tingilinde

the chinese version of the gop

Of of course their machine has firmly established control, but the lying is similar.

a tip of the hat to Roland

 

 

risk and the valley

On the psychology of Silicon Valley and the SVB crash.

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What I think VCs are not very good at is worrying about the downside potential. What I mean by that is: If you read interviews with start-up people, there’s a tremendous amount of puffery. They will say, “This is the greatest product, and we’re going to be the next Facebook” or “the next Google” or the next whatever. “We’ll be the Uber for schoolchildren” or something like that. And there’s usually a sense of unbridled optimism among this crowd.

Banking and finance, however, are the exact opposite. It’s related to something called risk management. So companies that deal with large amounts of money, particularly financial companies, have risk managers. They usually report to a C-suite executive, and they’re very important. Their job is to worry. Their job is to ask, “What are some scenarios in which we could lose a lot of money?” And they try to protect against downside risk. And I think most of the tech companies that have their money in places like SVB are just not thinking about risk management. [Editor’s Note: SVB itself reportedly had no risk officer for most of last year.]

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on the space force

An interview (audio and transcript) with Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno.

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Moskowitz: What would it actually mean to go to war in space?

Armango: Well, a war in space would be devastating. Because it would probably destroy the very domain itself. And so, you know, the world as we know it would be very, very different.

Billings: Yikes. And what would it mean for regular people down on Earth if we did lose some of those capabilities in space?

Armango: I mean, you know, today, especially in modern American life, we benefit from that timing signal from the GPS constellation–that timing signal runs everything from, you know, the power that we're enjoying, to, you know, the blue dot on your cell phone.

I mean, that timing signal is everything, not to mention the positioning and navigation that GPS provides free to the world.

A war in space could, at the, at the low end, disrupt those services. At the high end, it could be destroyed completely and potentially for a very, very long time. Debris lasts in space forever. So I don't even want to put a year on it. It would be decades.

I think we Take it all for granted. I really do

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americans in southern europe

Buying what the locals can't.

 

taxes and the ultrawealthy

They basically don't pay taxes ..  something like a wealth tax is needed.

 

good indoor light

We have a natural affinity for it.

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Over the course of our reporting, we came to think about this light — distinct from the blaze of a fluorescent light bulb — as the warm glow in a Vermeer painting. Dan Kaplan, a New York architect, put this idea in our heads.

When thinking about what an apartment wants that a modern office building often lacks, he wrote in an email:

“The ideal interior condition that you are getting at is perhaps best represented by those beautiful Vermeer paintings (‘The Music Lesson,’ ‘The Milkmaid,’ ‘The Geographer,’ etc.): tall windows (open!), letting soft light fall deeply into tall-ceilinged but relatively shallow rooms.”

Truly the man loved his window light:

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china's depopulation bomb

It's beginning to look like Japan's path.

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It appears to be a common sentiment among young urban women in China. A 2021 survey by China's Communist Youth League of almost 3,000 people between the ages of 18 and 26, found that more than 40% of young women living in cities did not plan to marry - compared to less than 25% of men. This is in part due to rising childcare costs and the ghosts of China's one-child policy.
"Having just one child or no children has become the social norm in China," says Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a prominent critic of the one-child policy.

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heroes of our time

A short talk by Timothy Snyder .. excellent.

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Timothy Snyder is a historian at Yale University, specializing in eastern Europe, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. His books have received widespread acclaim. His most recent book, "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century," explores the everyday ways a citizen can resist the authoritarianism of today. He is also the author of "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning" and, forthcoming in April 2018, "The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America."

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a tip of the hat to David

the gop obsession with a word they can't define

Not that it makes a difference to them..  as long as they can stir their base.

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But the funny thing about "woke" is that, while all Republicans hate it, they don't seem to have any idea how to define it. That was hilariously demonstrated in a viral video clip of conservative author Bethany Mandel falling completely apart when asked in an interview to define "woke," a concept she wrote an entire book denouncing. Mandel couldn't do it.

"So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that, um..." she stammered before admitting it "is something that's very hard to define," and then failing utterly to get close.

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the horny bro wing of the gop

Just what are Republicans these days?

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The debate that Mr. Hefner and Mr. Buckley had about politics in the 1960s has become a defining question for the conservative movement: whether conservatism is a project intended to get people to do something (even things they do not wish to do) or to protect people from being told what to do.

There is a conservatism of ideology and the “three-legged stool” and there is a conservatism of “feels,” so to speak, a conservatism that doesn’t really care about tax credits or ethanol policy but has a distinct sense that there used to be something better than there is now and that what is to come is likely to be worse. But what if what used to be was something more libertine? What if some conservatives aren’t longing for Ronald Reagan’s heyday but for the time when women were hotter, you could put up a topless calendar in your cubicle at the office without fear of reprisal from some mean H.R. lady, and nobody told you what to do?

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