at what point can the whole country of Norway just go on vacation and live off the interest?

"An update on the fund’s website showed the Government Pension Fund Global’s value reaching 10 trillion Norwegian crowns for the first time at 0857 GMT — more than $200,000 for every man, woman and child in Norway."

Even the quantum physicist Richard Feynman admitted, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

yet through the tools of culture and society were able to accomplish so much more than mere biology allows a single individual to fathom.

"Biologically, we are no different than we were 40,000 years ago, but now we know about bacteria and viruses, DNA and molecules, supernovas and black holes, the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum and a wide array of other strange things."

"The real world here is pretty hard,” he said. “The real world out there is even harder, and the real world in Times Square is supremely difficult.”

“Our view is, we can’t do all of them,” he said. “Let’s start with places we can get autonomous vehicles to work reasonably in the near term.”

we've all accepted profit over morality for too long. clearly keeping silent and looking the other way to China's abuses is not a policy that's worked for anyone in the western world. we're all complicit.

"It means that the N.B.A. has weighed China’s human rights abuses against China’s potential as a source of revenue, and it has decided that it can live with state policies like the detention of hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims in the northwestern province of Xinjiang."

"American executives and policymakers initially reconciled themselves to following China’s rules by arguing that China’s turn toward capitalism, and its exposure to the United States, would gradually lead toward democracy and a greater respect for human rights. They argued, in effect, that silence was the most productive form of criticism.

It should now be clear that silence is merely complicity, no more or less.

It is the moral price the N.B.A. and other businesses are paying for making money in China."

wild world we live in where companies gladly destroy free speech and fairness to make a buck.

"Under the game's rules, players can be removed for behaviour that results in public disrepute, offends the public or damages its image, Blizzard said, adding that the two hosts were also fired."

if our consumer patterns are the driving force behind devaluing our own labour, who's to blame?

he's not even trying anymore. or maybe he wants to return to his Plan A: lose the office, start a TV network

"Trump suggested Thursday that another foreign country should investigate Biden and his son Hunter, even though House Democrats have launched an impeachment inquiry against him over his request that the Ukrainian president do the same."

amazing.

Links to this tweet: https://twitter.com/ALT_uscis/status/1179262379877703687

“Central bank independence increasingly looks like a brief historical episode that peaked around the turn of the century,’’ said Joachim Fels, global economic adviser at Pacific Investment Management Co. “Like it or not, get used to the new normal of dependent central banks.’’

“Central bank independence increasingly looks like a brief historical episode that peaked around the turn of the century,’’ said Joachim Fels, global economic adviser at Pacific Investment Management Co. “Like it or not, get used to the new normal of dependent central banks.’’

so Trump's personal lawyer is a foreign agent but it's okay because he's lobbying foreign governments, not his own, in ways that are interpreted as repressing "foreign partners and foreign investors"

"Giuliani said he was hired to send the letter by a global consulting firm run by former FBI director Louis Freeh. He declined to say on whose behalf Freeh’s firm was working or how much he was paid.

This summer, Giuliani told The Washington Post that he was working with clients in Brazil and Colombia, among other countries, as well as delivering paid speeches for an Iranian dissident group. He has not registered as a foreign agent with the Justice Department on behalf of his overseas clients, saying it is not necessary because he does not directly lobby the U.S. government."

"One of the reasons I think we haven’t seen more strikes already — given that the labour share of the national pie has been declining in most G20 countries since the 1980s — is that asset prices have risen considerably in that time, offsetting stagnant wages for some" (emphasis some)

"An asset price collapse and a lasting period of low returns would bring a looming pensions crisis to the top of the political agenda. That would, in turn, force us finally to reckon with an economic model that has put the interests of capital before workers for far too long.
.. we are due for a swing away from a financially orientated economy to one driven more by income growth."

What Trump is alleged to have done is not a garden variety crime; it’s worse. It involved misusing $250 million in aid appropriated by Congress for his benefit—the kind of gross misconduct that easily clears the bar of high crimes and misdemeanors set by the Constitution when impeaching a president. Which means the best way to hold Trump accountable for that misconduct isn’t a criminal trial; it’s for Congress to impeach him.

Pursuing criminal cases that won’t stand legal scrutiny, or arguing that Trump has violated a criminal statute, risks undermining that goal.

Labeling Trump’s alleged conduct as “bribery” or “extortion” cheapens what is alleged to have occurred and does not capture what makes it wrongful. It’s not a crime—it’s a breach of the president’s duty to not use the powers of the presidency to benefit himself. And he invited a foreign nation to influence the 2020 presidential election on the heels of a nearly three-year investigation that proved Russia had tried to influence the 2016 presidential election.

No one should expect law enforcement to act if our elected representatives are unwilling to do so.

No social security net, no family security and a pensions crisis will evolve into a humanitarian catastrophe. In the future, the economic gap between elderly China and middle-aged US will again widen. From this, we can say that the US economy will not be overtaken by China but, rather, by India. China’s economic vitality will continue to decline, which will have a disastrous impact on the global economy.

In our games, when we fight Russia and China,” “blue [the color traditionally representing the US in the games] gets its ass handed to it.” This is because the massive increase in military spending has transformed China’s military. China’s military power in the region is such that within the next 5-10 years Beijing may feel confident it could win in a regional conflict with the US. While its military buildup makes a tactical victory possible, in the larger strategic sense China faces an unprecedented demographic cliff, the country is dependent on trade with the rest of the world, and geography has left the country boxed in.

We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of endless economic growth. How dare you!”

FT announces need for new corporate agenda: "the model has come under strain, particularly the focus on maximising profits and shareholder value... without change, the prescription risks being far more painful"