The only benefit of Obama’s restraint was as a source of lessons for his vice-president Joe Biden. Most obviously, the lesson is that erring on the side of restraint is worse than erring on the side of stimulus. Second, that the likelihood of securing Republican support for anything is minimal, so there is no point in proposing an inadequate response in the name of bipartisanship. The final lesson is reflected in the fact that neither Emanuel nor Summers has been given any role, formal or otherwise in the Biden Administration.
the idea that science should be devoted to finding the fact is itself an ideology. It’s an ideological belief that humanity is better off knowing the facts than not knowing them. That’s a deeply humanistic ideology. Knowledge is power, and the idea that human society always deserves more power — that in some general sense, we’ll eventually do the right thing with the knowledge science gives us — is an article of faith. It’s easy to find cases where reality tests that faith — the most obvious and famous example being the building of the atom bomb. Like many of the people who built it, I still wonder whether it was right to give humankind the power to wipe itself out; my faith in the goodness of science is not absolute.
What that view misses, I think, is how confusing rules like these are to employees. One Basecamp worker I spoke with today, who requested anonymity, wondered the extent to which parenting issues could be raised at work. “How do you talk about raising kids without talking about society?” the employee said. “As soon as I bring up public schools, then it’s already political.”
Team members want to know that you believe in them, and that you have their back. Particularly when taking on opportunities that could be exciting, but hold the risk of failure. Managers are often advised to ask in 1:1s, ‘What could I be doing to support you more?’
The first of April was a day when we were supposed to be aware that not everything was as it seemed, that we should be on our guard. And now, exhausting as it is, every day is like that.
In North Kosovo, though, cryptomining is about as close to printing free money as one can get. The region is an anomaly—not just within the country, but across almost all of Europe—for the fact that it doesn’t charge its residents for their electricity. In a strange twist of fate, locals pay for almost none of their public services.
THE REST OF US are going to pay for NFTs for a very long time. They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and trade. Together, they are already using more than is consumed by some states in the US. Imagine building a giant new power plant just to make Christie’s or the Basel Art Fair function. And the amount of power wasted will go up commensurate with their popularity and value.