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Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman have pointed out that Russia has run huge trade surpluses every year since the early 1990s, which should have led to a large accumulation of overseas assets. Yet official statistics show Russia with only moderately more assets than liabilities abroad. How is that possible? The obvious explanation is that wealthy Russians have been skimming off large sums and parking them abroad.

The sums involved are mind-boggling. Novokmet et al. estimate that in 2015 the hidden foreign wealth of rich Russians amounted to around 85 percent of Russia’s G.D.P. To give you some perspective, this is as if a U.S. president’s cronies had managed to hide $20 trillion in overseas accounts.

, “the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore.” As far as I can tell, the overseas exposure of Russia’s elite has no precedent in history — and it creates a huge vulnerability that the West can exploit.

America’s plutocrats are transforming themselves into hereditary dynasties, thanks to a prolonged campaign against inheritance taxes (or “death taxes” as they have been ingeniously dubbed).

The research firm Cerulli estimates that almost half of the estimated $72.6 trillion that will be transferred to the next generation between 2020 and 2045 will come from the richest 1.5% of households. Welcome to the world of trillion-dollar trust fund babies.

The rise of such dynasties clashes with America’s fundamental belief in equal opportunity and upward mobility. It leads to social closure as the children of the privileged hoard positions at the top of society.

CALIFORNIA -- Californians shouldering the nation's highest gas prices could soon get a tax break, free rides on public transit and up to $800 on debit cards to help pay for fuel under a proposal revealed Wednesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, but how soon could taxpayers start seeing the money?Gas prices have soared in recent weeks, the result of pandemic-induced inflation and Russia's invasion of Ukraine

State governments across the country have been debating what to do about it, with the most popular choices being slashing fuel taxes or offering rebates to taxpayers.Last week, the governors of Maryland and Georgia signed laws temporarily suspending their state's gas taxes, while Georgia on Wednesday also offered $1.1 billion in refunds to taxpayers in a separate action.California's average gas prices hit a new state record Wednesday at $5.88 per gallon, more than $2 higher than it was a year ago, according to AAA. California has the second-highest gas tax in the country at 51 cents per gallon. But the state's Democratic leaders have been wary of suspending the gas tax because they fear oil companies would not pass along the savings to drivers.

RELATED: Are California drivers paying a hidden gas fee?

In a style part investigative journalism, part polemic, the video’s hosts report that one of President Vladimir Putin’s allies, Russian senator Valentina Matviyenko, owns a multimillion-dollar villa on the Italian seafront. The video contrasts the luxurious lifestyle of Matviyenko and her family with footage of dead Russian soldiers, and with images of Russian artillery hitting civilian apartment buildings in Ukraine. A voiceover calls the war “senseless” and “unimaginable.” A slide at the end urges Russians to head to squares in their cities to protest at specific dates and times. In less than a week, the video racked up more than 4 million views.

TV news is dominated by the misleading narrative that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is actually a peace-keeping exercise. Despite this, YouTube has largely been spared from the Kremlin’s crackdown on American social media platforms since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly a month ago.

The app had been a particular venue for activism: Many Russian celebrities spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine in their Instagram stories, and Navalny’s Instagram page posted a statement criticizing the war, and calling on Russians to come out in protest.

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a former chief executive, said it was “somewhat rich that you’re being grilled by people who have never had the opportunity to create a single job.” He suggested that while a union might be necessary at companies “that are not good employers,” that was not the case at Starbucks.

Democrats’ response came at two levels of elevation. First, they said the company was excluding unionized stores from the benefits that Starbucks had introduced since the union campaign began, such as faster accrual of sick leave and a credit-card tipping option for customers, showing that its commitment to such benefits was tenuous.

More broadly, Democrats argued that unions acted as a corrective to a basic power imbalance between workers and management. A company might treat workers generously under one chief executive, then harshly under another. Only a union can ensure that the favorable treatment persists

a significant number of Russian men are still keen to fight — more, in fact, than at the war’s outset. What explains the disconnect?

One obvious reason is fear. Men called up to the army have no choice but to obey, because opposition to the war has effectively been outlawed.

while fear and repression shape responses to the war, that doesn’t explain the readiness — willingness, even — of some Russian men to serve at the front. About 36 percent of Russian men are content to be conscripted, with the most supportive group being men aged 45 and older.

Mr. Altman said he fears what could happen if AI is rolled out into society recklessly. He co-founded OpenAI eight years ago as a research nonprofit, arguing that it’s uniquely dangerous to have profits be the main driver of developing powerful AI models.

He is so wary of profit as an incentive in AI development that he has taken no direct financial stake in the business he built, he said—an anomaly in Silicon Valley, where founders of successful startups typically get rich off their equity. 

His goal, he said, is to forge a new world order in which machines free people to pursue more creative work. In his vision, universal basic income—the concept of a cash stipend for everyone, no strings attached—helps compensate for jobs replaced by AI. Mr. Altman even thinks that humanity will love AI so much that an advanced chatbot could represent “an extension of your will.”

Block, a vehement crypto skeptic, has spent the past 18 months doing forensic blockchain research. He uses open-source tools to follow flows of money between crypto companies, repeatedly demonstrating how shadow banks and nefarious scammers inflate the value of worthless assets in order to generate enormous wealth that exists only on paper.

Crypto hides behind all this complexity, and people hear words like blockchain and get confused. You hear about decentralized networks and mining, and it sounds complicated. But you get right down to it, and it’s just a ledger. It’s just like somebody writing down numbers in a book, and it’s page after page of numbers. That’s all it is.

Block: There’s always stuff going on the blockchain, but these companies also have agreements off of the blockchain, right? Everything they have inside these exchanges is not on the blockchain. It’s using regular old database technology, and it’s not traceable at all. So yeah, a lot of the most important economic activity in crypto has nothing to do with blockchain at all. Huge percentages of people who do this kind of retail crypto trading, they don’t even know how to take what they bought off the exchange and put it in their own wallet.

To hear Bankman-Fried tell it, the idea was to make billions through his crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, and FTX, the exchange he created for it — funneling the proceeds into the humble cause of “bed nets and malaria,” thereby saving poor people’s lives.

ast summer Bankman-Fried was telling The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus something quite different. “He told me that he never had a bed-nets phase, and considered neartermist causes — global health and poverty — to be more emotionally driven,” Lewis-Kraus wrote in August. Effective altruists talk about both “neartermism” and “longtermism.

Bankman-Fried said he wanted his money to address longtermist threats like the dangers posed by artificial intelligence spiraling out of control. As he put it, funding for the eradication of tropical diseases should come from other people who actually cared about tropical diseases: “Like, not me or something.”

the technological accomplishment of Bitcoin is that it invented a decentralized way to create scarcity on computers. Bitcoin demonstrated a way for me to send you a computer message so that you’d have it and I wouldn’t, to move items of computer information between us in a way that limited their supply and transferred possession.

The wild thing about Bitcoin is not that Satoshi invented a particular way for people to send numbers to one another and call them payments. It’s that people accepted the numbers as payments.

That social fact, that Bitcoin was accepted by many millions of people as having a lot of value, might be the most impressive thing about Bitcoin, much more than the stuff about hashing.

That beaver was simply doing what beavers do: altering their surroundings to create a more hospitable place for themselves.

beavers share something rare with humans. We build; they build. We change the landscape; they change the landscape. “Beavers,” she writes, “are the only animals apart from man that radically transform their environment.”

Indigenous people may have hunted beavers for their meat and their fur, but they maintained taboos against overhunting, and some tribes, like the Blackfeet, considered them sacred animals that must never be harmed.

Sam Altman is almost supine

the 37-year-old entrepreneur looks about as laid-back as someone with a galloping mind ever could. Yet the ceo of OpenAi, a startup reportedly valued at nearly $20bn whose mission is to make artificial intelligence a force for good, is not one for light conversation

Joe Lonsdale, 40, is nothing like Mr Altman. He’s sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley, dressed in linen with his hair slicked back. The tech investor and entrepreneur, who has helped create four unicorns plus Palantir, a data-analytics firm worth around $15bn that works with soldiers and spooks

One solution? Go low. “The possibilities are endless,” says Stephen Cheney, owner of Cheney Custom Homes, who is currently constructing a roughly 16,000-square-foot home and guest home with a 5,600-square-foot “bunker” below for a bowling alley, 3-D golf simulator, and spa..origami-wrapper *{margin:0;padding:0;border:0}.origami-top-border{border-top:1px solid #dadada;padding-top:10px}.origami-headline{font-family:Retina,'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:500;color:#333;font-size:18px;line-height:20px;margin-bottom:8px}.origami-image-wrapper{display:flex;margin-bottom:10px;gap:10px}.origami-image-wrapper:last-of-type{margin-bottom:8px}.origami-image{flex:1 1}.origami-image img{max-width:100%;width:100%;height:100%;display:block;max-inline-size:100%}.origami-image figcaption{display:none}.origami-caption{display:block;font-family:Retina,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-weight:300;color:#555;line-height:18.6667px;margin-bottom:4px}.origami-credit{display:block;font-family:Retina,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-weight:300;color:#555;line-height:20px;text-transform:uppercase}@media (min-width:640px){#origami-dac13529-1203-4200-8bb3-a2147cdf655f .origami-hide-on-desktop{display:none}}@media (max-width:639px){#origami-dac13529-1203-4200-8bb3-a2147cdf655f .origami-hide-on-mobile{display:none}}

Basements can dwarf homes above. Designer Andrew Kotchen, a principal at Workshop/APD, is working on a 5,000-square-foot Nantucket abode that will have a 10,000-square-foot basement with a basketball court, garage, bedrooms and a wellness space.

For the 10,000-square-foot grotto, workers are using the same waterproofing technique as Boston’s Big Dig highway project, Mr. Kotchen says. An emergency pump system and thick concrete slab underneath will prevent the foundation from floating up should water levels rise, he says.

These companies, launched with promises to connect the world, to think different, to make information free to all, to democratize technology, have spent much of the past decade making the sorts of moves that large corporations trying to grow ever larger have historically made—embracing profit over safety, market expansion over product integrity, and rent seeking over innovation—but at much greater scale, speed, and impact. Now, ruled by monopolies, marred by toxicity, and overly reliant on precarious labor, Silicon Valley looks like it’s finally run hard up into its limits.

They’re failing utterly to create the futures they’ve long advertised, or even to maintain the versions they were able to muster. Having scaled to immense size, they’re unable or unwilling to manage the digital communities they’ve built

They’re paralyzed when it comes to product development and reduced to monopolistic practices such as charging rents and copying or buying up smaller competitors

taking on the carbon aristocracy, and their most emissions-intensive modes of travel and leisure, may be the best chance we have to boost our collective “climate morale” and increase our appetite for personal sacrifice — from individual behavior changes to sweeping policy mandates.

the diesel fuel powering Mr. Geffen’s boating habit spews an estimated 16,320 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere annually, almost 800 times what the average American generates in a year.

The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitan

some eye-popping new realities about what’s really eating away at U.S.-China relations.

The new, new thing has a lot to do with the increasingly important role that trust, and its absence, plays in international relations, now that so many goods and services that the United States and China sell to one another are digital, and therefore dual use — meaning they can be both a weapon and a tool.

In the last 23 years America has built exactly one sort-of-high-speed rail line, the Acela, serving 15 stops between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Think about that: 900 to 15.

That’s not to say that Silicon Valley’s wealthy aren’t donating their money to charity. Many, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Larry Page, have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to dedicating the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. But much of that money is not making its way out into the community.

The San Francisco Bay Area has rapidly become the richest region in the country—the Census Bureau said last year that median household income was $96,777. It’s a place where $100,000 Teslas are commonplace, “raw water” goes for $37 a jug, and injecting clients with the plasma of youth —a gag on the television show Silicon Valley—is being tried by real companies for just $8,000 a pop.

There are many reasons for this, but one of them is likely the increasing popularity of a certain type of charitable account called a donor-advised fund. These funds allow donors to receive big tax breaks for giving money or stock, but have little transparency and no requirement that money put into them is actually spent.

Valter Longo, a nutrition-obsessed Italian Ph.D. student, wrestled with a lifelong addiction to longevity.

“For studying aging, Italy is just incredible,

Italy has one of the world’s oldest populations, including multiple pockets of centenarians who tantalize researchers searching for the fountain of youth. “It’s nirvana.”

Sullivan first had to dismantle establishment orthodoxies within himself — the same orthodoxies he now sought to undo at Brookings: That globalization and free trade were an unalloyed good, growing economies and improving people’s lives in the process. What was good for the stock market, in effect, was great for everybody. Given enough time, swelling wallets would produce a steady middle class, one that demands its political and human rights from its government. Even the most repressive regimes, the thinking went, would eventually crumble under the weight of inflowing capital. Consistent pressure via greenbacks did the most good for the most people.

“Those were the heady days when the mainstream foreign policy consensus was that globalization was a force for good,” Sullivan recalled in a 2017 interview. There was, of course, reason to think this. Capitalism helped keep the Soviet Union at bay, China still wasn’t a major power and building the economies of enemies turned them into friends. Globalization, per its champions, had the benefit of making many people rich while making the world safer in general and U.S. foreign policy less costly.

“After the Second World War, the United States led a fragmented world to build a new international economic order. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It sustained thrilling technological revolutions. And it helped the United States and many other nations around the world achieve new levels of prosperity. But the last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations,”

Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of “creative destruction,” but the process can be devastating, economically and socially, for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but also whole communities.

It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America.

This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman