump took from his resort in Florida, he advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe, said a person familiar with the call, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. The two men discussed the goal of peace on the European continent and Trump expressed an interest in follow-up conversations to discuss “the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon,” one of the people said.  

B. Peace deal in Ukraine very hard  

“Trump wants peace in Ukraine and Putin wants victory.” Putin, Aron added, cannot afford to come back to the Russian people after some 600,000 of their compatriots have been killed and wounded in Ukraine, and say, “Oops, sorry, we are not going to control Ukraine after all.” Putin cannot let this war end in defeat. But Trump cannot accept a peace that looks like a defeat for the West. Then he would look like a loser. If there is any chance of a mutually acceptable deal on Ukraine — a long-term cease-fire roughly on existing battle lines in return for some lifting of sanctions on Russia and accelerated membership for Ukraine in the European Union along with security guarantees but not formal NATO membership — it will most likely happen only after Putin suffers more defeats there and Trump makes clear that he would arm Ukraine even more heavily if Putin would not relent. The fact that Putin had to effectively hire 10,000 North Korean forces to help fight his reckless war in Ukraine shows two things: how afraid he is to stop without a visible victory “and how afraid he is of a societal backlash if he is forced to send into the trenches raw 18-year-old ethnic-Russian conscripts, especially from Moscow and St. Petersburg where the Russian elite lives,” “Putin is not in a position to have a forever war,” concluded Aron. “He is running out of people.” All of which is to say that if Trump is capable of sustaining Ukraine in its current battlefield position for 12 more months, he might get the deal to end the Ukraine war in a year that he promised in the campaign to deliver in a day.  

C. War reshaping trade patterns  

Sales of Chinese cars in Russia have hit fresh records after the country became the largest export destination for the Asian nation’s automakers when sanctions forced western brands to cut ties with Moscow. Surging Russian sales have helped Chinese carmakers at a time when Beijing faces higher tariffs on electric vehicle exports from Washington and Brussels — while engineering a rapid change in Russian auto culture. “People are voting with their wallets,” said Ilya Frolov, a car blogger based in Moscow. “If you’re buying a car, your choice is either a [Russian-made] Lada or an extremely expensive European car brought in as a grey import, or a very well-equipped and relatively cheap Chinese one.”  Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine sparked a sharp decline in sales of vehicles from the European, Korean and Japanese carmakers that previously dominated the country’s car market. At the time of the invasion in February 2022, their brands made up 69 per cent of all sales, according to the Avtostat analytics agency. They now have a market share of just 8.5 per cent, while Chinese manufacturers’ share over the same period has risen from 9 per cent to 57 per cent.

Article Source: WaPo, NYT, FT

November 15, 1867: First stock ticker debuts

Sources

1. https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/smugglers-tell-migrants-to-rush-to-u-s-before-trump-takes-power-2c3ee69e?mod=hp_lead_pos7

2. A https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/well/obesity-epidemic-america.html
B https://on.ft.com/4fLyJeT

3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/11/14/x-social-media-bluesky-threads/

4. A https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/technology/trump-elon-musk-silicon-valley.html
B https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/world/middleeast/elon-musk-iran-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
C https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-told-u-s-it-wasnt-trying-to-kill-trump-c2d8267d?mod=hp_lead_pos1

5. A https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/10/trump-putin-phone-call-ukraine/
B https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/opinion/trump-had-it-easy-the-first-time.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
C https://www.ft.com/content/d228a85c-248a-430d-afe5-2b93bbc9ba06