“Distributed work introduces friction for managers and they have to learn to manage people as people and not manage by proximity” ....... The point isn’t that there’s something wrong with working from an office. It’s that there’s something right about working from home. ...... It will also probably take years for the pro-remote work argument to fully sink in with the people who have the power to make it the new normal. And giving workers with caregiving responsibilities the flexibility to manage their lives is a drop in the bucket in terms of what America would need to do to make this country truly family friendly. But it’s a very necessary start. .
Xi Jinping Expands His Power, Elevating Loyalists, Forcing Out Moderates A new lineup of the Communist Party elite will limit potential resistance to Mr. Xi’s agenda of bolstering security and expanding state sway over the economy. ....... He kept officials who have promoted his muscular approach in diplomacy and the military. And Mr. Xi gave no hint of preparing for eventual retirement by anointing a likely successor. ......
“China has entered a new era of maximum Xi”
......... a stronger focus on political control, economic statism, and assertive diplomacy.” ...... Mr. Xi’s progress toward his new term has been hampered this year by China’s painful economic slowdown, spreading public frustration over the country’s strict Covid rules, and rumors of internal opposition. ..... urging the party’s members to stay in lock step with him “in thought, politics and action.” ........ A statement from the meeting said Mr. Xi’s leadership was essential to “eradicating grave hazards that were present inside the party, state and military,” apparently referring to corruption and disloyalty. ...... Mr. Xi’s enhanced control suggests China will maintain its tough stance toward Washington, and expand the party’s intervention in the economy, technology and the internet. ....... “It’s all shoulders to the wheel.” ......... Mr. Xi’s new term and his leadership team will not be officially confirmed until Sunday, when the new Central Committee meets and holds a carefully controlled vote. ........ “Proximity to Xi is all that really matters now.” ....... “There are no alternative centers of power centers left in the Standing Committee, if there ever were, even symbolically.” .
Moving Backward’: In Xi’s China, Some See an Era of Total Control A decade ago, many prominent Chinese hoped that Xi Jinping would usher in openness and reform. Today, some of them believe he has created a totalitarian state. ....... As Xi Jinping was preparing to take the helm of the Chinese Communist Party a decade ago, a great number of China’s political, business and intellectual elites were hopeful that he would make their country more open, just and prosperous. ........ China is moving in the opposite direction from liberalization. Obsessed with national security, he is more focused on quashing all ideological and geopolitical challenges than on reform and opening up, the policies that brought China out of poverty. ........ He used the term “new era” 39 times in his speech, boasting of the party’s achievements under his leadership. But for some Chinese, it has been a dark era — a shift away from a system that, while authoritarian, tolerated private enterprise and some diversity in public opinion to one that now espouses a single ideology and a single leader. ......... a totalitarian state that rules with “terror and ideology,” referring to a well-known political theory. ......... Ms. Cai has been expelled from the party for such criticism. The historian, Sun Peidong, can no longer teach or publish freely. Xu Chenggang, the economist, is disappointed that the party again controls everything, including the private sector. All three are living in the United States. ............. They all believe that China, with its vast surveillance systems and punitive social control, now resembles Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China. In their view, even Russia and Iran have more space for dissent. ............ It’s a view whispered at dinner tables and in chat groups. One online nickname refers to China as “the North Korea to the west.” ............ Many Chinese people were surprised to learn that before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russians had access to Twitter and Facebook, and that there were several independent Russian media outlets. Beijing has nearly absolute control over what information Chinese people can see and what they can say online. ......... When Mr. Xi came to power in 2012, Ms. Cai believed that the party would embark on a path of reform. But Mr. Xi soon began going after journalists, lawyers, entrepreneurs and nongovernmental organizations. ........ When Mr. Xi changed China’s Constitution in 2018 so he could serve more than two terms as president, Ms. Cai lost hope. “I realized that the party wasn’t able to change,” she said. “If the party couldn’t change, the country wouldn’t be able to change.” ....... In an online hangout with friends back in China, she criticized the party as a “political zombie” and Mr. Xi as a “mafia ringleader.” ......... In 2018, after spending two years in the United States, she went back to Fudan, to a changed country and a changed classroom........ She found that class discussions had become less candid, and she said so on the social media platform Weibo. One morning, she found her office door plastered with printouts of her social media posts, along with threats to post them in other places on campus. ........ Ms. Sun, now an associate professor of history at Cornell University, said she still had nightmares about her experience. “The teeth of totalitarianism were inching toward me,” she said in an interview. “If I still wanted to do the kind of research I liked, I would have to leave China.” .
Not-So-Great Britain’s Conservative Crackup She wilted faster than The Daily Star head of lettuce gussied up to look like her. ........ Liz squared. The longest-reigning monarch meets the shortest-serving prime minister. It was such a swift fall that Truss was anointed by a queen and resigned to a king. ...... Many consider the third woman to dwell at No. 10 incompetent and hopeless, perhaps the worst P.M. in history. ....... She was a bad communicator, a poor speaker and weak on camera. She didn’t understand that you couldn’t simply borrow money from the future. She managed to be a radical ideologue and a lightweight at the same time. ....... “It’s incredibly funny if you’re not English,” Henry Porter, a British writer, told me. “It’s humiliating if you are. Boris is Boris Karloff, the monster who comes alive again, after you thought he was buried.” ....... The outcome was foggy, as Johnson rushed back from a vacation in the Caribbean. In some vote estimates, Sunak was ahead but Johnson was winning support, as well. James Duddridge, an M.P. who backs Johnson, told the British press: “I’ve been in contact with the boss via WhatsApp. He’s going to fly back. He said: ‘I’m flying back, Dudders, we are going to do this. I’m up for it.’” ......... .
Tory lawmakers are split. Half are morally outraged by Boris, and the rest are worried that without the riveting spectacle of Boris, they’ll lose their seats in two years. ...... Many Tories believe, amid rising electric bills, power shortages and inflation, that Sunak — whose wealthy wife was accused of avoiding paying 20 million pounds in taxes until the press upbraided her — would be wiped out by Labour in two years. ........British conservatives are becoming as shameless as American conservatives, willing to put up with any outrage to keep their posh offices and perks. The “good chap” principle in England, the tradition that sometimes you have to leave office for the greater good, seems passé.
Liz Truss Believed in Markets, but the Markets Did Not Believe in Her The world has just witnessed one of the most extraordinary political immolations of recent times. Animated by faith in a fantasy version of the free market, Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain set off a sequence of events that has forced her to fire her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, and led her to the brink of being ousted by her own party. ........ The stakes of the crisis were global size. Strangest of all, this was done purposefully, in a reckless act of deliberate policy, better thought of as a gesture of political conviction. .......... capitalist revolutionaries Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng laid low by the mechanisms of capitalism itself. Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng may be the last of the Thatcherites, defeated by the very system they believed they were acting in fidelity to........ Many of Thatcher’s true believers attributed the derailing of her project to the rise of the European Union, which in their view tangled the homeland of classical liberalism in the red tape of European law. .......... Losing the leadership in 1990, Thatcher continued to grumble from the backbenches, growing increasingly hostile to the European Union and finding comfort with a surly group of Tory hard-liners. These Thatcherites, known collectively as the ultras, gained fresh blood in the 2010s as a group of Gen Xers too young to experience Thatcherism in its insurgent early years — including the former home secretary Priti Patel, the former foreign secretary Dominic Raab, the former minister of state for universities Chris Skidmore, Mr. Kwarteng and Ms. Truss — attempted to reboot her ideology for the new millennium. ........... They followed their idol not only in her antagonism to organized labor but also in her less-known fascination with Asian capitalism. In 2012’s “Britannia Unchained,” a book co-written by the group that remains a Rosetta Stone for the policy surprises of the last month, they slammed the Britons for their eroded work ethic and “culture of excuses” and the “cosseted” public sector unions. They praised China, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. “The average Singaporean works two hours and 20 minutes a day longer than the average Brit,” they observed — as if longer working days were something to aspire to. “Britannia Unchained” expressed a desire to go back to the future by restoring Victorian values of hard work, self-improvement and bootstrapping. ......... “there remains a sense in which many of Britain’s problems lie in the sphere of cultural values and mind-set.” ......... As Thatcher herself put it, “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” ........ Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng seemed to have believed that by patching together all of the most radical policies of Thatcherism (while conveniently dropping the need for spending cuts), they would be incanting a kind of magic spell, an “Open sesame” for “global Britain.” This was their Reagan moment, their moment when, as their favorite metaphors put it, a primordial repressed force would be “unchained,” “unleashed” or “unshackled.” ............ But as a leap of faith, it broke the diver’s neck. ..........
This was “Reaganism without the dollar.”
Without the confidence afforded to the global reserve currency, the pound went into free fall.
Liz Truss in the Libertarian Wilderness When the tax cuts were announced, many conservatives compared Truss’s policies — favorably — to those of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. When Reagan pushed through unfunded tax cuts, they also raised interest rates — but they drove the dollar up, not down. Thatcher similarly presided over a strong pound. Why was this time different? ....... the bank did intervene to limit what it considered the danger of a sort of death spiral driven by forced fire sales of long-term bonds........ Politics in the modern West tends to be more or less two-dimensional. One dimension is the left-right divide in economic policy, between those who favor high taxes on the rich and large social benefits and those who want low taxes and small government. The other dimension is the divide over social issues, between those who favor policies promoting racial equality and gay rights and those who bitterly oppose anything they consider “woke.” ........ most voters like government benefits, a lot. Opposition to social spending comes mainly from voters who believe that spending goes to the wrong people — people who don’t look like them. ........ a large bloc of voters who want the nastiness of MAGA without the right-wing economics.
How Atlanta Remade Hip-Hop In a regional game, rap’s Southern contingent has come to dominate its counterparts in New York and L.A. ......... the complex intersections between music, artists, the streets’ illicit economies, the prison system, racism, poverty and class dynamics in Atlanta, a city that’s branded from the block to the boardroom by an ethos of Black Excellence.
The fact the UK media outlets are even saying @BorisJohnson is in the lead to be PM over @RishiSunak tells you “racism” and “stupidity” is real in “white media.”
Trying to ignore Ukraine for 8 years is how the US and the rest of the world helped precipitate this crisis. And it's not a "nuclear crisis," it's Putin again seeing if he can get what he wants by ranting and bluffing. If he again meets weakness, he will again escalate.
We’ll find a way to use Russia’s frozen assets to help #Ukraine. @EU_Commission will work out details.
Russia must be held accountable, including for crime of aggression. EU could lead in establishing a tribunal. Today's decisions set basis for moving ahead. pic.twitter.com/MD6fA1f9CF
Putin has shown over and over that he talks big against strength but only acts against weakness. Russia is waging a war of extermination and is preparing new attacks on Kyiv and the north. Stop lecturing Ukraine about limits and stop Putin.
The West has overwhelming advantages but, as in 2014, is rushing to take things off the table to reassure terrorist dictatorships they are free to escalate when they like. They are afraid of victory and so guarantee more conflict, more deaths.
You need to revisit Iran 1953, to trace how the trouble started. 👍 You can trace back many of today’s conflicts back to one particular Country. pic.twitter.com/dNlhiqRUmX
— Craig Hall #GeneralStrike #Worldwide (@w41gy) October 18, 2022
Eminem turns 50 years old tonight and now I feel really old.
underrepresented founders out here rawdogging entrepreneurship with no connections, MBA, or rich uncles - just hopes, dreams and grit. you are the best kind.
An important decision taken in the meeting of the Cabinet today.
Approved of increase in MSP of 6 Rabi Crops for Marketing Season 2023-24. In line with the Budget announcements, it will ensure fair remuneration for our farmers.
Russians are ecstatic about hits on Ukrainian cities. “They should be living in Middle Ages! Go hide in basements! We should hit Kyiv with nuclear! Their kids should not have a piece of bread to eat!” Russian social media are full of comments like this. Disgusting!
The Estonian Parliament declared #Russia a terrorist regime.
Russia's tactics are the definition of terrorism - they try to seriously intimidate people and influence the international community to support Ukraine less. They won't succeed. https://t.co/IbWT58FDzi
Lalitpur-3 please vote for Dr. Toshima Karki (@tooshikarsu)! While I am still sad that Covid prevented my candidacy this year, I'm relieved I can pass the baton to a very capable woman who is passionate about accessible quality healthcare for all. pic.twitter.com/TPYi9A1NlR
SF right now (especially if you’re in AI) is electric. There’s more seriousness from higher quality builders than there has been in more than 5 years, the heat-seekers mostly left, ambitious technical people are moving here, and good ideas and idea collision are happening.
It was always unreasonable, and is becoming unwise, to expect @elonmusk to provide Internet to Ukraine for free forever. Western allies should pay. And US should have a plan ready to nationalize Starlink fast if Musk cuts off Ukraine's connection to advance his political agenda.
Russian Commander Surovikin tells Russian TV: “We & Ukrainians are one people. We want Ukraine to be independent of the West & Nato, a state that is friendly to Russia.” Moscow's aim is clear: to force Ukraine to be 'friends' with Russia (ie force Ukraine into Russia's orbit). pic.twitter.com/vem2rv6MuX
Spare a thought for all the international news outlets that need to explain to a non-British audience why Liz Truss is being compared to a wilting lettuce pic.twitter.com/mwOcLbB0sL
Chris Dixon addresses a16z's investment in Adam Neumann's new company at #tcdisrupt.
"We do our own research. We don’t rely on books and movies for our diligence. We do our own research and we just came to our own conclusion about a lot of what happened."
Elon Musk Foments More Geopolitical Controversy With Ukraine Internet Dispute The world’s richest man, whose Starlink internet service is critical to the Ukrainian Army, said he could not “indefinitely” fund the system’s use in Ukraine. ....... Musk said his company could not “indefinitely” fund Ukraine’s use of Starlink, which has become crucial for the Ukrainian Army’s communication as it advances into territory occupied by Russia and defends against continued Russian attacks. ........ About 20,000 Starlink terminals, which were designed to work with satellites orbiting in space to provide online access, have been delivered to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February. Mr. Musk, who did not mention the Pentagon, talked about the difficulties of funding the service. ........
Musk, 51, who has become an unlikely provocateur in international geopolitics.
........... Last week, Mr. Musk drew a fierce rebuke from Ukrainian officials for proposing a peace plan — which included ceding territory to Russia — to end the war. He also suggested in an interview with The Financial Times that tensions between China and Taiwan could be resolved by handing over some control of Taiwan to Beijing. .
Crude Comments From Europe’s Top Diplomat Point to Bigger Problems Josep Borrell Fontelles said Europe was “a garden,” and the world “a jungle,” triggering charges of neocolonialism and racism just as the E.U. tries to drum up support in the developing world. ......... The top European Union diplomat calling the world “a jungle” and Europe “a garden” at risk of being overrun isn’t helping. ......... “Yes, Europe is a garden.” Mr. Borrell told aspiring European diplomats in the Belgian city of Bruges. “We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build — the three things together.” ........ “Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden,” he added, calling the young European diplomats “gardeners” who “have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.” ....... He said that Europe was a privileged place to live and that his message to the aspiring diplomats was to cultivate relationships outside it, because it cannot be “an island in the world away from what was going on elsewhere.” ....... Among the first to seize on it was the Kremlin’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova. ........ “To continue the analogy, the European gardener is in a vegetative state,” she quipped on Telegram. “And now seriously. The ‘garden’ was built by Europe due to the barbaric attitude to the plundering of the ‘jungle.’ Borrell could not say it better: the most prosperous system created in Europe was nourished by its roots from the colonies, which it ruthlessly oppressed,” she added. ........ “This abhorrent, colonial language is unacceptable from any representative of our union, least of all our highest-ranking diplomat,” said Alice Bah Kuhnke, a prominent Swedish member of the European Parliament with the Green Party. ......... Experts also said that alienating nations in the developing world could undermine the European Union’s efforts to bolster global partnerships in its search for its own independent place in the global power structure, as well as drum up support for Ukraine against Russia. ......... “It upsets at the most profound level countries in the rest of the world, because of the history of colonialism.” ......... In United Nations General Assembly votes, a bellwether for how well Western allies are doing against Russia’s own diplomatic efforts, the European Union and the United States have struggled to rally support from African and Asian countries they would normally call allies. High-profile partners like South Africa and India have chosen to abstain on key votes ......... Seasoned E.U. observers point out that Mr. Borrell is not an outlier when it comes to the dominant thinking at the heart of the bloc’s policy machinery. ........ the garden-jungle analogy used by Mr. Borrell was first employed by the prominent American neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan.
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The state of the energy transition In the past decade, we finally got going. Over the next three, we need to go much further, much faster. I still believe we can avoid a climate disaster—if we devote the next generation to mobilizing the largest crisis response in human history. ........ .
Liz Truss Is Finished For 40 days, Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain has ridden a roller coaster of ridicule. ........ Her “mini budget,” on which she hung her free-market credentials, was a disaster: Bond yields rocketed, the pound tanked, and the markets, far from gratified, were distinctly upset. To mitigate the damage, she reversed a tax cut for high earners — and was rewarded with more mockery. At the Conservative Party conference, protesters played loud clown music, and the police refused to intervene, as sure a sign of a failing administration in Britain as the storming of the Winter Palace in Russia. ........... the polls, which put Labour 33 points ahead of the Conservatives and Ms. Truss’s approval rating at minus 47 ....... Ms. Truss may limp on, but she is without power. For all intents and purposes, her prime ministership is finished. ........ Behind this monumental failure stalks Boris Johnson, the most important ghost in British politics. ......... Ms. Truss was Mr. Johnson’s departing gift, a human land mine to level the ground for his possible return. ......... We are far from seriousness, data and hope. The choice of Brexit, the nightmare we are slowly awakening to, proves it. ........... Ms. Truss certainly invited opprobrium with her recklessness: Only 6 percent of the country supports her tax cuts, while Elizabeth II preached unity and love. That is the kind of authoritarianism the British like, the velvet kind. In comparison, Ms. Truss looked tinny and pitiful. She could be dismissed. ...... After 12 years in power, exhausted by Brexit, the pandemic and growing factionalism, they find themselves at the mercy of Mr. Johnson’s ambition, their own inadequacy and their members’ hunger for culling the state against the country’s wishes. Their choice of Ms. Truss was part error, part final roll of a doomsday cult. Britain, contrary to stereotype, is a kaleidoscope of opinion, not two resolutely opposed factions. The majority accepted Conservative rule for more than a decade. But Ms. Truss, bringer of market chaos and international condemnation, is where that consent ends. ......... In time, Britain may free itself of Mr. Johnson’s spell and Ms. Truss’s unreason — and choose leaders who deal in facts, not fantasies, and think of the country, not themselves. We may say at last: Enough of post-truth and extremism and drinking the dregs of empire.
Britain’s New Prime Minister Is Still in Thrall to the Empire In a campaign built around a belief in the miraculous power of tax cuts, Ms. Truss presented herself as the economic savior of a country heading into a winter of crisis. In the face of sky-high inflation and widespread economic misery, it’s a fantastical proposition. ......... in an era of decolonization, he sketched out a route for Britain to maintain its global dominance. Fashioned in the dying of the imperial light, that roster of policies — preferential terms of global trade achieved through hard-line anti-migrant policies, shrinking the state, undermining organized labor and fostering finance — forms the basis of Ms. Truss’s politics today. The British Empire may have all but ended 60 years ago, but the country’s next prime minister is still in thrall to its legacy. ......... borders for the people of the empire but not for the wealth of the empire. ......... it is on the terrain of the economy where her absorption in zombie imperial thinking is most striking. ........ In 2012, Ms. Truss announced herself on the political scene as a co-author of a book, tellingly titled “Britannia Unchained,” that argued that Britain’s diminished position globally was the result of an overextended welfare state raising generations of mollycoddled workers, derided as “the worst idlers in the world.” While she likes to wrap herself in the Union Jack, her position a decade on appears to be the same. British workers, she said in a recent leaked recording, lacked the “skill and application” of their foreign counterparts and needed to work harder. ........... tax cuts have been consistently shown to increase inequality while having a negligible effect on growth or unemployment.
Follow the thread. What a terrible analogy Mr Borrell has made. Surely history and our own lived experience teaches us that no part of the world is free from violence. https://t.co/UpSdTrT8oQ
SpaceX is not asking to recoup past expenses, but also cannot fund the existing system indefinitely *and* send several thousand more terminals that have data usage up to 100X greater than typical households. This is unreasonable.
I sprained my ankle and half of the internet says I should RICE (rest, ice compression elevation) and the other half says RICE is bad and it’s MEAT (movement, exercise, analgesics, tx)
Why Vladimir Putin Is Likely to Be Disappointed Against a turning tide, Vladimir Putin is resorting to desperate measures. ......... Last week, in retaliation for an attack on the Kerch Strait Bridge, Russia’s main route to Crimea, the Kremlin launched over 100 long-range missiles into Ukraine, killing more than three dozen civilians and striking 30 percent of Ukrainian energy facilities. .......... Four factors have combined to steadily diminish Russia’s battlefield prospects: the demands of a high-intensity war on an army unprepared to wage it; early and severe losses to its ground, airborne and special forces; the Ukrainians’ resilience and will to fight; and Western support for Ukraine. .......... Even before the majority of new troops have been deployed, there are anecdotes of mobilized forces being killed, being captured and deserting. There are, to put it mildly, obvious downsides to sending unprepared and questionably led conscripts to a combat zone. ......... Already there are signs of discipline problems among mobilized soldiers in Russian garrisons. ......... The Russian military leadership is unlikely to know with confidence how this undisciplined composite force will react when confronted with cold, exhausting combat conditions or rumors of Ukrainian assaults. Recent experience suggests these troops might abandon their positions and equipment in panic, as demoralized forces did in the Kharkiv region in September. ........... Right now, Mr. Putin seems to have two immediate goals: to sustain control of as much of the occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions as he can (with Russia’s desired boundaries not yet defined); and to freeze the front line, establishing a frontier Ukrainian forces cannot broach, possibly sealed by a cease-fire. .......... as the Ukrainians’ continued headway in the south suggests, it’s far from clear that Russia will be able to attain either aim. ........ In that case, Mr. Putin could lash out more broadly against Ukraine. The attacks of the past week — particularly striking critical civilian infrastructure — could be expanded across Ukraine if missile supplies hold out, while Russia could directly target the Ukrainian leadership with strikes or special operations. .......... To inflict domestic costs on Kyiv’s supporters, Russia could also conduct cyberattacks against Europe or the United States, targeting critical infrastructure like energy, transportation and communications systems. The war then would no longer be confined to the borders of Ukraine. ......... It’s worth recalling that, before breaking the nuclear taboo, Russia has other means available to escalate.
I’ve Studied 13 Days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This Is What I See When I Look at Putin. For six decades, the Cuban missile crisis has been viewed as the defining confrontation of the modern age, the world’s closest brush with nuclear annihilation. The war in Ukraine presents perils of at least equal magnitude, particularly now that Vladimir Putin has backed himself into a corner by declaring large chunks of neighboring Ukraine as belonging to Russia “forever.” ............ As I discovered when I assembled a minute-by-minute chronology of the most dangerous phase of the crisis, there were times when both leaders were unaware of developments on the battlefield that assumed a logic and momentum of their own.
