- My Posts
- Chat to Authors
Home
Home
Member since 2017-07-15T03:50:57Z. Last seen 2025-04-09T16:00:01Z.
2754 blog posts. 128 comments.
ALISON SIDER AND JACOB PASSY
The Wall Street Journal 14/9/2023
Travelers won’t need to step on a plane to earn status in Delta Air Lines’s frequentflier program—if they spend enough money.
Delta had been a holdout in keeping its SkyMiles loyalty program closely tied to flying even as rivals had shifted to reward credit-card spending more richly.
Now, the carrier is shifting to a model that ties status exclusively to how much people spend, either on travel with the airline and its partners, on co-branded credit cards, or by booking hotels, rental cars and vacation packages through Delta channels.
Elite status has long been highly sought after—and hotly pursued—by frequent fliers who cherish perks like early boarding, free checked bags, seat upgrades and bonus miles to spend on award travel. Delta is the latest carrier to decide that flying is no longer a prerequisite.
Dwight James, Delta’s senior vice president of customer engagement and loyalty, said the changes mean there are more ways for people to earn status and that it will be simpler to navigate. Instead of the three metrics that currently contribute to a customer’s progress toward the upper echelons of Delta’s Medallion status tiers, there will be just one.
“We wanted to make the program more welcoming to customers,” James said. “But we also want to ensure that we’re reserving the most premium experiences for our most premium customers.”
Travelers will have higher spending bars to clear.
Delta customers currently need to spend the equivalent of $3,000 on flights to earn Silver status, the lowest. Starting next year, requirements based on the number and distance of flights taken will be gone, but customers will have to spend double that. For the highest status, Diamond, they will need to spend $35,000 a year—$15,000 more.
Delta isn’t the only airline to make it more expensive to earn and maintain higher levels of status recently, which analysts say reflects the continuing travel boom. Other carriers also have been raising the bar for earning rewards as they look to address a glut of top-tier fliers that made it more difficult for members of loyalty programs to reap highflying benefits. Delta previously raised spending thresholds last year but left the overall structure of the program intact.
Delta also announced Wednesday plans to further restrict access to its Sky Clubs to ease the crowding that has become a persistent problem in the post-Covid travel boom.
Delta already has tried several tactics, including capping visits at three hours, limiting who can buy annual passes and raising fees. But it says demand is still exceeding clubs’ capacity, even as it has opened new spaces.
Those with the Delta SkyMiles Reserve card will now get 10 visits a year and can gain unlimited access only if they spend $75,000 on their card in a calendar year. SkyMiles Platinum cards will no longer provide access to Delta Sky Clubs.
The shift underscores changes in airlines’ customers. The road warriors who racked up points through constant flying haven’t fully returned. Leisure travelers, who fly less frequently, have proved willing to shell out for pricey premium tickets and other perks. James said millennials are spending more than ever on travel but devote the bulk of their budgets to things like hotels.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
MICAH MAIDENBERG AND ROLFE WINKLER
The Wall Street Journal 14/9/2023
SpaceX’s satellite-internet division has outpaced rivals, generated surging revenue and played a pivotal role in Ukraine. The business still has a long way to go before living up to Chief Executive Elon Musk’s ambitions.
Starlink, which relies on a satellite fleet to provide highspeed internet connections, reported $1.4 billion in revenue for 2022, according to recent documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal—up from $222 million the year before.
The company had predicted the business would be bigger by now: A 2015 presentation SpaceX used to raise money from investors, viewed by the Journal, projected the division the company would later call Starlink would generate almost $12 billion in revenue and $7 billion in operating profit in 2022.
SpaceX is best known for blasting off rockets, but Starlink is key for the company’s plan to one day send humans to Mars. Global spending on high-speed internet is orders of magnitude bigger than outlays on rocket launches, and Musk needs a cash cow to help pay for technology that could make interplanetary missions possible.
Investors in the company have said they are also watching Starlink closely because it undergirds much of SpaceX’s roughly $150 billion valuation and could one day go public, according to comments Musk has made in the past. A SpaceX spokesman didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The documents viewed by the Journal don’t break out Starlink’s profitability, but they show the company overall reported a loss for 2022 and a slim profit for the first three months of this year.
Musk—who is also Tesla’s CEO, owns X, the social-media company formerly known as Twitter and has backed other ventures—is known for setting aggressive goals.
Starlink hasn’t signed up customers as quickly as SpaceX had hoped. Toward the end of last year, Starlink had more than one million active subscribers, SpaceX has said. The company thought its satellite-internet business would have 20 million subscribers as 2022 closed out, according to SpaceX’s 2015 presentation.
Starlink is bumping up against a reality articulated by many skeptics of satellite internet. The majority of the world’s population that the business could serve and that can afford high-speed broadband lives in cities. In those regions, internet service is readily available, usually offers
cheaper monthly costs than Starlink and doesn’t require specialized equipment.
Most of the Earth’s surface is ocean, and while Starlink has looked to cruise operators, shipping, oil rigs and even airlines as possible customers, those represent a smaller market.
Starlink, which first deployed satellites in 2019, has shaken satellite-broadband rivals, prompting many to try to save money and deploy better technology to keep up.
The company’s fleet of reusable rockets has enabled it to launch satellites faster and in greater numbers than competitors, many of whom rely on SpaceX rockets to blast off their own satellites. The company has around 4,700 functioning Starlink satellites in orbit, ahead of where the company thought it would be.
Starlink drew worldwide attention last year when Musk ordered the service turned on for Ukraine, following Russia’s invasion. After shipping terminals and providing internet connections, he grew concerned about the business’s involvement in the war, and recently Musk said he declined a request to activate Starlink near Sevastopol, in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimea.
The recent documents viewed by the Journal showed that capital expenditures at SpaceX for 2022 were $3.2 billion. SpaceX has funded its capital investments in part by using upfront cash that customers use to reserve future launch slots, as well as by selling additional stock. Those sources of cash could be unsustainable without faster and more profitable growth.
The company last raised funding more than a year ago, according to regulatory filings. Musk said in April he didn’t believe the company would need additional outside capital.
SpaceX is trying to stoke growth at Starlink. User kits for the service are available from Home Depot and Best Buy. The company agreed to use third-party distributors to reach business clients. In July, it said Starlink was available in 60 countries.
Starlink has also sought out customers among recreational-vehicle and boat owners, and struck a deal to provide connections to T-Mobile customers in areas without wireless service.
Competitors are behind Starlink, but are setting their own plans for low-Earth-orbit satellite networks. Amazon.com is expected to have two prototype satellites launched soon. Canadian satellite operator Telesat recently said it came up with a funding plan to deploy a new fleet, called Lightspeed.
Part of SpaceX’s challenge is that Starlink satellites are designed to last five years before they fall out of orbit and burn up, meaning the company has to continually manufacture and launch them.
SpaceX aims to make launches of upgraded Starlink satellites more efficient with Starship, a massive rocket. The initial Starship launch ended with an explosion a few minutes into the flight in April. It isn’t clear when SpaceX might get to try to launch Starship again.
If it can squeeze down costs, the company still will have to find subscribers, often far from the regions home to the most potential customers.
“I’m pretty sure we can launch satellites into orbit,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in an interview four years ago with the Journal. A question the company was asking itself then about Starlink, she said: “Can you make money out of it?” Early this year, she said Starlink was expected to do so in 2023.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
KELLY CROW
The Wall Street Journal 14/9/2023
Sotheby’s will auction the 1932 portrait, ‘Woman With a Watch.’ It hails from the estate of Emily Fisher Landau, a New York collector who died in March at 102.
Sotheby’s just landed the chance to sell the undisputed star of the fall auction season: A royal blue, green and red portrait of Pablo Picasso’s young mistress curled up in a chair, “Woman With a Watch,” estimated to top $120 million this November.
The 1932 portrait hails from the estimated $400 million estate of Emily Fisher Landau, a New York collector who died in March at age 102. Fisher Landau’s 120-piece trove includes major examples by Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol, so market watchers will be closely following the estate’s performance to gauge global bidder interest during the current slump. The Picasso, which carries the artist’s second-highest asking price ever, will come under the most scrutiny.
“Masterpieces are incredibly market resilient,” Brooke Lam“Woman pley, Sotheby’s head of global fine art, said. Lampley confirmed the house won the consignment in part by guaranteeing Fisher Landau’s heirs that the house itself would buy her pieces, including the Picasso, if no other bidders stepped up during the Nov. 8-9 sales.
To break Picasso’s record, With a Watch” will need to sell for more than the $179.4 million paid in 2015 for a 1955 harem scene, “Women of Algiers (Version O).”
Collectors tend to pay a premium for Picasso’s works from the 1930s, with half of the artist’s top 10 priciest works hail
ing from that decade, according to auction database Artnet. Three date to the same year Sotheby’s example was painted: 1932, a seminal period in Picasso’s career when he was readying works for a retrospective and reveling in a secret love affair with MarieThérèse Walter. In 2010, Christie’s sold another Picasso from 1932, “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,” for $106.5 million.
Museums including London’s Tate Modern have devoted entire shows to that singular year when Picasso used a lush, jewel-tone palette to paint his mistress lounging in voluptuous repose. The Tate Modern didn’t borrow Fisher Landau’s Picasso, but at least six other museums have exhibited it over the years, most recently a 2022 show of her collection at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla.
Fisher Landau, born in 1920 and raised in New York, bought the Picasso with her first husband, real-estate developer Martin Fisher, in 1968 when she was just starting to collect art. The following year, armed burglars disguised as repairmen broke into their Upper East Side apartment and stole her jewels out of her safe. She decided to spend the insurance payout on art.
“She never bought important jewelry after that,” said her daughter, Candia Fisher, also a collector. “She’d point out women wearing big pieces at galas and say, ‘Think of the art they could buy.’”
Her mother later married clothing manufacturer Sheldon Landau, and in 1991 the couple arrayed much of the collection—estimated then to be around 1,500 works—in a former parachute harness factory in Queens. The Fisher Landau Center for Art regularly mounted shows until 2017, when Candia Fisher said her mother was no longer able to oversee it and no one else in the family wanted to take over.
The family is holding on to some of those pieces. Fisher Landau also gave around 400 pieces to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, where she served as a longtime trustee. In 1994, the museum named the fourth floor of its former Breuer Building in her honor.
In a twist, the Breuer now belongs to Sotheby’s. But since the house is still transforming the space into an auction hub, Fisher Landau’s estate will be auctioned off at its current York Avenue headquarters across town.
Other sale highlights include Johns’s “Flags” from 1986, a side-by-side view of two U.S. flags that Sotheby’s expects to sell for at least $35 million, and Warhol’s camouflage “Self Portrait” dated to the same year, which is estimated to sell for at least $15 million.
Willem de Kooning’s wispy red-and-blue abstract “Untitled XV” from 1983 is estimated to sell for at least $6 million, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Pink Tulip” from 1925 is estimated to sell for at least $3 million.
Another work to watch: Ruscha’s “Securing the Last Letter (Boss),” a 1964, blueand-orange wordplay painting in which the conceptual artist paints a clamp that appears to be squeezing the second “s” in the word boss. Sotheby’s said it still hasn’t finalized an asking price for that work, but expectations will likely run high as its sale coincides with the artist’s must-see retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
Fisher Landau was known to have one of the world’s biggest collections of Ruscha’s work and visited him often at his studio in Los Angeles. “Mom used to get so excited about seeing Ed,” her daughter said, adding, “Artists were her rock stars.”
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
Burton G. Malkiel Mr. Malkiel is the author of “A Random Walk Down Wall Street,” whose 50th anniversary edition was released this year.
The Wall Street Journal 14/9/2023
Active portfolio managers claim that agile stock picking is the best way to invest. Many have lately argued that simple indexing is a bad strategy in today’s environment because the stock market is dangerously “narrow.” Seven stocks—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla—constitute close to 20% of the S&P 500’s value and have been responsible for almost 90% of the index’s gains this year. Now these “Magnificent Seven” are beginning to falter. The simple index investor, the active managers warn, will soon be overly concentrated in a small number of stocks that are overpriced and have been hyped by the promise of artificial intelligence.
This argument is wrong. Indexing a stock portfolio through a low-cost fund remains the best way to participate in the stock market. Critics of indexing tend to point to the late 1990s, when the promise of the internet drove high-tech stocks like Apple and Amazon to triple-digit price/earnings ratios and the market indexes to unprecedented high valuations. The market then declined sharply until 2002. Another sharp decline occurred during the 2007-08 financial crisis. The market ended the first decade of the 2000s below where it started. Index investors got banged up. Tech stocks got crushed. Even successful companies such as Amazon and Apple lost more than 90% of their value through early 2002 before finally recovering.
But did indexing really fail? The evidence suggests it didn’t. From 1990 to 2009, according to the Bogle Financial Research Center at Vanguard, a broad U.S. stock market index fund outperformed the average actively managed equity fund by almost 1% a year. The total stock market index returned 8.42% annually in that 20-year period, including both the dot-com bubble and the poor returns that followed. The realized annual return from the average actively managed equity mutual fund was only 7.53%. And the best 20 active funds of the 1990s underperformed the index by more than 3 percentage points a year in the first decade of the 2000s.
There is no way to predict which active managers will be the best stock pickers. Portfolio-manager fees are the only reliable predictor of performance. The lower the fees, the higher the returns realized by investors. The quintessential low-fee equity funds are index funds. Competition has driven the expense ratio of total stock market U.S. equity funds almost to zero.
Certainly there are some similarities today to the economic environment of the dot-com era of the late 1990s. Technological innovation promises to transform our economy. The internet is revolutionizing how we communicate, access information and purchase goods and services. But changes— today, as then—occur slowly. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that productivity statistics reflected internet-related technological improvements. Today, artificial intelligence promises to transform transportation, entertainment, medicine and more. But these changes won’t be rapid. Stock-price reactions that assume a virtually instant realization of benefits are likely to be overdone.
There is no doubt that U.S. equities are richly valued in part because of the promise of AI. The cyclically adjusted price/earning ratio for the market as a whole stands at 30, well above its longrun average in the midteens. But that multiple was over 40 in early 2000, a record high. The average multiple for the Magnificent Seven is about 50. But the multiples for Apple, Amazon and Cisco Systems, the darlings of the market in early 2000, were over 100. The average multiple for Apple, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft today is just over 30. Only Nvidia has a triple-digit earnings multiple. It may be that hype over the promise of AI has inflated these multiples to unwarranted heights. But it is also possible that they simply reflect the enormous potential of AI to transform the way the world’s work is done.
The basic idea of efficient markets isn’t that prices are always correct. In fact, they are always wrong. What efficiency implies is that information is reflected in prices without delay. And the current tableau of market prices reflects the combined judgment of hundreds of thousands of investors, including those of the research departments of the most influential firms on Wall Street— as well as the galaxy of active managers who run mutual funds and institutional portfolios. It’s rare for an individual manager to make correct bets against the wisdom of the market. And even when it does happen, it doesn’t last. More than 90% of active managers fail to beat the market over 10and 20-year periods.
It isn’t impossible to beat the market. But if you go active, chances are you’ll underperform. Years of evidence in a variety of market environments confirms the wisdom of indexing. And if you do decide to alter your portfolio from market weightings, you can do so with much less risk if your active bets are made around a core portfolio that is broadly indexed.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
Sadanand Dhume
The Wall Street Journal 14/9/2023
For many observers, last week’s Group of 20 summit in New Delhi marked the emergence of India as a leading player in global affairs. That’s the conventional wisdom in India, trumpeted endlessly by governmentfriendly media. It will likely be central to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s re-election campaign next year, as he attempts to become the first Indian leader in more than 60 years to win three consecutive national elections.
But Indians shouldn’t believe too much of the hype. While India matters considerably more today than it did 10 years ago, it is far from achieving Mr. Modi’s stated goal of becoming a Vishwa Guru, or teacher to the world. If anything, the G-20 summit underscores that India needs the U.S. and its allies more than ever to achieve its domestic and geopolitical ambitions.
The New Delhi summit wouldn’t have made an international splash if it hadn’t coincided with a real increase in India’s stature. Mexico, Turkey and Argentina, among others, have all taken their turns as G-20 hosts without commentators reading geopolitical significance into it. In India’s case, the endless stream of photo-ops of Mr. Modi posing with world leaders lined up with meaningful national advances.
Ten years ago, India’s $1.86 trillion economy was the 10th largest in the world at market exchange rates, according to World Bank figures. By last year, India’s gross domestic product nearly doubled to $3.39 trillion, making it the world’s fifth-largest economy, ahead of the U.K. The International Monetary Fund estimates that India will become the world’s thirdlargest economy as early as 2027.
Earlier this year, India overtook China to become the world’s most populous nation for the first time since the 1750s. While China’s population has already begun to decline, the United Nations expects India’s to peak at 1.7 billion in 2064. And weeks before the G-20 summit, India became only the fourth nation to land a craft on the moon, and the first to land on its harder-to-reach south pole. That a Russian lunar craft crashed a few days earlier heightened India’s achievement.
As it has risen, India has become more active in shaping global events.
“Ten years ago, nobody in India cared about foreign policy,” says Constantino Xavier, a fellow at New Delhi’s Centre for Social and Economic Progress. “Now India’s international aspirations have become part of Modi’s domestic political ambitions across the country.”
India treated its yearlong stint as chair of the G-20—a group founded in 1999 to represent 19 large national economies and the European Union—as a combination debutante party for itself and extended campaign event for Mr. Modi. Over the course of the year, India hosted 100,000 delegates from 125 countries. Foreign diplomats traveled to 60 Indian cities. An estimated 15 million Indians took part in a G-20related event.
Posters and giant billboards across the country reminded Indians that Mr. Modi was “Solving the Greatest Challenges of the World Together” and “Giving Voice to the Global South.” In an interview before the summit, Mr. Modi told the Press Trust of India that his development model has shown how “India can also be a guiding principle for the welfare of the world.”
But for all this buildup, it wasn’t clear that India could pull off a successful summit. A meeting of G-20 foreign ministers in March failed to come up with a joint statement thanks to deep divisions between Western nations and Russia and China over Ukraine. Both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping skipped the New Delhi summit, the first time Mr. Xi has missed a G-20 gathering since he became president in 2013.
In the end, however, Mr. Modi was spared the embarrassment of a summit without a joint statement when participants agreed to watered-down language on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to overcome intransigence from Russian and Chinese diplomats. They also agreed to a proposal by Mr. Modi to include the African Union as a member of the G-20. On the sidelines of the summit, the U.S., Saudi Arabia and India, among others, announced an infrastructure project that aims to challenge China’s Belt and Road Initiative by linking India by ship and rail to Europe via the United Arab Emirates and Israel.
For India and Mr. Modi, all this undoubtedly counts as a foreign-policy win. But it doesn’t change hard realities. China’s economy is more than five times as large as India’s and Beijing remains hostile to India’s aspirations. The U.S.-led global order welcomes India’s rise. A Chinese- and Russian-led order would seek to quash India’s ambitions rather than nurture them.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
Wall Street Journal 14/9/2023
Inflation rebounded in August, which is bad for consumers but perhaps not enough to spook the Federal Reserve from standing pat on monetary policy when its Open Market Committee (FOMC) meets next week.
The consumer-price index climbed a sharp 0.6% for the month, owing largely to a surge in fuel prices. Prices are up 3.7% over the last 12 months, which is substantial progress from the heights of summer 2022. But gasoline prices were up 10.6% for the month, as no doubt our readers have noticed. Services less energy are also continuing to be sticky, rising 0.4% for the month and 5.9% in the last year.
The good news for the Fed is that so-called core prices, sans food and energy, rose only 0.3% for the month. After three straight months of relatively small increases, core prices are now up only 4.3% in the last 12 months. That’s still well above the Fed’s inflation target of 2%, but it will probably give Chairman Jerome Powell confidence that he’s slowly winning his antiinflation fight.
Whether the Fed raises its fed-funds target rate another 25 basis points next week from the current 5.25%-5.5% probably doesn’t matter much. The market doesn’t expect it, and it doesn’t look to us like another one is required even with the August price rebound.
The harder challenge for the Fed will be keeping money tight enough for long enough to get back to its 2% target even as the political clamor rises on Wall Street and Washington for rate cuts. The Fed signaled in June that its median projection was four 25-point rate cuts next year, but that will depend on further inflation progress.
Wall Street wants to restart the easy-money party, but the best case for Fed caution is in the Census Bureau data on real incomes that we report nearby. Inflation punished America’s lower- and middle-income earners with a vengeance in 2021 and 2022.
The corner on falling incomes looked like it might have turned this year with five monthly increases in real average hourly wages from March to July. But the consumer-price rebound in August meant that real wages fell 0.5% for all employees, erasing nearly all of the gains for June and July. Americans need a raise, and that means slaying the inflation beast.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
ANNE MARIE CHAKER
The Wall Street Journal 14/9/2023
Office happy hours, client dinners and other night gatherings are rarer and earlier these days
Patience for after-hours work socializing is wearing thin. After an initial burst of postpandemic happy hours, rubber chicken dinners and mandatory office merriment, many employees are adopting a stricter 5:01-and-I’mdone attitude to their work schedules. More U.S. workers say they’re trying to draw thicker lines between work and the rest of life, and that often means clocking out and eschewing invites to socialize with co-workers.
Corporate event planners say they’re already facing pushback for fall activities and any work-related functions that take place on weekends.
“The flake-out rate is so much higher at events now,” says Gretchen Goldman, a research director in Takoma Park, Md.
This summer Goldman invited 100 colleagues for casual afterwork drinks at some picnic tables just outside the office as a goodbye party. She was taking a new job with the federal government. Fewer than 10 showed up.
“I guess people are just busy,” she says.
The pandemic altered eating and drinking habits, and pandemic puppies, now fully grown dogs, have to be walked on a schedule.
With fewer people back in offices, there are fewer impromptu happy hours and a lack of interest in staying out late with colleagues, some bosses and workers say.
Andy Challenger oversees employees who participate in the fantasy football league at his outplacement firm, Challenger, Gray & Christmas. When some of them floated the same game plan as prior years—an in-office pizza party that goes past 11 p.m. as everybody drafts their favorite players—the pushback was swift.
This season, the pizza arrived at 4:30 p.m. and everyone was finished and out of the office by 6 p.m.
“Normally that would have been the starting time,” he says.
For decades, an unspoken rule of office culture has been that much of work happens outside the 9-to-5 window. Getting ahead often requires being known outside the building and having organizational allies—the type of networking that’s helped by showing up for dinner with the boss and getting relaxed face time with coworkers at happy hours, says Jon Levy, a New York City-based consultant who advises organizations on connection and culture.
Now, even the go-getters are saying no to after-hours schmoozing opportunities. The thinking is: “That 20th happy hour isn’t going to produce anything better for me,” Levy says.
People are less jazzed about eating out once they are home, and many got pretty good at making dinner during the pandemic, says David Portalatin, food industry adviser at Circana Group, a market research firm.
In the past year, U.S. consumers had 264 million restaurant dinners after leaving work, which is down 43% from 2019 levels, according to Circana. And reservations are now earlier: In 2023, 26% of after-work restaurant dinners happened before 6 p.m., compared with 21% in 2019.
Barbara Martin hosts bimonthly evening soirees for clients of her marketing firm, Brand Guild. Traditionally, cocktails start flowing around 6:30 p.m. and the mingling could last until 9 o’clock—or beyond. But last Thursday she pulled the start time forward to 5:30 p.m. sharp.
“‘I’d love to come to these if you could do them earlier,’ ” Martin says she’s heard again and again this summer. “Nobody wants to overbook themselves until 10 p.m. on a weeknight anymore.”
Attitudes don’t appear to be changing as the summer vacation season ends. Kay Ciesla is helping organize an all-staff gathering for 80 people at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Washington, D.C., nonprofit where she works as a governance executive. She is considering an axthrowing theme, and serving finger foods and cocktails.
“I’m already getting pushback,” she says of spending precious time that bleeds into personal hours on team building. Due to scheduling conflicts the group can’t gather until December. One employee voiced concern that the socializing could turn into a superspreader event ahead of Christmas travel.
Doug Quattrini, an event planner in the Philadelphia area, has already booked six Christmas parties. What’s different this year, he says, is that most are on weekdays, in the office— and end at 8 p.m.
“Nobody wants to take up people’s Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays,” says Fausto Pifferrer, co-owner of Blue Elephant Catering in Saco, Maine, near Portland, which has booked several office holiday parties for Monday through Thursday.
Younger Americans are drinking less. The share of people between 18 and 34 who said they “ever” drink alcohol has fallen to 62% from 72% two decades ago, according to Gallup data.
Caroline Wong, the chief strategy officer at Cobalt, a cybersecurity company in San Francisco, quit drinking in her early 30s and tries to plan social gatherings sans alcohol. A team off-site next month will be a tour of waterfalls near Portland, Ore. She’s noticed things wrap up earlier when there’s no drinking involved.
“It’s like, ‘You know what, we hung out for 90 minutes. We’re good and I’ll see you tomorrow,’” Wong says. “I think there’s something awesome about that.”
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
RYAN TRACY AND DEEPA SEETHARAMAN —Katy Stech Ferek contributed to this article.
The Wall Street Journal 14/9/2023
WASHINGTON—Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and other technology heavyweights debated the possibilities and risks of artificial intelligence in a closed-door meeting with more than 60 U.S. senators who are contemplating legislation to regulate the technology.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of X (formerly Twitter), warned about what he views as AI’s potential to threaten humanity, according to a participant. Microsoft co-founder Gates said the technology could help address world hunger, said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who convened Wednesday’s session.
Other speakers included Facebook founder Zuckerberg and the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and IBM, along with union leaders, civil rights advocates, and others.
Schumer at one point asked the guests if they agreed that the government needed to play a role in regulating artificial intelligence. Everyone present raised their hands, Schumer said.
“No one backed off in saying we need government involvement,” Schumer said in an interview after the session ended. “They understood that there needed to be government responsibility, because let’s say even these companies would be willing to install guardrails on themselves—they’ll have competitors who won’t.”
Despite that consensus— and Schumer’s vow to move toward passing legislation within months—the meeting also laid bare some of the tension points ahead.
One debate centered on socalled “open-source” AI systems that are available for the public to download and modify. These systems allow companies and researchers to tap in to AI technology similar to the models that power ChatGPT without spending millions of dollars to train them.
Tristan Harris, head of the nonprofit Center for Humane Technology, argued that bad actors can abuse open-source AI systems, including the Llama 2 model recently released by Meta Platforms, the company led by Zuckerberg, according to people in the room.
Harris said his nonprofit was able to get the Llama 2 model to provide instructions on how to create dangerous biological compounds, these people said.
Zuckerberg parried back, saying similar instructions can already be found on the internet, the people said. He added that open-source models could pose dangers, but that Meta was trying to build this technology as safely as possible, the people in the room said.
Zuckerberg told senators in his opening statement that open source “democratizes access to these tools, and that helps level the playing field and foster innovation for people and businesses,” according to excerpts released by Meta. Another point of tension related to workers who see AI as a potential threat to their jobs. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.) recounted a moment where the head of the Writers Guild of America West, Meredith Stiehm, described the views of members who are on strike seeking a new contract with Hollywood studios in part to address those fears.
Also in the room: The head of the Hollywood trade group Motion Picture Association.
“That was, like, two sides right there,” Cantwell said. “Lots of different viewpoints.”
Some executives in the room argued that adding too many safety guardrails on AI systems risked American leadership in the technology. Another contested topic: the possibility that future AI systems could wipe out humanity.
Deb Raji, an AI researcher who attended Wednesday’s meeting, said she urged the room to focus on current-day harms, including biased decisions in housing, hiring or criminal sentencing, that can come from hastily deployed AI systems.
She also advocated for building auditing methods for AI systems now before companies develop even more powerful AI systems.
The closed-door nature of the session drew criticism from some quarters. Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) questioned whether the meeting was designed “to prevent senators from asking tough questions the CEOs don’t want to answer,” and he called on Schumer to bring AI legislation up for a vote.
Schumer, who organized the meeting with a bipartisan group of three other senators, said the format was designed to allow a frank debate.
“There were people who have created AI systems and there were people who had problems with parts of the AI systems,” Schumer said. “They talked directly to each other, they answered one another.”
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
.
A 3% Mortgage Rate In a Grim 7% World? A Startup Sees Gold
BEN EISEN
The Wall Street Journal 14/9/2023
There are millions of outstanding mortgages with a 3% interest rate. A new startup says it can help today’s home buyers get their hands on them.
Mortgage rates are now above 7%, leaps and bounds above the 3% they grazed two years ago. Buyers and sellers alike are giving up, sucking demand and supply out of the housing market. And things are expected to stay that way, with the Federal Reserve signaling plans to keep rates high for the foreseeable future.
Roam, a real-estate company that launched Wednesday, is betting that it can popularize an obscure workaround. “Assumable loans” allow sellers to transfer their own mortgage loans to the buyer alongside the house
In theory, the idea sounds great, at least for discouraged house hunters who can inherit a lower-rate loan. Sellers, in turn, might fetch higher prices for their houses.
But Roam’s vision faces an uphill battle. Loan assumptions haven’t gained much traction recently, even though rates are up. Many lenders are cool to the idea because for them it would mean more work for less money.
Some 22% of active mortgages are part of the government programs that have assumption features, according to the mortgage-data and technology company Black Knight. That includes loans extended through the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Federal Housing Administration programs.
Few consumers know about the option, and fewer still follow through with it. The FHA has processed 3,349 assumptions in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, up from 2,566 in the year prior.
Raunaq Singh, Roam’s founder and chief executive officer, said his new company will find and advertise home listings attached to attractive assumable mortgages. It is initially launching in Georgia, Arizona, Colorado, Texas and Florida.
The company aims to help
with the paperwork and other bureaucratic hoops. That means working with the seller’s mortgage company on behalf of the buyer and seller.
“Have you ever called someone every day until you get what you wanted?” said Singh, who earlier in his career worked at the online realestate company Opendoor. “That’s the kind of service we do on your behalf.”
A loan assumption is different from a standard sale, in which a buyer takes out a mortgage at the going rate to pay the seller. In that case, a seller uses the money to pay off his or her own mortgage and pockets the rest.
An assumable transaction doesn’t replace an old mortgage with a new one, but instead transfers the old mortgage to the new owner. The seller is relieved of the remaining mortgage liability, so the balance is subtracted from the purchase amount owed. The buyer must come up with cash to cover the rest of the purchase price.
Take a $500,000 house that is tied to an assumable mortgage with a $300,000 balance. Even after the buyer assumes the mortgage, the buyer still needs to come up with $200,000. Unless the buyer can pay that amount, he or she would need to take out a second loan at going rates.
Roam said it would recommend lenders to provide additional financing. It wouldn’t specify which lenders it will work with. Roam will collect a fee from the buyer that equals 1% of the purchase price.
Roam, with 10 employees, received $1.25 million in a seed-funding round led by the venture-capital firm Founders Fund and Eric Wu, who cofounded Opendoor. Tim Mayopoulos, the former Fannie Mae CEO who briefly ran Silicon Valley Bank after it failed, is an adviser.
The startup could run up against the Luddite world of mortgage banking, where assumption documents are still often transmitted by fax machine. Lenders sometimes drag their feet in processing assumptions because they earn only a few hundred dollars for processing them, often not enough to cover the cost and far less than they make originating new mortgages, according to Ted Tozer, nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center.
For loan assumptions to become popular, lenders will need to be allowed to earn more on them, Tozer said. “There’s not much you can do with that if the lenders aren’t going to be efficiently processing assumptions,” he said.
If assumptions did take off, mortgage investors could effectively demand higher rates on new loans to compensate for being stuck holding assumable mortgages for longer, according to John Kerschner, head of U.S. securitized products at Janus Henderson Investors.
Another challenge: Not every seller wants to part with a loan. If a seller with a VA loan bequeaths a mortgage to a civilian buyer, the seller might not be able to take out a new VA loan immediately.
Veterans United Home Loans, the largest VA lender, expects to process about 150 assumptions this year, up from about two dozen last year.
Jessica Pardinas and her family assumed a Veterans United loan with a rate of just over 3% when they bought a four-bedroom home in Bowie, Md., in August. She knew loan assumption was a possibility because it was mentioned in the listing. Because Pardinas is a veteran, the process was a little easier.
The seller hadn’t paid down much of the loan balance, so a second loan wasn’t needed. She estimated taking the lower rate will save about $10,000 a year.
“It was a very welcome surprise,” she said. “We certainly will be able to put the money we are saving to good use.”
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
JIM CARLTON
The Wall Street Journal 15/9/2023
In Montana and other states, owners oblige city folks’ interest in Western way of life
GALLATIN GATEWAY, Mont.—Fifth-generation rancher Bayard Black has a lot of city folks looking to pay top dollar to rent his spread in the mountains near Yellowstone National Park. He can thank John Dutton in part for that.
The runaway popularity of the “Yellowstone” TV series, starring Kevin Costner as rancher patriarch Dutton, has helped spur interest among tourists to spend time on real ranches. Black is charging visitors for everything from traipsing his property in search of elk antlers to bird watching and fishing.
His motivation is the same as for many other ranchers: getting extra income to help offset rising costs, including a 61% jump in property taxes since 2021 spurred by the hot real-estate market in nearby Bozeman.
“We’re just trying to figure out how to keep the ranch in the family,” Black said.
Ranchers have for years occasionally allowed outsiders to hunt or fish for a fee, but they have begun adding more activities as the demand to spend time on their property has grown, which people in the industry attribute to “Yellowstone,” as well as increased interest in the outdoors following the pandemic.
A startup called LandTrust has increased its number of rental listings, most of which are ranches, from 140 covering 300,000 acres in 2020 to 427 on 1.2 million acres currently. Many are in Montana, where “Yellowstone” takes place.
Chief Executive Nic De Castro said his Bozeman, Mont., firm, which has raised $10 million of funding, has recently added offerings including overnight stays in RVs.
In all, landowners have earned $1 million from LandTrust rentals, according to the company.
Western ranchers have been caught in a squeeze they say was brought on, in part, by the prolonged drought in the U.S. West in recent years.
That has pressured them to reduce their herds at the same time prices have gone up for essentials. Hay, for example, has more than tripled in price over the past five years as increased wildfires and other factors have made it harder for ranchers to grow their own.
“When there’s no hay, it’s expensive to feed animals in the winter,” said Sigrid Johannes, director of the Public Lands Council, a nonprofit ranching group.
Explore Ranches, based in Austin, Texas, started in 2018 with a roster of seven ranches in Texas and Colorado willing to rent out to large groups, and has since expanded to 20 in six Western states, said co-founder Allison Ryan. The firm specializes in upscale ranch stays.
“Everyone wants their ‘Yellowstone’ moment,” Ryan said.
The new breed of visitors is often looking for an authentic ranch experience rather than a simplistic simulation or an opportunity to fish and hunt.
That’s what Jett Ferebee and his sons, Joseph and John, did in August when they paid $4,485 to spend five nights on the Mahlstedt Ranch in the rugged badlands of Eastern Montana and got to help herd cattle.
“We didn’t want a dude ranch with trail rides,” said John, a 25-year-old law-school student.
Tana Canen, who helps oversee her family’s ranch, said she and her husband Ross decided to list the property with LandTrust last year after a series of droughts beginning in 2017 crippled their crops, including barley, and forced them to deplete some $200,000 in savings to feed their animals.
“When your crops fail and you have to buy feed, you have to look at other options,” said the 53-year-old, whose family first homesteaded the land in 1912.
Since then, she said the ranch has hosted dozens of visitors, providing enough extra income to help make payments on a 4,000-acre addition to the property in 2022.
At the Black family ranch, one recent customer was Bozeman resident Marciela Ross, who paid $287 for all-day family access as a Father’s Day gift for her husband, Michael. He spent the day fishing with his family members, while his wife hiked with their two young children and chased butterflies. Bayard Black, as he often does, left them on their own for the day.
“There’s something special,” said the 47-year-old Ross, “just knowing you are the only people in this place right now.”
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
Wall Street Journal 15/9/2023
From an early age, Salehe Bembury could see the sneakers of the future. In childhood sketchbooks he morphed the shapes of dinosaurs and praying mantises into intricate, tubular shoes, with strap closures and cupped soles. They were like nothing the market had seen before.
Today, Bembury, 36, continues to give the footwear buyers something novel with each box-breaking shoe he rolls out. In a market worth at least $70 billion and as much as $130 billion, the native New Yorker is something of a sneaker oracle—the designer responsible for some of the most inventive, forward-thinking products of the past several years.
He worked at Kanye West’s Yeezy on shapely military boots that looked beamed in from a yet-to-be-made “Blade Runner” sequel. At Versace, he brought to life the gold-necklace-inspired Chain Reaction sneaker with its colossal chain-imprinted outsole, helping to usher in the trend of chunky dad sneakers.
Under his own name, he collaborated with New Balance on a sly update of its 574 model, giving it a functional whistle on the back. He’s responsible for Crocs’s wildly successful Pollex, a closed-heel clog that drew its spindly, textured design from Bembury’s own fingerprint.
So where does Bembury, the pragmatic sneaker-savant, think the footwear world will navigate next?
Personalization was his immediate answer. “The future of shoes might fall into the hands of the individual,” said Bembury.
He cited Nike ID, the pioneering* do-it-yourself program that launched in 1999, allowing shoppers to select each shade of a Dunk sneaker and stitch their initials on the back heel, as a possible template. Beyond choosing colors, the next frontier could place the power of choosing the actual sole’s composition, upper materials and the shape of lace loops in the consumers hands. Imagine a Build-A-Bear-Workshop in sneaker form. You want a lavender mesh sneaker sitting on an outsole the size of a Subway sub? You got it.
3-D printing might well hold the key to maximum personalization. Bembury acknowledged that thus far the technology is too creaky— printing a single design takes an inordinately long time, even longer, in his estimation, than sampling a new shoe model by hand. But he is optimistic it will catch up and get brisker.
“There will be a time where maybe your consumer can print a shoe in his own home,” said Bembury, who currently 3-D prints experimental shapes and ideas for presentations with potential collaborators. “At the end of the day, people want to feel like they are an individual, and brands need to give them the tools to do that.”
As for that marquee technology of the moment, artificial intelligence, Bembury has just begun sprinkling it into his process. “It really comes down to the amount of time it takes me to come up with ideas compared with the amount of time it takes AI to come up with ideas,” he said.
Bembury projects that soon, AI will be able to train itself on his design language and spit out hundreds of options of color schemes that channel his sensibility. “That would probably save me a week of playing around with color,” he said.
Bembury often looks at each component of a shoe individually, to spot where he can stretch the form. Take the attached whistle detail on his New Balance 574 Yurt. The idea sparked when he was wearing the Nike Vomero 5, designed by A Cold Wall designer Samuel Ross, which featured a blocky, functionless cube jutting out from the heel.
“People would always ask like,
‘Hey, what’s that do? Does it light up?’ And I would tell them no,” said Bembury.
But then he thought, well, why shouldn’t it do something? An avid hiker, Bembury figured he could add a molded plastic whistle to the back of a shoe. “It could potentially be a lifesaving tool,” he said. At the time he was working on a design for New Balance and decided to give it a go. Bembury has been tagged in Instagram videos of people blowing the whistle on their hiking trails—a new form of flexing that you own a rare piece of footwear.
Bembury, who sketches by hand and uses the Adobe design suite to execute his ideas, brings a healthy heap of realism to his designs. “What’s important at the end of the day, is a shoe has to work,” he said.
His designs come to life in a plantstuffed Los Angeles studio brimming with curios that reflect his achievements and influences. There’s a chair by artist Tom Sachs, a figurine of Louis Vuitton designer Pharrell Williams and cartoony collectibles by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. There are also shoes of his own design, displayed like proud trophies.
Bembury studied industrial design at Syracuse University, conscious that a career in sneakers specifically might not pan out. His early jobs were at high-volume labels like Payless and Cole Haan. He continues to have an “extreme focus on satisfying a customer because it all really comes down to sales.”
In recent years, the sneaker industry has been awash with what appear to be paradigm-shifting, futuristic innovations. Nike and Puma have brought the automatic self-lacing sneaker, once a mere “Back to the Future” fantasy, to life. And earlier this year, Dior 3-D printed an intricate, spider-webby iteration of classic derby dress shoe.
But those are mostly marketing exercises. According to Dior, just one of those shoes took 12 hours to print. And good luck finding self-lacing shoes at your local Nordstrom. Nike only releases its “HyperAdapt” motorized-lacing sneakers in small batches, and those models have packed a staggering $720 price tag.
“You could probably have some sneakers that make you hover over water, but you’re probably paying like $400,000 for them,” said Bembury. “A sign of a good designer is the ability to exercise restraint.”
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
Shaun Wooller Health Editor
Daily Mail 13/9/2023
MORE than 40 per cent of patients admitted to hospital for planned treatment say their health deteriorated while on the NHS waiting list, a major survey reveals.
Some 24 per cent of those questioned said their health got a ‘bit worse’ while waiting, and 17 per cent said it became ‘much worse’.
Many also complained that they were unable to access the food and medication they needed while in hospital due to staff shortages. The Care Quality Commission’s annual inpatient survey looked at the overall experience of more than 63,000 people who stayed in one of 133 acute and specialist NHS trusts in England for at least one night during last November.
The damning findings, which come as waiting lists stand at a record 7.6million patients, show 39 per cent of respondents would have liked to have been admitted sooner – up from 35 per cent the previous year. A total of 34 per cent of all those admitted for planned or emergency treatment said they had to wait too long for a bed once they arrived at hospital.
Among these, those that said they had to wait ‘far too long’ increased from 8 per cent in 2020 and 15 per cent in 2021 to 18 per cent last year.
Only 70 per cent of patients reported always getting help to wash or keep themselves clean (unchanged from 2021, but down from 75 per cent in 2020), and just 75 per cent said they were always offered food that met their dietary needs or requirements.
A quarter said they could never get hospital food outside of set mealtimes and 17 per cent said they did not get enough help from staff to eat. One in 20 patients also said they were not given enough to drink.
Despite the criticisms, the CQC found most patients were still positive about their experiences.
Most (81 per cent) said they always had confidence and trust in the doctors treating them, while 82 per cent said they were always treated with dignity and respect – both unchanged from 2021.
When asked to rate their overall inpatient experience, the proportion of people who gave a score of nine or higher out of 10 fell to 50 per cent last year, down from 56 per cent in 2020. Labour health spokesman Wes Streeting said: ‘ Patients are being left for months or even years, and their conditions are worsening as a result. This is bad for their health, and it increases the overall bill for their care to the taxpayer.’
Dr Sean O’Kelly, chief inspector of healthcare at the CQC, said the survey was ‘testament to the efforts of frontline healthcare professionals working tirelessly to provide high quality care to those that need it’.
‘However, the lack of improvements in areas such as discharge arrangements and in people feeling like they were given enough information is disappointing and highlights the need for us to do more.’
An NHS England spokesman said: ‘While the vast majority of patients responding to this survey reported a positive overall experience and a high level of trust in doctors and nurses, the results also reflect the
ongoing pressures the NHS is under. During November 2022, when respondents were surveyed, the NHS was treating an average of 5,000 covid-positive patients in hospital a day and more than 13,500 beds were occupied by patients medically fit to leave each day. Staff treated more than 1.5million patients last month and the longest waits are now down more than half since their peak.’
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
Daily Mail 13/9/2023
WE know from experience that when Labour politicians start talking about a ‘New Deal’ it’s time to count the spoons.
With Tony Blair, it presaged a £5.6billiona-year tax raid on final- salary pensions from which the industry never recovered.
The result has been that virtually the only defined-benefit pension schemes left are those in the public sector, which are directly funded by the taxpayer.
Angela Rayner’s New Deal, outlined at the TUC annual congress yesterday, is not such a direct assault on private savings, but could ultimately prove just as costly.
To cheers from the comrades, the party’s deputy leader promised that a Labour government would bring forward an employment rights bill in its first 100 days.
More power to unions, more collective bargaining, an end to zero-hours contracts. Plus, inevitably, the scrapping of laws requiring minimum levels of service to be maintained during strikes in key industries such as the railways.
Perish the thought that unions should have to show any sense of responsibility to those who pay their wages.
Striking, said Ms Rayner, is ‘a fundamental freedom that should be respected’. She might try telling that to passengers who have given up travelling by train because of constant walkouts.
Or the hundreds of thousands of patients left in pain and discomfort as their operations were cancelled because of strike action first by nurses and then by doctors. What price their fundamental freedoms? We learned in the 1970s what happens when the combination of a socialist government and over-mighty unions take control of British industry.
Productivity crashes, profit becomes a dirty word, growth and eventually business viability are crushed.
By 1979, Britain was universally regarded as the sick man of Europe. It took the courage of Margaret Thatcher to stand up to the union militants and administer the necessary economic medicine.
Significantly, New Labour did not repeal any of the union laws that she brought in when the party came to power – including the legislation that outlawed secondary picketing.
But this is not New Labour. Despite Sir Keir Starmer’s attempts to shift to the centre ground, it remains the party of Jeremy Corbyn, for whom Miss Rayner was one of the main cheerleaders.
This New Deal for workers is straight out of his hard-Left playbook.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界
Daily Mail 13/9/2023
THE 21st century will see a fierce struggle between two visions for humanity. One embraces openness and democracy, the other authoritarianism and oppression.
Unless we want to live in a society where rulers are above the law and flagrantly exploit AI and big data to oppress their own populations, this is a battle we cannot lose.
This is why Chinese spying is serious. It is part of a much larger threat to our way of life. We know, from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents, that they wish to challenge and dominate Western democracy, rather than live in harmony with it.
And so the news that a parliamentary researcher, working within the Palace of Westminster, has been arrested on suspicion of spying for Beijing, has left me and my fellow MPs shocked and appalled.
Threat
The Westminster Parliament is a symbol of our profoundly stable democracy. If the operative of a hostile state can access our distinguished chambers armed with nefarious intentions, that is a threat to our democracy.
Although the suspect’s name is widely available online, the Speaker of the House, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has advised MPs not to name them. As frustrating as this is, there are good reasons for this informal embargo, and it is one that I — like this newspaper — am happy to accept out of respect for the Speaker. Furthermore, the individual has not been charged, and has issued a strong statement protesting their innocence.
Lessons must be learned from this scandal, and that means for MPs, too. So, now that we hear this warning shot loud and clear, how do we protect ourselves and our institutions for the battle ahead?
There are several China ‘interest groups’ in Parliament: the China Research Group, which I believe has seven members in the UK, and there is also the international Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), which I understand has 600 MPs across 32 counties.
In the past, Chinese and Soviet regimes have attempted to infiltrate organisations such as these in order to gain influence within political systems. They use them as fronts to discredit anyone holding them to account. Firstly, we must ensure that any attempts to exploit parliamentary groups is impossible.
Equally, MPs need to be mindful that we may be targeted ourselves. Nefarious agents typically seek to find vulnerabilities in MPs: Selfimportance, ego and ambition can all be exploited so that MPs and other public servants, wittingly or unwittingly, become, in Lenin’s phrase, ‘useful idiots’. I sometimes receive emails that come from suspect sources, and which aim to develop relationships for what iniquitous purpose I don’t know.
Our Deputy Prime Minister, Oliver Dowden, was right to imply this week that much has changed since the early 2010s when David Cameron famously took President Xi Jinping for a pint in his local boozer.
Thankfully, we are getting tougher — Rishi is getting it right, but there is more to do.
We need to understand the threats that face us and resolutely counter them.
For example, China’s Confucius Institutes in the UK are widely thought to be used to spy on their students studying here. The centres are funded by the Chinese government, and supposedly promote its language and culture abroad. However, they are alleged to be Trojan Horses for spreading propaganda and censoring Chinese nationals. That is unacceptable.
Nor must these centres be allowed to intimidate brave Hong Kong activists who have sought sanctuary in our country. If these institutes can’t obey our rules, we should shut them down, like Sweden has.
Our universities must also be wise to Chinese students who come here to steal our ground-breaking research in science and technology.
Sadly, some seem utterly blasé about this threat, perhaps so blinded by their dislike of the Government, too consumed by political correctness and wokery, that they see a moral equivalence between imperfect dem- ocracy and authoritarianism.
However, by far the greatest danger we face is our economic dependence on China.
Every year, that dependency increases, and yet we seem unwilling to understand its significance, nor take measures to stop it. I have repeatedly asked the Government to make an annual ‘statement of trade dependency’ in order to enhance transparency. We still don’t have one.
The Government also needs to work with business to diversify supply chains, rather than having so much one- way traffic from Chinese ports. For example, we must do more to ensure that Chinese slavelabour products do not enter our marketplace.
Half the global supply of polysilicon — used in solar panels — comes from Xinjiang, where the ethnic Uyghur Muslims are widely imprisoned in indoctrination camps and forced into slave labour.
Warnings
Further alleged atrocities against the Uyghur people include forced sterilisation and even murder. Many consider the actions of the CCP in Xinjiang to be genocide.
We also need to get real about exporting our own industry to China. We currently virtue- signal about lower domestic carbon emissions, all while exporting our manufacturing to China, which is building two coalfired power stations a week to fulfil demand.
Coal-fire stations are the number one man-made driver of global warming. So the outcome of this naïve policy is that we enrich a regime which seeks to intimidate its opponents, while making the world a dirtier place and hastening climate change. This is simply doolally policymaking which might as well have been written by our adversaries.
If we fail to heed these warnings, how bad could it get?
A worst- case scenario will see us increasingly dependent on China just as President Xi orders the military invasion of Taiwan — he wants to be ready to take it back by 2027.
The U.S. being directly or indirectly engaged, we and other democracies will be asked to close our economies to Chinese imports. Would we refuse because the cost would collapse the global economy? If we did, the Western alliance will break, shattering the peace most of us have enjoyed since World War II.
Britain’s naysayers say we are too weak to oppose China and must simply allow the Communist Party to steal our intellectual property, collapse Western industries, build artificial islands in the South China Sea that threaten their neighbours, and ramp up espionage operations here.
What utter nonsense. Australia’s GDP is less than ours, their global influence weaker, and yet they are much tougher in their dealings with Beijing. They have, to put it bluntly, the political balls our Foreign Office lacks.
Backbone
Indeed, the Huawei rebellion to stop China-dominated 5Gtech in the UK in 2020, led by myself and other wise colleagues, was not modelled on the U.S., but Australia.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not believe in shutting off our nation against international competitors or adversaries — the more one disagrees, the more vital it is to talk and find common ground. However, having a backbone is a prerequisite when dealing with a Communist regime.
Under President Xi, China seeks to dominate free nations. I hope that in the future he will be replaced by a leader who understands that the greatness of the Chinese nation rests on its ability to promote harmony, not drive an imperial, authoritarian project.
In the meantime, let’s be proud of who we are, stop talking ourselves down, and work with our allies to robustly defend our interests. It is also time for all MPs to work together to ensure we keep our Parliament safe by being the best we can.
In doing so, we’ll be strengthening our democracy, too.
通過分享 PressReader
通過新聞連接世界