MrLittleTexas

1. Bonds are given B by Fitch - default in 12 months seems extremely unlikely. Maybe 2%

2. Stock M/M market collapse of 30% hasn't happened since 2008 - maybe 5% chance

3. Inflation is very high though - down from it's peak, but I give it a 10% of going in a really bad direction

These are not independent probabilities however, as e.g. a default and hyperinflation could coincide. So I'm going with 15%

They've controlled Deir ez-Zor territory for ~5 years and the others for longer. Maybe 20% per year baseline that they lose one of the key territories, if war was still active; but it's cooled down a lot since then, so the chance of e.g. losing territory to conquest by the Syrian government seems low. However with Trump possibly pulling the hundreds of millions in funding SDF gets each year, I think this is a relatively high probability.

This is more or less a random number generator as far as I can tell. I'm sure there was not actually 80% less disinformation in Oct 2022- Sep 23 as in other timeframes. Likewise I'm pretty sure that the last 50 days have not seen a sudden explosion of disinformation despite the high recent rate in the source material. Lots of things could happen - a peace deal early next year in the Ukraine war might mean there are fewer disinformation cases. Or the source agency could decide to record lots of incidents. The median not counting the outlier period in 2022-2023 is 75. I assume from the rate so far we come in on the high end, but who knows.

Eagerly awaiting the 2025 report, which will probably be soon. But if 53 was the elevated but pre-war baseline, and 78 was months after the war started, and has trended downward since then, I expect the number at the end of next year will be in the high 50s/low 60s. A peace deal next year could send it more decisively into the 50s while escalating threats from Russia could  in theory cause it to spike again.

Seems like too short of a timeframe; commercial DUV machines have been available since the 1990s, and China only seems to have their first ones as of September this year. What is the chance they can reach 50% speed in the next 13 months? Doesn't seem high. Admittedly playing catch-up is a lot easier than inventing something for the first time, but this is a race against decades of accumulated experience, and I don't think they can pull it off that quickly.

It looks like EUV had a very long  development history before it achieved the speeds required for this question. China hasn't produced anything close yet, and they need machines that are at a pretty advanced stage to reach this goal. Unlike Chinese developments in LLMs, you can't just read Western research papers and have your smart computer scientists replicate what's already been done. Probably many trade secrets belonging to ASML they won't have access to, and a lot of stuff that needs to be invented from scratch. China has not shown a great capacity for inventing new technology compared to copying foreign inventions. And this is among the most complex inventions in the entire history of human civilization - there's a reason that nobody but ASML has been able to do it in any country, and I'm sure many would love to.

Agree with @LogicCurve that collaboration b/w NK and Russia probably makes a test less likely rather than more. I could see an argument to the contrary but with Russian funds no doubt flowing to NK, less of an incentive to saber rattle to then de-escalate in exchange for aid or sanctions reduction; also Russia may not want NK to escalate if peace negotiations over Ukraine become a priority.

Long term bond ratings from Fitch are all in the B- range except for Ethiopia. This is a pretty short timeframe to go from that to default. Nigeria is given a positive outlook, Angola and Kenya a negative outlook.

Ethiopia has an RD rating for their recent default. Their debt is still being restructured from that initial default. I'm not sure they can even default a second time while they are already restructuring debt from the initial default? Regardless it looks like the IMF may be giving them a lifeline.

I would like at some point to dig into the 3GPP governing docs to see how hard would it be to get such a change approved. It seems like plenty of vendors and countries have not bought into O-RAN, so on its face a large international group with hundreds of existing members seems unlikely to buy in.

Additionally, I'm not sure to what extent these organizations operate in the same space. If - I'm not sure myself - 3GPP operates at a high level of abstraction, specifying the basic protocol, leaving certain implementation details to vendors, and O-RAN is in the business of standardizing these implementation details, then it would be unlikely that 3GPP would take on a new role of standardizing lower level details. I'm not sure how it works and this area is technical enough it would take some digging for me to figure it out.