A Pilgrimage : Mysuru to Muktinath -5 months - A Motorcycle -2 guitars and 3 flutes - No maps and no Phone - Move when it gets hot and the moon is full - Chai stops are the best - And …….I found out India is HUGE!
Trump’s Gilded Ballroom and the Fall of the American Republic Tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand .............. Donald Trump is in the process of destroying a large part of the White House so he can construct a 90,000 square foot gold-encrusted ballroom. And this is being done without any historical or architectural review, treating a national treasure that belongs to the people as if it were his own personal property. In true Trumpian style, this act of vandalism is being paid for by large corporate donors — mostly tech and crypto companies — seeking to buy Trump’s favor. ........... Masked government agents are snatching people off the street. The National Guard has been sent into major cities on the obviously false pretext that these cities are in chaos. The U.S. military is essentially murdering people on the high seas. Huge tariffs are, in addition to their economic costs, undermining a system of alliances former presidents spent generations building. Green energy is being eviscerated, vindictive prosecutions are the norm, and many millions are on course to lose their health insurance. ..............
tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand
........... York is an authority on the design and décor choices of modern despots, from Saddam Hussein to Ferdinand Marcos to Nicolae Ceausescu. He noted that despite the vast differences in their cultural backgrounds, the palaces of despots all looked very similar: Gigantic rooms confected with massive amounts of gold, glass and marble, clearly in imitation of Versailles. ............. Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago North .............. Washington DC is a city full of grand monuments and impressive public buildings. Yet the style of these monuments and public buildings is generally one of restrained neoclassicism meant to evoke the Roman Republic – an ideal of a republic of equals reflected in law and norms as well as architecture. Anything approximating the Louis XIV style of Trump would have been considered monarchical and autocratic by the Founding Fathers. ............ Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can. L’etat, c’est moi. .............. even at the height of its glory the Roman Empire would have looked incredibly poor and shabby by 21st-century standards. ................ Modern historians of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire mostly agree upon one explanation for the Republic’s collapse – namely that the enormous loot from Rome’s conquests created a class of incredibly wealthy oligarchs who were too wealthy and powerful to be constrained by republican norms, institutions and laws. ............. Trump’s demolition of the White House — because that’s what it is. This isn’t a remodeling or building an addition, it’s a teardown. It may seem like a trivial story, but it’s a highly visual metaphor for the way MAGA is tearing down almost everything good about our country. And that ballroom’s hideousness is an equally good metaphor for all the political ugliness that lies in our future.
The Mamdani Moment And the Future of the Democratic Party ...... the current Democratic Party is dysfunctional if not dead. .......
The brightest light in the Democratic Party is Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old member of the New York State Assembly who has a good chance of being elected the next mayor of New York City when New Yorkers go to the polls a week from Tuesday.
.......... He’s proposing a few easy-to-understand things — free buses, free childcare, a four-year rent freeze for some two million residents, and a $30 minimum wage. He’s aiming to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did in the 1930s — fix it. ......... (My seventeen-year-old granddaughter is spending her weekends knocking on doors for him, as are her friends.) ............. Nonetheless, Mamdani is horrifying the leaders of the Democratic Party. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries haven’t endorsed him. Hillary Clinton has endorsed Andrew Cuomo, who’s spending what are likely to be the last days of his political career indulging in the kind of racist, Islamophobic attacks we’d expect from Trump. ........... Tell me: Where’s the center between democracy and fascism ......... the Times’s so-called “moderate center” is code for corporate Democrats using gobs of money to pursue culturally-conservative “swing” voters — which is what the Democratic Party has been doing for decades. ......... Corporate Democrats took the Party’s away from its real mission — to lift up the working class and lower middle class, and help the poor. Instead, they pushed for globalization, privatization, and the deregulation of Wall Street. They became Republican-Lite. ......... In 2016 and again in 2024, working and lower-middle class voters saw this and opted for a squalid real estate developer who at least sounded like he was on their side. He wasn’t and still isn’t — he’s on the side of the billionaires to whom he gave two whopping tax cuts. ............ Trump also fed voters red-meat cultural populism — blaming their problems on immigrants, Latinos, Black people, transgender people, bureaucrats, and “coastal elites.” Democrats gave voters incomprehensible 10-point plans. ......... He aims to generate $9 billion in new tax revenue by raising taxes on the city’s wealthiest residents and businesses. He’s calling for a 2% tax on incomes over $1 million, which would produce $4 billion in tax revenue. He wants to increase the state’s corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent to match New Jersey’s, generating about $5 billion annually. ..............
The wealthy have never been as wealthy as they are now, while the tax rate they pay hasn’t been as low in living memory.
.......... Inequalities of income and wealth are at record levels. A handful of billionaires now control almost every facet of the United States government and the U.S. economy. .......... Wages are nearly stagnant, prices are rising. Monopolies control food processing, housing, technology, oil and gas. ........... The time is made for the Democrats. If the Party stands for anything, it should be the growing needs of bottom 90 percent — for affordable groceries, housing, and childcare. For higher wages and better working conditions. For paid family leave. For busting up monopolies that keep prices high. For making it easier to form and join labor unions.
I think it is extremely possible. The 2008 fiasco was a policy failure on a massive scale. The 2008 fiasco was preventable. The 2008 fiasco was stupidity run amok, on Wall Street and on Capitol Hill. Main Street paid the price, and continues to do so. In any other industry the fiasco would have given rise to a whole new generation of innovative companies. The rules in finance are obviously not market friendly enough.
It was like somebody (at home) bombed the interstate highways. The basic fabric of finance lay in tatters.
China is on its way to becoming the leading economy in the world by 2016. But that is based on PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) and that is a country with four times as many people as America. And a lot of that growth is coming from playing catch up with America. America still shows signs of coming up with the industries of tomorrow. I think the explanation is simple. A country that celebrates free speech will beat a country that does not celebrate free speech any day when it comes to cutting edge innovation.
Yes but of course America could hit 5% growth rates. The Great Recession could have been avoided, if only the people on Wall Street and on Capitol Hill had been doing their job.
Unemployment is stuck above 8% and growth probably slipped below an annualised 2% in the first half of this year. Ahead lie the threats of a euro break-up, a slowdown in China and the “fiscal cliff”, a withering year-end combination of tax increases and spending cuts...... Led by its inventive private sector, the economy is remaking itself. Old weaknesses are being remedied and new strengths discovered, with an agility that has much to teach stagnant Europe and dirigiste Asia. ..... America’s sluggishness stems above all from pre-crisis excesses ..... Until 2008 growth relied too heavily on consumer spending and house-buying, both of them financed by foreign savings channelled through an undercapitalised financial system. Household debt, already nearly 100% of income in 2000, reached 133% in 2007. Recoveries from debt-driven busts always take years, as households and banks repair their balance-sheets. ...... in the past three years that repair has proceeded fast. America’s houses are now among the world’s most undervalued: 19% below fair value ..... because the Treasury and other regulators, unlike their euro-zone counterparts, chose to confront the rot in their financial system quickly, American banks have had to write off debts and raise equity faster than their peers. (Citigroup alone has flushed through some $143 billion of loan losses; no euro-zone bank has set aside more than $30 billion.) American capital ratios are among the world’s highest. And consumers have cut back, too: debts are now 114% of income. ..... a richer China has become the third-largest market for America’s exports, up 53% since 2007 ...... a growing “app economy”, nurtured by Facebook, Apple and Google, which employs more than 300,000 people; its games, virtual merchandise and so on sell effortlessly across borders .... even small companies are seeking a toehold in emerging markets ..... Many countries have shale gas, but, as it did with the internet revolution, America leads in exploiting it ...... Even the most productive start-ups cannot help an economy held back by dilapidated roads, the world’s most expensive health system, underachieving union-dominated schools and a Byzantine immigration system that deprives companies of the world’s best talent
American companies have left their mark all over Shanghai’s skyline..... Five of America’s biggest banks wrote off almost $500 billion in the aftermath of the financial crisis and raised $318 billion in fresh capital. As a result, their equity ratios now exceed 10%—above both pre-crisis levels and those of euro-zone banks. ...... Consumers are now engaged in a long, hard process of shedding debt and learning to live within their means. .... an uncommonly feeble recovery. In the three years since the recession ended, GDP has grown by an average of 2.4%. ..... With many old mortgages defaulted on and written off, and new ones harder to get, debt burdens have shrunk considerably. ..... two things beyond America’s control: the slowing world economy and the rising price of oil, America’s largest import. ..... Sales to traditional markets in the OECD, a rich-world club, have risen 20% since the end of 2007. But they have risen 51% to Latin America and 53% to China, which is now America’s third-largest market after Canada and Mexico. ..... Services have long been an American strength, consistently making up 30% of its exports. ..... scientific, engineering and other consulting, plus financial services .... Exports of such services to Brazil, India and China nearly doubled between 2006 and 2010. .... This trend has been pushed on by digital technology, which makes effortless the sale of many services across borders. ..... Zynga, one of the largest makers of online games and mobile entertainment applications, recorded $1.1 billion in revenue last year, largely from the sales of virtual goods in its games. A third of this came from players who live outside America. ...... Manufacturing employment has risen steadily for two years now. ..... Traditionally, America’s largest companies, such as Boeing and Caterpillar, have dominated exports. Small companies find distribution, regulation and language barriers overwhelming in foreign countries. ...... Small companies (with fewer than 500 employees) accounted for 34% of exports in 2010, up from 29% in 2006. ..... Soaring grain exports have raised farmers’ incomes to record levels, and regulators fret about incipient bubbles in agricultural land. At the same time, surging oil prices have triggered a gusher of new output. ..... America is the world’s third-largest oil producer. ..... a bonanza of domestic gas. Americans pay less than $3 for 1m British thermal units, where Europeans and Asians often pay more than $10. ..... America’s most successful exporters employ relatively few people. .... Emerging markets may have survived the 2008 crisis largely unscathed, but their growth is now succumbing to their own financial excesses. Nor are they an easy place to make money. China’s government, in particular, often forces foreign companies to share with local partners the ideas that give them their competitive advantage
Even for India, though, the blackout that began in the early hours of Monday was extraordinary. Nearly 360 million people—more than the population of the U.S. and Canada combined—lost power across seven states in northern India when excessive demand and a shortfall in hydro power overwhelmed the electricity grid. The worst blackout in a decade started at 2:32 in the morning, leaving people sweltering in their homes and stopping service on trains and subways in Delhi..... Slightly more than 12 hours later, power resumed in the capital...... The less-than-normal rainfall has put strains on India’s hydroelectric power supply, which accounts for 19 percent of the country’s 205 gigawatt generation capacity ..... The blackout “is symbolic of the infrastructure bottlenecks of the country” ...... The government wants to spend $400 billion over the next five years on power-sector investment, adding 76 gigawatts of capacity by 2017. That’s on top of the 85 gigawatts of power India has added in the past 10 years.
the decelerating growth of its advertising business, which accounted for 85 percent of its $3.7 billion in revenue ..... in the last quarter, Facebook got $1.28 in revenue from each of its users, which is barely changed from the same time last year. .... the average revenue per user in the U.S. and Canada jumped to $3.20 from $2.84 a year ago
There is no relationship at Facebook between user growth and revenue growth. And that seems to be the problem. Long term I am not worried. There are several ways to monetize Facebook. Facebook has to figure out Facebook-unique ways to make money.
