Ukrainians fight "to show everybody else, including Russia, to respect sovereignty, human rights, territorial integrity; and to respect people, not to kill people, not to rape women, not to kill animals, not to take that which is not yours." – Zelens’kyihttps://t.co/s3G0Z3M2tw
THE COUNTEROFFENSIVE The future of the democratic world will be determined by whether the Ukrainian military can break a stalemate with Russia and drive the country backwards—perhaps even out of Crimea for good.
Ben Merric (@TheBenMerric ) is planning to launch his paid course.
Here's how I'd work with him to generate up $15,000+ just from the launch alone.
China Orders Tesla to Recall 1.1 Million Vehicles Over Braking Risks Defects on certain Tesla models could lead drivers to step on the accelerator pedals for longer than necessary, increasing the risk of collisions, China’s market regulator says........ Tesla said it would fix the vehicles with a software update sent wirelessly to the vehicles ....... China is a significant market for Tesla, with revenue from the country increasing to $18.2 billion last year from $13.8 billion in 2021. The recalls will begin on May 29, and Tesla will notify relevant car owners by mail or text.
How a Solo Gig Can Give You a Stronger Retirement Becoming a solo entrepreneur in the years after leaving an employer can give your Social Security benefit and savings a boost. Here’s what to know....... Mr. Eanes was a hiker and cyclist, and he decided to fashion a new life of independent work around those interests and his spirituality. His first move was self-publishing a book in 2019 about his pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, followed by starting a business aimed at helping other writers publish their books. ...... Along with paying income taxes, you’ll be responsible for the self-employment tax, which covers the full cost of your contributions to Social Security and Medicare. As a self-employed worker, you can deduct half of these costs from your income taxes. .... “It’s a great way to stay active and engaged, and bring in the extra income I need.”
‘Christianity’s Got a Branding Problem’ I’d never really thought of religions as brands. I’ve always thought of them in the context of personal, somewhat private beliefs — or in the way that I, as a Jew, think of Judaism as a value system passed down from previous generations....... Many said that while they no longer attend church or ally themselves with a particular faith tradition, they still believe in God, miss the sound of the choir and find transcendence in nature....... Political polarization, however, isn’t the only reason for the rise of the “nones” — a catchall term for atheists, agnostics and those who say they have no religion in particular. Nones went from 0 percent to 2 percent of the population in the 1950s, according to Gallup, to somewhere between 20 percent and 30 percent of Americans today ....... the 1950s as a boom time for American religiosity, in part because “religion represented patriotism” during the Cold War against “atheistic communism.” They continue: “It was no accident that ‘under God’ was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954” and the words “In God We Trust” that we see stamped onto our coins became the national motto in 1956. Not believing in or subscribing to “Judeo-Christian” values was often considered un-American. ........ With the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War, it became easier to “come out” as having no religion ....... Religion became less tightly connected to nationalism, so it was no longer seen as treasonous if you “wouldn’t show up on Sunday at church.” ........ “most pastors are not political because they don’t gain anything from being political”; they only risk alienating their flocks.
The Second Phase of the Biden Presidency Through the infrastructure law and many other measures, Team Biden directed huge amounts of money to create working-class jobs and to increase benefits to working-class families. That spending contributed to white-hot labor markets that have lifted wages, brought people back into the labor force and turbocharged American capitalism...... Today, its main purpose is to prepare the nation for a period of accelerating and explosive change. ........ there have been three periods of transformational change over the course of human history: the Neolithic period, which brought about settled farming, writing and the birth of cities; the Industrial Revolution, which gave us factories, mass production and cars; and the information age. ........ The information age is accelerating and growing more disruptive. The first cause is artificial intelligence. A.I. will produce pervasive breakthroughs and threats that none of us can now predict. ....... Another cause is the emerging cold war with China. This will produce a remorseless technological competition that will turbocharge developments in biotech, energy, chip manufacturing, trade flows, political alliances and many other spheres. ........ When Covid hit, the United States successfully pivoted and threw trillions of dollars at that problem. But the United States may not be able to mobilize that kind of response in the future. That’s because we’re now manacled by debt. ......... During the Trump administration, the debt increased by roughly $7.8 trillion, and during the Biden administration, it has increased by about $3.7 trillion. Over the past 50 years, the annual federal deficit has averaged about 3.5 percent of G.D.P. Over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office expects that deficits will average 6.1 percent of G.D.P. ......... The United States is projected to spend roughly $640 billion this year merely paying interest on that debt, a figure that is expected to more than double by 2033. That’s about the time the Social Security Trust Fund will become insolvent ........... Any prudent family saves money as hurricane season approaches, so it can deal with the coming storms. With self-destructive recklessness, the United States is doing the exact opposite. ........ In contrast to Donald Trump, who is all about himself, Biden can be the source of security in times of chaos.
Putin Is Fighting, and Losing, His Last War Today’s Russia issues an unending stream of nuclear threats. In the West today, unlike during the Cold War, these are discussed in psychological rather than strategic terms. How does Mr. Putin feel? How do we feel? ....... Americans’ fear of escalation delayed the supply of weapons that could have allowed Ukraine to win last year. One after the other, the weapons systems deemed escalatory have now been delivered, with no negative consequences. But the cost of delay can be observed in the Ukrainian territories that Russia still controls: the death pits, the torture chambers and the empty homes of kidnapped children. Tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides have unnecessarily died. .......... Strategic thinkers point to deterrence and note that nuclear use would not in fact bring a Russian victory. It would ensure a dramatic Western response and make Russian leaders pariahs. But there is a deeper explanation: Russia’s nuclear talk is itself the weapon. ......... Russian nuclear propaganda assumes that the bully always wins. But the bully does not always win. Russian propagandists want us to think that nuclear powers can never lose wars, on the logic that they could always deploy nuclear weapons to win. This is an ahistoric fantasy. Nuclear weapons did not bring the French victory in Algeria, nor did they preserve the British Empire. The Soviet Union lost its war in Afghanistan. America lost in Vietnam and in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Israel failed to win in Lebanon. Nuclear powers lose wars with some regularity........ Russia has been defeated in Ukraine, on its own terms, again and again. What it has proved is its ability to change those terms after each defeat. .......... Russia can lose without being cornered. It has 11 time zones of space for retreating soldiers and plenty of practice in propaganda refashionings. Indeed, Russian leaders have already indicated what they will do if they believe that they are losing: change the terms of reference and change the subject in Russian media. Mr. Putin’s kleptocratic state as a whole and its dependencies such as the Wagner mercenary army are public relations projects with a military arm. The assumption in Russian politics is that rhetoric overcomes reality. And the rhetorical preparations for defeat have been made. ............ Beneath Mr. Putin’s vague bellicosity is the idea that Russia wins if it avoids (in his words) “strategic defeat” imposed by NATO. Almost no matter what happens, it will be easy for him to define the war in Ukraine as a strategic victory. Since the Kremlin claims that it is fighting NATO, all Mr. Putin has to say is that Russia stopped NATO from crossing into Russia. The commander of Wagner wrote recently, in this spirit, that Russia can end the “special military operation” at any time and just claim that its goals have been achieved, so long as Russia does not retreat from any more occupied Ukrainian territory. ........ If nuclear blackmail enables a Russian victory, the consequences will be incalculably awful. If any country with nuclear weapons can do whatever it likes, then law means nothing, no international order is possible and catastrophe beckons at every turn. Countries without nuclear weapons will have to build them, on the logic that they will need nuclear deterrence in the future. Nuclear proliferation would make nuclear war much more likely in the future. ........... The Russians talk about nuclear weapons not because they mean to use them but because they believe a large nuclear arsenal makes them a superpower. Nuclear talk makes them feel powerful. They see nuclear bullying as their prerogative and believe that others should automatically yield at the first mention of their weapons. The Ukrainians have not allowed this to affect their tactics. ......... If Russia detonated a weapon, it would lose that jealously guarded treasure of superpower status. Such an act would constitute an admission that its army has been beaten — a tremendous loss of face. Worse still, neighbors would build (or build up) their own nuclear arsenals. That would deprive Russia of superpower status in the minds of the Russians themselves. That is, for the Russian leadership, the one intolerable outcome of this war. In my view, the greatest risk of a Russian nuclear action would therefore be one that Moscow would lay the blame for on Ukraine, such as the deliberate destruction of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. ........... When Russians talk about nuclear war, the safest response is to ensure their very conventional defeat.
China's Xi calls Ukraine's Zelenskyy, after weeks of intensifying pressure to do so "China will send the Special Representative of the Chinese Government on Eurasian Affairs to Ukraine and other countries to have in-depth communication with all parties on political settlement of the Ukraine crisis." ...... Xi's call comes as the Chinese leader has sought to play the role of peacemaker, having brokered a deal to mend fences between Middle Eastern rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia. However, chances of a breakthrough in the Ukraine conflict are slim, given how far apart Moscow and Kyiv's positions remain. ........ Even a cease-fire, Ukraine says, will only allow Moscow time to regroup in its faltering military campaign. Ukraine rejected a 36-hour Russian cease-fire over Orthodox Christmas.
US-China relations have entered a frightening new era Economic co-operation with Beijing will be harder than recent speeches by Janet Yellen and Ursula von der Leyen suggest ........ Yellen sets out a plan for what she calls “constructive engagement”. This has three elements: first, “secure our national security interests and those of our allies and partners, and . . . protect human rights”; second, “seek a healthy economic relationship” based on “fair” competition; and, third, “seek co-operation on the urgent global challenges of our day”. In her discussion of the first element, she makes the point that US “national security actions are not designed for us to gain a competitive economic advantage, or stifle China’s economic and technological modernisation”. Yet the difficulty is that this is not at all how it looks in China, as I learnt during a brief recent stay in Beijing......
the US trades more with China than with any other country, except Canada and Mexico
......... US controls on chip exports may be designed to strengthen US security. But they are also a curb on China’s economy. The two cannot be separated. ......... China is still a poor country: at PPP, China’s GDP per head in 2022 was still less than 30 per cent that of the US. ........ Somehow, we have to co-operate and compete, while also avoiding military conflict. Our starting point must be to achieve the greatest possible transparency over our aims and plans. We learnt the necessity of that after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. But we will need far more than that and probably for longer. Few leaders in history have borne a heavier moral burden than those of today.
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My course helps prepare. Details in bio. Might want to get your team on board.
Ukraine’s Spring Offensive Comes With Immense Stakes for Future of the War Without a decisive victory, Western support for Ukraine could weaken, and Kyiv could come under increasing pressure to enter serious peace talks to end or freeze the conflict....... 12 Ukrainian combat brigades of about 4,000 soldiers each are expected to be ready at the end of April ....... While Ukrainian officials have said their goal is to break through dug-in Russian defenses and create a widespread collapse in Russia’s army, American officials have assessed that it is unlikely the offensive will result in a dramatic shift in momentum in Ukraine’s favor. ........ There is not going to be a single magic-wand moment when Russia collapses.” ........... Ukraine’s army will use deception and feints to throw the Russians off balance. ......... big gains are not guaranteed, or even necessarily likely. The battlefield is heavily mined by the Russians ........ One soldier in Ukraine who participated in a recent failed attack in southern Ukraine said that coordinating anything above the platoon level — a unit of about 30 soldiers — remains extremely difficult. .......... After the offensive is over, there is little chance that the West can recreate the buildup that it did for Ukraine’s coming assault for the foreseeable future, because Western allies do not have enough supplies in existing inventories to draw from and domestic production will not be able to fill the gap until next year ......... The Ukrainian military has been firing thousands of artillery shells a day as it tries to hold Bakhmut, a pace that American and European officials say is unsustainable and could jeopardize the coming offensive. ....... Given Russia’s bigger reserves of equipment and manpower, the officials say Mr. Putin believes he will ultimately emerge victorious as the West’s appetite to support Ukraine subsides. ........ Wagner, Russia’s biggest military contractor, had restarted recruiting troops from Russia’s prisons. ........ some analysts have raised doubts that Moscow has enough soldiers to fill the trenches they have built across their front lines. ......... Egyptian officials might also supply weaponry to Russia. ..... Some European countries, including France, are pushing for negotiations. For now, Mr. Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, are dug in, and peace talks appear to be nowhere in sight. ............ For the Ukrainians to force a real negotiation, they must make sure “Vladimir Putin’s hubris, his arrogance, is punctured ....... “There is very little evidence and little reason to believe that Putin will give up on his strategic goal of subjugating Ukraine politically, if not fully militarily,” she said in an interview. “It’s been his goal, not just for a year, but it’s been going on for nearly a decade. So there’s no sign he’s giving up on that.” .
Your interview. Let me interview you for my tech blog. Can answer questions over email.
CEOs selling to enterprises: don’t let the PLG / PLS motion blind you to the importance of relationships in enterprise sales. These relationships are nurtured over time through meals, gifts, sporting events, etc. Don’t skimp on $1000 to close $5m deals.
Our Administration has made the largest investment in infrastructure since President Eisenhower and the largest investment in climate action in history.
We are investing in America and building a better future for all.
America Fails the Civilization Test The average American my age is roughly six times more likely to die in the coming year than his counterpart in Switzerland......... The true test of a civilization may be the answer to a basic question: Can it keep its children alive? For most of recorded history, the answer everywhere was plainly no. Roughly half of all people—tens of billions of us—died before finishing puberty until about the 1700s, when breakthroughs in medicine and hygiene led to tremendous advances in longevity. In Central Europe, for example, the mortality rate for children fell from roughly 50 percent in 1750 to 0.3 percent in 2020. You will not find more unambiguous evidence of human progress. ......... How’s the U.S. doing on the civilization test? When graded on a curve against its peer nations, it is failing. The U.S. mortality rate is much higher, at almost every age, than that of most of Europe, Japan, and Australia. That is, compared with the citizens of these nations, American infants are less likely to turn 5, American teenagers are less likely to turn 30, and American 30-somethings are less likely to survive to retirement.
Are Text Messages the New Social Media? One Start-Up Thinks So. Community, which was first marketed as a way for celebrities to text their fans, now has big brands on board. ....... Ashton Kutcher, the actor turned venture capitalist, and Guy Oseary, Bono’s and Madonna’s manager turned investor, made when they co-founded a text message company called Community in 2019. In the beginning, it was marketed to celebrities to communicate with their fans about tour dates and new projects. ........ sign up large corporate customers over the past year, bringing the total clients to over 8,000. ......... “I started out with Twitter and built a fairly large following on Twitter,” said Mr. Kutcher, who has 16.8 million followers. “But Twitter today is very different than what Twitter was when I originally started playing around it,” he added. “The click-through rates are massively degraded — the number of people that actually see the post is massively degraded.” ........ At Community, in contrast, “we have like 45 percent click-through rates and 98 percent open rates,” Mr. Kutcher said. “You don’t get that in social environments because most people don’t even see the things you’re posting.”
Late Night Responds to Fox News’s Ouster of Tucker Carlson Seth Meyers joked it would be funny if Fox News “replaced him at 8 p.m. with the new green M&M.” ........ “Now, apparently, Tucker was forced out by Rupert Murdoch, which is pretty ironic. Tucker spent so many years saying that Mexican people were coming to take our jobs away. Turns out, he should have been worrying about Australians.” — DESI LYDIC, guest host of “The Daily Show” ......... “And we still don’t know exactly what led Rupert Murdoch to fire his network’s biggest star, but, reportedly, he was concerned over Carlson’s conspiracy theories about Jan. 6. So let this be a lesson to everybody: If you try to topple America’s democracy, you can stay on TV for two more years and that’s it!” — DESI LYDIC .......... “By the way, Tucker Carlson isn’t the only cable news anchor to get the ax. CNN just fired Don Lemon after 17 New Year’s Eve blackouts — sorry, years of service.” — DESI LYDIC ......... “Don Lemon and Tucker Carlson — for those of you who don’t follow cable news, this is like if Ronald McDonald and the Burger King got fired on the same day.” — JIMMY KIMMEL .............. “Yep, Tucker Carlson is out. When he heard, Vladimir Putin was like, ‘Damn, we need a new P.R. guy.’” — JIMMY FALLON .......... “Tucker Carlson has now worked at and left MSNBC, CNN and Fox News. He’s running out of options now. Like soon he’s just going to be on the Weather Channel, saying that hurricanes are caused by drag queens.” — JAMES CORDEN
Russians Seem Very Interested in My Book About How Dictatorships End Three years in the making, the book came out at the end of January and quickly became a best seller across Russia. The first print run disappeared almost immediately, and since then, there have been three more. ......... there has been a huge amount of attention on social media and an extensive series of reviews in Russian-language publications abroad. Objectively — though it’s awkward to say — the book has become a bit of a phenomenon. ......... But the book, “The End of the Regime: How Three European Dictatorships Ended,” is not about Russia or Vladimir Putin. ......... How do prolonged right-wing dictatorships end? And can Russia become a democracy? ........ surprisingly, it is also being read by the Russian nomenklatura — those at the apex of the Russian state. It seems that the book has become a pretext for discussion of taboo topics, such as political transition, the health and death of the leader, defeat in a colonial war, the end of isolation and, indeed, the end of the regime. ......... The bulk of its scholars have left the country and are now creating another think tank in Berlin. .......... the extraordinarily high level of interest in the book is evidence that, despite the fiction of consensus that state propaganda has tried to reinforce, Russians have not stopped asking questions about what comes next. ......
For many, the simple act of buying the book is a political statement
.......... This is not a book about Russia disguised as a book about Spain, Portugal and Greece. ......... analogies with the collapse of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union are misleading. It is difficult to imagine a defeat along the lines of that suffered by Germany being experienced by a nuclear power such as Russia. Similarly, the collapse of the Soviet regime came about first and foremost because of its sclerotic economic system, which left the population behind the Iron Curtain without food and consumer goods. ........... Even while waging war, Mr. Putin’s Russia remains a market economy and a consumerist society that has yet to close its borders. That makes it more akin to the dictatorships described in the book. They, too, kept their borders open and retained private ownership while dividing citizens into patriots and enemies, repressing the opposition, branding the West as corrupt and promoting special paths for their countries. ...... How the Greek dictatorship, for example, collapsed after an attempt to annex Cyprus, which it regarded as a historical part of the country. ......... Salazar, plagued by health problems, was removed from power but continued to think that he was ruling the country. (To maintain the illusion, a special newspaper was published just for him.) ........ in Spain, the idea of a transition to democracy slowly took hold and was brought about by the ruling elite itself. ........ there is no legal way for the authorities to ban it ...... In one chapter, I write that political energy, like any other kind of energy, doesn’t simply disappear — it merely takes on different forms. Russians’ interest in “The End of the Regime,” it seems, is a good example of that energy finding an outlet.
Tucker Carlson’s Great Replacement On Monday, news broke that Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s highest-rated and most demagogic prime time host, was out, and wouldn’t even get a final show to say goodbye. ......... Sometimes the terrible elements of our political culture seem so immutable that it’s tempting to give in to despair as a prophylactic against perpetual disappointment. But it turns out that it is in fact sometimes possible to shame the shameless. Once in a while, justice is delivered. .......... Grossberg describes an environment in which women of all political persuasions were constantly discussed in terms of sexual desirability. One of Carlson’s bookers, she alleges, was told that she should sleep with Elon Musk to secure an interview. .......... Contempt for women was part of Carlson’s brand at Fox News; his infamous “The End of Men” special urged men to tan their testicles to ostensibly increase testosterone and thereby rescue society from collapse. It would be fitting if contempt for women is what finally derailed him. ......... Like Trump, he and his producers mined the white nationalist internet for narratives, promiscuously spread wild conspiracy theories, and hinted at the need for violence to take back America. After Trump was indicted last month, Carlson said, “Probably not the best time to give up your AR-15.” ......... “what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful.” ........ The similarity of Carlson’s and Trump’s sensibilities might derive from the similarity of their resentments. Both were children of privilege — Carlson was kicked out of a Swiss boarding school — who sought the respect of the establishment but never got it. It’s worth noting, given his loathing of the putative deep state, that Carlson tried to join the C.I.A. but was rejected. He shifted his ambitions to cable news, but before landing at Fox News, he struggled to fit in. ...... Carlson has achieved the rare cable news trifecta of flaming out at CNN, MSNBC and Fox. ....... He has an intensely loyal following, and could easily start his own venture or join a would-be Fox competitor like Newsmax or OAN. ....... Bill O’Reilly, once the face of Fox, has a podcast and a string of best-selling books, but he’s no longer a particularly important cultural figure.
— ๐บ๐ฆUkraineNewsLive๐บ๐ฆ (@UkraineNewsLive) April 22, 2023
#ukrainecounteroffensive "It took us about two hours to more or less learn the Black Hawk. Then we got into it and immediately flew. When I showed what I could do with it, the American instructors were shocked," said the first pilot of the UH-60A Black Hawk. pic.twitter.com/yiisooH9Aa
— Rapid Dragon USA๐บ๐ธ๐บ๐ฆ๐น๐ผ (@RapidDragonUSA) April 22, 2023
Prez Zelensky: This visit of Jens Stoltenberg is the first since the full-scale war – we interpret it as a sign that the Alliance is ready to start a new chapter in relations with Ukraine – a chapter of ambitious decisions#Ukrainecounteroffensivepic.twitter.com/k6CA8bSFL1
It has been one year since I moved to NY from SF, and I’m not gonna lie — NY is an extremely depressing and lonely place for a builder, even if you are working in the hottest area of AI, LMs, and whatnot. I miss working in San Francisco.
Just go to a random coffee shop, hang out at Dolores, or do your normal things, and you will find people doing your thing. You can’t throw a stick in SF without it landing on a founder/hacker.
I first knew something was up when two of the entrepreneurs I work with told me within a week of each other that they had just pivoted their companies to AI.
And it feels like at least a quarter of the entrepreneurs in my Discord community are…
America, China and a Crisis of Trust. my first rule of journalism: If you don’t go, you don’t know. Relations between our two countries have soured so badly, so quickly, and have so reduced our points of contact — very few American reporters are left in China, and our leaders are barely talking — that we’re now like two giant gorillas looking at each other through a pinhole. Nothing good will come from this. .......... The smallest misstep by either side could ignite a U.S.-China war that would make Ukraine look like a neighborhood dust-up. ....... Attending the China Development Forum — Beijing’s very useful annual gathering of local and global business leaders, senior Chinese officials, retired diplomats and a few local and Western journalists — reminded me of some powerful old truths and exposed me to some eye-popping new realities about what’s really eating away at U.S.-China relations. ......... Just when trust has become more important than ever between the U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend. ........ There’s something of a competition today between Democrats and Republicans over who can speak most harshly about China. ........
I can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and naturally capitalist population than China.
......... Facial recognition cameras are everywhere. ....... These days, it is extremely difficult for a visiting columnist to get anyone — a senior official or a Starbucks barista — to speak on the record. It was not that way a decade ago. .......... Beijing and Shanghai, in particular, have become very livable cities, with the air pollution largely erased and lots of new, walkable green spaces. ........ Shanghai had recently built 55 new parks, bringing its total to 406, and had plans for nearly 600 more. ......... some 900 cities and towns in China are now served by high-speed rail, which makes travel to even remote communities incredibly cheap, easy and comfortable. ........ In the last 23 years America has built exactly one sort-of-high-speed rail line, the Acela, serving 15 stops between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Think about that: 900 to 15. .......... I say this not to argue that high-speed trains are better than freedom. ......... a regime that takes both absolute control and relentless nation-building seriously. ........ For an American to fly from New York’s Kennedy Airport into Beijing Capital International Airport today is to fly from an overcrowded bus terminal to a Disney-like Tomorrowland. It makes me weep for all the time we have wasted these past eight years talking about a faux nation builder named Donald Trump. .......... more people can compete, connect and collaborate on more things for less money from more places than ever ......... educated Chinese people seem to be more connected, and able to get around digital firewalls ....... And then she dropped this: “I just used ChatGPT.” ........ a story making the rounds in Beijing is that many Chinese have begun using ChatGPT to do their ideology homework for the local Communist Party cell, so they don’t have to waste time on it. ........... China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns. .......... generative A.I., like ChatGPT, gives anyone, from a poor farmer to a college professor, the power to ask any question on any subject in his or her own language. This could be a real problem for China ........ “ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,” Dingding Chen, a Chinese political scientist, told me and Bradsher.............. through social media, many Chinese got to see parts of the March 23rd hearing on Capitol Hill where members of Congress questioned — or, actually, berated, harangued and constantly interrupted — TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Chew, claiming TikTok’s videos were damaging American children’s mental health. ........... just how insulting Chinese found that hearing. It was widely and derisively commented about online in China. .......... “you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end. We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.” ......... most Chinese people think there is no hope for better relations. We think the relationship will be worse and worse and hope that war will not break out between our two countries.” ........
this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule.
....... Americans’ favorite device is an iPhone assembled mostly in China, and until recently the favored foreign destination of Chinese college students — some 300,000 of them today — is America. ........ Today, it’s just a few lines of code that separate autonomous cars from autonomous weapons. ......... about eight years ago, we got a knock on our door and there was a Chinese salesman. He said: “Hi, my name is Mr. Huawei and I make 5G telephone equipment better than anything you have. I’m starting to install it all over the world, and I’d like to wire America.” .......... So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.” .......... What crude oil was to powering 19th- and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies. ......... a human hair is about 90,000 nanometers thick and the world’s best mass producer of advanced chips in the world is now making three-nanometer transistors .......... When you ask them what is the secret that enables TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.” ............. TSMC makes two solemn oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it will never share the designs of one of its customers with another. .......... China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their most advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC. ............. Deng established a much more collective leadership for China and term limits for the top leaders, and he put pragmatism — whatever would drive economic growth — above Communist ideology, while hiding China’s growing strength. .......... after Xi Jinping took over as China’s paramount leader in 2012, he seemed to be alarmed at how China’s openness toward the world, its consensus approach to leadership and its rush down a semi-capitalist path had led to runaway corruption inside both the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army, to a degree that was hurting the party’s legitimacy. ............. Whatever trust that China had built up with the West since the late 1970s evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by software, connectivity and microchips.............. As Beijing sees it, China not only became America’s go-to boogeyman, but in their frenzy to blame Beijing for everything, members of Congress started to more recklessly promote Taiwan’s independence......... Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people. You’re playing with fire. .............. they have frightened both the world and their own innovators at precisely the wrong time. ........ we are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century. ............ Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other’s deepest insecurities. ........... we’ve decided to focus our waning strength vis-ร -vis Beijing on ensuring the Chinese will always be a decade behind us on microchips. ............ in today’s fused world, the notion that China can economically collapse and America still thrive is utter fantasy ......... China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized, deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor. ......... one of Shultz’s cardinal rules of diplomacy and life: “Trust is the coin of the realm.” .
So typically human that, out of all the things AI could have been used for first, we took the most creative acts of visual design and writing and automated it away.
Could have been law, or accounting, or some other chore.
But no, it HAD to be painting and creative writing. ๐ซค
I spend a lot of time thinking about this for our commercial customers. More bespoke specialized software or collapse / rationalization coming? https://t.co/waT9mG7NOw
- Topic you could talk about unprepared - A well-sized, engaged audience - Presell via landing page first - Focused on one outcome - Timebox 21 to 30 days - Keep it short (45 min.) - Price for impulse buy - Ask for testimonials - One-click upsell
My neighbor and I talked about bibles and guns and that's in Silicon Valley. I learned TV at a church where I ran camera in the middle of a thousand every Sunday. So, I tend to look at things in stereotypical ways. Held Pat Robertson's hand in prayer circle.
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 6, 2023
I once drove through .... in an 18-wheeler. 2004?
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 6, 2023
Get professional advice. https://t.co/m3kS9bHrDD You will get a fantastic helping hand with many aspects of your tech startup
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 6, 2023
Education in the future:
How many things you ask AI. (Especially in one area) What you ask AI. (Complex prompts and topics gain more) Did you listen and/or act? (Are you coachable)
The well educated? Will have many more and much deeper. Will listen to, and act on, more.
