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carolinehayter

Back At White House, Trump Still Faces Serious Health Risks : Live Updates: Trump Tests... - 0 views

  • President Trump was discharged from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and returned to the White House Monday evening
  • But he's a few days into his diagnosis with COVID-19, a novel disease that doctors are still learning how best to treat. And medical experts say, he may still be in a danger zone.
  • though largely optimistic about the President's condition,
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  • "may not be out of the woods yet."
  • just because he's going home, he's not completely out of the woods,
  • some of these patients have long-term lung impact
  • Trump's oxygen levels were healthy and he was breathing well, but he declined to answer a reporter question about whether there is evidence of pneumonia on the President's lung scans
  • Masud notes that recovering COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized need to be closely monitored in case they get worse, especially older adults.
  • It's a good sign that he was well enough to be discharged
  • "Individuals that have mild disease to start out with, just mild symptoms, they can in a week or so feel worse, worse enough to be in an ICU," she says.
  • most people with mild symptoms don't get the kind of aggressive treatment that Trump received. He's received an experimental antibody treatment, a course of remdesivir and the steroid dexamethasone, all treatments generally reserved for patients hospitalized with severe symptoms.
  • "It's possible that [the interventions] could make him better sooner," she says. "[But] we don't know really what happens to people that have mild disease and then get treatment with antibody medications, antivirals or steroids. I think we're sort of a little bit in a data-free zone, where we're not sure."
  • he'll be getting his vitals checked at least every day or every couple times a day in order to make sure nothing is happening." He will also need to complete his course of medications — the Remdesivir and dexamethasone
  • The President did have a fever, fatigue and a mild cough late last week, but hasn't had fever in 72 hours, his doctors said.
  • confusion, issues with memory, fatigue and not being able to catch their breath
  • Though Trump is not on oxygen now, his physicians did disclose he had "several little temporary drops in his oxygen" and took supplemental oxygen twice.
  • Masud says if he had a patient with Trump's profile — male, over 70 years and overweight — who was hospitalized for a few days and received aggressive treatments, he would want to monitor the patient's oxygen levels closely even after they went home.
  • We like to watch them for a day or two to make sure there's no relapse because we've had patients who relapsed also and required oxygen, especially when they become active ... they get tired and they can't catch their breath."
  • also monitor markers of inflammation
  • When speaking with reporters, Conley said the President would be closely monitored by the medical team at the White House at least through the weekend. "If we can get through Monday with him remaining the same or improving, better yet, then we will all take that final, big sigh of relief," he said.
  • one of the key things which has been shown to help patients recover is having good sleep, long duration of sleep
  • With a grueling election season ahead of him, lack of sleep and adequate breaks could hurt Trump's recovery, he adds.
anonymous

In Florida, Biden Says 'I Wasn't Surprised' by Trump's Diagnosis - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Wasn’t Surprised
  • he wished the president a speedy recovery but criticized his leadership,
  • s responsible for what happens to them,
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  • I wasn’t surprised,
  • weeting campaign messages,
  • There’s a lot to be concerned about,
  • Democrats have responded to the effort with incredulity, but it has appeared to gain some traction with some South Florida voters.
  • I’m the guy that ran against the socialist, remember
  • decided by a few thousand votes or a single percentage point.”
katherineharron

Stimulus update: Trump calls for negotiations to stop until after Election Day - CNNPol... - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump has ordered his negotiators to halt talks over a new stimulus package,
  • "I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election when, immediately after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill that focuses on hardworking Americans and Small Business,"
  • The decision to pull the plug on the talks is a major blow to Americans still struggling with the fallout from the once-in-a century pandemic and endangers an economic recovery that for months was driven by the initial $2.2 trillion stimulus passed by Congress in the spring.
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  • On Trump call with GOP leaders, the President signaled he wanted a deal and didn't say he was going to pull the plug on the talks, according to a source familiar with the call. 
  • Republican Rep. John Katko, a New York lawmaker who represents a swing district, responded to the news in a tweet saying, "I disagree with the President. With lives at stake, we cannot afford to stop negotiations on a relief package," and adding, "I strongly urge the President to rethink this move."
  • "Today, once again, President Trump showed his true colors: putting himself first at the expense of the country, with the full complicity of the GOP Members of Congress," Pelosi said, adding, "Walking away from coronavirus talks demonstrates that President Trump is unwilling to crush the virus."
  • "The Speaker expressed her disappointment in the President's decision to abandon the economic & health needs of the American people," Hammill said.
  • Pelosi also questioned whether Trump taking a steroid was impacting his thinking, according to two people on the call. Trump was given the corticosteroid drug dexamethasone on Saturday after his oxygen level transiently dipped, White House physician Sean Conley said during a briefing on Sunday.
  • "Believe me, there are people who think that steroids have an impact on thinking," Pelosi told Democrats as she tried to explain her view of what the President was trying to do, a person on the call said. "So I just don't know."
  • Last week, the House of Representatives approved a $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus measure put forward by House Democrats with no bipartisan deal in sight as Pelosi and Mnuchin continued talks.
  • That vote came after House Democrats moved in May to pass a sweeping bill to spend roughly $3 trillion on relief measures, a proposal that similarly generated opposition from Republicans, who dismissed the aid package as a liberal wish list.
dytonka

US Election: Coronavirus looms over vice presidential debate as Pence and Harris quarre... - 1 views

shared by dytonka on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
    • dytonka
       
      False, Biden's raising tax on the top 1%.
  • Harris argued that because the election is underway, Republicans should not attempt to confirm a replacement for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Trump has nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who appears to have a clear path to the seat if Republicans can hew to their scheduled timeline of confirming her by the end of the year.
  • In the opening minutes of the debate, Harris -- 12 feet from Pence and shielded by plexiglass --delivered a swift condemnation of the Trump administration's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, noting that some 210,000 people have died and more than 7.5 million people have contracted the disease.
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  • He also attacked Biden's economic policies, and said that he would raise taxes on working Americans that would harm the nation's economic recovery.
ethanshilling

Immunity to the Coronavirus May Last Years, New Data Hint - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Blood samples from recovered patients suggest a powerful, long-lasting immune response, researchers reported.
  • How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study
  • Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come.
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  • “That amount of memory would likely prevent the vast majority of people from getting hospitalized disease, severe disease, for many years,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology who co-led the new study.
  • A study published last week also found that people who have recovered from Covid-19 have powerful and protective killer immune cells even when antibodies are not detectable.
  • These studies “are all by and large painting the same picture, which is that once you get past those first few critical weeks, the rest of the response looks pretty conventional,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona
  • A small number of infected people in the new study did not have long-lasting immunity after recovery, perhaps because of differences in the amounts of coronavirus they were exposed to.
  • Although antibodies in the blood are needed to block the virus and forestall a second infection — a condition known as sterilizing immunity — immune cells that “remember” the virus more often are responsible for preventing serious illness.
  • More often, people become infected a second time with a particular pathogen, and the immune system recognizes the invader and quickly extinguishes the infection. The coronavirus in particular is slow to do harm, giving the immune system plenty of time to kick into gear.
  • “It may be terminated fast enough that not only are you not experiencing any symptoms but you are not infectious,” Dr. Sette said.
  • Dr. Sette and his colleagues recruited 185 men and women, aged 19 to 81, who had recovered from Covid-19. The majority had mild symptoms not requiring hospitalization
  • The team tracked four components of the immune system: antibodies, B cells that make more antibodies as needed; and two types of T cells that kill other infected cells.
  • He and his colleagues found that antibodies were durable, with modest declines at six to eight months after infection, although there was a 200-fold difference in the levels among the participants.
  • The study is the first to chart the immune response to a virus in such granular detail, experts said. “For sure, we have no priors here,” Dr. Gommerman said. “We’re learning, I think for the first time, about some of the dynamics of these populations through time.”
  • Exactly how long immunity lasts is hard to predict, because scientists don’t yet know what levels of various immune cells are needed to protect from the virus. But studies so far have suggested that even small numbers of antibodies or T and B cells may be enough to shield those who have recovered.
anonymous

COVID Economic Help: What Biden Can And Can't Do : NPR - 0 views

  • Joe Biden will still inherit a fragile economy and a possibly uncooperative Congress, which raises questions about what — if anything — the next president can do on his own to bolster an economic recovery.
  • the best way the president can directly stimulate the economy is by tackling the public health crisis and ensuring vaccines are deployed efficiently.
  • "The No. 1 rule of virus economics, I always say, is that if you want to help the economy, you need to get control of the spread of the virus,"
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  • Biden could help control the virus, some say, by encouraging Americans to wear masks, but he could also mandate changes to make workplaces safer.
  • Many economists believe additional congressional spending is vital right now, but if that's not feasible, then it's worth considering what Biden could do autonomously.
  • "It is my belief that the new president — President Biden — within the first few weeks of becoming president can simply sign an executive order and eliminate, end, $50,000 of student debt from every student,"
  • "Ninety-five percent of all student debt is actually held by the government, and so the secretary of education would have it in his or her authority to cancel a lot of that debt,"
  • "The Trump administration stretched the bounds of what maybe almost anyone thought would be possible with multiple billions of dollars to payments to farmers [and] diversions of billions of dollars from defense budget to building the wall,"
  • The president also adopted a number of COVID-19 relief measures without Congress, issuing a moratorium on evictions and taking disaster money away from FEMA to pay for expanded temporary unemployment assistance.
  • Shierholz also questions how much some of these unilateral moves — such as canceling student loan debt, which might provide a "more equitable economy" in the long run — would actually tackle the immediate financial problems people are facing.
  • But the president can't dole out more money to state governments — Congress would need to allocate those funds.
  • "The thing he'll have to resort to is trying to lean on his nearly 50 years of experience in Washington," Shierholz said. "That is what it will come down to. Can President Biden convince [current Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell to move on some of that stuff because that is what it will take to get the stimulus that is needed."
martinelligi

Biden Immigration Plan May Fall Short Of Activists' Demands : NPR - 0 views

  • Immigration activists are gearing up for a fight to push President-elect Joe Biden to do more to counter the measures taken by President Trump that made life more uncomfortable for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the county.
  • But some immigrant-rights groups like the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, Movimiento Cosecha and United We Dream want more. "We need advocates and people who wake up every day thinking about how they're going to fix the system so that people like myself and people like my family and others who are seeking refuge here have the ability to have a better life,"
  • Their requests include returning undocumented immigrants wrongfully deported under Trump, stopping detention of asylum seekers, expanding the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and using other executive powers like Temporary Protected Status to protect more undocumented immigrants.
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  • While Biden promised to reverse Trump's most restrictive immigration policies, he did not include immigration among his four top priorities: the coronavirus pandemic, economic recovery, racial equity and climate change.
  • Biden is largely expected to go back to the priorities that were in place at the end of the Obama administration.
  • the Biden administration must be careful not to unwind Trump's restrictions too quickly before getting their own processing system in place — or they will risk a new surge at the border.
Javier E

What the War on Terror Cost America | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

  • At a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush announced a new type of war, a “war on terror.” He laid out its terms: “We will direct every resource at our command—every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war—to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.” Then he described what that defeat might look like: “We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest.”
  • If Bush’s words outlined the essential objectives of the global war on terror, 20 years later, the United States has largely achieved them. Osama bin Laden is dead. The surviving core members of al Qaeda are dispersed and weak. Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, communicates only through rare propaganda releases, and al Qaeda’s most powerful offshoot, the Islamic State (or ISIS), has seen its territorial holdings dwindle to insignificance in Iraq and Syria.
  • Most important, however, is the United States’ success in securing its homeland.
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  • Since 9/11, the United States has suffered, on average, six deaths per year due to jihadi terrorism. (To put this in perspective, in 2019, an average of 39 Americans died every day from overdoses involving prescription opioids.) If the goal of the global war on terror was to prevent significant acts of terrorism, particularly in the United States, then the war has succeeded.
  • But at what cost?
  • Every war the United States has fought, beginning with the American Revolution, has required an economic model to sustain it with sufficient bodies and cash.
  • Like its predecessors, the war on terror came with its own model: the war was fought by an all-volunteer military and paid for largely through deficit spending.
  • It should be no surprise that this model, which by design anesthetized a majority of Americans to the costs of conflict, delivered them their longest war; in his September 20, 2001, speech, when describing how Americans might support the war effort, Bush said, “I ask you to live your lives and hug your children.”
  • This model has also had a profound effect on American democracy, one that is only being fully understood 20 years later.
  • Funding the war through deficit spending allowed it to fester through successive administrations with hardly a single politician ever mentioning the idea of a war tax. Meanwhile, other forms of spending—from financial bailouts to health care and, most recently, a pandemic recovery stimulus package—generate breathless debate.
  • , technological and social changes have numbed them to its human cost. The use of drone aircraft and other platforms has facilitated the growing automation of combat, which allows the U.S. military to kill remotely. This development has further distanced Americans from the grim costs of war
  • the absence of a draft has allowed the U.S. government to outsource its wars to a military caste, an increasingly self-segregated portion of society, opening up a yawning civil-military divide as profound as any that American society has ever known.
  • For now, the military remains one of the most trusted institutions in the United States and one of the few that the public sees as having no overt political bias. How long will this trust last under existing political conditions? As partisanship taints every facet of American life, it would seem to be only a matter of time before that infection spreads to the U.S. military.
  • From Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. The United States today meets both conditions.
  • Historically, this has invited the type of political crisis that leads to military involvement (or even intervention) in domestic politics.
  • How imminent is the threat from these states? When it comes to legacy military platforms—aircraft carriers, tanks, fighter planes—the United States continues to enjoy a healthy technological dominance over its near-peer competitors. But its preferred platforms might not be the right ones. Long-range land-based cruise missiles could render large aircraft carriers obsolete. Advances in cyberoffense could make tech-reliant fighter aircraft too vulnerable to fly
  • It is not difficult to imagine a more limited counterterrorism campaign in Afghanistan that might have brought bin Laden to justice or a strategy to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that would not have involved a full-scale U.S. invasion. The long, costly counterinsurgency campaigns that followed in each country were wars of choice.
  • Both proved to be major missteps when it came to achieving the twin goals of bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice and securing the homeland. In fact, at several moments over the past two decades, the wars set back those objectives
  • Few years proved to be more significant in the war on terror than 2011. Aside from being the year bin Laden was killed, it also was the year the Arab Spring took off and the year U.S. troops fully withdrew from Iraq. If the great strategic blunder of the Bush administration was to put troops into Iraq, then the great strategic blunder of the Obama administration was to pull all of them out. Both missteps created power vacuums. The first saw the flourishing of al Qaeda in Iraq; the second gave birth to that group’s successor, ISIS.
  • But what makes the war on terror different from other wars is that victory has never been based on achieving a positive outcome; the goal has been to prevent a negative one.
  • How, then, do you declare victory? How do you prove a negative?
  • The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq represented a familiar type of war, with an invasion to topple a government and liberate a people, followed by a long occupation and counterinsurgency campaigns.
  • In addition to blood and treasure, there is another metric by which the war on terror can be judged: opportunity cost
  • For the past two decades, while Washington was repurposing the U.S. military to engage in massive counterinsurgency campaigns and precision counterterrorism operations, Beijing was busy building a military to fight and defeat a peer-level competitor.
  • Today, the Chinese navy is the largest in the world. It boasts 350 commissioned warships to the U.S. Navy’s roughly 290.
  • it now seems inevitable that the two countries’ militaries will one day reach parity. China has spent 20 years building a chain of artificial islands throughout the South China Sea that can effectively serve as a defensive line of unsinkable aircraft carriers.
  • Culturally, China has become more militaristic, producing hypernationalist content such as the Wolf Warrior action movies.
  • After the century opened with 9/11, conventional wisdom had it that nonstate actors would prove to be the greatest threat to U.S. national security
  • Nonstate actors have compromised national security not by attacking the United States but by diverting its attention away from state actors. It is these classic antagonists—China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia—that have expanded their capabilities and antipathies in the face of a distracted United States.
  • it may seem odd to separate the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the war on terror,
  • The greatest minds in the U.S. military have now, finally, turned their attention to these concerns, with the U.S. Marine Corps, for example, shifting its entire strategic focus to a potential conflict with China. But it may be too late.
  • Americans’ fatigue—and rival countries’ recognition of it—has limited the United States’ strategic options. As a result, presidents have adopted policies of inaction, and American credibility has eroded.
  • When Obama went to legislators to gain support for a military strike against the Assad regime, he encountered bipartisan war fatigue that mirrored the fatigue of voters, and he called off the attack. The United States’ redline had been crossed, without incident or reprisal.
  • Fatigue may seem like a “soft” cost of the war on terror, but it is a glaring strategic liability.
  • This proved to be true during the Cold War when, at the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and when, in the war’s aftermath, in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Because it was embroiled in a war in the first case and reeling from it in the second, the United States could not credibly deter Soviet military aggression
  • It is no coincidence that China, for instance, has felt empowered to infringe on Hong Kong’s autonomy and commit brazen human rights abuses against its minority Uyghur population. When American power recedes, other states fill the vacuum.
  • U.S. adversaries have also learned to obfuscate their aggression. The cyberwar currently being waged from Russia is one example, with the Russian government claiming no knowledge of the spate of ransomware attacks emanating from within its borders. With Taiwan, likewise, Chinese aggression probably wouldn’t manifest in conventional military ways. Beijing is more likely to take over the island through gradual annexation, akin to what it has done with Hong Kong, than stage an outright invasion.
  • From time to time, people have asked in what ways the war changed me. I have never known how to answer this question because ultimately the war didn’t change me; the war made me
  • Today, I have a hard time remembering what the United States used to be like. I forget what it was like to be able to arrive at the airport just 20 minutes before a flight. What it was like to walk through a train station without armed police meandering around the platforms. Or what it was like to believe—particularly in those heady years right after the Cold War—that the United States’ version of democracy would remain ascendant for all time and that the world had reached “the end of history.”
  • Today, the United States is different; it is skeptical of its role in the world, more clear-eyed about the costs of war despite having experienced those costs only in predominantly tangential ways. Americans’ appetite to export their ideals abroad is also diminished, particularly as they struggle to uphold those ideals at home, whether in violence around the 2020 presidential election, the summer of 2020’s civil unrest, or even the way the war on terror compromised the country through scandals from Abu Ghraib prison to Edward Snowden’s leaks. A United States in which Band of Brothers has near-universal appeal is a distant memory.
  • When I told him that even though we might have lost the war in Afghanistan, our generation could still claim to have won the war on terror, he was skeptical. We debated the issue but soon let it drop. The next day, I received an email from him. A southerner and a lover of literature, he had sent me the following, from The Sound and the Fury:
  • No battle is ever won. . . . They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
lucieperloff

How a Stunning Lagoon in Spain Turned Into 'Green Soup' - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Tons of dead fish have washed ashore as the once-crystalline waters became choked with algae.
  • But they agree that nitrate-filled runoffs from fertilizers from nearby farms have heavily damaged the waters where oysters and sea-horses used to thrive
  • He also put some of the blame on local politicians, accusing them of long downplaying the contamination
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  • And waste produced by a nearby electricity plan and oil refinery has damaged the giant Berre lagoon in southern France.
  • When five tons of dead fish washed up in August near her house on the lagoon, she decided that she was ready to move.
  • Madrid says the responsibility lies at the local level.
  • “I unfortunately do think that political colors matter,” she said.
  • ut in September, the Spanish Institute of Oceanography published a report that rejected the idea that excessive summer heat helped kill the fish.
  • the contamination comes from water seeping into the lagoon from an aquifer in which toxic substances have accumulated over decades.
  • Laggards should get government incentives to invest in green technology rather than “stones thrown by people who have no knowledge of our modern irrigation systems,” he added.
  • She said at least 75 percent of the lagoon’s water contamination came from runoffs.
  • The lagoon was proof that “one of the major problems of Europe is the contamination of its waters by nitrates,” he said.
  • Mr. Morán said that his central government planned to use 300 million euros, or about $350 million, from the European Union’s pandemic recovery fund to protect the Mar Menor’s natural habitat and waters.
Javier E

Opinion | What Europe Can Teach Us About Jobs - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Americans have a hard time learning from foreign experience. Our size and the role of English as an international language (which reduces our incentive to learn other tongues) conspire to make us oblivious to alternative ways of living and the possibilities of change.
  • Unfortunately, any suggestion that Europe does something we might want to emulate tends to be shouted down with cries of “socialism.”
  • an under-discussed aspect of the current economic scene: Europe’s comparative success in getting workers idled by the pandemic back into the labor force.
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  • the Great Resignation, it turns out, is largely an American phenomenon. European nations have been much more successful than we have at getting people back to work. In France, in particular, employment and labor force participation are now well above prepandemic levels. What explains this difference?
  • Europe, on the other hand, mainly relied on job retention schemes — government aid intended to keep people on employer payrolls even if they weren’t working at the moment.
  • where European labor support helped keep workers linked to their old jobs, facilitating a rapid return, U.S. policy allowed many of those links to be severed, making an employment recovery harder.
  • Perhaps one reason Europeans aren’t engaging in an American-style Great Resignation is that they don’t hate their jobs quite as much.
  • a significant number may have realized that low-paying jobs with lousy working conditions weren’t worth having
  • some jobs that are grueling and poorly paid here are less awful on the other side of the Atlantic. Famously, in Denmark McDonald’s pays more than $20 an hour and offers six weeks of paid vacation each year
  • the U.S. does stand out among wealthy countries for having a low minimum wage, for offering very little vacation time and for failing to offer parental and sick leave
Javier E

Men's groups reject masculinity promoted by Trump, Josh Hawley - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • connection that U.S. men increasingly say is missing from their lives, leaving them lonely, disconnected and, often, angry. Earlier this year, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared the country to be in an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” National suicide rates have risen in recent decades, and men in 2021 died by suicide at a rate nearly four times higher than women, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
  • American men’s isolation stems in large part from a pervasive cultural belief, experts say: that men should be self-reliant and hide their emotions, especially from other men.
  • some men are looking for alternatives, and some are finding them in fellowship organizations with names like EvryMan, the ManKind Project and the Journeymen, the group doing breathwork that night in D.C.
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  • “If a boy expresses too much emotion or too much need for connection, is too giddy, is too joyful, what we say to that boy is, ‘What are you, a sissy? What are you, a girl? What are you, gay?’” Greene said. “It’s your job to dominate those around you, or you will lose status, and that will increase the number of individuals above you who can dish out dominance to you. And what we find is that in that system, in that structure, men are constantly in competition with each other and constantly driven by this sense of anxiety.”
  • many boys are raised with what she called “the cowboy mentality — ‘I can do it myself, I don’t need others,’” often perpetuated by “the father wanting the son to man up and not be so soft. … The whole model of getting help is part of so-called femininity.”
  • As a result, she said, “Women end up being the therapist for their husband, and more are getting sick of it.”
  • Today, a battle over the face of American masculinity is underway. Popular music, action movies and leaders like former president Donald Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), author of the recent book “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” push for a more aggressive model.
  • “We have all these groups that are just spontaneously coming into being, as men say, ‘I want a circle of men that I can call my brothers, I want a circle of men that I can express what’s going on for me emotionally, and I want a circle of men who will hold me accountable in positive ways,’”
  • The toll of American loneliness is steep. The condition can increase the risk of premature death to a degree comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and correlates with an increased risk of heart disease, stroke and dementia. “Humans are wired for social connection,” said Murthy, the surgeon general, “but we’ve become more isolated over time.”
  • “People here have gone through a lot in our lives, some in the last few months. As we move through the world as men, sometimes it can be hard to have a sense of that,” he said. “All that which has been unnamed and unfelt, it’s actually been felt, it just hasn’t been dealt with. We put up a stiff arm and won’t let the other guy into our lane of traffic, we don’t want to make eye contact because if we did, we’d have to let him into our lane and show up really differently in the world.”
  • As a man, he said, “you can sense that there are deeper things that are happening in men’s lives, but when you bring it up the subject is changed. If guys’ lives are a house, they only let you see the living room with the plastic on the furniture. And you’re like, ‘Hey, I’m hearing some baying in the basement.’ But we don’t talk about that.”
  • Going around the circle, they began to talk about what lurked in the basement. One had lost his sister a few months earlier. Many talked of fraught or violent relationships with their fathers — or of not having a father around.
  • The theme of the Journeymen’s gathering in April, their first in-person meeting in D.C. since the pandemic, was “heartbreak and grief.” As the sky turned cobalt, Williamson implored the men to sense their emotions and “let them flow freely,” to raise their voices and “release them into the darkness.”
  • “I saw guys suffering with their sense of identity, their sense of self-worth, their sense of belonging, their sense of their rights to their pain,” he said. “I’d see a guy who’d be drinking really heavily. … They’d come over and start talking about their relationship or lack of relationship. Next minute they’d sober up, they didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”
  • Cogan, now 47, had been working through his own personal difficulties: the end of a previous relationship; his at-times fraught relationship with his father; the bullying he had suffered as a child. Now, he said, he was often the only man his male friends were talking to. “My intuition is that I was modeling openness,” he said. “They saw me talk about my relationship, crying, going to therapy. They saw me as a safe harbor.”
  • For many men, he said, “The world isn’t safe. There’s no expectation that a guy in our culture can say, ‘I’m scared, I’ve got fear.’ There’s no expectation that a guy can ask for safety in our culture. A lot of the guys I know, they can’t even do this with their partner.”
  • in recent years, Way said, men have witnessed societal movements such as the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter, which also challenged old paradigms. “Then covid happens, and we hit the bottom of the barrel on connections,” she noted. “We can’t walk out of our homes. We woke up to see we are a mess, and we’re not having the connections we want, and we’re not actually happy.
Javier E

China's Brain Drain Threatens Its Future - WSJ - 0 views

  • the trend of rising emigration actually predates the pandemic—and coincides with the emergence of several other important economic trends since 2017, including higher youth unemployment, the state’s renewed grip on the financial sector and an apparently structural downtrend in Chinese growth.
  • Rebounding emigration is also striking in the context of a declining overall birthrate, and suggests that Beijing must do far more to convince talent, both domestic and foreign, that China is a good place to put down roots if it wants to avoid a steeper growth slowdown in the years ahead.
  • China, unlike the U.S., has always been a nation of emigrants—its diaspora is among the world’s largest and most influential.
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  • the scope of emigration has been highly variable over time. For most of the early 2000s around half a million residents, on net, were leaving every year according to United Nations data. But after 2008 that number fell sharply—probably in part due to China’s strong recovery from the global financial crisis while the U.S. and other major economies struggled. The early 2010s, a period of strong Chinese growth, also coincided with the slow erosion of China’s working-age labor force, creating opportunities for both ambitious Chinese citizens and foreigners willing to relocate there.
  • by the late 2010s, this trend had begun to reverse. Net emigration from China, which had fallen as low as 125,000 in 2012 according to U.N. data, had rebounded to nearly 300,000 by 2018
  • net emigration in 2022 at over 300,000 again, after a net drain of about 200,000 in 2021.
  • Net outflows of high net-worth individuals (with more than $1 million in assets) from China were steady at around 9,000 a year for most of the early 2010s. But in the late 2010s, that number started rocketing up: In 2017, net emigration by the wealthy was over 11,000 individuals, and by 2019 it was more than 15,000.
  • Higher numbers of wealthy individuals leaving could indicate faster wealth creation itself—and ambitious emigrants can help facilitate flows of capital and technology back to China.
  • this latest emigration wave is also taking place at a time of weakening growth and an increased populist tilt by Beijing. It is also happening during a fast rise in postsecondary education that is creating a growing supply of credentialed workers. Those same workers are facing anemic job growth in the service sectors where many of them would find employment
  • Since 2017, average annual service-sector employment growth has been just 0.4%, according to figures from data provider CEIC. Excluding 2022, when much of the economy was shut due to Covid-19 lockdowns, only moves that average up to 1.4%. In the five years through 2017 on the other hand, service jobs grew an average of 4.4% a year.
  • Rising net emigration also mirrors much smaller influxes of foreign talent in recent years—another trend that threatens to slow China’s climb up the technological ladder. Foreign residents of Shanghai and Beijing numbered just 163,954 and 62,812 in 2020, according to official data, down 21% and 42%, respectively, since 2010.
  • For much of the new millennium, China has been a place where the ambitious, hardworking and lucky could often get ahead. But in today’s China—more focused on security and control, less on growth—it is no longer clear how true that really is.
Javier E

China's Young People Can't Find Jobs. Xi Jinping Says to 'Eat Bitterness.' - The New Yo... - 0 views

  • China’s young people are facing record high unemployment as the country’s recovery from the pandemic is fluttering. They’re struggling professionally and emotionally. Yet the Communist Party and the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, are telling them to stop thinking they are above doing manual work or moving to the countryside. They should learn to “eat bitterness,” Mr. Xi instructed, using a colloquial expression that means to endure hardships.
  • A record 11.6 million college graduates are entering the work force this year, and one in five young people are unemployed. China’s leadership is hoping to persuade a generation that gre
  • up amid mostly rising prosperity to accept a different reality
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  • The youth unemployment rate is a statistic the Chinese Communist Party takes seriously because it believes that idle young people could threaten its rule. Mao Zedong sent more than 16 million urban youth, including Mr. Xi, to toil in the fields of the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. The return of these jobless young people to cities after the Cultural Revolution, in part, forced the party to embrace self-employment, or jobs outside the state planned economy.
  • Many people are struggling emotionally. A young woman in Shanghai named Ms. Zhang, who graduated last year with a master’s degree in city planning, has sent out 130 resumes and secured no job offers and only a handful of interviews. Living in a 100-square-foot bedroom in a three-bedroom apartment, she barely gets by with a monthly income of less than $700 as a part-time tutor.“At my emotional low point, I wished I were a robot,” she said. “I thought to myself if I didn’t have emotions, I would not feel helpless, powerless and disappointed. I would be able to keep sending out résumés.”
  • “To ask us to endure hardships is to try to shift focus from the anemic economic growth and the decreasing job opportunities,” said Ms. Zhang, who, like most people I interviewed for this column, wanted to be identified with only her family name because of safety concerns. A few others want to be identified only with their English names.
  • Mr. Xi’s instruction to move to the countryside is equally out of touch with young people, as well as with China’s reality. Last December he told officials “to systematically guide college graduates to rural areas.” On Youth Day a few weeks ago, he responded to a letter by a group of agriculture students who are working in rural areas, commending them for “seeking self-inflicted hardships.” The letter, also published on the front page of People’s Daily, triggered discussions about whether Mr. Xi would start a Maoist-style campaign to send urban youths to the countryside.
  • In the hierarchical Chinese society, manual jobs are looked down upon. Farming ranks even lower because of the huge wealth gap between cities and rural areas. “Women wouldn’t consider to become my girlfriends if they knew that I deliver meals,” said Wang. He would fare even worse in the marriage market if he becomes a farmer.
  • Out of 13 Chinese graduates from his school, the five who chose to stay in the West have found jobs at Silicon Valley or Wall Street firms. Only three out of the eight who returned to China have secured job offers. Steven moved back to China earlier this year to be closer to his mother.
  • Now after months of fruitless job hunting, he, like almost every young worker I interviewed for this column, sees no future for himself in China.“My best way out,” he said, “is to persuade my parents to let me run away from China.”
Javier E

New Measure of Climate's Toll: Disasters Are Now Common Across US - The New York Times - 0 views

  • a report released on Wednesday uses a different measure: Which parts of the country have suffered the greatest number of federally declared disasters?
  • That designation is reserved for disasters so severe, they overwhelm the ability of state and local officials to respond. The report finds that disasters like these have become alarmingly common.
  • From 2011 to the end of last year, 90 percent of U.S. counties have experienced a flood, hurricane, wildfire or other calamity serious enough to receive a federal disaster declaration, according to the report, and more than 700 counties suffered five or more such disasters.
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  • During that same period, 29 states had, on average, at least one federally declared disaster a year somewhere within their borders. Five states have experienced at least 20 disasters since 2011.
  • The numbers exclude disaster declarations related to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • “Climate change is here,”
  • “Every single taxpayer is paying for climate change.”
  • By focusing on federally declared disasters, the report is able to equalize those differences, offering something close to a true accounting of which places are most exposed to climate shocks they cannot cope with on their own.
  • At the top of that list are five counties that have each experienced, on average, more than a disaster a year since 2011. Those counties are concentrated in two areas: Southern Louisiana (where counties are called parishes) and eastern Kentucky.
  • Louisiana outpaces the rest of the United States in another regard. Over the past decade, the state has received more federal disaster money per capita — $1,736 for each resident — than anywhere else in the nation, the report found. Only New York State comes close, at $1,348.
  • Since 2011, California has received 25 federal disaster declarations, including for wildfires in 2017 and 2018 that resulted in $2.5 billion in federal money to rebuild public infrastructure. Mississippi and Oklahoma have each suffered 22 disasters. Iowa has had 21, mostly for severe storms and flooding
  • Not every type of disaster is associated with climate change. For example, it’s unclear whether there is a link between rising temperatures and earthquakes. But scientists have become increasingly convinced that a warming world is contributing to worsening floods, hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme weather events.
  • The data also shows the areas least exposed to unmanageable climate shocks, at least so far. States in the Midwest, including Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan, are among those with the smallest number of federal disaster declarations, with an average of roughly one disaster every two years.
  • At the bottom of the list is Nevada, which has had just three federal disaster declarations since 2011. Next door, Arizona has had just six. Yet, Nevada and Arizona ranked highest for heat-related deaths from 2018 to 2021, according to the report
  • “Heat has the highest mortality of all climate impacts, but their disaster declarations were so low,” Ms. Chester said. The reason: Federal disaster declarations focus on property damage more than direct human consequences like illness, injury or death.
  • “By better understanding risk,” she said, “we can more effectively take action together to accelerate resilience and adaptation in our nation’s most at-risk and disadvantaged communities.”
  • To pay for that new spending, Rebuild by Design proposes, states should impose a 2 percent surcharge on insurance premiums.
  • Using an insurance surtax to pay for disasters is a strategy that is already in use, in a sense. As the report notes, Florida levies surcharges on private insurance policies to make up for shortfalls in its state-run insurance program — something that’s likely to happen in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.
  • Rebuild by Design suggests reversing the chronology. Rather than taxing insurance payments to pay for disaster recovery, a state would come up with additional funds before a storm, then use that money to better prepare communities before a disaster strikes, perhaps making it unnecessary for the federal government to declare a disaster at all.
criscimagnael

Shanghai Reopens After Nearly 2-Month Covid Lockdown - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As Shanghai eased one of the longest, toughest lockdowns anywhere since the pandemic began, many of its 25 million residents celebrated being free to move around. The reopening on Wednesday came after Shanghai’s two-month siege against Covid had set off public anger over shortages of food and medicine as well as the harsh enforcement of quarantine rules.
  • For now at least, that anger gave way to relief after the government wound back many restrictions. During the day, people — all wearing masks — basked in the novelty of previously mundane pleasures like meeting friends and relatives, strolling in parks, and driving through streets that had been largely empty since early April. Hairdressers were, as in many cities freed from lockdowns, busy. Subway lines were open but quiet.
  • With daily infections now falling to low double digits, the government has launched an urgent effort to revive factories, companies and supply lines vital to China’s sagging economy. On Tuesday, Shanghai recorded 15 infections.
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  • The uncertainty and anxiety about the future could impede Shanghai’s — and China’s — recovery. Officials have been cautiously lifting some restrictions on residents and selected companies since midway through May.
  • Over 10 million students in Chinese universities, many in Shanghai, are about to graduate and enter the job market.
  • Despite the easing, hundreds of thousands of Shanghai residents remain locked in their housing compounds because of recent infections in their areas. Under China’s stringent rules, being in the vicinity of a confirmed infection is enough to land someone in a quarantine facility.
  • Mr. Xi and other Chinese officials maintain that their zero-tolerance strategy has spared the country the millions of deaths that the virus has inflicted in the United States, Europe and other richer countries. China has officially recorded 5,226 deaths from Covid, though the real number is probably higher, because China typically classifies Covid-related deaths more narrowly than many other countries. Shanghai has counted 588 deaths from the recent outbreak.
lilyrashkind

Start-up investors issue warnings as boom times 'unambiguously over' - 0 views

  • Y Combinator said companies have to “understand that the poor public market performance of tech companies significantly impacts VC investing.”
  • Slow your hiring! Cut back on marketing! Extend your runway!The venture capital missives are back, and they’re coming in hot.With tech stocks cratering through the first five months of 2022 and the Nasdaq on pace for its second-worst quarter since the 2008 financial crisis, start-up investors are telling their portfolio companies they won’t be spared in the fallout, and that conditions could be worsening.
  • It’s a stark contrast to 2021, when investors were rushing into pre-IPO companies at sky-high valuations, deal-making was happening at a frenzied pace and buzzy software start-ups were commanding multiples of 100 times revenue. That era reflected an extended bull market in tech, with the Nasdaq Composite notching gains in 11 of the past 13 years, and venture funding in the U.S. reaching $332.8 billion last year, up sevenfold from a decade earlier. according to the National Venture Capital Association.
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  • As it turns out, technology demand only increased and the Nasdaq had its best year since 2009, spurred on by low interest rates and a surge in spending on products for remote work.
  • “Companies that recently raised at very high prices at the height of valuation inflation may be grappling with high burn rates and near-term challenges growing into those valuations,” Shakir told CNBC in an email. “Others that were more dilution-sensitive and chose to raise less may now need to consider avenues for extending runway that would have seemed unpalatable to them just months ago.”
  • “Our companies heeded that advice and most companies are now prepared for winter,” Lux wrote.
  • “This time, many of those tools have been exhausted,” Sequoia wrote. “We do not believe that this is going to be another steep correction followed by an equally swift V-shaped recovery like we saw at the outset of the pandemic.”Sequoia told its companies to look at projects, research and development, marketing and elsewhere for opportunities to cut costs. Companies don’t have to immediately pull the trigger, the firm added, but they should be ready to do it in the next 30 days if needed.
  • And among companies that are still private, staff reductions are underway at Klarna and Cameo, while Instacart is reportedly slowing hiring ahead of an expected initial public offering. Cloud software vendor Lacework announced staffing cuts on Friday, six months after the company was valued at $8.3 billion by venture investors.“We have adjusted our plan to increase our cash runway through to profitability and significantly strengthened our balance sheet so we can be more opportunistic around investment opportunities and weather uncertainty in the macro environment,” Lacework said in a blog post.
  • Shakir agreed with that assessment. “Like many, we at Lux have been advising our companies to think long term, extend runway to 2+ years if possible, take a very close look at reducing burn and improving gross margins, and start to set expectations that near-term future financings are unlikely to look like what they may have expected six or 12 months ago,” she wrote.
  • Lux highlighted one of the painful decisions it expects to see. For several companies, the firm said, “sacrificing people will come before sacrificing valuation.”But venture firms are keen to remind founders that great companies emerge from the darkest of times. Those that prove they can survive and even thrive when capital is in short supply, the thinking goes, are positioned to flourish when the economy bounces back.
  • conditions.”CORRECTION: This story was updated to reflect that cloud software vendor Lacework raised $1.3 billion in growth funding at a valuation of $8.3 billion.
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