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Tuesday, July 04, 2023

4: Steve Jobs

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4: Bill Gates



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4: Vinod Khosla

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4: Biden



Anthony Fauci on Larry Kramer and Loving Difficult People Larry was the initial driving force that changed forever the relationship between the advocacy community and the scientific and regulatory establishment. .......... the tactics that he had mastered to an art form: confrontation, outrageous behavior, anger and insults followed by insight, rationality, sensitivity, vulnerability, empathy and even humor. ........ it was pure passion related to his concern for the plight of what he called “my people,” the gay community, which drove him to outrageous behavior in order to gain the attention of the government and the general public concerning the disaster of the AIDS epidemic. ........ despite his sometimes provocative behavior, he was as noble as the most respected scientist and public servant .......... He felt strongly that I should chain myself to the White House fence and, as he put it, embarrass President George H.W. Bush into speaking out more on AIDS and providing more funding for AIDS research. I explained to him that this would be 15 minutes of attention and I would immediately lose all access to the White House. No matter. He still felt I should do it. ........... During a dinner that he threw for just the two of us in his Greenwich Village apartment, we reminisced like two aging warriors who recalled the battles that we fought together, how despite our initial adversarial relationship, we ultimately became partners in an important struggle and how differences of opinion and even a history of antagonism are entirely compatible with friendship and even love. .

Putin’s Options for Dealing With Wagner Aren’t Great For years, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s sprawling private army has quietly acted as a proxy for Russian foreign policy. The Wagner force’s network of thousands of Russian mercenaries installed in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa have helped the Kremlin secure natural resources and project influence in failed states and conflict zones, while allowing President Vladimir Putin of Russia to conveniently distance himself from the group’s unsavory alliances and ruthless tactics. ........... In Syria and Libya, Wagner fighters prop up strongmen like Bashar al-Assad and Khalifa Haftar in exchange for profits accrued from the oil and gas installations the mercenaries help protect. In Madagascar and Sudan, Wagner has advised governments on stamping out protests, started disinformation campaigns and meddled in elections. In Mali and the Central African Republic, military juntas rely on Wagner for regime security, while Wagner extracts gold, diamonds and timber, and wages counterinsurgency campaigns against jihadist groups affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. ........... Days after the doomed uprising, Mr. Putin proclaimed that Wagner was entirely funded by the Russian state, to the tune of billions of dollars. ........... Wagner forces already have a well-deserved reputation for brutality, are alleged to have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in several theaters and have been credibly accused of torture, kidnapping and executing civilians. .......... Wagner’s African footprint is vast, with ongoing activities in Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya. .......... Patriot, a group linked to Mr. Shoigu, is widely viewed as a significant competitor to Wagner, with reported operations in Burundi, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Syria and Yemen. ........... The E.N.O.T. Corporation is another Russian private military company, founded by Russian nationalist Igor Mangushev, with some experience abroad, but is much less influential and experienced than Wagner. Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, has also developed its own private army, although it is designed mainly to protect oil and gas infrastructure against attacks............. For a leader who has worked assiduously to cultivate an image as master strategist, Mr. Putin does not appear to have a plan for what comes next with Wagner. Instead, he looks increasingly vulnerable, both at home and in his effort to maintain Russia’s influence abroad. He will almost certainly struggle to rein in the beast he helped create. .

Jersey Boy Takes On Florida Man After years of watching Republicans cower before Trump, it’s bracing to see the disgraced former president finally meet his mean match............ I warned that Trump is an asymmetrical fighter, so it’s hard to know how to go at him. Clinton tried to rise above him, and Marco Rubio imitated his crude style. ........... He knows I know what his game is. .......... Trump came to debate prep in September 2020 without telling Christie or anyone else that he had tested positive the day before, and Christie ended up in the I.C.U. for seven days. ........... Christie mocked Ron DeSantis responding to Jan. 6 by saying he was not in Washington — “Was he alive?” Christie asked Kaitlan Collins on CNN. ........... Trump is playing checkers, not chess, Christie said, just scrambling to make that next jump. ......... He told me one time the reason he ties his ties so long is that it slenderizes him and I should do the same thing.” .

Biden Is Taking Aim at Trump’s Biggest Strength . The wildness of Donald Trump’s political style often obscures — at least to his critics — the more banal dimensions of his appeal. ....... the order of the day was incoherence. Infrastructure weeks came and went. Tax cuts were tilted toward the rich. There was no strategy to restore America’s manufacturing prowess or rebuild bargaining power for workers without college degrees. ......... Only about a third of voters approve of the job Biden has done on the economy. Polls show Trump is the more trusted economic manager, by far. ........ “Bidenomics.” Biden’s case is this: What Trump only promised, I delivered. ........... The Biden administration is thickly populated with veterans of the Obama and Clinton White Houses. But it doesn’t see itself in comfortable continuity with those legacies. It sees itself, in key ways, as a break with them. .......... Sullivan slammed the belief that “the type of growth did not matter.” That had led, he said, to administrations that let Wall Street thrive while “essential sectors, like semiconductors and infrastructure, atrophied.” He dismissed the “assumption at the heart of all of this policy: that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently.” ......... In letting globalization and automation hollow out domestic manufacturing, Democrats had been part of a Washington consensus that “had frayed the socioeconomic foundations on which any strong and resilient democracy rests.” .......... “I believe every American willing to work hard should be able to say where they grew up and stay where they grew up,” he said. “That’s Bidenomics.” ......... Biden’s red states will get $623 billion in clean energy investments by 2030, compared with $354 billion for blue states. ....... After comparing the infrastructure weeks Trump never delivered and “the infrastructure decade” he did, Biden noted: “Construction of manufacturing facilities here on U.S. soil grew only 2 percent on my predecessor’s watch in four years. Two percent. On my watch, it’s grown nearly 100 percent in two years.” ......... About two-thirds of the work force isn’t college-educated. And there’s no version of Bidenomics that leaves two-thirds of the labor force out.” ........... The Black-white employment gap has nearly closed, and wage gains have been particularly strong for workers without a college education. ........ Inflation is down by more than half since its peak. Forecasters who were confidently predicting a recession in 2023 are now hedging. .

Biden Versus the Bad News Bros no longer a fringe phenomenon: Bizarre conspiracy theories are now mainstream on the American right. .......... the old inflation truthers and the new recession truthers. ....... The new group is dominated by tech bros, billionaires who imagine themselves focused on the future rather than the golden past, more likely to be crypto cultists than gold bugs. .......... Indeed, the most prominent recession truther right now is none other than Elon Musk ............ You might have expected technology billionaires to be well-informed about the world — someone like Musk could, if he chose, easily maintain a large research department for his personal edification. ........... So why do we see tech bros indulging in conspiracy theories, often citing random Twitter accounts to justify their views? ......... The answer, I believe, is that technology billionaires are especially susceptible to the belief that they’re uniquely brilliant, able to instantly master any subject, from Covid to the war in Ukraine. They could afford to hire experts to brief them on world affairs, but that would only work if they were willing to listen when the experts told them things they didn’t want to hear. So what happens instead, all too often, is that they go down the rabbit hole: Their belief in their own genius makes them highly gullible, easy marks for grifters claiming that the experts are all wrong. ............ What you need to know, then, is that the economic data isn’t fake. A recession might eventually happen, but it isn’t happening now. And the wealthy men claiming to know better are actually less well-informed than, say, the average reader of The New York Times — because they don’t know what they don’t know, and nobody is in a position to enlighten them. .

Putin Thinks He’s Still in Control. He’s Not. That was rather strange, because the festival was on Saturday, June 24 — the day Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner group, launched his mutiny. Despite the shock of the rebellion, which saw Wagner forces march to within 125 miles of Moscow unimpeded, Mr. Putin flew to St. Petersburg. Nothing, not even armed revolt, would deter him from his favorite party. .......... In the opinion of my sources close to Mr. Putin’s inner circle — officials, administrators, journalists, businessmen and more — this is the clearest evidence yet that the president is divorced from reality. He still believes that he has everything under control and that Mr. Prigozhin’s rebellion has not changed the political situation in any way. But he is mistaken. Not only is the atmosphere around Mr. Putin fundamentally different, but there is also a growing appetite for change — even among those close to the president. For many I spoke to, Mr. Putin’s system of rule simply can’t go on much longer. ............. Prigozhin was clearly elevated to act as a counterweight to the defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, and the military generals, ensuring they didn’t become too popular. So when Mr. Prigozhin started criticizing the military leadership — often in explicit, expletive-ridden diatribes — the president did nothing to stop it. ............ But it soon became a problem. Mr. Prigozhin, riding a wave of popularity, became increasingly personal and insulting in his denunciations of Mr. Shoigu. Yet Mr. Putin failed to mediate. Though he arranged a meeting between the two men in February, he did not, according to a source in the presidential administration, say anything specific in the conversation, hoping the gathering itself was a sufficient warning to stop the public attacks. Mr. Prigozhin did not take the hint, however, and continued to fulminate against the military commanders. ........... In the weeks after the meeting, Mr. Prigozhin traveled the country as if he were a politician running an election campaign, meeting with potential supporters and criticizing the war effort. In this again he was unhindered by the Kremlin, which knew of his plans but chose to do nothing about them. As Mr. Prigozhin grew in popularity, even pulling in a former deputy defense minister as a deputy commander for Wagner — a clear sign he had high-ranking admirers among the security forces — Mr. Putin kept to himself. Sources close to him tell me he hasn’t met with Mr. Prigozhin for months. ........... In early June, when Mr. Shoigu sought to clamp down on private militias like Wagner by making all mercenaries sign a contract with the army, Mr. Prigozhin couldn’t get in touch with the president to object. In the language of Russian bureaucracy, this signals the highest degree of disfavor. ............... the Wagner chief is in Belarus. Exile in the Central African Republic, where the Wagner group has a military base, is reportedly in the cards. ............ A purge is to be expected, starting with Gen. Sergei Surovikin, a former commander of Russian forces in Ukraine who is said to have known of the mutiny in advance. ............ The rebellion has desacralized Mr. Putin, substantially weakening his authority. Before this weekend, much of Russian society, and especially state bureaucrats, believed that he always made the right decisions, that he was much more cunning, wiser and better informed than anyone else. But the events of the weekend have shown Mr. Putin in the worst possible light: weak, vacillating, incapable of exerting control. He alone is to blame for what happened, something that is obvious to everyone except him. ........... For many members of the ruling elite, it is now clear that Mr. Putin has ceased to be the guarantor of stability he was for so long. .

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Friday, June 30, 2023

30: Ukraine



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How Can ChatGPT Provide Recommendations For Improving Customer Loyalty Programs?
How Can ChatGPT Suggest Ways To Use Gamification To Engage Customers?
How Can ChatGPT Provide Guidance On How To Use Chatbots And Other AI-Powered Tools To Enhance Customer Interactions?
How Can ChatGPT Help Develop Influencer Marketing Strategies?
How Can ChatGPT Provide Guidance On How To Create Effective Video Marketing Campaigns?
How Can ChatGPT Help Analyze Ad Campaign Data And Provide Recommendations For Improving Campaign Performance?
How Can ChatGPT Help Create And Manage Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns?

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Thursday, June 29, 2023

29: Russia



How Can ChatGPT Help Create And Implement A Social Media Influencer Program?
How Can ChatGPT Analyze Data To Determine Which Types Of Content Generate The Most Engagement?
Image Generation
How Can ChatGPT Suggest Ways To Use Virtual Events To Engage Customers?
How Can ChatGPT Help Create And Implement A Customer Retention Strategy?


The Mediterranean Diet Really Is That Good for You. Here’s Why. It has become the bedrock of virtuous eating. Experts answer common questions about how it leads to better health. .





Reshape your marketing with GPT In this webinar, discover the true potential of GPT for marketing.......... While AI can assist in drafting marketing materials and offering prompt responses to customer inquiries, its capabilities extend far beyond these basic functions. .



काठमाडौँबाट पाकिस्तान लागे चिनियाँ अर्बपति ज्याक मा
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Wednesday, June 28, 2023

28: Putin



Russian General Knew About Mercenary Chief’s Rebellion Plans, U.S. Officials Say Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner, may have believed he had support in Russia’s military. ........ The officials said they are trying to learn if Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the former top Russian commander in Ukraine, helped plan Mr. Prigozhin’s actions last weekend, which posed the most dramatic threat to President Vladimir V. Putin in his 23 years in power. ........ there are signs that other Russian generals may also have supported Mr. Prigozhin’s attempt to change the leadership of the Defense Ministry by force. ......... Mr. Putin must now decide, officials say, whether he believes that General Surovikin helped Mr. Prigozhin and how he should respond. .......... “Think of how easy it was to take Rostov,” Mr. McFaul said. “There are armed guards everywhere in Russia, and suddenly, there’s no one around to do anything?” ........ Prigozhin seemed to believe that large parts of Russia’s army would rally to his side as his convoy moved on Moscow. .......... Mr. Prigozhin had worked with General Surovikin during Russia’s military intervention in Syria, and had described him as the most capable commander in the Russian army. Former officials said General Surovikin did not support pushing Mr. Putin from power but appears to have agreed with Mr. Prigozhin that Mr. Shoigu and General Gerasimov needed to be relieved of duty. ......... General Surovikin and Mr. Prigozhin have both brushed up against Mr. Shoigu and General Gerasimov over tactics used in Ukraine. ......... a frustrated General Surovikin represented a hard-line faction of generals intent on using the toughest tactics against Ukrainians. ......... Russia’s entire military campaign in Ukraine has been characterized by a musical chairs of changing generals. .

In Kremlin Stagecraft, Putin Tries to Rewrite the Mutiny in Russia President Vladimir V. Putin appeared only once during a mercenary’s daylong mutiny against the military. He was all over Russian TV on Tuesday, seeking to project an image of control. ........ Mr. Putin on Tuesday thanked the military for having “essentially stopped a civil war” .......... The speech finally showed Mr. Putin outside of a nondescript room, and in an identifiable place: Cathedral Square in the Kremlin, the historic seat of power. Mr. Putin has often used the palatial buildings and rooms of the Kremlin, a fortified complex in the heart of Moscow, to project the image of a singular Russian leader, flanked by loyal officers and resembling the generations of czars who ruled from inside the Kremlin’s walls. ......... The triumphant imagery and heroic rhetoric stood in contrast to the weekend’s photos and videos in which it seemed no one was in charge: Wagner fighters breezing into a major city with armored vehicles, Mr. Prigozhin chatting with military officers in a command center he had just seized. ........... A statue of Peter the Great, the 18th-century czar who Mr. Putin compared himself to last summer, stood behind him. ........ He also said that Wagner was entirely financed through the state. In doing so, he essentially asserted that the mercenary force was always just a tool of the Kremlin and never beyond his control, despite the fact that Mr. Prigozhin’s fighters took over a major city in hours and reached within 125 miles of Moscow. ........... He claimed that Ukraine’s counteroffensive was failing badly, and that Kyiv had lost dozens of tanks and more than 100 armored vehicles over the last seven days. .

Putin, Prigozhin and the Danger of Disorder They meet so little resistance that the internet is full of pictures of his mercenaries waiting patiently in line to buy coffee: “Hey, could you put a lid on that? I don’t want it to spill on my tank!” ........... But then, just as suddenly, as Prigozhin’s men got within 120 miles of Moscow, he apparently caught wind that his convoy on the open highway would be sitting ducks to a determined air attack. So Prigozhin opted for a plea bargain, arranged by the president of Belarus, and called off his revolution — sorry, didn’t mean it, I was just trying to point out some problems with the Russian Army — and everyone called it a day. ........... the Russian president told him that he wanted to kill his traitorous mercenary commander, to “squash him like a bug.” .......... a script that is still playing out, as the analog Putin tries to keep pace on state-run Russian TV while the digitally savvy Prigozhin continues to run circles around him on Telegram. .......... It was the broad and sustained coalition Biden assembled to confront Putin in Ukraine that ripped the facade off Putin’s Potemkin village. .......... Biden understood from the start that Putin “is the epicenter of an anti-American, antidemocratic, fascist constellation that needs to be defeated, not negotiated with.” ........ Putin has long ruled with two instruments: fear and money, covered with a cloak of nationalism. ........... fear has now left the building in Moscow. With Putin’s aura of invincibility having at least taken a hit, others could soon challenge him ......... the deep fears of Russians about any return to the early 1990s chaos after the fall of the Soviet Union and how grateful many still are for the order that Putin restored. ........... we in the West have as much to fear from Putin’s weakness as his strength.......... U.S. officials argue that Putin’s strategy is to exhaust the Ukrainian Army of its 155-millimeter howitzer artillery shells, the mainstay of its ground forces, as well as of its antiaircraft interceptors, so its ground forces would be naked to Russian airpower and then try to hold on until the Western allies are exhausted or Donald Trump gets re-elected and Putin can get a dirty deal where he saves face in Ukraine. .......... offense is harder and the Russians are now really dug in and have laid mines all across their defense lines, which is why the Ukrainian counteroffensive has been off to a slow start. .......... “In the first year of this war, when Russia was on the offensive, every day that it was not winning, it was losing. In the second year, every day that Ukraine is not winning it, it is losing.” ............ Putin’s army has gotten better at pushing authority down to the officers on the front lines and using drones extensively .............. “When Putin came in, he bulldozed or subverted all political and social structures outside the Kremlin.” .......... “Longer term, historically, successors to Russia’s reactionary rulers are often more liberal, especially early in their term: Alexander I after Paul I, Alexander II after Nicholas I, Khrushchev after Stalin, Gorbachev after Andropov. So if we can get through a transition from Putin, there is some hope.” ............ As much as I detest Putin, I detest disorder even more, because when a big state cracks apart, it is very hard to put it back together. The nuclear weapons and criminality that could spill out of a disintegrated Russia would change the world......... a ticking time bomb spread across 11 time zones. Putin has taken the whole world hostage. ........ If he wins, the Russian people lose. But if he loses and his successor is disorder, the whole world loses. .

Yesterday’s Putin Is Gone On the day of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s ill-fated uprising in Russia, Moscow fell silent. Traffic was sparse on Saturday, and there were few people on the streets. Events were canceled, and parks were closed as virtually everyone stayed inside, glued to the internet as Mr. Prigozhin’s private army convoy headed toward the Russian capital. ........... More than anything, modern Muscovites, like residents of Russia’s other major cities, fear a radical change to their comfortable way of life, particularly a change that might bring martial law or, worse, a widespread draft and border closures. .......... It poked a hole in the Kremlin’s campaign to assure Russians that everything is fine — that the economy is booming, that the war in Ukraine won’t come for them, that the military is focused on winning. .......... His statements about the war in Ukraine, for instance, have been wildly contradictory in recent weeks. First, he said that to defeat the enemy in Ukraine, Russians should tighten their belts and be ready to live like North Koreans. Not long after, he took an altogether different tack: There was no need for an invasion of Ukraine at all, he argued. ........... What did Mr. Prigozhin want to do? Replace Mr. Putin, his teacher in the profession of gaining power? Too ambitious. Unseat his recent nemesis, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu? Too petty and certainly not worth a civil war in Russia’s capital. .......... the revolt gave the world a rare window into the Russian state’s slow decline. No state with functioning institutions can thrive while in pursuit of senseless military expansionism that contradicts the meaning of democratic and civic values, the most important of which is human life .......... During Russia’s transition from democracy to authoritarianism to hybrid totalitarianism, Mr. Putin and his elite inner circle have colonized civil society and built a system of repression. This is not a sign of strength but of desperation. And the outsourcing of critical government functions, like the military role handed to Mr. Prigozhin and his Wagner force, is a glaring manifestation of that weakness. ........... showed Russians that the system could produce a different future — one without Mr. Putin. ......... Populism, finally. Mr. Prigozhin has embodied the voice of populism, sending an anti-elitist message despite being a product of the elite himself. .......... This is why he called the mutiny a “stab in the back.” It took the ultimate insider to show the cracks in the system. ......... Not once has he mentioned Mr. Prigozhin’s name in his speeches since the threat of the coup emerged. What’s the other name Mr. Putin never mentions? The opposition leader who posed such a threat, he threw him in jail: Aleksei Navalny. .

The Terror of Threes in the Heavens and on Earth Physicists have long explored how phenomena in groups of three can sow chaos. A new three-body problem, they warn, could lead to not only global races for new armaments but also thermonuclear war. ......... Isaac Newton was baffled. He was already famous for discovering how gravity holds the universe together and for using that knowledge to predict the movements of celestial bodies, such as the moon’s path around the Earth. Now, by taking the sun’s gravitational tugs into account, he sought to improve his lunar predictions. Instead, it made them worse. ............. As Beijing rapidly expands its nuclear arsenal, they warn that the world of atomic superpowers is about to escalate to three from two. The outcome, they add, compared with the Moscow-Washington standoff, now 70 years old, could represent a dangerous new kind of unthinkable. ........... The looming era could encourage “states to resort to nuclear weapons in a crisis” ........ He cited the natural instabilities observed by physicists and astronomers as a portent. ......... The world’s nuclear thinkers are finding the knotty topic to be as intractable as it was for Newton. ......... the interval from two to three can produce a counterintuitive jump in complexity, as Newton found to his dismay. ........... “Threes are inherently problematic. Things get tricky.” ......... Atoms illustrate the complexity jump. Hydrogen, the simplest, has two main parts — a nucleus and a single circling electron. Physicists can predict with great accuracy the future states of the subatomic particle ............ But helium — the next larger atom — has two electrons. The interplay of those two particles with the element’s nucleus throws them into a complicated state beyond the comprehension of science. “There’s no exact solution,” Dr. Lubell said. “You can’t find out what’s happening to their behavior, their location or anything else. It doesn’t scale. Things get chaotic.” ......... Surprisingly, the jump in disorganization also shows up in the world’s oceans and atmosphere — in whirlpools and maelstroms, tornadoes and hurricanes. ......... Notably, the jump also shows up in human life as groups of three cause social complexities to soar — markedly in young families. Two siblings have one relationship. But a third child results in seven kinds of ties among the siblings — .............. In the cosmos, stars also come in chaotic threesomes. The celebrated science fiction novel “The Three-Body Problem,” by Liu Cixin, features three stars that whirl around one another in unruly orbits. As a result, the planet Trisolaris suffers cycles of blistering heat and icy cold that can reverse in minutes, producing an alien civilization obsessed with survival. ........... The Cold War — for all its terrors and crises — avoided nuclear war in part because its mature structures echoed the binary stability that astronomers see in the heavens and that young families see in the relatively simple play of two children. ........... The looming departure is Beijing’s plan to produce 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, as the Pentagon estimates. If achieved, the rise would represent a fivefold increase from the “minimum deterrent” that Beijing possessed for more than a half-century and would make it a nuclear peer of Moscow and Washington. ........... Moscow could fade into economic and strategic insignificance, leaving a strong Beijing and Washington to “navigate their way to a new bipolar equilibrium.” ............. “I don’t see Russia and China getting together” on atomic strategies, he said. “I see it as two bipolars.” As the Ukraine war rages and Washington has little interaction with Moscow, Dr. Hecker added, now is a good time “to work with the Chinese” in building a two-body relationship. .......... The main worry of military planners is that Beijing will not only achieve weapons parity with Washington but also form a military pact with Moscow. ......... Rather than weapon equivalence, they see endless arms races whose moves and countermoves could raise the risk of miscalculation and war......... an object suspended over three magnets makes unpredictable moves. ...... keeping an uneasy peace among nuclear foes required them to talk, to share concerns and to take modest steps at confidence-building. “We have to keep the lines of communication open and interacting” ........ After all, he added, “None of these nations want to wipe each other off the face of the earth.” .

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28: Modi



How Can ChatGPT Provide Suggestions For Creating Effective Social Media Ads?
How Can ChatGPT Suggest Ways To Improve Social Media Engagement And Grow A Following?
How Can ChatGPT Assist In Creating Email Marketing Campaigns That Generate High Open And Click-through Rates?
How Can ChatGPT Provide Guidance On How To Create Compelling Marketing Copy?
How Can ChatGPT Help Create Effective Landing Pages That Convert Visitors Into Leads Or Customers?
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