ChrisLicht

Isn’t the dominant theory for its use something about knitting gloves?

Historically, American millionaires had a much higher rate of prior bankruptcies than the general population. A good way to squelch entrepreneurship is to make failure so onerous that it’s not worth the risk.

China’s system has a potential duality:

Everyone from the top to the bottom plays along when the pie is expanding, and endemic corruption can be treated as a predictable cost of doing business.

However, when the pie stops growing, there isn’t the level of contract assurance that other rich countries offer. The Pareto optimal competition between powerful interests once growth fully stalls will be very interesting to watch. Xi will have his hands full, picking winners and losers, and lots of billionaires and centimillionaires will head for the door, taking significant capital with them. Worse, foreign investment will tail off, and decreased predictability will cause foreign companies to look hard at production in other places. At the bottom of the economic ladder, corruption will be much more apparent and challenging.

Xi’s bet seems to be that he can use technological repression tools to manage discontent in a downturn. We’ll see; he may be right. If the Stasi had had access to Palantir, Israeli spy software, and Chinese hardware, Checkpoint Charlie might still be in place.

Yuri Gagarin was rumored to be drunk when he took the famous flight.

I’m older than dirt and have seen lots o’ presidential elections. Polls this far out, for the general election, are utterly meaningless.

I was reading several months ago that there was a time in the mid ‘90s that there were a few gay clubs in Russia that were relatively unmolested by the cops, as long as the local “roof” was paid off.

“Unhoused” troubles me. It feels like it denudes the impact of a person having no place to call home. Is it supposed to destigmatize “homeless” in some way?

Just stand closer.

You’re thinking in the right direction. And, employers are going to increasingly insist on what I like to call repressionware, hardware and software installed in your home workspace that effectively leashes you to work, vitiating many of the advantages wfh gives today.

There used to be a business joke you’d hear in the ‘60s, often attributed to John Wanamaker, a pioneer in marketing:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half!”

The joke highlights the dilemma many businesses face in evaluating the effectiveness of their advertising spend. It’s remained relevant in the advertising and marketing industries, reflecting the challenges in measuring the impact of advertising efforts.

Too bad the product is execrable today.

What about the Dutch?