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Saturday, July 09, 2022

9: Eid Mubarak

Import explosion and trade deficit pushing Nepal into economic crisis Feverish consumption has been a bonanza for the trading sector, but the phenomenon brought disaster to manufacturing and agriculture sectors, experts say........ Experts have described Nepal's current economic situation as the "Dutch disease" because feverish consumption has been a bonanza for the trading sector, but brought disaster to manufacturing and agriculture......... 20 percent of the loans issued by banks have gone to fund trading, which particularly represents wholesale and retail services........ “Remittance is good, but it is hurting the country's competitiveness as all skilled and semi-skilled people are going abroad,” the report said. “The money they send back to the country is not utilised in the productive sector either.” ........ Edible oil imports in the whole of the fiscal year 2018-19 were valued at Rs37.12 billion. ...... Experts say that importing and re-exporting edible oil under zero tariff privilege gives Nepali traders a profit of almost 45 percent, an advantage Nepal receives under the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA). ....... Remittance inflows have risen sharply since 2001, growing by 2 percent to 11 percent annually with political instability playing a major role in driving youths to go abroad to work for lack of jobs in the country.......

There is a mismatch between remittance and job creation indicating that most of the money is going into consumption rather than production or employment creation.

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जन्मसिद्धका सन्तानलाई नागरिकता दिने सहमति जुटेको छ : महतो .

Ukraine’s Implausible Theories of Victory The Fantasy of Russian Defeat and the Case for Diplomacy .......... Russia would disgorge the territorial gains it has made since February. Ukraine would recognize neither the annexation of Crimea nor the secessionist statelets in the Donbas and would continue down the path toward membership in the EU and NATO. ........ With some combination of battlefield gains and economic pressure, the West can convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war—or convince someone in his circle to forcibly replace him. ......... In Ukraine, the Russian army is likely strong enough to defend most of its gains. In Russia, the economy is autonomous enough and Putin’s grip tight enough that the president cannot be coerced into giving up those gains, either. The most likely outcome of the current strategy, then, is not a Ukrainian triumph but a long, bloody, and ultimately indecisive war. A drawn-out conflict would be costly not only in terms of the loss of human life and economic damage but also in terms of escalation—including the potential use of nuclear weapons. ........... Ukraine’s leaders and its backers speak as if victory is just around the corner. But that view increasingly appears to be a fantasy. Ukraine and the West should therefore reconsider their ambitions and shift from a strategy of winning the war toward a more realistic approach: finding a diplomatic compromise that ends the fighting. ........... In April, the British defense ministry estimated that 15,000 Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine. Assuming that the number of wounded was three times as high, which was the average experience during World War II, that would imply that roughly 60,000 Russians had been knocked out of commission. Initial Western estimates put the size of the frontline Russian force in Ukraine at 120 battalion tactical groups, which would total at most 120,000 people. If these casualty estimates were correct, the strength of most Russian combat units would have fallen below 50 percent, a figure that experts suggest renders a combat unit at least temporarily ineffective. .......... Ukraine’s forces could beat the enemy in mechanized warfare, with tanks and accompanying infantry and artillery, just as Israel beat its Arab enemies in the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has sufficient mechanized combat units to densely defend their vast fronts, which means in principle that either side should be vulnerable to rapid, hard-hitting mechanized attacks. ......... Russian forces could find their flanks and supply lines vulnerable to counterattacks—as appears to have occurred on a small scale around Kyiv in the early battles of the war. .......... Ukraine’s recent counterattacks in the Kherson region do not appear to involve much surprise or maneuver. Rather, they seem to look like the kind of slow, grinding offensives that the Russians have themselves mounted in the Donbas. ............. a country’s ability to conduct mechanized warfare correlates with its socioeconomic development. Both technical and managerial skills are needed to keep thousands of machines and electronic devices in working order and to coordinate far-flung, fast-moving combat units in real time. Ukraine and Russia have similarly skilled populations from which to draw their soldiers, so it is unlikely that the former enjoys an advantage in mechanized warfare. ............ Russia enjoys a three-to-one advantage in population and economic output, a gap that even the highest-tech tools would be hard-pressed to close. ......... It is much harder to exploit advanced technology to go on the offense against an adversary that possesses a significant quantitative advantage, because doing so requires overcoming both superior numbers and the tactical advantages of defense. ............. Alternatively, Putin doesn’t see how fast battlefield attrition and economic privation are undercutting his support, but others in his circle do, and in their own naked self-interest, they depose and perhaps even execute him. Once in power, they sue for peace. Either way, Russia concedes defeat. .......... For one thing, Putin is a veteran intelligence professional who presumably knows a lot about conspiracies, including how to defend against them. This alone makes a strategy of regime change suspect, even if there were some in Moscow who were willing to risk their lives to try it. For another thing, squeezing the Russian economy is unlikely to produce sufficient privation to create meaningful political pressure against Putin. The West can make the lives of Russians a bit drabber, and it can deprive Russian weapons manufacturers of sophisticated imported electronic subcomponents. But these achievements seem unlikely to shake Putin or his rule. Russia is a vast and populous country, with ample arable land, plentiful energy supplies, lots of other natural resources, and a big, if dated, industrial base. ........

U.S. President Donald Trump tried and failed to strangle Iran, a much smaller and less developed but equally energy independent country. It is hard to see how the same strategy will work against Russia.

............. Great powers often incur major war losses for years, even for flimsy reasons. The United States did so in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq; the Soviet Union did so in Afghanistan. ........... If mounting casualties require Ukraine to throw ever less prepared troops into a hopeless battle, support for an open-ended war of attrition would erode even further. At the same time, the Russians are likely to have a high tolerance for pain. Putin has so controlled the domestic narrative about his war that many Russian citizens see the fight the same way he does—as a crucial battle for national security. And Russia has more people than Ukraine. ........... Nobody can say with certainty that the Russian army cannot be hit hard enough or cleverly enough to induce its collapse or that Russia cannot be hurt enough to induce Putin to surrender. But these outcomes are highly improbable. At present, the most plausible result after months or years of fighting is a stalemate close to the current battle lines. ........ At some point, then, the two countries will likely find it expedient to negotiate. Both sides will have to recognize that these must be true negotiations, in which each must give up something of value. ............. the West should move toward the negotiating table now. .......... The difference between the two experiments is that diplomacy is cheap. Besides time, airfare, and coffee, its only costs are political. ........... Russia possesses powerful and diverse nuclear forces, and the imminent collapse of its effort in Ukraine might tempt Putin to use them. .......... Ukraine would have to relinquish considerable territory and do so in writing. Russia would need to relinquish some of its battlefield gains and renounce future territorial claims. To prevent a future Russian attack, Ukraine would surely need strong assurances of U.S. and European military support, as well as continuing military aid (but consisting mainly of defensive, not offensive, weapons). Russia would need to acknowledge the legitimacy of such arrangements. The West would need to agree to relax many of the economic sanctions it has placed on Russia. NATO and Russia would need to launch a new set of negotiations to limit the intensity of military deployments and interactions along their respective frontiers. ............. The Ukrainian and Western theories of victory have been built on weak reasoning. At best, they are a costly avenue to a painful stalemate that leaves much Ukrainian territory in Russian hands. If this is the best that can be hoped for after additional months or years of fighting, then there is only one responsible thing to do: seek a diplomatic end to the war now. .



Thinking About the Unthinkable in Ukraine What Happens If Putin Goes Nuclear? ........ “Whoever tries to impede us, let alone create threats for our country and its people, must know that the Russian response will be immediate and lead to the consequences you have never seen in history,” Putin declared in February in the first of many statements warning of a potential nuclear strike. .......... the danger would be greatest if the war were to turn decisively in Ukraine’s favor. ......... The Russians might do this by setting off one or a few tactical nuclear weapons against Ukrainian forces or by triggering a symbolic explosion over an empty area. ........... The United States could opt to rhetorically decry a nuclear detonation but do nothing militarily. It could unleash nuclear weapons of its own. Or it could refrain from a nuclear counterattack but enter the war directly with large-scale conventional airstrikes and the mobilization of ground forces. All those alternatives are bad because no low-risk options exist for coping with the end of the nuclear taboo. A conventional war response is the least bad of the three because it avoids the higher risks of either the weaker or the stronger options. ........ Back then, it was NATO that relied in principle on the option of deliberate escalation—beginning with the limited use of tactical nuclear weapons—as a way to halt a Soviet invasion. This strategy was controversial, but it was adopted because the West believed its conventional forces to be inferior to the Warsaw Pact’s. .......... Today, with the balance of forces reversed since the Cold War, the current Russian doctrine of “escalate to deescalate” mimics NATO’s Cold War “flexible response” concept. ........... He could play the madman and apply nuclear shock as an acceptable risk for ending the war on Russian terms. ....... If a few Russian nuclear weapons do not provoke the United States into direct combat, Moscow will have a green light to use even more such weapons and crush Ukraine quickly. ......... there is a very real possibility that policymakers would wind up with the weakest option: rant about the unthinkable barbarity of the Russian action and implement whatever unused economic sanctions are still available but do nothing militarily. This would signal that Moscow has complete freedom of action militarily, including the further use of nuclear weapons to wipe out Ukrainian defenses, essentially conceding a Russian victory. ......... During the Cold War, strategists critical of relying on tactical nuclear weapons to counter invading Soviet forces quipped, “In Germany, the towns are only two kilotons apart.” Using nuclear weapons instead against targets inside Russia would intensify the danger of triggering unlimited war. .......... would risk unleashing the all-out mutual destruction of the major powers’ homelands. ........... Direct entry into the war at the conventional level would not neutralize panic in the West. But it would mean that Russia would be faced with the prospect of combat against a NATO that was substantially superior in nonnuclear forces, backed by a nuclear retaliatory capability, and less likely to remain restrained if Russia turned its nuclear strikes against U.S. rather than Ukrainian forces. The second important message to emphasize would be that any subsequent Russian nuclear use would trigger American nuclear retaliation. ........ Direct war between the major powers that starts at any level risks escalation to mass destruction. Such a strategy would appear weaker than retaliation in kind and would worsen the Russians’ desperation about losing rather than relieve it, thus leaving their original motive for escalation in place along with the possibility that they would double down and use even more nuclear weapons. ............ So far, Moscow has been buoyed by the refusal of China, India, and other countries to fully join the economic sanctions campaign imposed by the West. These fence sitters, however, have a stake in maintaining the nuclear taboo. They might be persuaded to declare that their continued economic collaboration with Russia is contingent on it refraining from the use of nuclear weapons. As a declaration about a still hypothetical eventuality, the neutral countries could see this as a low-cost gesture, a way to keep the West off their backs by addressing a situation they don’t expect to occur. ........... Russia is utterly vulnerable to nuclear retaliation, and as generations of thinkers and practitioners on both sides have reiterated, a nuclear war has no winner.

Can Putin Survive? The Lessons of the Soviet Collapse

The Beginning of the End for Putin? Dictatorships Look Stable—Until They Aren’t ....... Putin’s attack on Ukraine has been a clarifying moment. Since he came to power in 2000, various Western leaders have tried to cooperate, accommodate, or negotiate with him. But by embarking on a war of choice against a country he claims doesn’t have a right to exist, Putin has forced the international community to see him for what he is: a belligerent leader with a remarkable capacity for destruction.

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Monday, July 04, 2022

4: Netflix

Hitting the road costs $700 a month Even if your car is paid off, it's still costly to drive. Gas prices have reached an average of more than $5 per gallon across the U.S., with states like California seeing prices nearing $10.



RadioShack's 'wild' pivot to crypto



Is the Netflix era nearing its end?



Why execs are here for hybrid work

64% of workers would choose WFH over a $30,000 raise





Netflix Says It’s Business as Usual. Is That Good Enough? Long Hollywood’s leading innovator, the streaming service is staying the course, despite serious challenges to its business and questions about its content. .......... For years, Netflix has been the leading innovator in Hollywood, spearheading a revolution in how people around the world watch movies and television. Now, confronting the loss of subscribers for the first time in a decade — with more losses expected this year — Netflix’s main response seems to be an effort to crack down on password sharing among friends and family members, as well as an introduction of a lower-priced advertising tier. There is some concern in Hollywood and on Wall Street that those moves are not enough. ......... The savior to Netflix is they spend $17 billion on content, and they need more ‘Stranger Things’ and less ‘Space Force.’” ........ Netflix reached more than 221 million subscribers worldwide by taking chances: greenlighting ambitious content, paying for shows it believed in whether or not they featured big names, giving great latitude to famed directors like Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese. ........ In 2019 — when Disney+ and Apple TV+ were just getting started and HBO Max did not exist — Netflix spent $2.6 billion on marketing. In 2021, when competition greatly increased, it spent $2.5 billion.......... the company still intends to spend some $17 billion on content this year. ......... Netflix had fallen from second to fourth place in the firm’s annual streaming customer satisfaction survey, behind HBO Max, Disney+ and Hulu. .......... by the end of 2025 nearly a third of the subscriber base would pay for the cheaper ad-supported model, roughly 100 million users. ......... In the end, though, Netflix’s success will most likely come down to how well it spends its $17 billion content budget.

Updated Covid Shots Are Coming. Will They Be Too Late? The government has greenlit new vaccines to defend against the latest Omicron variants. But the shots won’t arrive until the fall, and cases are rising now. ......... The most evasive forms of Omicron yet, known as BA.4 and BA.5, appear to be driving a fresh surge of cases across much of the United States. The same subvariants have sent hospital admissions climbing in Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium and Israel. ....... In the worst case, epidemiologists have predicted some 200,000 Covid deaths in the United States within the next year. ........ More than half of vaccinated Americans have not received a booster. Three-quarters of those eligible for a second booster have not gotten one. ......... This spring, people age 50 and older who had received a single booster were dying from Covid at four times the rate of those with two booster doses ....... whereas flu viruses typically turn over in the course of years, new coronavirus variants can emerge and then start stampeding across the world within months.

How TikTok Became a Best Seller Machine #BookTok, where enthusiastic readers share reading recommendations, has gone from being a novelty to becoming an anchor in the publishing industry and a dominant driver of fiction sales. ......... Publishers were surprised, authors were surprised, even the readers making those TikTok videos were surprised. ........ A year later, the hashtag #BookTok has become a sustained and powerful force in the world of books, helping to create some of the biggest sellers on the market. ........ Books by the writer Colleen Hoover, for example, became a sensation on TikTok, and Ms. Hoover is now one of the best selling authors in the country. NPD BookScan, which tracks the sale of most printed books in the United States, said that of the ten best selling books so far this year, Ms. Hoover has written four. .........

no other form of social media has ever had this kind of impact on sales

........ BookTok is not dominated by the usual power players in the book world such as authors and publishers but by regular readers, many of them young, who share recommendations and videos of themselves talking about the books they love, sometimes weeping or screaming or tossing a copy across the room. .......... In essence, BookTok supercharges something that’s always been essential to selling a book: word of mouth. ......... “It’s not one video that makes a book explode in sales,” said Ms. Brown from Doubleday. “It’s this grass roots explosion of people creating the videos and then organically, by word of mouth, it grows from there.”

The Best Films of 2022, So Far Here are the movies that our critics say have made the year a strong one onscreen.

The 25 Most Significant New York City Novels From the Last 100 Years Four writers and one bookseller gathered over Zoom to make a list devoted to fiction in which the city is more than mere setting. .......... If anything, New York’s scale and complexity — the diversity of neighborhoods and industries and lives that coexist here — are what make it an inexhaustible and consistently compelling setting. .......... Also, I think there’s a version of New York where people almost never leave their apartments and aren’t that interested in the city, and she’s on that list for me. There’s something hermetic about her work that feels true to New York. ........ “The aim is a realism dilated to deal with the almost surreal state of our everyday American life,” he wrote in response to readers of an early excerpt from the book. “Invisible Man” (1952) tracks the pilgrimage an unnamed narrator — a Black American — takes across the country’s racist underbelly. He begins in the Deep South, with all its attendant humiliations, then joins the Great Migration by moving to Harlem, where he comes across an old couple getting evicted and argues with the authorities on their behalf. His gift for oration makes him useful to the Brotherhood (a stand-in for the Communist Party, with which Ellison grew disenchanted during World War II), but just as the narrator’s profile begins to rise, making it harder for the Brotherhood to order him around, he’s pushed aside. Soon after, he sees an old friend, Brother Clifton, get shot and killed for having the nerve to assert his humanity to a police officer. .......... but in New York, everybody comes from somewhere else, kind of, and the idea that those histories and the national history are also baked into the city is something that doesn’t always come through .......... To what extent is race in America, particularly Blackness, a choice, and to what extent is it an inheritance? What are its various obligations, privileges and betrayals? “Passing” (1929), a classic of the Harlem Renaissance, ripples with the complexity of such questions. Set mostly in 1920s Manhattan, the novella follows Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black society wife, as she reconnects with Clare Kendry, an acquaintance from childhood who has embraced her “white-passing” features, severing nearly all ties to her past and taking a wealthy white husband. .......... At one point, the book alludes to Rhinelander v. Rhinelander, the 1925 divorce trial in which a white man accused his wife of obscuring her mixed-race ancestry. .......... Lutie Johnson, a single mother hellbent on providing a better life for her 8-year-old son, moves into a tiny Harlem apartment on 116th Street, a temporary arrangement that gets her “just one step farther up on the ladder of success,” though she’s hemmed in by a handsy super, a neighbor who’s a madam, a son who unwittingly runs afoul of the law and, of course, various power structures. ..........

Lutie’s son “didn’t have the ghost of a chance on that street. The best you could give him wasn’t good enough.”

......... Sam, for his part, has fallen for the handsome Tracy Bacon, the radio voice of the Escapist, at a time when gay men are routinely rounded up and thrown in jail.

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Saturday, July 02, 2022

2: Bihar, China, Ukraine, Mumbai



गगन थापासंग चुनाव लड्दै सेयर सुन्दरी राधा स्रोतका अनुसार महानगरमा स्वतन्त्रबाट बालेन साहले शानदार जित हासिल गरेपछि लगानीकर्ताहरुवाट पोखरेललाई राजनीतिमा आउन देश विदेशबाट दबाब आइरहेको छ ।

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Monday, June 27, 2022

27: Abortion, Ukraine, Arlan Hamilton

Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith: We’ve Seen What Will Happen Next to America’s Women We both lived in an America where abortion was illegal. A nation in which infections and other complications destroyed lives. A nation in which unplanned pregnancies derailed careers and livelihoods. A nation in which some women took their own lives rather than continue pregnancies they could not bear. ........ increasing access to abortion medication, providing federal resources for individuals seeking abortion care in other states and using federal property and resources to protect people seeking abortion services locally. ......... In order to fix the damage Republicans have done to our system in their efforts to control women’s lives, we need broad democracy reform: changing the composition of the courts, reforming Senate rules like the filibuster, and even fixing the outdated Electoral College that allowed presidential candidates who lost the popular vote to take office and nominate five of the justices who agreed to end the right to an abortion......... Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And more Americans describe themselves as pro-choice today than at any other point in the last 25 years. ....... Ask every Senate candidate to commit to reforming the filibuster rules, so that the chamber can pass federal legislation protecting the right to reproductive freedom. If voters help us maintain our control of the House and expand our majority in the Senate by at least two votes this November, we can make Roe the law all across the country as soon as January...... The two of us lived in an America without Roe, and we are not going back. Not now. Not ever.

What Comes after Roe? how we can make our country more welcoming to children and more supportive of families, an essential task if we want to make abortion both illegal and unthinkable, if we want to end abortion in a sustainable way. .......... abolition of abortion through both law and culture, a world where abortion is both illegal and inconceivable. ........ Pro-lifers can hold a range of views on, for example, paid family leave or child tax credits. We should debate these policies on the merits and keep in mind that ending abortion will require a “both/and” approach in many areas, not an “either/or.” We need plans for shifting our laws and our culture, efforts to care for babies and mothers, work from state and federal governments — and all of these efforts should aim at ending the supply of abortion and the demand for it.

Leaving Wish Lists at the Door, Senators Found Consensus on Guns The bipartisan gun safety legislation that cleared Congress on Friday was the product of weeks of fraught negotiations that started with both sides acknowledging what had to stay off the table. ....... Instead of a wish list, he came with a blacklist. ........ sending Mr. Murphy to the floor to beg his colleagues to end a vicious, decades-long cycle of inaction on gun safety and finally do something. .......... Now, sitting with his fellow Democrat, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and two conservative Republicans, Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, to try to hammer out a compromise, he did not even bother mentioning the sweeping gun control measures he and his party had long demanded. .......... the first substantial step in nearly three decades to toughen gun laws. ........ The National Rifle Association was deeply involved in drafting the bill, although the gun rights group ultimately opposed it, as was Everytown, the nation’s leading gun safety group. Their improbable pairing mirrored the unlikely bipartisan coalition of senators that forged the compromise, beginning not with lofty hopes of a historic deal, but by checking their respective priorities at the door. ......... “There’s a couple of ways to do things around here: One is if you want a result; the other is if you just want to make a political statement,” Mr. Cornyn said this week. He added, “I think the Democrats wanted to get a result and we wanted to get a result, so this is what we came up with.” ......... Then Mr. Murphy texted Ms. Sinema after seeing her quoted saying she wanted to talk with Democrats and Republicans to see if there was anything Congress could do to protect frightened children nationwide. ........ “Are you serious?” he typed out on his phone. Ms. Sinema responded that she was. .......... Republicans made sure the N.R.A. was involved, knowing that while the group was unlikely to back any compromise, its vocal opposition could quickly kill any hope of a deal. ...... Mr. Murphy and Ms. Sinema were simultaneously meeting with a broader group of senators in both parties, cobbling together eight other centrists and veterans of past failed efforts at gun safety deals. None of the Republicans was facing re-election, giving the group more political latitude to act without fear of retribution from voters in November’s midterm elections. .......... Senators wrestled with an array of sticking points, sometimes over Thai food or wine Ms. Sinema brought from a Texas-born winemaker. ....... A week earlier, he and Mr. McConnell had commissioned a poll of 1,000 gun-owning households across the country and found that most supported the key elements of the emerging bill. A solid majority backed increasing federal funding for states to maintain or implement red flag laws, and more than 80 percent supported closing the boyfriend loophole and allowing law enforcement to have more time to examine juvenile and mental health records.

Decades Ago, Alito Laid Out Methodical Strategy to Eventually Overrule Roe A slow-burning hostility to constitutional abortion rights runs through the career of the author of the Supreme Court opinion overturning them......... how he slowly and patiently sought to chip away at abortion rights throughout his career before demolishing them in the majority opinion on Friday. ......... “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Justice Alito wrote. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.” ........... Even “abortion supporters have found it hard to defend Roe’s reasoning,” he wrote. “One prominent constitutional scholar wrote that he ‘would vote for a statute very much like the one the Court end[ed] up drafting’ if he were ‘a legislator,’ but his assessment of Roe was memorable and brutal: Roe was ‘not constitutional law’ at all and gave ‘almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.’” ........... In a memo on the cases, Mr. Alito displayed not only tactical acumen but personal passion, taking umbrage with a judge’s objection that forcing women to listen to details about fetal development before their abortions would cause “emotional distress, anxiety, guilt and in some cases increased physical pain.” ........ Good, he wrote: Such results “are part of the responsibility of moral choice.” ........ “I personally believe very strongly,” he wrote in an application, that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.” ........... But in 2016 and 2020, just as in 1985, a new frontal attack on abortion rights would have failed. With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg still on the bench, there were not five votes to overturn Roe. This year, there was no longer need for a restrained, slower-burning approach. ......... “Abortion presents a profound moral question,” Justice Alito wrote. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each state from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

In Unusually Political Speech, Alito Says Liberals Pose Threat to Liberties The conservative justice’s pointed remarks, which he made in a speech to the Federalist Society, reflected thoughts he has expressed in his opinions. ........ Legal experts said there were few clear lines governing what justices may say off the bench.Credit... ....... that liberals posed a growing threat to religious liberty and free speech. ........ While Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has tried to signal that the Supreme Court is apolitical, Justice Alito’s comments sent a different message. ....... “Justice Alito’s speech Thursday was more befitting a Trump rally than a legal society” ........ Mr. Trump has repeatedly credited the Federalist Society with helping draw up his lists of potential nominees to the Supreme Court. All three of his appointees — Justices Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh — appeared on those lists. ......... Public appearances by justices before friendly audiences are commonplace, and several of the court’s more liberal justices have appeared before the American Constitution Society, a liberal group. But the comments they make on such occasions are generally anodyne. ......... Justice Alito’s comments were more pointed, and they were consistent with his sense that his views have not been given the respect they deserve. He felt bruised by some of the questions at his confirmation hearings in 2006 .......... He was not pleased when President Barack Obama criticized the court’s Citizens United campaign finance decision at the State of the Union address in 2010 with six justices present. Mr. Obama said the decision had “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.” ......... Justice Alito responded by mouthing the words “not true.” He has not attended another State of the Union address. ......... “I am not diminishing the severity of the virus’s threat to public health,” he said. “All that I’m saying is this, and I think that it is an indisputable statement of fact: We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020.” ......... The state treated houses of worship less favorably than it did casinos, he said. Casinos were limited to 50 percent of their fire-code capacities, while houses of worship were subject to a flat 50-person limit. .......... The Nevada decision was based in part on a 1905 Supreme Court decision concerning an outbreak of smallpox in Cambridge, Mass., the home of Harvard University. “Now I’m all in favor of preventing dangerous things from issuing out of Cambridge and infecting the rest of the country and the world,” said Justice Alito, who attended Princeton and Yale Law School. “It would be good if what originates in Cambridge stayed in Cambridge.” ............ “Tolerance for opposing views is now in short supply at many law schools and in the broader academic community,” he said. ......... “You can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman,” Justice Alito said. “Until very recently that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it’s considered bigotry.”

Arlan Hamilton Went From Homeless to Running $20 Million in VC Funds. Here's How She Did It Arlan Hamilton was homeless and sleeping on the floor of the San Francisco Airport in 2015, when an investor wrote the first check that set her on the way to becoming a venture capitalist. ......... Hamilton, then 34, hadn’t attended college and had been working in the music industry. But she read about venture capital and decided that she needed to break into the elite and largely white and male corps of investors funding startup companies. ............ Now, six-and-a-half years later, Hamilton’s VC firm, Backstage Capital, has invested about $20 million in nearly 200 companies, and is in the process of raising a new $30 million investment fund. Backstage has focused on underrepresented founders, including women, people of color, and LGBTQ entrepreneurs. ......... Companies with only women founders received just 2% of venture capital funds invested last year, according to PitchBook. Investments in Black and Latinx female founders represented just 0.64% of VC investment since 2018 ........... “I want to share this journey,

not because I think I’m exceptional, but because, like many people, I have been exceptionally underestimated”

............ To help finance her firm’s operations and open up access to returns from venture capital investments, Hamilton last year raised about $5 million using a new crowdfunding model. ......... I didn’t know what a venture capitalist was in 2010. .......... I didn’t have much money and I didn’t have any connections in that world, but I knew it was for me. .......... 90%-plus of all venture funding and angel funding goes to white men in a country where they make up one-third of the population. That caught me off guard as a gay Black woman in the South with no connections. I thought, ‘That doesn’t seem like that’s going to end well, if that stays the same. ......... I taught myself how to raise money for a fund by diving into any book I could get my hands on and any interview I could get my hands on. I started making phone calls, sending emails in the dozens at a time and little by little started making breadcrumbs and finding my way. And then, you know, an overnight five years later I got a check for $25,000 that would kick off my investing career. ......... 6,500 people invested approximately $5 million over an eight-day period in Q1 of 2021 to now become partial owners of Backstage Management Co., which shares in any upside that we have as a fund across any investment we’ve ever made in the past and will ever make in the future, as long as they hold that stock. .......... when it comes to institutional investors and corporate investors who are throwing money at one company at a time, in some cases that fail, in my opinion it’s insulting that we have to scrape for so little. .......... we’ve only raised $6 million of our $30 million raise. And there are white men who use our thesis and get $200 million, $300 million to start a new fund because they worked at Facebook for two years. But they haven’t done the work that we’ve done for the past decade, I’ve done for the past decade and our team has done for the past six, seven years. ............ So Microsoft, with Satya Nadella at the helm, they invested in our accelerator four years ago. We didn’t have a relationship with them post-George Floyd. .......... with Bank of America, every single person I talked to was Black, who had the decision making ability. On PayPal, nobody was Black and they passed. JP Morgan, Black person was going to say, yes, white person said no. I just recognize patterns. ............. One is the lottery is really risky, but this country has no problem letting Black and brown people spend half their paycheck on the lottery in certain states, casinos, et cetera. ........... My activism is in being successful, wealthy, and also opening up access for others who look like me to do the same. .......... There are people who will chain themselves outside of government buildings, or so they don’t knock down this building, don’t do this pipeline. They’re risking life and limb. They’re risking reputation. They’re risking livelihood because they believe in something so strongly. That is what I’m doing by being so brazen in public, and being so non-humble in public. And also I’m being called a key maker, not a gatekeeper. So I’m throwing open the gates for others to follow me and in doing so I risk life and limb, reputation, livelihood every single day, because I want it to change something in the future, whether I see it or not. I want it to effect change. ........... I will be one of the richest Black women in America, probably in the echelons of Oprah and Beyonce and Rihanna and Serena and all them.



Backstage reflects after reaching 200th investment “Meaning that in 2014 and ’15, when I was telling anyone who would listen that I would invest in 100 companies by 2020, I never imagined we’d be at 200,” she told Green Room. “It was my moonshot idea. One hundred was my moonshot idea. It also signifies and reconfirms what I knew a decade ago, which is that women, people of color, LGBTQ+ founders and others who are underestimated are simply that, are underestimated. And we’re always here. We were always building and innovating and being simply overlooked. So, this means a lot for the ecosystem.” .........

the brilliant underestimated founders building companies.

........ “They believed in us and the market for digital nomads before a lot of other people did,” Carriman said. “And here we are today. The entire world is now working remote. And as a result, the work from anywhere digital nomad lifestyle has gone mainstream and is expanding.” ........ Moving forward, Backstage also plans to focus more on follow-on investments rather than first-time investments in startups. What hasn’t changed, however, is Hamilton’s gut instinct that she continues to use to this day ........ “Somewhere around 60 investments,” Hamilton said, “I stopped trying to predict the future and figured out that trusting my instinct and trusting the founders and where they would lead me was the best strategy.”

How Backstage Capital is creating the next generation of venture capitalists

Venture capital is still mostly pale, male and stale.

......... The idea is to invest in “the future of firsts” by investing in first-time founders, first-generation individuals and early stage startup ideas with an emphasis on underrepresented founders. ........ The pilot program taught 21 apprentices how to evaluate potential deals, identify trends, build a fund from scratch and more. Apprentices also made deal recommendations to the Backstage Capital investment team. ......... Deal warehousing entails investing in a handful of companies before forming a fund to show traction to potential investors. ......... “What’s ‘fun’ for emerging managers is it’s this catch 22 that if you don’t have money, you can’t invest in anyone,” Heyman said. “And if you can’t invest in anyone, you can’t show traction.” ........ Part of achieving those goals entails raising $50,000 through a regulatory crowdfunding campaign. Johnson said he was inspired by Backstage’s Reg CF campaign where the firm raised $4.7 million in one week.

Backstage Capital receives $1M investment from Comcast Backstage has been investing in underestimated founders since 2015. Since then, the firm has built one of the largest portfolios of underrepresented founders in venture capital by investing in nearly 200 startups to date. ......... Backstage Capital made its first investment in Career Karma back in 2018 with a $25K check from a $1.25 million fund. Its latest raise, which Backstage participated in, returned two-thirds of Backstage Capital’s fund. ........... As Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton previously said, the exits from Backstage Capital’s portfolio companies “will be like popcorn, with an exit here, then a few weeks later, there, etc.”

“There are Black people in the future.” It’s time to invest in them. Julia Collins, founder and CEO at Planet FWD, says the lack of equitable access to capital for Black founders is “connected to the core of what’s broken in our country.” ......... the data that diversity is good for business and key to maximizing returns has been out for years. Still, in the first half of 2021, Black founders in the U.S. raised just 1.2% of all venture dollars raised by U.S. startups ........

the lack of funding that goes to Black founders is deeply connected to white supremacy, structural injustice and systematic marginalization.

......... The reason why [access to capital] is such a sticky problem is because it’s connected to the core of what’s broken in our country.” .......... “I would argue access to capital is the only issue that Black founders have to deal with,” Brackeen said. “The real problem is even with the right traction, they can’t get the capital they need. So you get into this truly mathematical conundrum where the better the startup does, the more cash it needs and the less cash that is available, the riskier the business becomes. There’s nothing more dangerous than scaling without the money you need. It can all come crashing down quite quickly.” ............ Part of what led Brackeen to start Lightship Capital was to be the investor he never had. ....... “Arlan, though she tries, can’t fund every single Black company ever,” Brackeen said. “She’s like carrying America on her back. So yeah, there’s got to be more and I wanted to be part of that solution.” .......... LPs are the ones that provide the capital necessary for funds to invest in startups. Typically, LPs are institutional investors, such as pension funds, family offices, college endowments and trusts. ...... That theory aligns with anecdotes of Black firm managers who receive early-stage meetings with investors, but fail to receive the necessary funding. ......... “LPs have created this wild Hunger Games scenario where they’re asking all of us to beat each other to the death. And they won’t adjust for stage.” ......... Andreessen Horowitz, with $12 billion in assets under management at the time, announced an initial $2.2 million to go into its Talent x Opportunity initiative. Array VC, which recently closed a $56.1 million fund, set aside $1 million for racially diverse founders in 2020. And, SoftBank, which operates the $100 billion Vision Fund, set aside $100 million to go toward Black, Latinx and Native American founders............ Increasing access to capital for Black founders is as easy as making the hire and sending the wire .... and as hard as changing the entire fabric of our society ........... And, as we’ve seen throughout the entire existence of America, racial equity across any facet, whether that’s housing, education, employment and so on, is hard to achieve. ....... “If we could just get our fair share based on population of venture capital, you would see the most prosperous country in the world” ....... Black people are “keenly aware of all the ways the system doesn’t work.” ........ she recognizes the system doesn’t work for her and has no allegiance to it

Venture capital is a black box. Backstage Capital’s Christie Pitts wants to make it more transparent.

how pale, male and stale the venture capital world is

......... Given that women hold the majority of spending power in the U.S. and that people of color will soon make up the majority in the U.S., Pitts assumed those folks would receive a large share of the venture capital funding that goes to startups. ......... I rarely have an opportunity to research the company ahead of a meeting.



Yelp CEO: Hybrid is the 'worst'



Anatomy of a Product Placement As consumers skip ads and streaming content balloons, brands aim to be everywhere all at once. ....... When Larry David casually opens the door in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” those shelves need to be full of food and drink, and each one of those items is likely to have a brand: Perrier sparkling water, Pacific chicken broth, Clover cottage cheese. Maybe there will even be a box of Cheerios on top of it, as in a recent episode of “Euphoria.” The fridge itself will have a brand, too, of course. All of this must usually be negotiated through carefully considered placements that give these products their 15 seconds (or less) of fame. ............. The first documented example was in 1896, when the Lumière brothers, often credited as the earliest filmmakers, agreed to feature soap in their film “Washing Day in Switzerland.” .........

the rise of streaming has led to an explosion in product placement.

......... Product placement is now a $23 billion industry, up by an estimated 14 percent since 2020. .......... (Hollywood Branded even has a warehouse full of discontinued BlackBerry cellphones, handpicked PassionRoses, minimalist eero Wi-Fi routers, and all manner of things they can ship to sets on a moment’s notice.) ....... “Say you have a Montblanc pen, you automatically think, That character has a pen worth hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.” ....... “If you have a female whiskey drinker, you know she’ll be a badass character,” said Erin Schmidt, chief product placement officer at BEN, another agency that helps to coordinate product placement. “You don’t need to write more script in there because the brand gives you that contextual element.” ........... A car company might lend an expensive car to a set in exchange for an appearance in the show, or S’well water might mail a case of bottles to propmasters for consideration. (With cars, Schmidt said, there’s often another kind of trade-off: A company might agree to give a certain number that can be destroyed in an action scene, in exchange for being featured in another scene.) There are paid placements, too, but particularly with large streaming companies like Netflix and HBO, it’s more frequently a matter of finagling loan-and-trade agreements to reduce production budgets. ......... “If James Bond were shown drinking only milk, or getting in a Ford Fiesta and not an Aston Martin, viewers would feel that crossed some kind of line” ....... “In every scene, there was an in-place money agreement. There was a kitchen appliance that was in a third of the movie for over $1 million — literally written into the story.” .......... Surveys showed that layering visual and verbal references worked best for Zillow. “Now Zillow as a verb has become a part of the cultural norm,” Schmidt said. .......... when a character on “And Just Like That” had a heart attack while riding a Peloton — causing the real-life brand’s stock to plunge. ......... Certain items can take on almost talismanic importance, like the BlackBerry that Kevin Spacey’s character used in the Netflix series “House of Cards.” ........ verbal mentions, inserted in the script, worked well for Zillow. “We found really fun ways to integrate it verbally, like, ‘I Zillowed his house and it’s only worth x,” Schmidt said. “Saying ‘I’m going to Zillow that house’ became a part of the cultural norm.” .............. At an industry conference in May, Amazon announced that it would be experimenting with a beta version of “virtual product placement,” which the company is testing in shows like “Reacher,” “Jack Ryan,” and the “Bosch” franchise. “It creates the ability to film your series without thinking about all that is required with traditional placements during production” ........... “I think the bigger context is that product placement acclimatizes viewers to the inevitability of capitalist exchange,” Deery, the professor, said. “It normalizes the idea that there is a commercial motive behind almost everything we experience in our increasingly mediatized and branded experience.” .......... this is “its own kind of realism” in a world where brands do reign supreme ........ “Everything is a brand,” Jones said. “You product place roses, almonds. You can do roofing, shingles.” And, of course, the refrigerator. “Refrigerators are full of real products, and you want that to be realistic,” she added. “Unless it’s full of Tupperware. But Tupperware is a brand, too.”

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