Sharing my piece on the ongoing BIT debate in India, in today's HT. I make the following key points:
1. India's backlash against the investment treaty regime could be understood as a Polanyian countermovement against neoliberal BITs, where the economy was disembedded from society.
2. A key form this countermovement has taken is the de-legalisation of investment norms.
3. The problem is not with de-legalisation per se, as many countries have followed this path, but rather with the degree of de-legalisation.
4. India needs to temper its de-legalisation to successfully conclude BIT negotiations with countries/blocks like the EU, EFTA and the UK.
🦛 The Berlin Zoo announced the name of its newborn pygmy hippopotamus ��� a rare mammal native to West Africa: Broetchen, which is German for ‘bread roll’
Today, I learned about the origins of the "dummy text" I saw in the testimonials section of a website a few days ago. Still don't know why the website had dummy testimonials, though :/
internet is fascinating
The Unsolved Mystery of Lorem Ipsum https://t.co/QqfsiXQmg5
trained a diffusion policy on the so-101 using @LeRobotHF to flip a tube upright and place it on a small platform
the balancing is the part that surprised me. platform’s barely wider than the tube but the policy lands it cleanly and lets go without tipping it
150 episodes across 30 cells, 12 hr training on a g5.16xlarge
works really well inside cells, weaker on interpolation between them
what’s a good way to handle inter-cell interpolation without just collecting more data?
More in 🧵 …
scoping the so-101’s task space for this embodiment before designing experiments
paying attention to what’s ergonomically possible to demonstrate to ensure high data quality
leader-follower teleop, telemetry per episode, custom tool on top of @LeRobotHF
The Savings and Investments Union, Fair Labour Mobility Package (Union of Skills & upcoming Skills Portability Initiative) & Industrial Accelerator Act all point in that direction.
Will these initiatives be enough to help European firms scale?
Here, integration across capital, labour and consumer markets is presented as a solution to Europe's productivity gap.
The Draghi report recommended several aspects of these and seems to be the guiding force of @EU_Commission's initiatives.
https://t.co/9drj25O9HL
Europe once led the world in productivity but now trails the US by about 20%. The problem is scale: too many companies remain small. More capital, labor, and consumer markets integration can help innovative companies scale up.
https://t.co/rbLkMMmZPi
Celebrating the first week of operation: The EU-Mercosur Interim Trade Agreement (ITA) entered into provisional application on 1 May 2026, for the EU and the four founding Mercosur countries, 26 years after negotiations began. #EUMercosur#TradePolicy#TradeAgreement 1/4
More 🇪🇺 food is heading to Mercosur 🇦🇷🇧🇷🇵🇾🇺🇾
The EU is already a net exporter of food.
With this agreement, exports to the region could grow by up to 50%.
Here’s what starts changing 👇
🧵 1/4
#EUTrade#Mercosur#Access2Markets
I welcome the political agreement on our Digital Omnibus on AI.
This provides a simple, innovation-friendly environment for our European AI ecosystem to grow.
At the same time, we are strengthening protections for our citizens.
For safe and simple AI governance in Europe.
@harshitsatija@DESTA_Project Yes, a timeline slider would be interesting!
Here, the UK's 2020 exit from the EU triggered over 1,000 withdrawal rows in the DESTA data. But, because my filter starts in 2017 and most Brexit withdrawal rows pre-date that in DESTA, only 1 required active removal
I mapped preferential trade agreements signed between 2017 and 2025.
I wanted to see what the post-2016 FTA landscape looks like visually. So I built two visualisations using the @DESTA_Project database v2.3.