Vice-President Harris announced that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is moving to remove medical debt for people's credit score. This move will improve the credit rating of 15 million Americans. Millions of Americans struggling with debt from medical expenses can't get approved for a loan for a car, to start a small business or buy a home. The new rule will improve credit scores by an average of 20 points and lead to 22,000 additional mortgages being approved every year. This comes on top of efforts by the Biden Administration to buy up and forgive medical debt. Through money in the American Rescue Plan $7 billion dollars of medical debt will be forgiven by the end of 2026. To date state and local governments have used ARP funds to buy up and forgive the debt of 3 million Americans and counting.
The EPA, Department of Agriculture, and FDA announced a joint "National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics". The Strategy aimed to cut food waste by 50% by 2030. Currently 24% of municipal solid waste in landfills is food waste, and food waste accounts for 58% of methane emissions from landfills roughly the green house gas emissions of 60 coal-fired power plants every year. This connects to $200 million the EPA already has invested in recycling, the largest investment in recycling by the federal government in 30 years. The average American family loses $1,500 ever year in spoiled food, and the strategy through better labeling, packaging, and education hopes to save people money and reduce hunger as well as the environmental impact.
President Biden signed with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy a ten-year US-Ukraine Security Agreement. The Agreement is aimed at helping Ukraine win the war against Russia, as well as help Ukraine meet the standards it will have to be ready for EU and NATO memberships. President Biden also spearheaded efforts at the G7 meeting to secure $50 billion for Ukraine from the 7 top economic nations.
HHS announced $500 million for the development of new non-injection vaccines against Covid. The money is part of Project NextGen a $5 billion program to accelerate and streamline new Covid vaccines and treatments. The investment announced this week will support a clinical trial of 10,000 people testing a vaccine in pill form. It's also supporting two vaccines administered as nasal sprays that are in earlier stages of development. The government hopes that break throughs in non-needle based vaccines for Covid might be applied to other vaccinations thus making vaccines more widely available and more easily administered.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced $404 million in additional humanitarian assistance for Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and the region. This brings the total invested by the Biden administration in the Palestinians to $1.8 billion since taking office, over $600 million since the war started in October 2023. The money will focus on safe drinking water, health care, protection, education, shelter, and psychosocial support.
The Department of the Interior announced $142 million for drought resilience and boosting water supplies. The funding will provide about 40,000 acre-feet of annual recycled water, enough to support more than 160,000 people a year. It's funding water recycling programs in California, Hawaii, Kansas, Nevada and Texas. It's also supporting 4 water desalination projects in Southern California. Desalination is proving to be an important tool used by countries with limited freshwater.
President Biden took the lead at the G7 on the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. The PGI is a global program to connect the developing world to investment in its infrastructure from the G7 nations. So far the US has invested $40 billion into the program with a goal of $200 billion by 2027. The G7 overall plans on $600 billion by 2027. There has been heavy investment in the Lobito Corridor, an economic zone that runs from Angola, through the Democratic Republic of Congo, to Zambia, the PGI has helped connect the 3 nations by rail allowing land locked Zambia and largely landlocked DRC access Angolan ports. The PGI also is investing in a $900 million solar farm in Angola. The PGI got a $5 billion dollar investment from Microsoft aimed at expanding digital access in Kenya, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The PGI's bold vision is to connect Africa and the Indian Ocean region economically through rail and transportation link as well as boost greener economic growth in the developing world and bring developing nations on-line.
"If I wanted to convince you of the reality of human progress, of the fact that we as a species have advanced materially, morally, and politically over our time on this planet, I could quote you chapter and verse from a thick stack of development statistics.
I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. [Note: This is average life expectancy, old people did still exist in olden times] I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history.
But that doesn’t mean you’ll be convinced.
In one 2017 Pew poll, a plurality of Americans — people who, perhaps more than anywhere else, are heirs to the benefits of centuries of material and political progress — reported that life was better 50 years ago than it is today. A 2015 survey of thousands of adults in nine rich countries found that 10 percent or fewer believed that the world was getting better. On the internet, a strange nostalgia persists for the supposedly better times before industrialization, when ordinary people supposedly worked less and life was allegedly simpler and healthier. (They didn’t and it wasn’t.)
Looking backward, we imagine a halcyon past that never was; looking forward, it seems to many as if, in the words of young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, “the world is getting more and more grim every day.”
So it’s boom times for doom times. But the apocalyptic mindset that has gripped so many of us not only understates how far we’ve come, but how much further we can still go. The real story of progress today is its remarkable expansion to the rest of the world in recent decades. In 1950, life expectancy in Africa was just 40; today, it’s past 62. Meanwhile more than 1 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty since 1990 alone.
But there’s more to do — much more. That hundreds of millions of people still go without the benefit of electricity or live in states still racked by violence and injustice isn’t so much an indictment of progress as it is an indication that there is still more low-hanging fruit to harvest.
The world hasn’t become a better place for nearly everyone who lives on it because we wished it so. The astounding economic and technological progress made over the past 200 years has been the result of deliberate policies, a drive to invent and innovate, one advance building upon another. And as our material condition improved, so, for the most part, did our morals and politics — not as a side effect, but as a direct consequence. It’s simply easier to be good when the world isn’t zero-sum.
Which isn’t to say that the record of progress is one of unending wins. For every problem it solved — the lack of usable energy in the pre-fossil fuel days, for instance — it often created a new one, like climate change. But just as a primary way climate change is being addressed is through innovation that has drastically reduced the price of clean energy, so progress tends to be the best route to solving the problems that progress itself can create.
The biggest danger we face today, if we care about actually making the future a more perfect place, isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all. It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress.
Changing Humanity's "Normal" Forever
Progress may be about where we’re going, but it’s impossible to understand without returning to where we’ve been. So let’s take a trip back to the foreign country that was the early years of the 19th century.
In 1820, according to data compiled by the historian Michail Moatsos, about three-quarters of the world’s population earned so little that they could not afford even a tiny living space, some heat and, hopefully, enough food to stave off malnutrition.
It was a state that we would now call “extreme poverty,” except that for most people back then, it wasn’t extreme — it was simply life.
-via Vox, March 20, 2023. More from the article below - and I highly encourage you to read it.
What matters here for the story of progress isn’t the fact that the overwhelming majority of humankind lived in destitution. It’s that this was the norm, and had been the norm since essentially… forever. Poverty, illiteracy, premature death — these weren’t problems, as we would come to define them in our time. They were simply the background reality of being human, as largely unchangeable as birth and death itself...
Between 10,000 BCE and 1700, the average global population growth rate was just 0.04 percent per year. And that wasn’t because human beings weren’t having babies. They were simply dying, in great numbers: at birth, giving birth, in childhood from now-preventable diseases, and in young adulthood from now-preventable wars and violence...
But that nearly flat line of population growth, century after century, hides an untellable story of misery and suffering, one of children dead before their time, of families snuffed out by starvation, of potential and of people that would never have the chance to be realized. It was a story, as the writer Bill Bryson has put it, of “tiny coffins.”
It was only with the progress of industrialization that we broke out of [this long cycle], producing enough food to feed the mounting billions, enough scientific breakthroughs to conquer old killers like smallpox and the measles, and enough political advances to dwindle violent death.
Between 1800 and today, our numbers grew from around 1 billion to 8 billion. And that 8 billion aren’t just healthier, richer, and better educated. On average, they can expect to live more than twice as long. The writer Steven Johnson has called this achievement humanity’s “extra life” — but that extra isn’t just the decades that have been added to our lifespans. It’s the extra people that have been added to our numbers. I’m probably one of them, and you probably are too...
The progress we’ve earned has hardly been uninterrupted or perfectly distributed... [But] once we could prove in practice that the lot of humanity didn’t have to be hand-to-mouth existence, we could see that progress could continue to expand.
Current Progress "Flows Overwhelmingly" to the Developing World
The long twentieth century came late to the Global South, but it did get there. Between 1960 and today, India and China, together home to nearly one in every three people alive today, have seen life expectancy rise from 45 to 70 and 33 to 78, respectively. Per-capita GDP over those years rose some 2,600 percent for India and an astounding 13,400 percent for China, with the latter lifting an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty.
In the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa, progress has been slower and later, but shouldn’t be underestimated. When we see the drastic decline in child mortality — which has fallen since 1990 from 18.1 percent of all children in that region to 7.4 percent in 2021 — or the more than 20 million measles deaths that have been prevented since 2000 in Africa alone, this is progress continuing to happen now, with the benefits overwhelmingly flowing to the poorest among us.
Vanishing Autocracies
In 1800, according to Our World in Data, zero — none, nada, zip — people lived in what we would now classify as a liberal democracy. Just 22 million people — about 2 percent of the global population — lived in what the site classifies as “electoral autocracies,” meaning that what democracy they had was limited, and limited to a subset of the population.
One hundred years later, things weren’t much better — there were actual liberal democracies, but fewer than 1 percent of the world’s population lived in them...
Today just 2 billion people live in countries that are classified as closed autocracies — relatively few legal rights, no real electoral democracy — and most of them are in China...
Expanding Human Rights
All you have to do is roll the clock back a few decades to see the way that rights, on the whole, have been extended wider and wider: to LGBTQ citizens, to people of color, to women. The fundamental fact is that as much as the technological and economic world of 2023 would be unrecognizable to people in 1800, the same is true of the political world.
Nor can you disentangle that political progress from material progress. Take the gradual but definitive emancipation of women. That has been a hard-fought, ongoing battle, chiefly waged by women who saw the inherent unfairness of a male-dominated society.
But it was aided by the invention of labor-saving technologies in the home like washing machines and refrigerators that primarily gave time back to women and made it easier for them to move into the workforce.
These are all examples of the expansion of the circle of moral concern — the enlargement of who and what is considered worthy of respect and rights, from the foundation of the family or tribe all the way to humans around the world (and increasingly non-human animals as well). And it can’t be separated from the hard fact of material progress.
Leaving a Zero-Sum World Behind
The pre-industrial world was a zero-sum one... In a zero-sum world, you advance only at the expense of others, by taking from a set stock, not by adding, which is why wars of conquest between great powers were so common hundreds of years ago, or why homicide between neighbors was so much more frequent in the pre-industrial era.
We have obviously not eradicated violence, including by the state itself. But a society that can produce more of what it needs and wants is one that will be less inclined to fight over what it has, either with its neighbors or with itself. It’s not that the humans of 2023 are necessarily better, more moral, than their ancestors 200 or more years ago. It’s that war and violence cease to make economic sense...
Doomerism, at its heart, may be that exhaustion made manifest.
But just as we need continued advances in clean tech or biosecurity to protect ourselves from some of the existential threats we’ve inadvertently created, so do we need continued progress to address the problems that have been with us always: of want, of freedom, even of mortality. Nothing can dispel the terminal exhaustion that seems endemic in 2023 better than the idea that there is so much more left to do to lift millions out of poverty and misery while protecting the future — which is possible, thanks to the path of the progress we’ve made.
And we’ll know we’re successful if our descendants can one day look back on the present with the same mix of sympathy and relief with which we should look back on our past. How, they’ll wonder, did they ever live like that?"
-via Vox, March 20, 2023
--
Note: I would seriously recommend reading the whole article--because as long as this post is, this is only about half of it! The article contains a lot more information about the hows and whys of human progress, and it also definitely made me cry the first time I read it. Some warning for fatphobia at the full article, and also I really wish there was more of an Indigenous and anti-colonial analysis to this article - but it's still pretty damn good.
Thousands of Cubans have been recruited to travel to Russia—and many have ended up fighting in Ukraine, possibly under false pretenses. A 41
Last month we mentioned how Russia is trying to trick people in Kenya and India into joining the Russian Army. Apparently Putin is also looking to Cuba as a source of cannon fodder for his disastrous invasion of Ukraine.
A Russian travel agent in Ryazan (Рязань) in particular has been luring young men from Cuba with promises of employment. Of course the "jobs" are with the failing Russian Army.
Cubans – two 19-year-olds identified as Alex Vega and Andorf Velasquez – recounted how they ended up wounded in battle alongside Russian forces in Ukraine.
Speaking from what they said was a military hospital in Russia’s Kaliningrad region, the two said they had traveled to Russia “to make some money,” a trip they said was arranged and paid for up front, by a trio of women: two Russian, one Cuban.
When they arrived in Moscow, the pair told a popular Cuban video blogger, they were forced to sign a Russian-language contract they did not understand and were then sent to the provincial city of Ryazan, where they were housed in a school dormitory.
They ended up on the front lines in Ukraine, digging ditches -- and eventually being wounded, they said in the August 2023 video.
Rule #1: Don't go to Russia for "employment". Rule #2: If you're already in Russia, don't sign anything unless you want to be shot or blown to pieces in an illegal war.
Putin can't round up enough Russians to die in his war. So he has to import people from developing countries to die in place of Russians.
Nearly 44 months into its all-out assault on Ukraine, Russia has deployed nearly 700,000 men to wage its war, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates. And Moscow has cast its net wide to keep up the flow of personnel: some 12,000 North Koreans are believed to be fighting alongside Russian forces.
First among other nationalities? Cubans.
Ukrainian intelligence estimates several thousand Cubans have been recruited, many of them tricked into fighting alongside Russian units. An internal US State Department cable seen by Reuters put the number of Cubans fighting in Ukraine around 5,000, and the Cuban government, US officials allege, is actively supporting them.
According to Ukrainian officials who traveled to Washington last month to brief congressional leaders, at least 20,000 Cubans in total are “awaiting travel and deployment” to Russia.
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Cubans may been recruited by a 41-year-old, multi-lingual travel agent from Ryazan: more than 3,000 foreigners, in fact, according to a letter written by her lawyer and obtained exclusively by Systema, RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit.
Alex Vega and Andorf Velásquez were certainly not the only Cubans duped into the Russian Army.
Their story also overlaps with that of Frank Manfuga, a 36-year-old Cuban man who was captured by Ukrainian troops in March 2024, three months after joining the Russian military. In interviews with Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, he claimed he was tricked into boarding a Russia-bound plane with the promise of a job in construction.
Sometime in early 2023, Smirnova began posting Spanish-language job announcements on Facebook and the Russian equivalent, VK, in a Spanish-language group called "Cubans in Moscow.”
The job postings, which have since been deleted, offered a signing bonus, a monthly salary of around 200,000 rubles ($2,000), and eventually Russian citizenship. The amounts were vastly higher than average wages in Cuba.
The travel agent in Ryazan, Yelena Smirnova, was not just luring Cubans to Russia but profiting off of them.
Smirnova would front the costs for a recruit’s travel from Havana to Moscow, accommodation in Russia, and related expenses.
After arriving in Russia, the person would then reimburse her for these expenses after signing a contract. Smirnova or her co-workers would make a copy of the person’s bank card and withdraw an initial payment from it—to cover their expenses.
A May 2023 article in the newspaper Ryazanskiye Vedomosti detailed how a group of new recruits, from Russia as well as Cuba, had signed new contracts. “The main motivation is to help our Motherland in these difficult times for her, and the financial component is a nice bonus,” the paper quoted a local military recruiter as saying.
"Bonus" indeed. So Smirnova was both essentially robbing the Cubans and then putting them in grave danger by sending them to Russia's shabby invasion of Ukraine.
The article by investigative reporters Yelizaveta Surnacheva and Andrei Soshnikov is longer and more detailed. Hopefully somebody will translate it into Spanish and circulate it in Cuba.
Putin keeps the war going even though everybody outside the Russian World knows he'll never conquer Ukraine.
Today is Day 1,329 of Putin's "3-Day Special Operation". Only somebody who is demented or crazy would keep such a staggeringly costly and futile war going on. Putin is a sociopath who cares nothing about human life except his own. He's perfectly willing to let hundreds of thousands of Russians, Koreans, Kenyans, or Indians die so he can pretend that he is the Peter the Great of the 21st century.
Here's the official Ukrainian daily report of Russian losses; this one is for 14 October 2025. It's in Ukrainian with English translations. Ukraine should consider publishing these with translations in languages of countries where Russia is looking for new cannon fodder. They can then be circulated on social media in those countries.
Vulnerable countries to pay record $22bn this year, mostly relating to loans issued under Xi Jinping’s belt and road initiative
The most vulnerable nations on Earth are facing a “tidal wave” of debt repayments as a Chinese lending boom starts to be called in, a new report has warned.
The analysis, published on Tuesday by Australian foreign policy thinktank the Lowy Institute, said that in 2025 the poorest 75 countries were on the hook for record high debt repayments US$22bn to China. The 75 nations’ debt formed the bulk of the total $35bn calculated by Lowy for 2025.
“Now, and for the rest of this decade, China will be more debt collector than banker to the developing world,” the report said.
The pressure to repay was putting strain on local funding for health and education as well as climate change mitigation.
“China’s lending has collapsed exactly when it is needed most, instead creating large net financial outflows when countries are already under intense economic pressure,” it said.
The loans were largely issued under President Xi Jinping’s signature belt and road initiative (BRI), a state-backed global infrastructure investment programme which has underwritten national projects from schools, bridges and hospitals to major roads and shipping and air ports.
The lending spree turned China into the largest supplier of bilateral loans, peaking with a total of more than $50bn in 2016 – more than all western creditors combined.
How do you keep from Copy/Pasting existing Cultures into your Worlds?
Basically just as the title says, and I'm sure there's been pleeeeenty of discussion on the topic, but I'm genuinely curious what makes your cultures unique and original (especially when the modern aura of writing is "everything's been done"). Furthermore, is having a copy/paste culture a bad thing? For context, I'm primarily a Game Master (GM) who also on occasion writes as well as works in the TTRPG actualplay space. When you have an audience (whether friends or fans) is it necessarily a bad thing to have familiar locations, themes, and even characters that mimic real life? Can it be easier for an audience to just assume we're in "Ancient Rome" or "Habsburg controlled Austria"?
For me I do like creating totally original locations with their own weird political systems influenced by magic, gods, monsters, and anything else fantastical--BUT sometimes I find a setting is more interesting of just "what if Romans could directly interact with their deities?". For me I just find the idea of almost "alternate history" but in my uniquely fantastical setting interesting. However, I also understand that some people like genuinely different worlds with no trace of the real world left behind.
When creating unique cultures I try to combine elements to create something more unique. For example I'm currently working on the ancient periods of my current homebrew world, and specifically in a portion I haven't particularly worked on before. In Evrosea, a sort of "ancients world" where Greco-Roman culture lives on well into the medieval 15th Century (of course technology has changed and evolved) I find myself studying more ancient histories. I knew from before I fully began working on worldbuilding Erosea that there was some sort of "Roman Empire" which spread its tongue as a sort of lingua franca across the continent of Dulgren (aka why Common exists in my D&D world). Also originating from the region of Evrosea was the sorta monolithic pantheon of "new gods" (aka Catholicism). So I have the ideas of imperialism and religious importance in this region. So the very clear start was Rome itself, but how could I make this Rome unique? Well here's what I found from my research on Ancient Rome:
Many pre-settlers, and even contemporaries of Ancient Rome, in Italy were nomadic grazers and herders.
The Aeneid, which tells one of the many origin stories of Ancient Rome, ties in the ancient Greek tale of the Trojan War, and makes Rome the successors of Troy.
That many of their religious practices were tied up with the Senate (especially after the abolishment of the crown).
Finally, while perhaps never directly ruled by the Etruscans, their neighbors were much more confederate like and were similar in culture rather than being a unified people or kingdom.
Taking the information I found I twisted and jumbled much of this random history and constructed a group of nomads who controlled the fertile valleys of Uvemos (home region of the ancient Carinaens, my replacement for the Romans).
Many of these nomads worshipped similar sounding gods (if not outright the same gods), and most of them lived off the lands of Uvemos. Only a select few of whom ever settled into cities. However, long after the first nomads of Uvemos walked the hilly countryside arrived a band of pirates and raiders, terrors of the ancient world, many knew not their names, but they quickly accrued a nickname, "The Sea People" (see Sea Peoples on Wikipedia for more, TL;DR a bunch of random marauders who attacked or even helped cause the collapse of some Bronze Age Civilizations). One such pirate was said to be the Prince Laogonus, an exile from Apeiros, who was said to be a direct descendant of the God King Ulios himself. Laogonus settled down on the banks of Janian Sea in a small dirt settlement near to the roaming tribes of Uvemos. Many years later the small city of Carina was established as a blossoming trade hub by the many different tribes of Uvemians. Of these tribes was born a Chieftain's daughter, Aurora. Aurora was said to be descended from the god blood of Ulios, and when she prayed to her great grandsire on the eve of battle she was enveloped in holy light-- thus becoming the world's first cleric. Of her legacy were many rituals formed and practices established, and the civitas mille clericorum* was born.
*(civitas mille clericorum) meaning "city of a thousand clerics," named after the heavy religious undertones established by the first cleric Aurora, at least according to legend.
Super cool right?? I combined some other ideas than the ones I established such as the Sea People from the Collapse of the Bronze Age, as well as these kind of Shinto-like-beliefs in the Carinaen religion, which, to me at least, seems the most like what Ancient Roman beliefs would look like to us today (though I didn't really get to talk about in my blurb). I like taking existing pillars of cultures and extending them, now rather than just being a complete Roman rip-off there's more of this nomadic or tribal culture, at least to early Carinaen history, there's more of a nautical legacy (unlike Rome, who didn't establish a truly working navy up until the Punic Wars), and finally the city of Carina is a beacon for holy warriors and classes like Paladins and Clerics (again this is D&D so that's oriented towards that).
But tell me what you think, and how best do you come up with your fictional cultures/countries? Do you merely copy off of pre-existing cultures or do you fully work from the ground up? I'm super curious to hear what you all have to say!
I'm also tagging a couple friends since I'm curious of your responses @hessdalen-globe, @northernthiefcranberry, @kerghoulen, and the ever wonderful @somethingclevermahogony.
Also guys I need you to pull me out, I'm this close to dropping out of the arts and trying to get into Harvard to do Ancient Studies. Send Help.
Just speaking this into existence but the term "3rd World Country" is an outdated term born during the Cold War and with distinct Imperialist/Colonialist connotations; it is highly discouraged already in academic discourses and it would be best to drop it altogether in news outlets and daily life.
There are more suited options, although not perfect and all-encopassing, some arguably can still hold negative connotations, but you can use them to your discretion and sensibility:
