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in title, tags, annotations or urlChartbook-Unhedged Exchange: China under pressure, a debate - 0 views
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China’s investment-driven, debt-heavy development model needs replacement. Its geopolitical and economic position will become more precarious if the globe’s authoritarian and liberal democratic blocs decouple, a threat made vivid by the war in Ukraine. Its demographics will be a drag on growth
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Adam sees reasons for hope:
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Similarly, the Chinese state’s recent intervention in the tech sector, while it has led to market volatility, is aimed at doing exactly what western regulators want to do, but can’t seem to do: stop huge companies from extracting monopoly rents from the economy.
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California gas prices: If Gov. Newsom's $400 rebate plan gets approved, how soon could CA car owners expect to see the money? - ABC7 Los Angeles - 0 views
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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
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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.
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RELATED: Are California drivers paying a hidden gas fee?
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U.S. announces new Russian sanctions, plans to admit thousands of Ukrainian refugees - 0 views
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BRUSSELS — The United States announced a package of new sanctions against Russia and further aid for Ukrainian refugees as President Joe Biden looked to rally the leaders of some of the world’s most powerful democracies to increase their efforts to help Ukraine in a series of high-stakes meetings.
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with a focus on those who are most vulnerable. The administration is also prepared to offer more than $1 billion in additional funding toward humanitarian assistance and $11 billion over the next five years to address worldwide food security threats after the disruptions to the Russian and the Ukrainian agricultural industries.
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While the U.S. announced new efforts around sanctions and refugees, it made no new military commitments — despite pleas from Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
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Utah bans transgender athletes in girls sports : NPR - 0 views
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SALT LAKE CITY — Utah lawmakers voted Friday to override GOP Gov. Spencer Cox's veto of legislation banning transgender youth athletes from playing on girls teams — a move that comes amid a nationwide culture war over transgender issues. Before the veto, the ban received support from a majority of Utah lawmakers, but fell short of the two-thirds needed to override it. Its sponsors on Friday successfully flipped 10 Republicans in the House and five in the Senate who had previously voted against the proposal.
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Salt Lake City is set to host the NBA All-Star game in February 2023. League spokesman Mike Bass has said the league is "working closely" with the Jazz on the matter.
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I cannot support this bill. I cannot support the veto override and if it costs me my seat so be it. I will do the right thing, as I always do," said Republican Sen. Daniel Thatcher. With the override of Cox's veto, Utah becomes the 12th state to enact some sort of ban on transgender kids in school sports. The state's law takes effect July 1.
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House prices are crumbling - and so is Britain's faith in property ownership | John Harris | The Guardian - 0 views
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one of the most absurd features of modern Britain is that “we’re not building houses in a housing crisis”
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The average British home now costs about nine times average earnings: one estimate I recently read reckoned that the last time UK houses were this expensive was in 1876.
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Across England, between 2021 and 2022, 21,600 social homes were either sold or demolished, but only 7,500 were built.
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Opinion | How China Keeps Putting Off Its 'Lehman Moment' - The New York Times - 0 views
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In 2008, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department also stepped in during the subprime lending crisis to coordinate the restructuring of troubled institutions. But creditor and investor rights and the political risks of bailing out banks limited what American regulators can do; arrangements were reached only after hard bargaining with banks and investment houses. In China, financial institutions have to do what the government tells them.
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The government’s hand is everywhere. The most fundamental asset in China — land — is owned or controlled by the state. The value of China’s currency, the renminbi, is government-managed and regulators are widely believed to intervene in trading on the country’s stock markets.
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Most of China’s biggest and most powerful companies, including all of its major banks, are state-owned, and executives are usually members of the Communist Party, which controls top-level corporate appointments.
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The Contradictions of Sam Altman, the AI Crusader Behind ChatGPT - WSJ - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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Opinion | There's a Reason There Aren't Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actually. - The New York Times - 0 views
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Here are just a few of the longstanding problems plaguing American education: a generalized decline in literacy; the faltering international performance of American students; an inability to recruit enough qualified college graduates into the teaching profession; a lack of trained and able substitutes to fill teacher shortages; unequal access to educational resources; inadequate funding for schools; stagnant compensation for teachers; heavier workloads; declining prestige; and deteriorating faculty morale.
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Nine-year-old students earlier this year revealed “the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics,”
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In the latest comparison of fourth grade reading ability, the United States ranked below 15 countries, including Russia, Ireland, Poland and Bulgaria.
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How Sam Bankman-Fried Put Effective Altruism on the Defensive - The New York Times - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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What Does Peter Thiel Want? - Persuasion - 0 views
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Of the many wealthy donors working to shape the future of the Republican Party, none has inspired greater fascination, confusion, and anxiety than billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
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Thiel’s current outlook may well make him a danger to American democracy. But assessing the precise nature of that threat requires coming to terms with his ultimate aims—which have little to do with politics at all.
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Thiel and others point out that when we lift our gaze from our phones and related consumer products to the wider vistas of human endeavor—breakthroughs in medicine, the development of new energy sources, advances in the speed and ease of transportation, and the exploration of space—progress has indeed slowed to a crawl.
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Welcome to the blah blah blah economy - 0 views
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The new tech worldview | The Economist - 0 views
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Sam Altman is almost supine
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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
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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
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Opinion | America, China and a Crisis of Trust - The New York Times - 0 views
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some eye-popping new realities about what’s really eating away at U.S.-China relations.
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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.
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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.
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Opinion | Biden's course correction on China is smart and important - The Washington Post - 0 views
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French President Emmanuel Macron might have been too blunt about his worries about Europe becoming a “vassal” of the United States, but his views are in fact widely shared in Europe and beyond. The war in Ukraine has hurt Europe by raising its energy costs while benefiting the United States, which is the world’s top producer of hydrocarbons and sells many at low cost. European companies are shifting investment to the United States, lured in part by the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous subsidies. A German CEO said to me recently, “You cannot expect us to forgo cheap Russian energy as well as the Chinese market. That would be suicide for Europe.”
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More broadly, if geopolitical tensions win out and economic ties continue to weaken, we will move into a very different world, marked by much greater chaos and disorder at every level. One sign of this can be seen in the impasse over debt restructuring. Dozens of the world’s most vulnerable economies are in or at high risk of debt distress. (Lebanon, for example, has been in default for three years.) Yet the International Monetary Fund cannot bail out these countries because China (which is one of the world’s largest creditors) cannot come to an agreement with Western nations on the terms of relief. The two sides blame each other and hundreds of millions of people suffer.
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The last time two major world powers tried to manage a relationship of economic interdependence and rising geopolitical rivalry was Britain and Germany in the period from the 1880s to 1914. That experiment ended very badly, with a war that destroyed much of the industrialized world. Both sides should try to ensure we do better this time
Opinion | This Is the Actual Danger Posed by D.E.I. - The New York Times - 0 views
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D.E.I. Short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the term — like the related progressive concepts of wokeness and critical race theory — used to have an agreed-upon meaning but has now been essentially redefined on the populist right. In that world, D.E.I. has become yet another catchall boogeyman, a stand-in not just for actual policies or practices designed to increase diversity, but also a scapegoat for unrelated crises.
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the immense backlash from parts of the right against almost any diversity initiative is a sign of the extent to which millions of white Americans are content with their vastly disproportionate share of national wealth and power.
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Outside the reactionary right, there is a cohort of Americans, on both right and left, who want to eradicate illegal discrimination and remedy the effects of centuries of American injustice yet also have grave concerns about the way in which some D.E.I. efforts are undermining American constitutional values, especially on college campuses.
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Opinion | The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez You Don't Know - The New York Times - 0 views
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First impressions are hard to erase, and the obstinacy that made Ms. Ocasio-Cortez an instant national celebrity remains at the heart of her detractors’ most enduring critique: that she is a performer, out for herself, with a reach that exceeds her grasp.
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In straddling the line between outsider and insider, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is trying to achieve the one thing that might just shore up her fractured party: building a new Democratic coalition that can consistently draw a majority of American support.
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In some ways, she’s asking the obvious questions: What’s broadly popular among a vast majority of Americans, and how can I make it happen? To achieve progress on these issues, she has sought common ground in places where her peers are not thinking to look. Her willingness to forge unlikely alliances, in surprisingly productive places, has opened a path to new voters — for her party, her ideas and her own political ambitions if she ever decides to run for higher office.
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Opinion | Campus Protesters Are Demanding Colleges Divest From Israel. That Is Intellectually Impossible. - The New York Times - 0 views
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Based on the size of G.D.P., not investing is Israel directly would be like not investing in Colorado. And despite the chants that charge otherwise, many endowments appear to have little to no direct exposure to Israel or to many of the American companies protesters want to blacklist.
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But there’s a key difference between avoiding fossil fuels and shunning Israel. The institutions that divested from oil and gas made sure to describe it as financially prudent, albeit sometimes with shallow investment logic.
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This time, Israel’s social license is the only thing that is on the table. And if Israel is on the table, what other countries should lose their social license?
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Opinion | A Simple Fix for the Antisemitism Awareness Act - The New York Times - 0 views
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it’s necessary to understand the legal ambiguities that now exist on campus. “No person in the United States,” Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states, “shall, on the ground of race, color or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” There is no corresponding federal prohibition on discrimination on the basis of religion.
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The problem is immediately obvious. Jewishness doesn’t fit neatly into any of those three categories. Israelis of all races, religions and ethnicities are protected because of their national origin, but what about American Jews? Judaism is a religion, and religion isn’t covered. Jewishness is more of an ancestry than a “race” or a “color” — there are Jews of many races and colors.
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There is an answer to the problem. Congress should pass legislation clearly stating that antisemitism is included in the scope of Title VI.
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