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Friday, December 10, 2021

December 10: Elon Musk, 2022



29 Big Ideas that will change our world in 2022 as of 2020, employees stayed with their employers for an average of 4.1 years. Look for that number to drop below 4.0 in the future. ........ career counseling as a profession that’s ready to boom ....... even faster vaccine development ....... Scientists and politicians are already targeting a 100-day timeline from “lab to jab” ....... But Farrar thinks even that is too long. He foresees cutting the timeline from genome to vaccine to just seven days, with a global rollout within 30 days. How? By identifying the 20 to 50 virus families in the animal kingdom with the greatest pandemic potential and building “a library of advanced vaccines” that can be ready with only minor alterations. .......... Tech giants like Meta (Facebook), Google, Amazon and Alibaba are increasingly acting as sovereigns, rivaling states for influence over our lives. ........ Think about what happened on January 6. After rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, it was social media companies — not law enforcement, Congress or the judiciary — that sprang into action to punish those responsible. ........... There’s a metaverse land grab afoot ....... The next iteration of the web is arriving, and it’s leaping off of our screens. It’s the metaverse, a term that describes the 3D immersive and collaborative experiences that are already making their way into our lives. ........ blockchain, which will allow metaverse participants to build and use decentralized technology, rather than rely on Big Tech players alone. The second is the artists and technologists who are laying the initial groundwork for the metaverse aren’t beholden to Big Tech in the ways they once were. Thanks to blockchain, they have a decentralized means to make money. This version of the web holds the potential to be open; one that rewards individual creators for their contributions. ............. Life may be normalizing, but many people are still grappling with grief, depression and anxiety. .......... After years of enduring stagnant pay and dreary working conditions, the world’s front-line workers in fields such as retail, hospitality and customer service could be heading into better times. ......... a strong 2022 economy in which the U.S. unemployment rate could shrink to 3.5%, from the current 4.8%. ......... “The power dynamic will shift from employers and leave them pining for talent like never before” ......... Mayor Hillary Schieve of Reno, Nevada has proposed a plan that includes selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to support public art and using decentralized autonomous organizations to sell crypto-based stakes of city-owned properties to investors. .......... What’s the benefit of adopting a blockchain approach to government? It puts transactions into public view, boosting transparency. And its automation of most processes can reduce red tape and the likelihood of errors. ............ “Integrating blockchain-based organization formats ... will allow institutions to manage public goods in a much more efficient and transparent way, reduce coordination costs and can drastically speed up the decision making process” .......... “The number of organizations that will adopt crypto to address public challenges will grow exponentially.” ......... From Microsoft Japan to Semco in Brazil and the government of Iceland to Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand, organizations are figuring out how to make the 4-day work week work. ........ Every workplace has a gravitational field. Leaders who take the 4-day work week seriously will draw stars into their orbit. ......... “Blue foods” — fish, aquatic plants, mussels and algae — may offer a key solution. ...........

Algae’s protein content, for example, is higher than conventional sources such as meat, poultry and dairy products; and it can be cultivated without freshwater or arable land.

........... Pay rates were once an opaque internal mystery at offices and the subject of much speculation, gossip and resentment. But as the push for equity at work gains momentum, pay transparency will begin to go mainstream ...........

the current impetus for pay transparency stems from growing momentum around addressing gender and racial pay inequities

........... “Organizations have an advantage in being ahead of legislation and demonstrating to employees they're about equity and inclusion.” ........... More retailers will embrace virtual and augmented reality in 2022, allowing customers to interact with products in environments that go far beyond digital replications of a store. ......... “The metaverse may do more to change retail than anything since the physical store” ........... “It's not about creating virtual interpretations of the store. It's about uncoupling retail from the store and reimagining it entirely.” .......... Last year, some 75% of companies said that they were reshoring operations to their home bases or to neighboring countries .......... more companies will start building “smart factories,” with an emphasis on automation, cloud platforms and other technologies .......... In 2021 — in the wake of the 2020 murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor — companies promised to take diverse hiring seriously. .......... Some 96% of U.S. companies report the gender representation of their employees at all levels, and 90% report representation at senior levels, according to LeanIn and McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace report. But only 54% of companies track gender and race/ethnicity — i.e. Black or Latina women in senior leadership. This renders women of color “invisible” ............ The rise of the “hybrid workday” — in which we work from home and the office — means we’re not all commuting at the same time anymore. ............. Flexible work is now a fact of life: 93% of knowledge workers globally want the freedom to decide where and when they do their job. ......... Perhaps we should discard the commute as we know it altogether? "To improve quality of life, we need to become less dependent on mobility and more committed to local proximity." Making work — even in an office — just a walk or short bike ride away may be in store for more of us. .......... Just 2.2% of venture capital funding went to female-founded companies in the first eight months of 2021 ......... Black entrepreneurs only received a small fraction — just over 1% — of U.S. venture capital funding. .......... a paradigm shift in funding, as “technologies that democratize wealth-building opportunities and fix our broken distribution system of capital become the default option.” .......... More VCs may turn to AI to identify promising startups, placing an emphasis on business fundamentals over founder demographics .........
29 Big Ideas that will change our world in 2022 as of 2020, employees stayed with their employers for an average of 4.1 years. Look for that number to drop below 4.0 in the future. ........ career counseling as a profession that’s ready to boom ....... even faster vaccine development ....... Scientists and politicians are already targeting a 100-day timeline from “lab to jab” ....... But Farrar thinks even that is too long. He foresees cutting the timeline from genome to vaccine to just seven days, with a global rollout within 30 days. How? By identifying the 20 to 50 virus families in the animal kingdom with the greatest pandemic potential and building “a library of advanced vaccines” that can be ready with only minor alterations. .......... Tech giants like Meta (Facebook), Google, Amazon and Alibaba are increasingly acting as sovereigns, rivaling states for influence over our lives. ........ Think about what happened on January 6. After rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, it was social media companies — not law enforcement, Congress or the judiciary — that sprang into action to punish those responsible. ........... There’s a metaverse land grab afoot ....... The next iteration of the web is arriving, and it’s leaping off of our screens. It’s the metaverse, a term that describes the 3D immersive and collaborative experiences that are already making their way into our lives. ........ blockchain, which will allow metaverse participants to build and use decentralized technology, rather than rely on Big Tech players alone. The second is the artists and technologists who are laying the initial groundwork for the metaverse aren’t beholden to Big Tech in the ways they once were. Thanks to blockchain, they have a decentralized means to make money. This version of the web holds the potential to be open; one that rewards individual creators for their contributions. ............. Life may be normalizing, but many people are still grappling with grief, depression and anxiety. .......... After years of enduring stagnant pay and dreary working conditions, the world’s front-line workers in fields such as retail, hospitality and customer service could be heading into better times. ......... a strong 2022 economy in which the U.S. unemployment rate could shrink to 3.5%, from the current 4.8%. ......... “The power dynamic will shift from employers and leave them pining for talent like never before” ......... Mayor Hillary Schieve of Reno, Nevada has proposed a plan that includes selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to support public art and using decentralized autonomous organizations to sell crypto-based stakes of city-owned properties to investors. .......... What’s the benefit of adopting a blockchain approach to government? It puts transactions into public view, boosting transparency. And its automation of most processes can reduce red tape and the likelihood of errors. ............ “Integrating blockchain-based organization formats ... will allow institutions to manage public goods in a much more efficient and transparent way, reduce coordination costs and can drastically speed up the decision making process” .......... “The number of organizations that will adopt crypto to address public challenges will grow exponentially.” ......... From Microsoft Japan to Semco in Brazil and the government of Iceland to Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand, organizations are figuring out how to make the 4-day work week work. ........ Every workplace has a gravitational field. Leaders who take the 4-day work week seriously will draw stars into their orbit. ......... “Blue foods” — fish, aquatic plants, mussels and algae — may offer a key solution. ...........

Algae’s protein content, for example, is higher than conventional sources such as meat, poultry and dairy products; and it can be cultivated without freshwater or arable land.

........... Pay rates were once an opaque internal mystery at offices and the subject of much speculation, gossip and resentment. But as the push for equity at work gains momentum, pay transparency will begin to go mainstream ...........

the current impetus for pay transparency stems from growing momentum around addressing gender and racial pay inequities

........... “Organizations have an advantage in being ahead of legislation and demonstrating to employees they're about equity and inclusion.” ........... More retailers will embrace virtual and augmented reality in 2022, allowing customers to interact with products in environments that go far beyond digital replications of a store. ......... “The metaverse may do more to change retail than anything since the physical store” ........... “It's not about creating virtual interpretations of the store. It's about uncoupling retail from the store and reimagining it entirely.” .......... Last year, some 75% of companies said that they were reshoring operations to their home bases or to neighboring countries .......... more companies will start building “smart factories,” with an emphasis on automation, cloud platforms and other technologies .......... In 2021 — in the wake of the 2020 murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor — companies promised to take diverse hiring seriously. .......... Some 96% of U.S. companies report the gender representation of their employees at all levels, and 90% report representation at senior levels, according to LeanIn and McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace report. But only 54% of companies track gender and race/ethnicity — i.e. Black or Latina women in senior leadership. This renders women of color “invisible” ............ The rise of the “hybrid workday” — in which we work from home and the office — means we’re not all commuting at the same time anymore. ............. Flexible work is now a fact of life: 93% of knowledge workers globally want the freedom to decide where and when they do their job. ......... Perhaps we should discard the commute as we know it altogether? "To improve quality of life, we need to become less dependent on mobility and more committed to local proximity." Making work — even in an office — just a walk or short bike ride away may be in store for more of us. .......... Just 2.2% of venture capital funding went to female-founded companies in the first eight months of 2021 ......... Black entrepreneurs only received a small fraction — just over 1% — of U.S. venture capital funding. .......... a paradigm shift in funding, as “technologies that democratize wealth-building opportunities and fix our broken distribution system of capital become the default option.” .......... More VCs may turn to AI to identify promising startups, placing an emphasis on business fundamentals over founder demographics ......... We may soon see the rise of “self-sufficient hotel guests” ........ where guests are in charge of making their beds, washing their cutlery and more — perhaps in exchange for hotel vouchers or discounts. ........... “America’s teacher shortage will outlast the pandemic” ............ Black families in particular are showing the greatest interest in homeschooling ......... when students were driven into various forms of homeschooling during pandemic lockdowns, learning rates actually increased. ......... Lucrative television deals have translated into seismic pay increases for top athletes. And social media has offered athletes a direct line to fans. ............. NBA players put the Black Lives Matter movement in the spotlight in 2020 at the Orlando basketball bubble. Euro 2020 soccer players effectively banished soft drinks from news conferences at the championship. .......... The electric car has become a green badge of honor, driving Tesla’s market value above a trillion dollars. But for some of us, electrifying our home would reduce our greenhouse gases even more than electrifying our cars .......... Electrifying a home would immediately reduce its emissions by 45% and by 82% over time, as electricity grids get cleaner. .......... In the 1950s, U.S. homes switched en masse from being powered by coal and wood to natural gas. .......... Many of the world’s billionaires — who saw a $5 trillion dollar increase in wealth this year — are shielding their wealth from taxes by establishing residency abroad. ..........

You may like it, you may hate it, but our work culture still places high value on those who want to #CrushIt.

.......... We’ll drive on plastic roads ............. One of the world’s biggest environmental thorns — plastic — may help roads weather the coming storms. ........ “Plastic roads can store around 300 liters of water per square meter, a multiple of most asphalt roads.” ......... Plastic roads last longer, are easier to repair and are, unlike asphalt, easy to recycle. It would also put the world’s surplus of plastics to good use ........... “I believe plastic roads, if created at scale, will offer an opportunity to absorb hundreds of thousands of tons [of plastic], almost overnight.” ........... Hong Kong has long been the crown jewel of finance and technology in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly for international companies looking to expand into high-growth markets like China and India. Singapore held a similar role for firms with an interest in southeast Asia. ............ In 2010, there were 6.1 multinational firms for every Chinese company in Hong Kong. That ratio narrowed to 3.1 in 2020 ............ don’t expect a major drop in home values. Long after the price of most other assets comes back down to earth, home prices will be way above pre-pandemic levels. The world just doesn't have enough houses, or enough home-building capacity. .............. In 2021, home prices rose by more than 40% year-over-year in cities like Austin, Texas and Boise, Idaho .......... A family moving from California to Idaho suddenly feels richer, regardless of whether their new home costs $550,000 or $400,000. But that price jump makes the rest of Idaho feel poorer. And not everyone buying one home is putting another up for sale. The trend that initially set off the pandemic housing boom, relocation, is being overtaken by an increase in second-home demand, now 50% to 100% above pre-pandemic levels. .......... NFTs — digital tokens that represent ownership of assets and can be traded on blockchain exchanges — are set to infiltrate many more areas of our lives and shake up our understanding of ownership. .......... Decentralized mortgage lender Bacon Protocol recently issued its first seven mortgages as NFTs, collectively worth $1.5 million, offering investors and borrowers a new entry into the housing market. ......... In 2022, Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) will become a formidable challenger — even a replacement — to credit cards among consumers. ........ “Investors will increasingly be able to construct comparable metrics on carbon footprints, throughout the entire value chain and across a whole portfolio.” ............. In a post-pandemic world, employees will be moved more by meaning. Right now, many organizations aren’t keeping up, as they continue to focus on short-sighted, bottom-line outcomes at the expense of human connection. This has led to a rising tide of “organizational cynicism” — employees’ sense that their workplace is competitive, individualistic and greedy. Cynicism does pervasive damage to the workplace, stifling collaboration, dissolving cohesive cultures and killing creativity and drive.




Google’s top 2021 searches revealed 1. Australia vs. India 2. India vs. England 3. IPL 4. NBA 5. Euro 2021 6. Copa América 7. India vs New Zealand 8. T20 World Cup 9. Squid Game 10. DMX

Wednesday, December 08, 2021

The US Is Making A Major Mistake In Afghanistan

The US going in as a response to the 9/11 attacks that were orchestrated by the Al Qaeda who were hosted by the Taliban who ruled Afghanistan can make some sense, although it must be noted the Taliban kept asking for "proof." The US did have proof. The Al Qaeda did not keep the Taliban in confidence before the 9/11 attacks. They maintained utmost secrecy for understandable logistical reasons. The word might have leaked out. The operation might have failed.

The Taliban said, give us proof Bin Laden did it, and we will hand him over to you. The US refused. That was hubris. That was arrogance. That was not the democratic spirit. That was the attitude of an empire. The US could have privately provided proof while keeping the military option open all along.

At one point Condi Rice said, "Iraq is not Iran." The Taliban and the Al Qaeda are two separate organizations.

Afghanistan was a country like Nepal before the two superpowers took turns going in. Expats (the term for white immigrants) would write glowingly about the wonderful hospitality of the Afghan people, like they still say about the people in Nepal.

The right response would have been for the US to give the proof it had, privately, and then ask the Taliban to deliver. The Taliban did have the option to deliver Bin Laden at that point. They knew exactly where he was. They controlled the territory all around Bin Laden. They controlled the ground on which Bin Laden stood.

But the US figured, why waste a chance to make a movie out of the situation? Zero Dark Thirty.



After the US did go in, not long after the Taliban offered to surrender. The US refused the offer. That is mystifying to me. A puny military power under massive attack by an uncomparably larger military power offered to surrender. Why not take that surrender?

The corruption money from the military misadventure in Afghanistan is buying houses all across the US right now to park the money. That is why. The trillions wasted in Afghanistan could have paid to solve every "intractable" social problem America has. It could have ended homelessness. It could have rebuilt every public school. It could have rebuilt the country's infrastructure. But instead an average person can't even buy a house in America today.

And the corrupt Afghans who ran the puppet regime for the US took their money to Dubai. Cashloads of helicopters would land in Kabul and then, an hour later, fly off to Dubai.

The US did not stay a long time to win the war in Afghanistan. It won the war within weeks of going in.

I see no serious efforts of democracy building in Afghanistan. Plenty of outrageously expensive efforts yes, but no serious efforts. You can not build democracy in a country where you will not listen to the local population.

Finally the US gave up. It threw its hands in the air and walked out. Fine. Sometimes you cut your losses and move.

Except now the strategy seems to be to starve the population into revolting against the Taliban. Give me a break. You want starving Afghans to do what well-fed, well-trained, well-armed, well-financed Americans were not able to do?

The US needs to release Afghan funds that can feed the hungry Afghans. Maybe some sort of a deal can be cut that will allow for funds to be released for specified humanitarian purposes.

America did not go into Afghanistan to build democracy. It went in to get Bin Laden who it could have had by engaging the Taliban in dialogue. And offering the proof that it had that the Taliban asked for.

And it stayed long after Bin Laden was killed.

Several trillion dollars later, hundreds of thousands of lives later, when you have nothing to show for it, it is a shame.

It would have been better for the US to stay one more year, or two more years than to do what it is doing now. This economic strangulation is punishing a people who did not put the Taliban into power. The US did. This is wrong.



Facing Economic Collapse, Afghanistan Is Gripped by Starvation An estimated 22.8 million people — more than half the country’s population — are expected to face potentially life-threatening food insecurity this winter. Many are already on the brink of catastrophe. ....... Nearly four months since the Taliban seized power, Afghanistan is on the brink of a mass starvation that aid groups say threatens to kill a million children this winter — a toll that would dwarf the total number of Afghan civilians estimated to have been killed as a direct result of the war over the past 20 years. .......... While Afghanistan has suffered from malnutrition for decades, the country’s hunger crisis has drastically worsened in recent months. This winter, an estimated 22.8 million people — more than half the population — are expected to face potentially life-threatening levels of food insecurity, according to an analysis by the United Nations World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization. Of those, 8.7 million people are nearing famine — the worst stage of a food crisis. ......... Such widespread hunger is the most devastating sign of the economic crash that has crippled Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power.

Practically overnight, billions of dollars in foreign aid that propped up the previous Western-backed government vanished and U.S. sanctions on the Taliban isolated the country from the global financial system, paralyzing Afghan banks and impeding relief work by humanitarian organizations.

....... Across the country, millions of Afghans — from day laborers to doctors and teachers — have gone months without steady or any incomes. The prices of food and other basic goods have soared beyond the reach of many families. Emaciated children and anemic mothers have flooded into the malnutrition wards of hospitals, many of those facilities bereft of medical supplies that donor aid once provided. ...... Now, as freezing winter weather sets in, with humanitarian organizations warning that

a million children could die, the crisis is potentially damning to both the new Taliban government and to the United States, which is facing mounting pressure to ease the economic restrictions that are worsening the crisis.



Monday, November 29, 2021

AOC 2028: Green New Deal Nation





Wednesday, November 24, 2021

November 24

He Convinced Voters He Would Be Like Merkel. But Who Is Olaf Scholz? Germany’s next chancellor is something of an enigma. He comes to power with a dizzying array of challenges, raising questions about whether he can fill the very big shoes of his predecessor......... Terse, well-briefed and abstaining from any gesture of triumph ........ he perfected the art of embodying her aura of stability and calm to the point of holding his hands together in her signature diamond shape. .........

“He’s like a soccer player who studied videos of another player and changed his game”

............ Rarely has a German leader come into office with so many burning crises. As soon as he is sworn in as chancellor in early December, Mr. Scholz will have to deal with a surging pandemic, tensions at the Polish-Belarussian border, a Russian president mobilizing troops on Ukraine’s eastern border, a more confrontational China and a less dependable United States. ........ and served in two governments led by Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party, most recently as her finance minister. ....... Mr. Scholz grew up in Hamburg, the city he would later run as mayor. His grandfather was a railway man, his parents worked in textiles. He and his brothers were the first in his family to go to university. ........ the youthful idealist who mellowed into a post-ideological centrist might be turning more radical again in his 60s. ........ Three years ago, when his party’s approval ratings were hovering near record lows, he told The New York Times that the Social Democrats would win the next election. ...........

Like Ms. Merkel, he has a reputation for being a safe pair of hands and a decent person with a bipartisan aura.

.......... keeping the peace in an unusual and untested three-way coalition with two ideologically divergent parties: the progressive Greens, who want to spend 50 billion euros, or about $56 billion, on a green transition, and the pro-market Free Democrats, who will control the finance ministry and with it the purse strings. .......... if things go smoothly, Mr. Scholz’ Germany could turn out to be a pivotal power for European cohesion, for more trans-Atlantic unity on fighting climate change and for confronting strategic competitors like China and Russia, and, some hope, for a revival of social democracy in different parts of the world. .......... Not since the second term of former President Bill Clinton have both the White House and the German chancellery been in the hands of center-left leaders. ......... Belarus, a Russian ally that has been funneling migrants to the Polish border in an apparent attempt to destabilize the bloc.




What the Arbery and Rittenhouse Verdicts Couldn’t Tell Us Many of us wish that the public could witness the degradation and absurdity of everyday legal proceedings. ............ An officer testified that after the shooting, Mr. Rittenhouse approached his car with his weapon strapped to his chest and his hands up in surrender, but officers ordered him to get out of the way and rushed past him to search for the shooter. Apparently, it did not enter their minds that the baby-faced white teen could be the culprit. So Mr. Rittenhouse went home, and ultimately turned himself in. ............ Anyone who has practiced criminal law or even attended a trial knows that plenty of judges are not the objective and omniscient arbiters of popular imagination: They are idiosyncratic and sometimes biased....... Convicting Kyle Rittenhouse would have sent Kyle Rittenhouse to prison — that’s all. Laws and legal procedures are not ethical codes and cannot sustain the weight of moral reckonings on a national scale. Looking to these trials to repair social damage, answer a larger question or fulfill some notion of justice is a mistake.

Beyond the futility of hope, looking to the criminal system — which was heavily influenced by slave codes and still serves to reinforce racial hierarchies — further centers it in our moral discourse.

............ The injustice extends beyond police abuse. Conspiracy theories exacerbate public health crises. The attack on voting rights by the right leads us ever closer to minority authoritarianism. And urgent warnings of climate disaster have gone unheeded for decades. A win for the prosecution in the Rittenhouse case may have felt vindicating for those on the left side of the culture wars, but it would not have addressed any of these problems. .........

Neither would it have loosened the hold of racism on our legal system.

........ To get a sense of the way racism pervades our criminal justice system, I would recommend paying less attention to blockbuster cases and instead visiting a local criminal court on a random day and witnessing the parade of low-income people of color shuffled before the court, most of them accused of minor, victimless offenses. Pay attention as a judge decides, within minutes, how much money will be required for each person to get out of a cage. Listen to the defense lawyer describe the life circumstances of each client. And then ask what can be done. What structures, literal or figurative, must be dismantled, built or changed in order to create the change we seek? ...... That work is harder, and it’s slower, but maybe one day my clients will not be called “bodies.”

Maybe they will be afforded the same dignity and deference given to Mr. Rittenhouse.



Trump Wanted to Punish China. We’re Still Paying for It.
Family Arguments
Can Liberals Survive Progressivism?
The Novel That Riveted France During Lockdown Arrives in the U.S. “The Anomaly,” by Hervé Le Tellier, sold more than a million copies during an anomalous time. Now the genre-bending novel is translated into English.

How the $4 Trillion Flood of Covid Relief Is Funding the Future From broadband to transportation to high-tech medical manufacturing, benefits from America’s pandemic money infusion will linger. ......... Nurses wore trash bags as medical equipment. Nobody could buy toilet paper. ....... To date, the federal government has allocated $4.52 trillion in response to Covid-19 — a staggering figure, one that exceeds the entire federal budget in 2019. Most of that funding comes from just two bills: the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security, or CARES, Act, passed in March 2020 ($2.2 trillion), and the American Rescue Plan Act, or A.R.P., from March 2021 ($1.9 trillion). ....... $10 billion to Moderna and $11 billion to Pfizer. .......

one of the biggest, fastest biomedical-research efforts that we’ve ever launched

........ The record turnaround from the Covid-19 vaccine will set a new standard for how fast other treatments can be developed with the appropriate funding. “Anything that involves getting an F.D.A.-​approved drug or medical device — whether it’s heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, lupus — all of these have the potential to benefit from these new approaches to clinical trial,” Fenton says. ........

U.S. government investment in nondefense R.& D. has fallen, slowly but significantly, over time, from 5.8 percent of the federal budget in 1966 to 1.5 percent in 2020.

....... “It felt like going back into a deployment again, where we knew a little bit of information but not the whole developed picture.” ....... Infrastructure, conjuring as it does images of potholes and rusted water pipes, often goes overlooked; politicians would rather be associated with cutting ribbons than maintaining systems. Paradoxically, that has meant the great leaps in American infrastructure often come from moments of great lack: the greater the crisis, the larger the possible investment. The Great Depression led to the New Deal, which established the Federal Housing Administration and brought electricity to the rural United States; the Great Recession led to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which directly funded improvements to 2,700 bridges and 42,000 miles of road. ......

In the 1930s, modernizing the country meant electricity. In the 2020s, it means broadband.

......... “and it’s really necessary now to think about broadband in an infrastructure space.” The digital divide is sharp in the United States: Census Bureau data shows that broadband access is concentrated in cities and in the Northeast, Florida and the West Coast. In rural areas and the South, West and Midwest, far fewer Americans have access. .........

In the South, 111 counties have broadband subscription rates at or below 55 percent.

........ a majority of counties in Alaska have zero access to broadband ......

nearly one in five tribal reservation residents had no home internet access

........ nearly $1 billion for tribes, which face some of the worst internet access in the country ........ The American Rescue Plan included $20.4 billion exclusively for broadband access, and gave states and localities about $388 billion in flexible funding that can be used for broadband. ...... broadband access in areas of upstate New York with fewer than 10 subscribers per mile, where offering service often isn’t cost-effective.




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Friday, November 19, 2021

Ending White Minority Rule Across America

The Donald Trump-inspired political phenomenon across America that seems to refuse to die down is not an attempt to take America to an era of white minority rule. America has always had white minority rule. It is an attempt to retain white minority rule when the demographics of the country, the economic growth happening across the world, and all-around political consciousness ask America to take yet another stride towards becoming a more perfect union. Democracy is one person one vote, no ifs, no buts about it. All human beings are created equal, white or not, American citizen or not.

But sometimes hubris takes over, like in the case of Brexit. A people refusing to let go of old attitudes, habits of mind that supported unequal structures of power will not hesitate to rob the next generation of its future. A significant proportion of the population across America right now is trying too hard to go the way of a Brexit. A country of immigrants wants to stench the flow of immigration. You might as well cut the oxygen supply.

To be fair, America has always been a messy democracy. All democracies are messy. When you let everyone speak, when you let everyone vote, you will likely end up with a cacophony. The political spectrum houses every zany idea that ever existed somewhere along its length. As someone said, the past is not even past.

Every great crisis is an opportunity. But then every great crisis is also a potential disaster. The political will has to be mustered not to keep America as the sole global superpower - that was never an ideal situation to begin with - but so as to optimize the lifestyle and living standards and spiritual well-being of current and future generations, in America as well as the world. America is still the leading nation, and its signals are still picked up around the world. Ask Bolsonaro.

China is obvious competition and a potential threat. China might have picked up the market to an extent in response to the implosion of the Soviet Union, but it still retains one party’s political monopoly. The godlessness that is at the core of the Chinese political system is the reason for its immense cruelties: organ harvesting of the Falun Gong practitioners, social engineering to turn Uighurs into Han Chinese, killing the hen that laid the golden egg, namely Hong Kong, saber-rattling in the skies of Taiwan, border disputes with pretty much every bordering nation large and small, and round-the-clock surveillance of the entire population. Always being watched robs you of your basic humanity.

But white supremacist tendencies in America are hardly godly. The black population might as well be American Uighurs. Too many Uighurs are in detention camps, too many blacks are in prison. China erased poverty, America is not even working on it. Crass wealth inequality, left on its current trajectory, will bring America down. America will go the way of the Soviet Union. It will implode.

America today is not a democracy, never has been. It is not a one-person, one-vote arrangement. America is not a free-market economy. There are too many entrenched pockets of uncompetitive terrains segment after segment, architected by bribing politicians. Money has deformed the political process. The vast majority are voiceless as evidenced by policy after sensible policy that falls on deaf ears in the corridors of power.

Perhaps what America needs is a constitutional convention, ala Philadelphia. Elected representatives from across the country should gather again for the sole purpose of writing a new constitution that would expire automatically in 50 years. That might be the only way to make sure winners of the popular vote do not routinely lose the presidential election, the Senate is not a House of Lords, under the grip of less than 20% of the population, the people elect politicians and it is not the other way round. America needs to make an attempt at one person one vote democracy. America needs to try and become a democracy.

A constitution is just the playground, the football field if you will. The game is political action. Voters asserting their rights, and that of others, realizing their responsibilities, leaders challenging as well as responding to an awakening population, robustly borrowing from imaginative academics and thinkers, idea people, and all collectively seizing the future for an unprecedented Age of Abundance that is already knocking on the door: that is the clarion call of the day. There are major reasons for optimism if only the moment will be seized.

Perhaps the president should be directly elected. Open primaries might be the antidote to shameless gerrymandering. No taxation without representation was right for Boston. It is right for DC and Puerto Rico. Maybe every state should get a minimum of one Senator, but above that it should be proportional to the population for a total of 200 Senators. A state like California might as well end up with 20 Senatorial districts, or 10 even if the Senate’s number is capped at the current 100. Non-citizen white immigrants voted. All immigrants should similarly get the right to vote, regardless of what papers they carry. If you pay a phone bill, you vote. If you pay the utility bill, you vote.

You can not have one person one vote democracy at the local level but have something else at the state level, or something else at the national level. Why stop at the national borders? It is high time for a world government that adheres to the basic principle of democracy, that of one person one vote. The global economy asks for a genuine world government. The five veto-wielding powers at the UN are a relic of World War II. Nobody alive today remembers World War II. The UN is the ultimate white minority rule. Four of the five veto faces are white. And all five are male.

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Beto, Your Courage Is In Running



Beto O'Rourke presidential campaign staff, 2020
Beto O'Rourke names Texas staff for presidential campaign
Beto for America
O’Rourke bolsters senior staff with 5 hires

5 factors that could determine the strength of Beto O’Rourke’s campaign for governor The former congressman must keep elements of his 2018 campaign against Sen. Ted Cruz, while fixing mess made in 2020 presidential effort.



Beto O’Rourke hires 4 for national communications team

https://betoorourke.com/

Monday, November 15, 2021

Bernie: The Elon Musk Of Politics

That designation is not to be taken at face value. He might have been if he had gotten himself elected president. But the execution part of him has been mush. Maybe AOC? She could be the Elon Musk of politics. But spare me the exactitude. I am only reacting to Elon Musk's disrespect of Bernie. Do not respect old people. That does not sound right.

I just finished reading Eizabeth Warren's book Persist a few weeks ago. I am all for the wealth tax. Without the wealth tax America as a country will kill itself. The inequality in America is civilization ending.

I would propose a 10% wealth tax on all billionaires.

That will not take away from innovation. That will not mean Elon Musk will have less money to invest in Tesla, or SpaceX. When was the last time Elon sold his shares in Tesla to put money back in Tesla? Instead I have seen him and Jeff Bezos do the my thing is bigger than yours thing. Give them marbles. Take the money to the homeless, and the hungry.





Knowing God Named by Christianity Today as one of the top fifty books that have shaped evangelicals, Knowing God is now among the iconic books featured in the IVP Signature Collection. ....... "A hundred years from now only a handful of books written today will still be widely read and accepted as Christian classics. Dr. James I. Packer's Knowing God may well prove to be one of them. A gifted theologian and writer, Dr. Packer has the rare ability to deal with profound and basic spiritual truths in a practical and highly readable way. This book will help every reader grasp in a fuller way one of the Bible's greatest truths: that we can know God personally because God wants us to know him." ..... Billy Graham .......... As it would be cruel to an Amazonian tribesman to fly him to London, put him down without explanation in Trafalgar Square and leave him, as one who knew nothing of English or England, to fend for himself, so we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it. The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God. ............. “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” .........

Why You Need to Read ‘Knowing God’ by JI Packer Christians have become confused as a result of their dealings with modern skepticism. Lacking a strong Biblical understanding of God, believers have become less certain about both God and His Word. The truth of Scripture is routinely questioned, and even the very concept of truth is itself been put up for debate. ........ there is an important distinction between knowing about God and knowing God. Whereas we can know a lot about God by reading Scripture and studying what theologians have to say on the topic, we can only know God by entering into a right relationship with Him ........ “Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life’s problems fall into place of their own accord.” ........ God is “immutable,” which is a fancy seminary word for “doesn’t change” or “unchangeable.” This is a very helpful reminder for the Christian. There is not a discontinuity between God as He is revealed in the Old Testament and how He is revealed in the New. He is unchanging in His truth, in His ways, and His purposes ......... being more diligent in our spiritual duties of prayer and reading His Word, of course, but we also must be more aware of the blessings which come from His hand. .......... how inward trials can be used by God to chastise us for sin, to guide us, and to draw us to fuller reliance on Him .........

Saturday, November 06, 2021

Reorganize The US Senate

DC and Puerto Rico ought to become states.

All 52 states should get a minimum one Senator each. After that, it should be based on population for a total of 200 Senators. So it would be roughly one Senator for about two million or less Americans. That would give California something like 20 Senatorial districts.

It would help to have open primaries. So the two top vote getters might both belong to the same party. And then they go compete in the general election. That should also be true for the House races. Open primaries would kill gerrymandering.



As for president, might as well directly vote. Get rid of the electoral college.