WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Riot-zone voters back Trump 2-1, and most say violence affects vote.
Archive for 2020
September 16, 2020
NOW WE KNOW: If you wondered if there is a China link to BLM, wonder no more.
CHANGE: Stripe Workers Who Relocate Get $20,000 Bonus and a Pay Cut. “Stripe Inc. plans to make a one-time payment of $20,000 to employees who opt to move out of San Francisco, New York or Seattle, but also cut their base salary by as much as 10%, according to a person familiar with the matter.”
Moving from one of those cities to almost anywhere else, a 10% paycut will amount to a hefty payraise.
MAYBE IT WASN’T ACTUALLY WISDOM: The ‘Coffee Boy’ Makes Peace in the Middle East: Trump’s negotiators buck the wisdom that led to decades of bipartisan failure.
Avi Berkowitz’s elevation to a top negotiating position on President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace team was met with near-universal derision by so-called experts and the mainstream press.
Martin Indyk, who served as ambassador to Israel under President Bill Clinton, mocked the appointment of Jared Kushner’s onetime “assistant.” The Brookings Institution’s Natan Sachs declared the then 29-year-old Berkowitz “young and inexperienced.” The media were less diplomatic: Politico derided Berkowitz as Kushner’s “mini-me”; Vanity Fair dubbed him a “coffee boy.”
On Tuesday, Trump oversaw the signing of the Kushner- and Berkowitz-orchestrated Abraham Accords that officially normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, as well as an agreement between Israel and Bahrain—the first such deals in over four decades. Pretty good for a coffee boy.
Criticisms of Berkowitz and Kushner were never about their age or experience, given that they came from the same crowd that celebrated the ascendance of the 30-something failed novelist Ben Rhodes to the highest reaches of power in the previous administration.
Rather, the criticisms were about the unwillingness of the two men, publicly Jewish and proudly Zionist, to kowtow to the same tired experts who have made their careers pushing the same conventional wisdom that produced nothing but stalemate. The success of the youthful Berkowitz on a project where the so-called experts have met little success is all the more proof of the intellectual bankruptcy of the experts President Donald Trump has so often dismissed—in this case, rightly so.
It’s been a bad millennium for the expert class.
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WELL, GOOD: America Is Going to Decapitate Huawei.
This being the New York Times, naturally it’s a bad thing:
Access to chips is crucial to any tech company — and Huawei has admitted it is already running out. Without chips, “What products can we still make?,” a Huawei employee has asked. The answer: not much. Fearing further pressure from the United States and seeing little hope for the future, some of Huawei’s top employees have already left the company. Huawei insists that it will soldier on. But it is hard to see how the company’s main products — like 5G equipment, network gear, smartphones and cloud computing services — will survive without access to chips.
China’s leading chip manufacturer, SMIC, is scrambling to build chips as small as 40 nanometers — billionths of a meter — without American technology. This might sound small, but today’s cutting edge is five nanometers. Even if China’s race to “de-Americanize” production at 40 nanometers succeeds, it will have built a chip as cutting edge as a flip phone.
Much as Beijing would like to, hardly any industry analysts expect China to wean itself off American tech soon. There’s just no way to create an entire industry from scratch, especially one that requires producing at the scale of nanometers. Beijing has no choice but to buy an estimated $300 billion worth of chips from abroad this year, more than it spends on any other product.
Huawei’s digital decapitation is a shocking display of American power. At the whim of the American president, any other Chinese tech company could suffer such a fate. Imagine if a foreign power could do the same to Google or Amazon.
Well, they can’t — and Trump aims to keep it that way.
UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY: UChicago declares that English is racist.
Frankly, any university whose name contains a word that MSNBC declared was racist in 2012 lacks the moral authority to make such a declaration.
PREDICTION: THIS WON’T GET THE KIND OF PRESS ATTENTION THAT MICHAEL MOORE’S ELECTION-YEAR DOCUMENTARIES USED TO GET: ‘Riding the Dragon’ documentary alleges Biden family self-enrichment from China.
HATE IS WHO THEY ARE, HATE IS WHAT THEY DO: The far left launches #RIPJKRowling hate-fest based on false claim about the author’s forthcoming book.
READER BOOK PLUG: From Kirsten Mortensen, Once Upon A Flarey Tale.
NEWS FROM THE BLUE ZONES: The Alarming Downward Spiral of Downtown Chicago: Is A Comeback Possible?
IRONY: ‘Dear White People’ Actor Leaves Show, Claims ‘Racial Discrimination.’
Why are Democrat-dominated industries such cesspits of racism? Plus: “Beyond the pay discrepancies, Tardy felt that since these companies have all expressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement it was the height of hypocrisy to deny fair and equal pay to people of color, especially on a show that deals with systemic racism.”
Heh.
OPEN THREAD: Do that comment voodoo that you do so well.
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