Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

How About Them Apples?
Browser Wars: Google Chrome Passes Firefox With 20% Share; Mish Chrome Test Run
483 Ukrainian Military Tired of War, Seek Asylum in Russia

Posted: 04 Aug 2014 06:47 PM PDT

On July 30, Moscow blocks Polish fruit, veg imports, mulls EU ban citing "systematic violations of international and Russian phytosanitary requirements".

Everyone understands this was retaliation for further EU sanctions on Russia.

Russia has slapped a temporary ban on fruit and vegetable imports from Poland, claiming the products breach its standards.

Rosselkhoznador, the country's federal veterinary and phytosanitary control agency, issued a statement yesterday (30 July) saying it is to introduce a ban on several Polish fruit and vegetable products after it discovered "systematic violations of international and Russian phytosanitary requirements".

"Rosselkhoznadzor considers it necessary to introduce from 1 August 2014 as a temporary emergency phytosanitary measures restrictions on imports to Russia from Poland and Polish imports through third countries," the Russian food safety body said.

Items affected include apples, pears and quince, apricot, cherries, plus all vegetables except mushrooms.

In an interview with Reuters, a spokesperson for Rosselkhoznador said the move "was part of a VPSS plan to consider restricting all or some fruit imports from the entire EU". However he denied the restrictions stemmed from the EU sanctions.

Bloomberg had reported Russia was also mulling the ban of chicken from the US, which has joined the EU in imposing sanctions on parts of the Russian economy.

Revenge

Reuters reports Russian ban on Polish produce is revenge for EU sanctions

Moscow, which buys more than 2 billion euros worth of EU fruit and vegetables a year making it by far the biggest export market for the produce, said the ban was for sanitary reasons and denied a link to the sanctions.

Moscow has frequently been accused in the past of using food safety inspections to restrict trade from countries with which it has political disputes. The EU said it was studying the announcement, describing it as a surprise.

"The embargo amounts to political repression in response to the sanctions imposed by the European Union against Russia," Poland's agriculture ministry said in a statement.

According to European Commission figures, the EU sold Russia 1.2 billion euros worth of fruit and 886 million euros worth of vegetables in 2011, accounting for 28 percent of the bloc's exports of fruit and 21.5 percent of its vegetables. For some EU countries, including Poland, the percentages are even higher.

Poland is the largest exporter of apples in the world. In 2013 it exported apples worth 438 million euro ($587 million), of which 56 percent went to Russia, according to Poland's Ministry of Agriculture.

"I'm expecting the Polish apple producers to suffer," Witold Boguta, representing Poland's Association of Fruit and Vegetable Producers, told Reuters.

Surprise?

If EU bureaucrats really were surprised by this, they are stupider than I thought, which is saying quite a lot.

Why anyone should be surprised by this is a mystery. Retaliation should have been widely expected.

Poland Mocks Russia's Ban on Polish Fruit

In response to the ban, Poland Mocks Russia With Eat More Apples Campaign.

The produce ban is expected to affect Polish apples more than any other product. Poland is Europe's largest producer of apples, with more than half of its production going to Russia.

The "Puls Biznesu" newspaper called on Wednesday for a show of support for Poland's apple producers, urging people to eat more apples and to drink cider. Poles responded with humorous posts on Twitter under the hashtag #jedzjablka – Polish for "eat apples".

One Twitter user predicted that half of Warsaw would get drunk on cider over the weekend.

"An apple a day keeps Putin away!" wrote another Twitter user, in a reference to the Russian president.

Poland is only the latest in a series of countries that Russia has targeted with import bans. Russia announced on Thursday that it would ban the import of soy products, cornmeal and sunflowers from Ukraine. The move comes following bans on Ukrainian dairy products and canned foods that were imposed in recent days.

Russia has a history of banning imports from the countries it is in disputes with, usually citing safety concerns or violations. Last year it blocked the import of Ukrainian chocolates made by the company owned by candy magnate Petro Poroshenko, a pro-Western politician who is now Ukraine's president.

Earlier this month Russia blocked the import of Moldovan fruit after the country signed an association agreement with the EU. And it banned shipments of Georgian wine and mineral water just before the 2008 war with Georgia over South Ossetia.

Eat Apples

Poles may get drunk on cider for a week or two while eating more apples than usual. Then what?

The Population of Russia is about 146 million. The Population of Poland is about 37 million. Polish will have to eat about 4 times as may apples per person as they used to.

Assuming that happens (which it probably won't beyond one week at most), at what price? Poland is going to have a lot of apples it will not know what to do with.

The Ukrainian economy is in ruins over the war and the collapse in trade with Russia as the cry from President Obama and Senator John McCain for for more sanctions on Russia grows.

Sanctions are not not very bright.

No one wins in a trade war. And Europe is about to find out in a big way.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Browser Wars: Google Chrome Passes Firefox With 20% Share; Mish Chrome Test Run

Posted: 04 Aug 2014 01:47 PM PDT

I have been a Mozilla Firefox user for what seems like forever. I never liked Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

Lately, Firefox has been quite irritating, especially when I have a large number of windows open. Firefox frequently crashes, then every page goes down. This has happened before at times, but crashes are even more frequent now.

Also Firefox frequently locks up, and Adobe Flash is the culprit. This problem also seems to have gotten worse. To fix the lock-up problem, I open up Task Manager and kill adobe flash player. My Firefox pages then instantly free up.

Chrome Passes Firefox With 20% Share

Today I read, Chrome Passes 20% Share Milestone, Locks Up 2nd Place.

Computerworld - Google's Chrome browser in July broke the 20% user share bar for the first time, according to data published Friday by Web measurement vendor Net Applications.

But because the browser war is a zero-sum game, when Chrome won others had to lose. The biggest loser, as has been the case for the last year: Mozilla's Firefox, which came dangerously close to another milestone, but on the way down.

Firefox accounted for 15.1% of the desktop and laptop personal computer browsers used in July, a low point not seen by the open-source application since October 2007, a year before Chrome debuted and when Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) was only on version 7.

Chrome's July user share of 20.4% put the browser solidly in second place, but still far behind IE in Net Applications' tallies. IE's share last month was 58%, down slightly from the month before.

Firefox also lost user share in July, dropping half a percentage point to 15.1%. It was the ninth straight month that the desktop browser lost share. In the past three months alone, Firefox has fallen nearly two points.

The timing of the decline has been terrible, as Mozilla's current contract with Google ends in November. That deal, which assigned Google's search engine as the default for most Firefox customers, has generated the bulk of Mozilla's revenue. In 2012, for example, the last year for which financial data was available, Google paid Mozilla an estimated $272 million, or 88% of all Mozilla income.

Going into this year's contract renewal talks, Mozilla will be bargaining from a much weaker position, down 34% in total user share since July 2011.

Browser Wars

Mish Chrome Test Run

After reading the above article, I decided to give Chrome a spin. Chrome imported my tab favorites from Firefox flawlessly.

Initial Appearance Different

The appearance on my blog looked different in each of IE, Firefox, and Chrome. It looked worst, by far, in Chrome. I could not get the fonts and text sizes to match.

The solution to that problem was to modify font-families specified on my blog.

I went with a simpler scheme of "font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" across the board after reading Which Font Should I Use for My Web Page?.

That scheme may not be the best, but it is likely to be the most consistent across all browsers.

Helvetica

Curiously, when I was attempting to fix the display issue with settings rather than in blog code, I noticed Helvetica, a popular font is not even in the selection list.

.

Each Window a Different Task

After the appearance issues were fixed, I liked what I saw. Task manager shows that each open Chrome window is its own task.

If a page crashes (I purposely crashed a Chrome page in task manager), you get a response that looks like this.

Firefox Crashes and Memory Leaks

In Chrome, if one page crashes they all don't crash. I setup Firefox that way at one time, but the plugin container used an enormous amount of memory when I tried it, and I had to switch back.

Other users still report Firefox Crashes for various reasons.

I do believe Firefox has a memory leak of some sort. Memory use goes up and does not fully recover even if you start closing pages.

In Chrome, unlike Firefox, Google reports "Adobe Flash Player is directly integrated with Google Chrome and enabled by default". Hopefully, this will prevent the freeze-ups I experienced with flash in Firefox.

Translation, Settings, Other Features

Chrome provides built-in translation, a feature that will come in very handy for me. I frequently translate pages from Spanish or German, and now Russian and Ukrainian as well. The process was very cumbersome before. Now, it's one click.

Also, Google Chrome allows you to pick up settings and sessions from one computer to another. This is very handy for me, although some will object to Google storing all the information required to accomplish that task.

Anyway, I like what I see so far. If I run into no Chrome issues, it will be goodbye to Firefox for me.

It appears others may be making the same choice.

If you wish to give it a try, here is the Google Chrome Download Link.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

483 Ukrainian Military Tired of War, Seek Asylum in Russia

Posted: 04 Aug 2014 10:08 AM PDT

Back in April, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers defected to pro-Russian side.

It's been a while since we have seen reports like that. Today we have another report: 483 Ukrainian Military Seek Asylum in Russia.

The spokesman for the Border Guard Service of Russia, Vasili Maláyev informed that during the night of Sunday, "about 438 Ukrainian military approached the Russian border guards to seek asylum. According to the decision of the Border Guard Service of Russia , officials opened a humanitarian corridor and allowed into Russia to those who need shelter."

Ukrainian military belonging to the 72nd Mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. "They said they were tired of war and are no longer willing to fight," Maláyev reported.

Before leaving Ukraine, they destroyed their weapons and ammunition depots.

In recent weeks such incidents have become increasingly common. In recent days, military Ukrainians marched through the neutral zone of the border between Russia and Ukraine unarmed and with a white flag.

According to Maláyev, the military, both officers and soldiers, also belonged to the 72nd Mechanized Brigade. Ukrainian military explained that they had run out of supplies and ammunition that were available were not suitable for fire systems

That is a rather curious source, and the English on the site was broken. I fixed a couple of spots.

The only other non-blog news media reference I could find was from RIA: Over 400 Ukrainian Military Personnel Request Refugee Status in Russia. Of course, Western mainstream media has no interest in reporting such things.

Here are some additional details from RIA.

"Overnight 438 Ukrainian military personnel turned to Russian border guards with a request for refugee [status]," the head of the FSB's border control in the southern Russian region of Rostov, Vasily Malaeyev, said.

Border control authorities have opened a humanitarian corridor and have allowed refugees into Russia. Among the 438 personnel, 164 are employees of Ukraine's State Border Service.

On Sunday, 12 soldiers from the Ukrainian Armed Forces made it into Russia and applied for an asylum at Gukovo checkpoint in Russia's Rostov Region, saying they had run out of food and ammunition.

Last month, another 40 Ukrainian troops abandoned their military units and asked independence supporters to allow them to come to Russia in order not to fight against their own people.

Ukraine's 72nd and 79th Brigades Pounded

Only the first link made reference to the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, a claim that seems highly credible.

For my July 26 reference to the entrapment of of the 72nd brigade, please see Who's Winning the War in Ukraine? Answer May Shock You!

For a video on the demise of part of the 79th brigade, please see Ukraine's Army Advances; Unguided Rockets Kill Civilians; Demise of Rebels?

Lost Territory

Nonetheless, the rebels have lost half the territory they once held, some in scorched earth policies of the Ukrainian army, with no regard to civilians.

If the rebels lose much more territory, it will be over.

Yet, my sources tell me the rebels are ordering Winter supplies in assumption the war will last quite some time.

Ukrainian Army Stretched to Limit?

For yet another piece of the puzzle, one that possibly indicates the Ukrainian army is stretched a bit too far, please consider Ukrainians Ordered to War, Women Burn the Military Writs

Regardless of who "wins" militarily, the scars will take years, if not far longer to heal, and Ukraine will be beholden to the IMF and other creditors for decades.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

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