Ben

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on the atlas — 24

highlights — 31

It is one of the achievements of Ari Shavit’s important and powerful book to recover the feeling of Israel’s facticity and to revel in it, to restore the grandeur of the simple fact in full view of the complicated facts. “My Promised Land” startles in many ways, not least in its relative lack of interest in providing its readers with a handy politics. Shavit, a columnist who serves on the editorial board of Haaretz, has an undoctrinaire mind. He comes not to praise or to blame, though along the way he does both, with erudition and with eloquence; he comes instead to observe and to reflect.
‘My Promised Land,’ by Ari Shavit - The New York Times
In outlining their prescriptions, the authors reject “the discredited détente policies” that Washington adopted toward the Soviet Union in the 1970s on the grounds that détente “failed to achieve its goals” and a similar approach today would “yield little cooperation from Chinese leaders.” But as the historian Niall Ferguson has persuasively argued in these pages, détente didn’t mean “embracing, trusting, or appeasing the Soviets.” It meant “recognizing the limits of U.S. power” and “employing a combination of carrots and sticks, and buying time.” As Ferguson concludes, “It worked.” Pottinger …
What Does America Want From China? | Foreign Affairs
Ironically, the authors resurrect the end goal of the engagement era: a more liberal China. They hope that this time, a vague toughness will succeed where commercial and people-to-people ties fell short. But if engagement risked complacency, their approach risks escalation. An explicit policy of seeking the end of CCP rule would turn the U.S.-Chinese rivalry into an existential one for China’s leadership. If Beijing concluded that the United States sought total victory, it would have little reason to exercise restraint.
What Does America Want From China? | Foreign Affairs
The United States is pushing for IMEC as a counter to the Chinese Belt Road Initiative (BRI). However, China already has considerable influence along the proposed route of IMEC. An important link in IMEC is the Greek port of Piraeus—the largest port in Eastern Europe—which will receive cargo coming from the Haifa port in Israel. The Chinese shipping company Cosco has been the majority stakeholder in the port since 2016, when the Greek government sold the company two-thirds stakes. In other words, this Chinese company has all the powers to decide the future of the port and control the piers and…
The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC): Too Little, Too Late? - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
No matter how hard it is for the rest of us to change our intentions, the good news is that this is something each side — even each person — is capable of achieving by themselves. We have little control over the intentions of others, but we should be able to change our own minds. Even readers who are neither Israeli nor Palestinian can contemplate whether they wish well for both sides, or whether they cherish the hope that one of these groups would simply disappear from the face of the Earth.
Is there a way out of the Israeli-Palestinian trap?
When Hamas launched its attack, it hoped these Palestinian-Israelis would rise up against their Jewish neighbours. Many Jews were terrified that this was indeed about to happen. In fact, on the day of the massacre, numerous Arab citizens rushed to help their Jewish neighbours. Some were even murdered by Hamas for doing so. For example, Abed al-Rahman Alnasarah of Kuseife was murdered while trying to rescue survivors from the Nova festival, and Awad Darawshe of Iksal was killed while taking care of injured victims.
Is there a way out of the Israeli-Palestinian trap?
“Banks aren’t very enthusiastic (about swapping LGFV debt),” the Chongqing government source said. They are mainly extending or swapping debts owed to themselves or cutting their interest rates, as a way of fulfilling a “political mission,” he said, adding that some banks ask for new collateral for the swaps.
In Depth: Why China’s Efforts to Resolve Hidden Government Debt Could Fall Short - Caixin Global
One problem is that despite the ban on local authorities from providing implicit guarantees for LGFV bond repayments, the rescue package reinforces investor belief that these bonds won’t default because the government will come to the rescue. Thus, in a spiraling cycle, investors are again scooping up these debt instruments.
In Depth: Why China’s Efforts to Resolve Hidden Government Debt Could Fall Short - Caixin Global
So people saying that lived experience contradicts the official data haven’t really done their homework. To the extent we can measure Americans’ personal experiences, as opposed to what they say about the economy, it seems to be quite positive and more or less in line with the macroeconomic indicators.
Opinion | Why Are Americans Still Down on the Economy? - The New York Times
In the latest poll, of Michigan voters, only 35 percent of people said that the national economy was excellent or good, while 65 percent said it was not so good or bad. But when asked about their personal finances the proportions were basically reversed, with 61 percent saying that they were in excellent or good shape and 38 percent saying they were in not so good or bad shape. A January poll of Pennsylvania voters produced almost the same results.
Opinion | Why Are Americans Still Down on the Economy? - The New York Times
But in 2023, Kazakhstan bought $5.9 million worth of unmanned aircraft from China and exported $2.7 million worth of such products to Russia, according to Kazakhstan and Chinese trade data. Kazakhstan isn’t a major producer of drones. Diverted trade originating from China and traveling through Central Asia has only risen in importance as U.S. and European Union regulators have clamped down on their own chip exports. In 2022, the first year of the war, millions of dollars worth of U.S. and EU chips exports ended up in Russia via Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia.
Russia’s Backdoor for Battlefield Goods From China: Central Asia - WSJ
Zhongke Wenge also claims its multi-lingual monitoring system caters to government and state media that face “difficulty [in] guiding international public opinion.” It does this by harvesting information from both domestic and international media, as well as prominent individuals, in 42 different languages. This allows the “timely warning of China-related public opinion” and recommendations on how to “tell China’s story well.”
What Does the Party Stand to Gain from AI? - China Media Project
So valuable is access to Nvidia’s chips that some customers are fearful of being punished for dealing with the company’s competitors. Jonathan Ross, CEO of chip-startup Groq, said that fear was palpable among customers who wanted alternatives but were wary of poking the beast. “A lot of people that we meet with say that if Nvidia were to hear that we were meeting, they would disavow it,” he said. “The problem is you have to pay Nvidia a year in advance, and you may get your hardware in a year or it may take longer, and it’s, ‘Aw shucks, you’re buying from someone else and I guess it’s going to…
Nvidia’s Stunning Ascent Has Also Made It a Giant Target - WSJ
The shortage of Nvidia’s chips has given Huang immense power. How Nvidia allocates its limited supplies could influence who wins or loses in the AI race. Nvidia has said little about how it decides. Asked by an analyst on Wednesday about how he does that, Huang said the company tries to allocate fairly but avoids selling chips to people who won’t immediately use them.
Nvidia’s Stunning Ascent Has Also Made It a Giant Target - WSJ
2 terawatts (TW) of generation and storage is waiting to connect to the grid in the United States, more than the total installed generation capacity currently operating.
GET a GRIP: A Path to More Renewable Energy on the Grid - RMI
China’s chip market also took a hit this year after the country’s post-pandemic recovery lost steam. Despite the technology breakthroughs with Huawei, SMIC saw its third quarter revenue decline 15 per cent year on year while net profits fell 80 per cent amid weaker consumer electronics spending in the home market. Hua Hong Semiconductor, China’s number two logic fab after SMIC, saw its third-quarter revenue slide 9.7 per cent year on year, as it slid into the red with a loss of US$25.9 million compared with a profit of US$65.4 million a year earlier. As of early December, more than 19,000 Chin…
Tech war: China’s semiconductor industry weathers tough year amid tighter US sanctions | South China Morning Post
The most serious obstacle for the United States in the Indo-Pacific, however, is that Washington lacks a true economic strategy for the region, which inherently limits the depth of its strategic cooperation. In early 2017, Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a multilateral trade agreement with many of Washington’s closet friends—and the United States has not joined the successor treaty, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. The Biden administration has put forward its own Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, but this falls far sh…
America’s Indo-Pacific Alliances Are Astonishingly Strong
In September, Biden visited Vietnam to raise the two countries’ partnership from “comprehensive” to “comprehensive strategic”—the highest level in Hanoi’s hierarchy of external relations, putting the United States on par with China, India, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. (Vietnam only elevated South Korea’s and Japan’s statuses in December 2022 and last month, respectively.) Vietnam boosted the United States to the top category in part to deepen security cooperation against China in the South China Sea, where Hanoi also has serious sovereignty and territorial disputes with Beijing.
America’s Indo-Pacific Alliances Are Astonishingly Strong
Makhijani thinks nuclear power isn’t going to be needed to balance the grid. A study he conducted in 2016 for the state of Maryland found that increased battery storage, combined with incentives to consumers to reduce their electricity use at peak times, would almost allow utilities to balance the variability of renewables.
The controversial future of nuclear power in the U.S.
In recent policy documents, including China's 14th Five-Year Plan, released in March, central authorities have designated data as one of a small number of "factors of production" — national resources that form the backbone of the country's economy. As of April 2020, it has been considered on par with land, labor, capital and technology in its potential to generate GDP. To facilitate this, one Beijing-led initiative would ask private companies and government departments to trade and exchange data with each other.
China’s plan to nationalize private companies’ data - Protocol
Republicans, in particular, remain at odds over how to confront Beijing, especially when it comes to the risks for U.S. farmers and rural communities — a key GOP constituency. Some rural Republican lawmakers have already raised concerns about former President Donald Trump’s plans to slap new tariffs on China if he’s reelected next year, which they warn could lead to a new wave of Chinese retaliation on U.S. exports. But they and other business-friendly lawmakers have largely raised those warnings in private, wary of being painted as soft on China by members of their own party.
Push for new China trade war splits Congress - POLITICO
In December, in response to a groundswell of suggestions for the updated draft of China’s civil code, China’s Legislature publicly acknowledged that when the government solicited public opinions last fall, it received a wave of requests for the legalization of same-sex marriage. The National People’s Congress announced that it would review the code this month (although the meeting has been postponed because of the coronavirus). While same-sex marriage in China remains a distant reality, this was a clear indication that the government was acknowledging the status of an increasingly visible comm…
How a Dating App Helped a Generation of Chinese Come Out of the Closet - The New York Times
A term still used today to refer to gay relationships — duan xiu, or “cut sleeve” — comes from a story in “The Book of Han,” an official history of the Han dynasty that was completed in the second century, in which the emperor wakes from a nap to find his male lover still asleep on his robe, and tenderly cuts off his sleeve to avoid waking him.
How a Dating App Helped a Generation of Chinese Come Out of the Closet - The New York Times
But the credibility of those statements has been called into question by Biden’s repeated insistence that the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense if attacked because it made a commitment to do so, even though the United States has not had a formal obligation to defend Taiwan since it abrogated the alliance with Taipei in 1979 as a precondition to normalizing diplomatic relations with Beijing. Biden administration officials have also noticeably failed to confirm that the United States would accept any peaceful resolution of cross-strait differences achieved through negotiations and wit…
Taiwan and the True Sources of Deterrence | Foreign Affairs
Mason Marks, senior fellow at Harvard Law’s Petrie-Flom Center, said it’s not just that there are no laws regulating the new AI. Old laws designed to protect patients don’t really hold up under the weight of this next generation technology, he said. Marks is worried that HIPAA, a decades-old law designed to protect patient privacy, falls apart in the face of large language models because HIPAA allows health systems and their vendors to use de-identified patient data. “Once you remove certain personal identifiers, you can do whatever you want with it,” he said. Researchers point out that de-ide…
AI is driving Google’s health care business. Washington doesn’t know what to do about it. - POLITICO
We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power). Economic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength. A technologically strong America is a force for good in a dangerous world. Technologically strong liberal democracies safeguard liberty and peace. Technologically weak liberal democracies lose to their autocratic rivals, making everyone worse off.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
We believe Andy Warhol was right when he said, “What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” Same for the browser, the smartphone, the chatbot.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
The big-picture findings are consistent with other recent bad polls for the incumbent: Trump is beating Biden by five points in these states and has higher approval ratings than the President, even among voting groups that form the Democratic base, such as African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, young voters, and college-educated women. How can this be? Greenberg’s analysis is not complicated: “Above all, they are desperate about inflation and the cost of living: 64 percent choose it as the top problem—about 30 points higher than any other. The Biden presidency is defined by that inflation and t…
Bidenomics Is a Political Bust for Biden | The New Yorker
he big-picture findings are consistent with other recent bad polls for the incumbent: Trump is beating Biden by
Bidenomics Is a Political Bust for Biden | The New Yorker
It often seems to me that we need a term to describe a somewhat similar phenomenon in policy debates, which we might call the Big Grift: policy proposals so corrupt, so obviously designed to benefit an undeserving few at everyone else’s expense that many voters balk at the notion that seemingly respectable politicians actually advocate such things. A case in point is the current demand by House Republicans that funding for Israel in this moment of crisis be tied to budget cuts that would undermine the ability of the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on wealthy tax cheats. This should be a…
Opinion | Israel, the I.R.S. and the Big Grift - The New York Times
find about business. The subject that interests him, he’s read newspapers, biographies, trade press. He went over to his grandfather who was a grocer and he read the progressive grocer magazine, and he re
Curius / Onboarding