Entrepreneurship – Page 6 – artdiamondblog.com

“Xi Is Dampening the Energy and Optimism of the Chinese People”

(p. A1) A song called “Tomorrow Will Be Better” became a sensation in mainland China in the 1980s, when the nation was emerging from the poverty and turmoil of Mao Zedong’s rule.

Its inspirational lyrics, which exhorted listeners to “look upward for the wings in the sky,” came to represent a generation that was starting to believe in a brighter future.

Now people in China are listening to the song again—but for a very different reason. Videos of the song are circulating on WeChat and other communications apps, often with taglines expressing sadness about the end of that era.

“The 1980s are gone forever,” wrote one listener. “So long, those years of burning passion,” wrote another.

For many Chinese, especially those who came of age during the past 40 years of reform and opening, China appeared to be on an irreversible path forward toward more growth, openness and opportunity.

But now China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is restoring aspects of Mao’s rule, forcing people to confront a more uncertain future rooted in China’s past.

Xi’s predecessors, beginning with Deng Xiaoping, embraced market forces, growth and limited freedoms. Xi, by contrast, is placing national security over the economy, tightening government control, and putting the Communist Party—and himself—at the center of Chinese society.

A Dec. 16 [2023] article published by the party’s influential journal, Qiushi, elevated Xi to the same historical status as Mao, calling Xi “the People’s leader”—a title previously reserved for China’s Great Helmsman.

Gone is the booming China that inspired many young people and entrepreneurs to take risks and bet on the future. Home prices are falling, youth unemployment is at a record high, private investment is shrinking, the financial system is drowning in debt and deflation is setting in.

. . .

(p. A9) “Xi is dampening the energy and optimism of the Chinese people,” said Susan Shirk, a former senior diplomat during the Clinton administration and author of a recent book, “Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise.”

“In a system so dominated by one leader,” Shirk said, “everyone feels powerless to effect positive change.”

. . .

In Shenzhen, Deng’s reform policies helped transform the former fishing village in the shadow of neighboring Hong Kong into a cosmopolitan city of 13 million, home to globally competitive tech companies such as Tencent.

“Time is money, efficiency is life” was the slogan that guided the city’s early development.

Today, Shenzhen has a new slogan: “Follow the party, start your business”—with the party coming first.

Communist Party direction doesn’t seem to be brightening the city’s future. More than a quarter of Shenzhen’s office space sits empty after Xi started a campaign in 2020 to rein in risk-taking at private firms. The regulatory crackdown wiped out more than $1 trillion in market value from publicly-listed tech firms and triggered layoffs and business retrenchment.

. . .

Faced with growing economic headwinds and challenges to order, Xi is doubling down on Mao-style control, embracing a Mao-era tool as a way to ensure national security.

The practice, called the “Fengqiao experience,” is named after a town in eastern China that gained national fame in the early 1960s when Mao praised the way its officials mobilized people to identify and punish so-called enemies of the proletariat—capitalists, traditionalists and the like.

People were encouraged to report on one another, with husbands informing on wives and children on their parents, leading to some of the most brutal aspects of the Cultural Revolution. After that tumultuous period, the “Fengqiao experience” faded into history.

Xi is trying to revive aspects of it to mobilize people to fix problems at the local level before they lead to widespread social unrest.

. . .

John Ling, an e-commerce entrepreneur in Shanghai in his late 40s, recalls a far more liberal environment in the early 2000s. Lured back home by China’s seemingly limitless opportunities after studying in the U.S., he started a business trading goods online.

Back then, “I did feel like you could realize your American dream in China, as long as you worked hard,” Ling recalled.

Year by year he felt greater government interference. As more capital poured into e-commerce, he said, Beijing grew concerned that the sector was diverting resources away from more strategic areas such as semiconductors, an industry in which China still heavily relies on Western firms.

Ling said it became so difficult to raise fresh funding for e-commerce that he decided to shut his venture earlier this year. “It’s all about hard-tech these days,” he said, referring to sectors now favored by the government. “But can you sustain the entire economy with just hard-tech?”

“It feels like nothing is possible” nowadays, he said.

For the full commentary, see:

Lingling Wei. “China Is Looking to Move Ahead, But Xi Revives Mao-Era Playbook.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Dec. 29, 2023): A1 & A9.

(Note: ellipses and bracketed year added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated December 28, 2023, and has the title “China Wants to Move Ahead, but Xi Jinping Is Looking to the Past.” The fourth and eighth paragraphs quoted above appear in the online, but not the print, version of the commentary. In other sections where the online version is more detailed than the print version, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The book by Shirk mentioned above is:

Shirk, Susan L. Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.

In Managing Workers Firms Should “Experiment with New Forms of Freedom”

(p. C1) In a classic 1958 lecture, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin distinguished between two types of freedom. Negative liberty is freedom from obstacles and interference by others. Positive liberty is freedom to control your own destiny and shape your own life. If we want to maximize net freedom in the future of work, we need to expand both positive and negative liberty.

The debate about whether work should be in-person, remote-first or hybrid is too narrow. Yes, people want the freedom to decide where they work. But they also want the freedom to decide who they work with, what they work on and when they work. Real flexibility is having autonomy to choose your people, your purpose and your priorities.

. . .

(p. C2) We need boundaries to protect individual focus time too.

. . .

One effective strategy seems to be blocking quiet time in the mornings as a window for deep work, and then coming together after lunch. When virtual meetings are held in the afternoon, people are less likely to multitask—probably in part because they’ve been able to make progress on their own tasks.

. . .

Flexible work is here to stay, but companies that resist it may not be. One of the biggest mistakes I saw companies make before Covid was failing to experiment with new forms of freedom.

For the full commentary, see:

Adam Grant. “The Real Meaning of Freedom at Work.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 9, 2021 [sic]): C1-C2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated October 8, 2021 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

“Discrimination on the Basis of Race, Which DEI Does, Is Literally the Definition of Racism”

(p. B1) Ackman and Musk, two billionaires with wide followings on X, which Musk owns, have . . . taken up the fight against DEI, giving it a bigger platform.

“Discrimination on the basis of race, which DEI does, is literally the definition of racism,” Musk posted in January [2024].

. . .

Ackman has frequently focused on DEI in the context of college campuses, where he says such initiatives foment antisemitism.

For the full story, see:

Tali Arbel. “Diversity Groups Urge Ackman, Musk Pushback.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, February 8, 2024): B1 & B10.

(Note: ellipses and bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Feb. 7, 2024, and has the title “The Case Against Ackman and Musk’s Anti-DEI Stance.”)

Modern Law Tries to Rule Out Error and Accident at the Expense of Individual Freedom

(p. C9) Philip K. Howard’s “Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society” is a slim book propounding a colossal, sometimes unwieldy, thesis. Beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Howard argues, American law was transformed from a system designed to guard individual freedom and accountability into one in which bad outcomes are impossible. Modern law, he writes, is “an elaborate precautionary system aimed at precluding human error. Anything that goes wrong, any accident or disappointment, any disagreement, potentially requires a legal solution. Instead of charging officials to do what’s sensible, modern law presumes that the gravest risk is to leave room for judgment of people in positions of authority.”

The consequence, he observes, is a society of people who feel they can’t make decisions without thick rule books explaining best practices and legal protections if their decision turns out badly.

For the full review, see:

Barton Swaim. “Bring Back the Smoke-Filled Rooms.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 2, 2024): C9.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 1, 2024, and has the title “Politics: ‘The Primary Solution’ by Nick Troiano Plus ‘Everyday Freedom’ by Philip K. Howard.”)

The book under review above is:

Howard, Philip K. Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society. Garden City, NY: Rodin Books, 2024.

Akio Toyoda Had the Courage to Predict the Current EV Debacle

On Nov. 25, 2022, I ran a blog entry that reported on the severe criticism that then-Toyota-President Akio Toyoda [sic] was receiving for his skepticism that charging infrastructure and consumer preferences were ready for an immediate full switch to electric vehicles. Because he had the courage to keep Toyota focused on hybrids, consumers now have more of what they need and want. As a result Toyota prospers. In a capitalist system, firms run by executives with foresight and courage receive their just reward.

(p. B1) TOKYO—Gasoline-electric vehicles are flying off dealer lots in the U.S. and generating a windfall for the reigning hegemon of hybrids, Toyota Motor.

Toyota on Tuesday [February 6, 2024] forecast a record $30.3 billion net profit for the fiscal year ending March thanks to higher sales of hybrid vehicles in all of its major markets. The results sent Toyota shares up 4.8% in Tokyo to close at a record high.

Hybrid sales grew last year at a faster clip than sales for pure electric vehicles in the U.S. and some other markets. Signs have emerged that the EV push might have gotten ahead of U.S. consumers who are worried about charging problems and higher prices. That has steered them toward less expensive hybrids, which can be filled up with gasoline.

Automakers that had been rushing to pivot toward full EVs are now reconsidering. General Motors said last week it would introduce some plug-in hybrid models in North America after facing pressure from dealers. Ford Motor said last year it would seek to quadruple its hybrid sales in the next five years.

For the full story, see:

River Davis. “Toyota Is Cashing In As Hybrid Sales Boom.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, February 7, 2024): B1-B2.

(Note: bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 6, 2024, and has the title “Toyota Cashes In on Booming Hybrid Sales.”)

Firms Develop Technology to Capture, Liquify, Transport, and Sequester CO2 into “Depleted Offshore Oil-and-Gas Wells”

(p. B4) ATHENS—Ship operators have a radical idea for industrial companies that are searching for ways to dispose of carbon emissions: Take the captured CO2 out to sea and bury it deep under the ocean floor.

But first, supercool the carbon emissions to temperatures so low that they become a liquid.

HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world’s largest shipyard, and Greece-based shipowner Capital Product Partners have designed a specialized vessel to carry liquefied CO2. They envision such ships transporting their cargo to depleted offshore oil-and-gas wells, where it would be pumped in and entombed for permanent storage. Capital Product Partners signed a deal for four such ships, to be delivered in 2025 and 2026, that together cost more than $300 million.

“Ships move everything from oil to our furniture, clothes and toothpaste. Now they’ll move our emissions, which is in effect waste management,” said Jerry Kalogiratos, chief executive of U.S.-listed Capital Product Partners, which operates more than 100 cargo vessels.

. . .

“The wells are sealed with a fast drying mix of concrete and sand. If there is a leak inland the gas could end up back in the atmosphere, but there is no conclusive research about what will happen if it escapes in the water,” said Fotis Pagoulatos, a naval engineer in Athens. “The consensus for now is that pollution risk at sea from leaked CO2 is low.”

. . .

While no contracts have been signed, Kalogiratos said Capital Product Partners is in talks with a number of European emitters as well as big energy companies in Japan and South Korea.

For the full story, see:

Costas Paris. “Ship Operators Offer to Bury Emissions.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, February 1, 2024): B4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 31, 2024, and has the title “A New Solution for CO2 Emissions: Bury Them at Sea.” The online version of the article says that the title of the print version is “Ship Operators Offer to Bury Emissions” but my copy of the print version has the title “Ship Operators Offer to Bury Emissions at Sea.”)

“Linguistic Diversity Is Precious” Because Languages Are “Natural Experiments” in “Ways of Seeing, Understanding, and Living”

(p. A13) Linguistic variety is “often seen as a problem, the curse of Babel,” but for a linguist, New York City is a riotous collection of living specimens—a “greenhouse, not a graveyard.”  . . .  Mr. Perlin, who has a doctorate in linguistics, helps run the Endangered Language Alliance, which works to document such minority tongues.  . . .

The heart of “Language City” is portraits of individual New York-based speakers. Mr. Perlin writes about their work as well as his, capturing the grind of immigrant life with empathy, balance and wit.  (. . .)  “If the country was rich we would never leave,” says Husniya, a Wakhi speaker from bleak post-Soviet Tajikistan. But she savors the city’s entrepreneurial energy: “New York opened my eyes. It shapes you to be a human being, not dividing based on religion, face, or race, or anything.”

. . .

Wonderfully rich, “Language City” is in part an introduction to the diverse ways different languages work. Seke and other “evidential” languages, for example, have different grammatical forms to indicate how the speaker knows what she’s asserting—whether from observation or inference, hearsay or hunch. Other languages syntactically “tag the speaker’s surprise at unexpected information” or have a special temporal marking “just for things happening today.”

. . .

Yet linguistic diversity is precious, Mr. Perlin stresses, and should be celebrated, not just tolerated.  . . .  . . ., languages “represent thousands of natural experiments” that encode wildly different “ways of seeing, understanding, and living.” Constructed by generations of collective effort, they are invisible cathedrals bigger and more democratic than any building.

For the full review see:

Timothy Farrington. “BOOKSHELF; The Words On the Street.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Feb. 23, 2024): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 22, 2024, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Language City’ Review: The Words on the Street.”)

The book under review is:

Perlin, Ross. Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. Washington, D.C.: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024.

“Adoption of Singular ‘Gold Standard’ Models” Closes “Off Other Important Avenues of Inquiry”

(p. A15) Ubiquitous and persuasive, models . . . drive decisions—one reason why, in Ms. Thompson’s view, they require our urgent attention. She tells us that, as a graduate student studying North Atlantic storms, she noticed how different models predicted different overall effects and produced contradictory results.

. . .

The problem is that Model Land is easy to enter but difficult to escape. Having built “a beautiful internally consistent model,” Ms. Thompson writes, it can be “emotionally difficult to acknowledge that the initial assumptions on which the whole thing is built are literally not true.”

There are all sorts of ways that models can lead us astray. A small measurement error on an input can lead to wildly inaccurate forecasts—a phenomenon known as the Butterfly Effect. Fortunately, this type of uncertainty is often manageable. Far more problematic are what Ms. Thompson calls “unquantifiable unknowns”—things that are left out of a model’s calculation because they can’t be anticipated, such as the unexpected arrival of a transformative technology or the abrupt collapse of a robust market. It is not always true, she observes, that the data we have now will be relevant to the future—as traders discovered in the stock-market crash of 1987, when their models catastrophically failed.

. . . We may be inclined to regard models as objective expressions of truth, yet they are deliberately constructed interpretations, imbued with the values and viewpoints of the modelers—primarily, as Ms. Thompson notes, well-educated, middle-class individuals. During the pandemic, models “took more account of harms to some groups of people than others,” resulting in a “moral case” for lockdowns that was “partial and biased.” Modelers who worked from home—while others maintained the supply chain—often overlooked “all of the possible harms” of the actions their models were suggesting. . . .

The promise and peril of models, Ms. Thompson recognizes, has deep resonance in biomedicine, where so-called model organisms, like yeast and zebrafish, have led to foundational insights and accelerated the development of therapeutics. At the same time, treatments that work brilliantly in Model Land often fail in people, devastating patients and disappointing drug developers. The search for improved disease models can be complicated when proponents of one model suppress research into alternative approaches, as the late journalist Sharon Begley documented in a powerful 2019 report. Ms. Thompson perceptively critiques the adoption of singular “gold standard” models, noting that the “solidification” of one set of assumptions can lock us into one way of thinking and close off other important avenues of inquiry.

For the full review see:

David A. Shaywitz. “BOOKSHELF; Seduced By Numbers.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2022): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 27, 2022, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Escape From Model Land’ Review: Seduced by Numbers.”)

The book under review is:

Thompson, Erica. Escape from Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It. New York: Basic Books, 2022.

Sharon Begley’s “powerful” 2019 report, mentioned above, is:

Begley, Sharon. “The Maddening Saga of How an Alzheimer’s ‘Cabal’ Thwarted Progress toward a Cure for Decades.” STAT; Reporting from the Frontiers of Health and Medicine, Posted June 25, 2019. Available from https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure/.

Miracle Drugs Should Not Lead Us to Ignore Nutrition as a Driver of Health

(p. A15) More than 100 years after the miraculous discovery of insulin to treat diabetes, how are things going? More people are getting the disease. (Between 1959 and 2021, the number of Americans diagnosed with diabetes increased from 1.5 million to 29.7 million, according to federal government surveys.) Patients are doing worse. (Fewer than 1 in 5 Type 1 patients are achieving blood-sugar goals established by the American Diabetes Association.) Diabetes intensifies America’s economic and racial divide. (Type 2 diabetes disproportionately affects the poor, the undereducated and minorities.) And the epidemic is global. (According to the World Health Organization, diabetes is the ninth leading cause of death worldwide.)

If any disease needs to be rethought, it is surely diabetes, and that is the premise of Gary Taubes’s latest book.

. . .

The hero of “Rethinking Diabetes” is Dr. Richard Bernstein, an engineer-turned-doctor who also has Type 1. In the 1970s, he became the first person to use a home glucose meter; looking at his data, he realized that a low-carb diet minimized his glycemic swings. For the past 40 years, in his books, academic papers and other advocacy, he has been the leading low-carb evangelist for people with diabetes.

But Dr. Bernstein is also a controversial figure, and not just because his nutritional guidance defied the medical establishment. I interviewed Dr. Bernstein and wrote about him in 2007. He’s prone to hyperbole and absurdities, such as his claim that insulin-pump patients “all have complications.” More important, his low-carb diet is uncompromising, and his advice is not realistic for everyone. When I interviewed him, he hadn’t eaten an apple since the Nixon administration. Nonetheless, I believe that Dr. Bernstein’s insights about diet and diabetes—and Mr. Taubes’s central argument—are correct. Imperfectly, I follow Dr. Bernstein’s guidance, and I’m far healthier because of it.

Mr. Taubes’s larger point is that we have allowed pharmacological miracles in the treatment of diabetes, insulin being one of them, to supplant food and nutrition as the foundation of good health. He concurs with Dr. Arnoldo Cantani, a 19th-century Italian physician, who said that the remedy for diabetes “is not in the drugstore but in the kitchen.”

For the full review see:

James S. Hirsch. “BOOKSHELF; Beyond Insulin.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Jan. 8, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 7, 2024, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Rethinking Diabetes’ Review: Beyond Insulin.”)

The book under review is:

Taubes, Gary. Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments. New York: Knopf, 2024.

Zuckerberg Praises Musk for Not Being Too Shy to Reduce Staff at X

(p. R3) At the beginning of the year, many were quick with predictions of X’s demise, in part because of the dramatic staff cuts made by Musk.

. . .

Perhaps the biggest impact of Musk’s staff reductions was provoking a broader conversation about staffing needs and overall productivity throughout Silicon Valley.

Even rival Mark Zuckerberg praised Musk for removing layers of management. “I also think that it was probably good for the industry that he made those changes because my sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought that those were good changes but who may have been a little shy about doing them,” the Facebook co-founder said.

For the full commentary, see:

Tim Higgins. “Elon Musk as Technoking? More Like DramaKing.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Dec. 18, 2023): R3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 16, 2023, and has the title “In the Year of a DramaKing: Elon Musk.”)

Like Wag Dodge at Mann Gulch, Bob Pardo Knew He Had to “Conceive” an Action Fast

(p. 21) In March 1967, Captain Pardo was on a mission over North Vietnam in an F-4 Phantom when antiaircraft fire hit his plane, inflicting damage, while more badly ripping into the fuel tank of another fighter in the strike force. Both jets pulled away to head home. But the second plane had lost too much fuel to make it to safety. Captain Pardo realized that its two-man crew would be forced to eject over enemy territory and face capture or worse.

Flying beneath the compromised plane, Captain Pardo told its pilot, Capt. Earl Aman, to lower his tailhook — a metal pole at the rear of a fighter used to arrest its landing. At 300 miles per hour, Captain Pardo nudged his plane’s glass windshield against the tip of the pole. For almost 90 miles, he pushed the other plane as both jets hemorrhaged fuel, until they crossed the border with Laos. Both crews ejected by parachute, and all four men were rescued.

. . .

“Pardo’s Push” entered Air Force legend — an extraordinary act of aerial ballet, but one that would never be prescribed in any pilot manuals or flying simulators. Only once before, during the Korean War, was a similar rescue maneuver performed.

The military did not honor Mr. Pardo for decades. It wasn’t until 1989 that he was awarded a Silver Star for gallantry. The citation described him pushing Captain Aman’s aircraft to safety. “The attempt was successful,” it read, “and consequently allowed the crew to avoid becoming prisoners of war.”

. . .

“My dad taught me that when your friend needs help, you help,” he said. “I couldn’t have come home and told him I didn’t even try anything. Because that’s exactly what he would have asked me. He would have said, ‘Did you try?’ So I had to be able to answer that with a yes.”

. . .

Between 1965 and 1968, the U.S. Air Force and Navy carried out an intense bombing campaign of the North, known as Operation Rolling Thunder, to destroy infrastructure. The tonnage of U.S. bombs dropped exceeded American bombing in the Pacific in World War II. North Vietnam’s defenses included antiaircraft batteries, missiles and Russian-made MIG fighter jets. . . .

Both Captain Pardo’s and Captain Aman’s F-4 fighter-bombers were hit about 40 miles from the steel mill, Captain Pardo recalled in a 2019 interview with The San Antonio Express-News.

. . .

He knew Captain Aman’s plane would not be able to make it out of North Vietnam to rendezvous with a flying refueling tanker. At first, he tried to push Captain Aman’s plane by sticking the nose of his own jet into a rear port, but there was too much turbulence. Next he tried to maneuver directly under the other jet and give it a piggyback ride. That also failed.

Then he conceived of pushing Captain Aman’s tailhook. A tailhook pole was used by the Navy’s version of the F-4 Phantom to land on aircraft carriers. The Air Force used it for emergency runway landings, when the hook snags a cable stretched across tarmac.