Europe gives China a taste of its own trade medicine - "Over the past years, EU trade policy has traditionally focused on building protective fortress walls, and last week's decision to impose punitive tariffs on Chinese electric cars initially looked like another example of the classic defensive playbook in Brussels. In a remarkable turn of events, however, the EU is now considering a next step that invites China's electric vehicle (EV) makers inside the walls. The big idea is to use the tariff threat to force Chinese carmakers to come to Europe to form joint ventures and share technology with their EU counterparts... For years, the EU has been at the vanguard of western investors howling in protest at Beijing's demands that foreign investors in China should form joint ventures and share know-how: It’s what the EU used to slam as forced technology transfer. The world has now changed. The fear is no longer that the Chinese will steal European EV technology in a game of catch-up, but rather that Europe is falling behind. Realizing that its industry needs fresh investment and expertise to compete, the EU is now turning its eyes toward a negotiated solution with Beijing... According to the German Chamber of Commerce in China, 69 percent of German automotive companies reckon their Chinese competitors already lead them in innovation or will do so within the next five years."
Meme - "顺肉 Wood shall be meat
莶肉 Toothpicks meat
烤肉 Fried meat
菜肉 Celery meat
爆肉 Onion Explosion meat
肉丝 Fish-flavored shredded pork
肉丝 Pure speculation meat
鸡丁 Kungpo-Chicken
鸡丁 Cashew Chicken
肉丝 Pure Belly Clearance
马鱼块 The fish mother
羊肉 Iron lamb"
(3) Making 400 Year Old Buttered Beere - YouTube - "Most people know Butterbeer from the Harry Potter books, but did you know it's based off an actual drink from Elizabethan England? In this episode, I show you how to make your own alcoholic (and non-alcoholic) Buttered Beere and we explore the importance of beer and ale in Medieval and Renaissance England."
DeepDive: What a pro-growth tax reform might look like - "The above analysis presented several broad-based, pro-growth reforms that could improve the country’s economic climate, while also introducing more fairness and simplicity into the tax system, including:
Increasing fairness and reducing disincentives to work by lowering marginal tax rates on working families
Reducing top marginal tax rates and/or thresholds to help Canada attract and retain high-skilled workers
Use broad-based reforms to the corporate income tax system to incentivize new investments
Increasing taxes on consumption to fund even more dramatic reductions in economically costly taxes on income—not necessarily by increasing the GST, but by further incentivising savings that can be used as investment in Canada’s economy
Simplify the tax system to reduce compliance costs"
Too bad left wing economic policy is about making the "rich" suffer, not about increasing the size of the pie for everyone
David Mulroney: The next PM must remind Canada’s public servants who really runs the show - "When I served as foreign policy advisor to the prime minister (a public service appointment within the Privy Council Office) I struggled for months to obtain a list of initiatives Canada was supporting at the U.N. under the heading of “Maternal Health.” I came to believe I was being stonewalled because officials were reluctant to reveal the extent to which Canada was promoting abortion in the developing world... as ambassador for Canada in China, I refused to sign off on a CIDA project that had as its objective improving the business skills of Tibetan women dubiously identified as “sex workers.” I suggested that we instead offer training in skills that would free women in Tibet from having to sell themselves to Chinese truckers to feed their families. CIDA ignored me and quietly secured project sign-off back at headquarters."
David Attenborough’s anti-human miserabilism - "Our planet is wonderful, but it sure isn’t A Perfect Planet, as the title of David Attenborough’s latest BBC spectacular declares. To claim so is a statement of blind faith, not an observation grounded in reality. And the fact this is the central rhetorical claim of Attenborough’s latest programme is startlingly revealing, as well as misleading... to call the state of the natural world ‘perfect’ at any one point in time is not only nonsensical but anti-scientific. After all, was the Earth perfect when a meteor smashed into it, killing 99 per cent of life? Was it perfect when toxic volcanic gases spread across entire continents and blocked out the Sun for years? Was it perfect when the bubonic plague killed millions, triggering the only major fall in the human population in history? Would humanity not mobilise all of its technology and resources to fight such terrifying natural events should they happen again? Or would we declare them part of our ‘perfect planet’ and meekly succumb to fate? Attenborough’s well-known support for reducing human-population size is perhaps one reason why he seems perfectly happy to accept huge population-reducing events as part of his ‘perfect’ planet. Others less Malthusian than Sir David might not be quite so callously accepting of nature’s ‘perfection’. Hence we don’t accept the global coronavirus pandemic as merely another wondrous aspect of our perfect planet. Rather we recognise it as a problem nature has thrown up that we must overcome – using science and technology. And in doing so, we ourselves seek to change, perhaps even ‘perfect’ nature... In the final episode, Niall McCann, a biologist, conservationist and explorer, says ‘this perfect planet of ours has been thrown into a state of flux’ thanks to the human species, which has become ‘so populous and so destructive that it has become the single most influential creature on Earth’. He even tells us that a catastrophe like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs will happen again. Writer Jeremy Rifkin gives the message an economic spin, announcing that ‘our mission is not growth, growth, growth’. Unchallenged, he tells viewers what infrastructure and power sources we should build and how we should reorganise our economy to preserve this perfect planet. The entire final episode, in fact, is not natural history at all. Instead, it features a series of activists delivering ultimatums, while Attenborough argues for an expansive array of global policy proposals. Many, such as spreading seeds in barren areas of the Amazon, seem eminently reasonable and hard to fault. But some, such as ‘financially incentivising’ foreign government involvement in developing nations, are deeply political and highly contested. And the message itself – millenarian, apocalyptic and coercive – is not without its critics, even within the environmentalist movement. Such a biased perspective should not be presented as fact, according to the BBC’s and Ofcom’s own guidelines. But because both institutions have now declared climate change an exceptional issue, there is no room for comeback. Indeed, since 2017 Ofcom has insisted that only one message on climate change is acceptable, ruling against the BBC for giving space to opposing views. The BBC has certainly got the message. It said that it had conceived of A Perfect Planet as an explicitly campaigning project to ‘raise awareness’ and deliver a ‘serious message’. Towards the very end of the series, several well-spoken teens tell us the ‘planet may not be able to sustain life’ by the time they are adults, as they stare down the camera at their potential killers. ‘Do you want to be the generation who signs the death warrant of humanity?’, Rifkin asks in the closing shots... If children grow up believing man is nothing but a plague upon a ‘perfect planet’ – that we are a virus, if you will – they will have no faith in humanity itself. And that would be no good for us, or the planet."
We are still told that environmentalism isn't misanthropic
I can see you typing: the most awkward part of online chat - "One of writing’s traditional advantages over speech is the time it affords you to collect your thoughts. This time empowers you to calculate your words’ effects on their reader. Rather than blurting out “YOU’RE SO HOT,” you pen a pleasing phrase: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Text and instant messages, however, are eroding this advantage. We don’t correspond over text and instant messages, like we do in letters; we chat in quick informal exchanges, like we do face-to-face. And one of the underpinnings of spoken conversation is what’s known in linguistics as turn-taking. “We need some way of determining when someone else’s turn is over and ours can begin,” says Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown and author of You Just Don’t Understand. “In speaking, we sense whether others are done – their voices trail off, their intonation goes down, they seem to have finished making a point, they leave a pause to let us know they’re finished.” It’s not as simple as it sounds. Tannen’s research has shown that conversational turn-taking actually creates a lot of social friction."
From 2014
Actual Fact Bot: Revived | Facebook - "There have been 8 Christian Prime Ministers in Japan even though the Christians make less than 1% of Japan's population."
Meme - Busty Woman: "Your son is not focused in class"
Man: "sorry, what did u say?"
MaxHelp on X - "We mistakenly sent out an empty test email to a portion of our HBO Max mailing list this evening. We apologize for the inconvenience, and as the jokes pile in, yes, it was the intern. No, really. And we’re helping them through it. ❤️"
aerin on X - "Dear Intern, when I was 25 I made a PDF assigning each employee to the Muppet they reminded me of the most. I meant to send it to my work friend, but I accidentally sent it to the entire company. My supervisor (Beaker) wanted to fire me, but the owners (Bert & Ernie) intervened."
HyperX on X - "Long ago a member of the team accidentally added an extra 0 to an ad campaign spending 10x more than what we had budgeted. We all make mistakes. 💜"
Mekka 💉x7 @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io on X - "To the intern: Hi! 🙋🏿♂️ I'm an Engineering Director on Google Play. Our team's systems send the emails for the Play Store.
|1. You'll be fine! As replies show, everyone breaks production!
|2. Congratulations on helping your team find missing guardrail features and capabilities!👍🏿"
Daenney on X - "Dear intern, I once globally took down Spotify. It almost happened twice. My team was awesome about it and I'm still here. You managed to find something broken in the way integration tests are done. It's a good thing and will help improve things. Good luck <3."
Microsoft Outlook on X- "Dear Intern, we've all hit the send button before we should've. It happens to the best of us 💙"
James Harper on X - "Dear Intern, I once auto-populated a mass vet email from @morris_animal to list the constituents as their “dogs name” instead of their first name and it got the best email response ever. A mistake turned into a new marketing process when we sent mass emails."
Caissie on X - "Dear Intern, I was using my desktop calendar to make a monthly note of when I started my menstrual period, but after several months I realized I was making that note on a calendar I shared with all of my colleagues company wide. I was 37 years old."
Ontario Liberal MP's map of Canada forgets P.E.I., Yukon - "Yasir Naqvi's map of Canada map depicts a country Canadians are not familiar with — it has eight provinces and two territories... The map also included several inconsistencies with provincial and territorial borders. The Quebec border takes over New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, lumping them into one province. And the border between Yukon and Northwest Territories has disappeared, merging the territories into one. The map has been making the rounds online, with many questioning how it was approved despite the inaccuracies."
What type of mattress should be chosen to avoid back pain and improve sleep quality? Review of the literature - "Energy spent during daily activities is recuperated by humans through sleep, ensuring optimal performance on the following day. Sleep disturbances are common: a meta-analysis on sleep quality showed that 15–30% of adults report sleep disorders, such as sleep onset latency (SOL), insufficient duration of sleep and frequently waking up at night. Low back pain (LBP) has been identified as one of the main causes of poor sleep quality. Literature findings are discordant on the type of mattress that might prevent onset of back pain, resulting in an improved quality of sleep. We conducted a systematic literature review of articles published until 2019, investigating the association of different mattresses with sleep quality and low back pain. Based on examined studies, mattresses were classified according to the European Committee for Standardization (2000) as: soft, medium-firm, extra-firm or mattresses customized for patients affected by supine decubitus. A total of 39 qualified articles have been included in the current systematic review. Results of this systematic review show that a medium-firm mattress promotes comfort, sleep quality and rachis alignment."
Dutch volleyball player who raped 12-year-old British girl qualifies for Paris Olympics - "Steven van de Velde was sentenced in March 2016 to four years in prison after admitting three counts of rape against a child he had met on Facebook. He had flown from the Netherlands to the UK in August 2014, when he was 19, to meet his victim. Judge Francis Sheridan told him: “Prior to coming to this country you were training as a potential Olympian. Your hopes of representing your country now lie as a shattered dream.” Except Van de Velde, who was released after serving just 12 months at a Dutch prison, has since been allowed to rehabilitate his Olympic career, this month sealing his spot in the national pair at the Paris Games alongside Matthew Immers... Van de Velde’s comeback presents a major moral conundrum for the International Olympic Committee. Every Paris Olympian is required to sign an Athletes’ Rights and Responsibilities Declaration, with point seven demanding: “Act as a role model.” Having travelled from Amsterdam to Milton Keynes to have sex with a girl he knew was just 12, Van de Velde was condemned in the strongest terms in 2016 by the judge. The court heard that he had gone to the home of the victim, with whom he had communicated on social networks before arranging to visit, while her mother was out and had taken her virginity."
Frozen embryo conceived the year after her mother was born - " Emma Wren Gibson, delivered November 25 by Dr. Jeffrey Keenan, medical director of the National Embryo Donation Center, is the result of an embryo originally frozen on October 14, 1992. Emma’s parents, Tina and Benjamin Gibson of eastern Tennessee, admit feeling surprised when they were told the exact age of the embryo thawed March 13 by Carol Sommerfelt, embryology lab director at the National Embryo Donation Center. “Do you realize I’m only 25? This embryo and I could have been best friends,” Tina Gibson said. Today, Tina, now 26, explained to CNN, “I just wanted a baby. I don’t care if it’s a world record or not.”... Emma’s story begins long before the Gibsons “adopted” her (and four sibling embryos from the same egg donor). Created for in vitro fertilization by another, anonymous couple, the embryos had been left in storage so they could be used by someone unable or unwilling to conceive a child naturally."
From 2017
Nvidia appears to have a major problem with wealthy middle managers who do barely any work - and new starters aren't happy - "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reportedly addressed worker complacency in a recent all-hands meeting following complaints that some employees are simply coasting along while enjoying bumper paycheques... some middle managers have entered a “semi-retirement” stage whereby they’re not putting in the work that’s worthy of their high salary. Several reasons for this complacency were cited, indicating that the inherently poor work ethic relates to workers resting and vesting. According to the report, the company’s CEO has been reluctant to fire workers, with the last large-scale round of redundancies taking place in 2008 at the time of the economic crash. During the 2022-2023 layoff season, Intel reportedly cut hundreds of jobs, while Nvidia kept all its workers onboard, offering reduced salaries and higher stock awards instead. The problem is that Nvidia’s stock is up by around 1,400% over the past five years, and around 240% this year to date, thanks to a huge surge in orders of chips powering new AI tools. Nvidia has arguably benefited more from artificial intelligence than rival chipmakers like AMD and Intel, and long-standing workers see this as an opportunity to stockpile shares and watch them grow, leaving them with little motivation to put in the work. The company is also slated for having a pretty hands-off management style, making it difficult for execs to identify and address problems like complacency."
Liberals spending on social-media influencers: why? - "Health Canada, Public Health Agency of Canada, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada are all tapping influencers, or people on social-media who have built large audiences and sometimes have a reputation for expertise on certain topics."
Government influence operations are only bad when the left disapprove
Opinion | Alex Karp, Nicholas Zamiska: U.S. tech companies should help build AI weaponry - The Washington Post - "The great-powers calculus that has helped prevent another world war might also change quickly. But the supremacy of U.S. military power has undoubtedly helped guard the peace, fragile as it might be. A commitment to maintaining such supremacy, however, has become increasingly unfashionable in the West. And deterrence, as a doctrine, is at risk of losing its moral appeal... for a nation that holds itself to a higher moral standard than its adversaries when it comes to the use of force, technical parity with an enemy is insufficient. A weapons system in the hand of an ethical society, and one rightly wary of its use, will only act as an effective deterrent if it is far more powerful than the capability of an opponent that would not hesitate to kill the innocent. The trouble is that the young Americans who are most capable of building AI systems are often also most ambivalent about working for the military. In Silicon Valley, engineers have turned their backs, unwilling to engage with the mess and moral complexity of geopolitics. While pockets of support for defense work have emerged, most funding and talent continue to stream toward the consumer. The engineering elite of our country rush to raise capital for video-sharing apps and social media platforms, advertising algorithms and shopping websites. They don’t hesitate to track and monetize people’s every movement online, burrowing their way into our lives. But many balk when it comes to working with the military. The rush is simply to build. Too few ask what ought to be built and why... Yet the peace that those in Silicon Valley who are opposed to working with the military enjoy is made possible by that same military’s credible threat of force... What’s most concerning is that a generation’s disenchantment with and disinterest in our country’s collective defense has led to a massive redirection of resources — intellectual and financial — toward sating the needs of consumer culture. The diminishing demands we place on the technology sector to produce products of enduring and collective value are ceding too much power to the whims of the market. As David Graeber, who taught anthropology at Yale and the London School of Economics, observed in a 2012 essay in the Baffler, “The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue.” The technology world’s drift toward the concerns of the consumer has helped reinforce a certain escapism — Silicon Valley’s instinct to ignore the important issues we face as a society in favor of the trivial and ephemeral. Challenges ranging from national defense and violent crime to education reform and medical research have appeared to many people in the technology industry to be too intractable, thorny and politically fraught to be worth addressing... outrage from the crowd has trained leaders and investors across the technology industry to avoid any hint of controversy or disapproval. But their reticence comes with significant costs. Many investors in Silicon Valley and legions of extraordinarily talented engineers simply set the hard problems aside. A generation of ascendant founders say they actively seek out risk, but when it comes to deeper investments in societal challenges, caution often prevails. Why wade into geopolitics when you can build another app? And build apps they have done. A proliferation of social media empires systematically monetizes and channels the human desire for status and recognition. For its part, the foreign policy establishment has repeatedly miscalculated when dealing with China, Russia and others, believing that economic integration can be sufficient to undercut their leaders’ domestic support and diminish their interest in military escalation abroad. The failure of the Davos consensus was to abandon the stick in favor of the carrot alone. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping of China and other authoritarian leaders have wielded power in a way that political leaders in the West might never understand... Pacifism satisfies our instinctive empathy for the powerless. It also relieves us of the need to navigate among the difficult trade-offs that the world presents... It would be a mistake, and indeed a form of moral condescension, to systematically equate powerlessness with piousness. The subjugated and subjugators are equally capable of grievous sin. We do not advocate a thin and shallow patriotism — a substitute for thought and genuine reflection about the merits of our nation as well as its flaws. We only want America’s technology industry to keep in mind an important question — which is not whether a new generation of autonomous weapons incorporating AI will be built. It is who will build them and for what purpose."