I have no idea what she wants, nor do I care. What I do care is that an NDA provision is being used to silence public reports of corporate misconduct. Those reports may be untrue, but quashing them outright shouldn't be an enforceable contract provision under the public policy principle. The arbiters even forbade her to talk to *lawmakers*, which definitely is a public policy violation.

This shows you what bullshit employee contract arbitration by an arbiter chosen by the employer is.

It doesn't matter if we don't care about the specific alleged misdeeds. It doesn't even matter if she is lying through her teeth. A corporation should not be able to put itself in a position where accusations of misconduct can't be lodged against them by employees. If it succeeds at that, there is no limit to the wrongs it can commit on employees and on the public. If she is lying, well, that's what a defamation suit is for. Understandably, Facebook would prefer their hand-picked arbitration firm handle this, but with eighty billion dollars on hand they can well afford to fund the mother of all defamation suits.

IF you publish a book and you want it to be read, you have to promote it. If Jesus died in the 1980s, St Mark would be on the Rogan podcast today.

Well, yes they're concerned about public opinion. That's why they put so much effort into controlling it. This is true of all authoritarian regimes, they are afraid of negative public sentiment, however they have a lot more leeway than a democratic government in how to deal with that.

Well, I think we're mostly on the same page here. Free trade really did deliver on its promise of super-cheap consumer goods, but it had other, undesirable, and in-hindsight-foreseeable consequences that we foolishly ignored.

Even allowing that we should "re-shore" many of those jobs that went overseas, we shouldn't make the same mistake of making a sudden radical change in direction because we have a particular and desirable policy goal in mind. Businesses, workers, and consumers need some modicum of stability to function. That's not incompatible with change, but it is incompatible with trying to reverse the effects of thirty years of policy you regret overnight.

Oooh, OS-9 was interesting. I worked for a company that developed software for Unix System III (then V), and a computer manufacturer gave us an 6809 based OS/9 system to see if we could port our software -- not that we promised to do that, they just shipped us the machine and asked. To tell you the truth I think they were desperate; there was so much going on at the time and 68000 based Unix systems were starting to come onto the market with a flat 32 bit address space.

For what it was, which was a machine based on an 8 bit processor with a 16 bit address bus, it was incredible. I would dearly have loved to have kept that machine as a home computer. It blew away anything Intel based at the time, which was around 1984. We probably could have ported our software, although the OS was different enough it would have been a major headache. The problem was nobody was going to buy a business system built on OS-9 on a 6809 when 68000 baed Unix machines were on the market. I understand OS-9 had somewhat more success in the industrial control market.

Well, that's the direction they're taking things, but we've got a long way to go still. It's a real advantage to China in a situation like this that it doesn't have something like a Congressional election every two years.

Sure, it's 20% of the whole world economy. That doesn't make up for the impact of losing export markets on investors in domestic projects, which is what we're talking about here. Especially as presumably the "conservative" government isn't going to be subsidizing battery uses for things like renewables or even EVs.

There are rare instances of trade wars working out for one side, but this won't be one of them. In the 80s, the US conducted two trade wars against Japan, over autos and semiconductors which were settled on US terms. So on the surface this was a success for the US, just at the time we began to engage with China and encourage China to engage in international trade. In retrospect less of a zero sum resolution to the Japan dispute -- one that didn't permanently weaken a key ally in the region -- might have been a good idea.

In this case, I think the US is better positioned to weather a trade war than China is. China is in a parlous state; as huge as the economy is, it has multiple hair-raising structural problems: a real estate bubble that just won't go away; eye-watering debt loads by corporations and local governments; foreign technological dependencies that it just can't shake; inefficient state owned enterprises; party meddling and endemic corruption and favoritism; and, oh, God, the fuse burning down on the mother of all demographic time bombs.

If the only thing that mattered about a trade war was "winning", then this might be the time to have a trade war against China. What it is not, as you point out, is a time to have a trade war against *everyone*. That is a thing so monumentally stupid nobody has ever attempted it before. And even if we do win the war against China like we did against Japan, we might not like the results of pushing an economy that size further into peril.

And who will you sell those batteries to?

Let's allow for the sake of argument a trade war with a major trading partner might turn out well for us. But it's not *China* we're playing this game with. It's *everyone*.

Neither side can afford a trade war, but only one side realizes that. On the other hand, the side that realizes that is the one in the system where public opinions is more readily ignored. Interesting times.

So he could give their job to his biggest campaign contributor, a man who built the largest fortune in the world using government subsidies, loan guarantees and contracts.

It wasn't the payments per se that were illegal; it was stuff that went around that like falsifying business records. He got one count for each invoice, one count each general ledger falsification, and one count for each falsified check.

This sounds like piling stuff on gratuitously, but this is how business record falsification is handled in *all* cases in the state of New York. Every false entry is considered a separate crime. It's in part conviction insurance -- suppose the jury thought 10 of the 11 checks in question were legitimate; they might give him a pass on #11 if all the checks were lumped into a single crime. By making each a separate count, the jury is required to come to a determination of fact for each check.

In theory, increasing the counts this way *could* increase the maximum sentence, but judges have leeway in these matters and take the relationship of each individual count to the whole into account. In this case, the judge chose to forgo all punishment for the crimes Trump was convicted of committing, so he can hardly complain of unfair treatement.

Except that the Administration has targeted the National Archives' independence, purging senior management and replacing with political loyalists, as well as cutting the work force.

NARA is an agency with a purely bureaucratic mission: maintaining records. Which goes to show that "slashing bureaucracy" doesn't mean making government better. Without an institutional memory, there is no accountability.

... when you have a perfect definition of merit, a perfect way of scoring that definition, and perfect people administering the scoring. Assuming all that, you'd have to be crazy "more meritocracy". Fail any of those conditions, and you have to examine any proposals of "meritocracy" critically.

Every system devised for running a company, good or bad, was an attempt to create a kind of meritocracy. The infamously backstabbing, empire-building culture Amazon is no exception. It comes from the practice relentlessly rank-stacking employees by performance scores. You backstab your colleague because the quickest way to get ahead is to pull your neighbor down. You build an empire because scale makes you harder target. This way of running things ruthlessly redistributes focus and resources as you expand into ever more markets dominated by slow-moving corporate dinosaurs, so in the early days its benefits outweighed its costs. Now that Amazon has metastasized to a scale where future growth will be more measured, it probably needs to tweak its culture. Doing it in the name of "meritocracy" is just effective sloganeering.

"Meritocracy" is not a philosophically conservative notion, in that it presupposes a kind of human perfectibility that in practice is unattainable. So we shouldn't automatically accept any proposal as a good idea because the proposer calls it "meritocracy". We should look at what is actually happening now, and how the proposal changes things. Cutting back on the empire-building aspects of Amazon's corporate culture is almost certainly a good idea, but not because that's introducing "meritocracy". The old system was a "meritocracy", it just doesn't serve anymore.

It's not what AI can do now. It's the promise of what it might do: usher in a world that doesn't need people. When that day comes, what matters is how much of the pie you're hanging onto.