#(mostly based on the There Are Eight Billion People principle)

[uncanny-tranny]

You know... it's okay to trust your body. If you are separated from your body to such an extent you feel you cannot trust it, I truly from the bottom of my heart empathize and feel grief for you, but you can trust your body.

It's okay to listen to your body and to heed what it is telling you. I wish you (and your body) well wherever you go. You deserve the peace of mind to feel able to do what you want.

[kiraofthewind]

The 88 sapienti species of the Pentagonal Dominion

No, I’m not here to describe all eighty-eight lol. Actually, my plan is to write short bios about each of them and post maybe four or so at random intervals? Depends on how long it would take to write them up, it could be weekly or just whenever I finish. In the future, I’d love to have artwork of all 88, but of course that takes a lot of time and money lol.

Currently, I have art of specific characters of the following species. An asterisk means that species is represented in at least one character I have art of:

A note on my invented word ‘sapienti.’ Some might be asking “Erika, why don’t you just call them sapient?” I do, quite often in fact. However, when I was writing my books, I found that ‘sapient’ didn’t always do what I wanted it to do. ‘Sapienti’ is essentially my fantasy-world’s version of the word ‘human.’ If a characters stumbles across the bones of a person, they would refer to the bones as “sapienti bones” meaning “the bones of a sapienti person.” Imagine instead if they’d referred to them as “sapient bones.” That makes it sound like the bones themselves are alive and chatting with you!

So how did a world manage to get eighty-eight different species of people living in it? Time travel, son. The world is only 1450 years old anyway. Ain’t no evolving from a single-celled organism in that amount of time!

Many of the sapienti species evolved over billions of years in timelines that the Time Spirit left alone to just let nature take its course. These are usually the more “human-looking” species. Ones with opposable thumbs or which can otherwise use tools.

Some species were made sapient by the blessing of a Mind God. Wynnles came from lions. Yosoe came from goats. All the insect-based species came from, well, insects lol. In the Pentagonal Dominion timeline I write about, there were actually only 87 sapienti species to begin with. The Domovye (singular: Domovoi) were animals. They would be yoked together and trained to dig deep underground, uncovering metals for their sapienti masters. This was seen as no different than yoking oxen to plow a field, or dogs to a sleigh, or a horse to a carriage. The Domovye turned sapient overnight by the blessing of Lucognidus. His purpose in doing so was to punish Ulinor, whose dictator refused to accept the (at the time) new Spiritism religion. Ulinor was the primary civilization that used Domovye as working animals. The Ulese lived underground and needed the Domovye to keep their city functional. But the Ulese abhorred slavery, so when the Domovye became sapient, they could no longer be forced to work.

Many of the species are capable of interbreeding, largely thanks to Life elemental magic. Biologically, without magic, most of them would not work. Their chromosomes would be incompatible or the sperm wouldn’t be able to merge with the egg. Life element magic just “makes it work, damn it.” It will fuck around with genetics until it creates something that can exist. I made this chart a while ago when I was playing a game with some people to create demigods:

It shows how some interbreeding works, but it was within the context of a certain time and place. For instance, the Morenzi can interbreed with any of the others that aren’t in colored boxes, but they currently live in the Quarantined Plane, so none of their hybrids currently exist. It also says Odonata cannot interbreed, but the entire point of Calinthe is that she’s the first and only Odonata hybrid.

The Pentagonal Dominionists use specific language to describe sapienti based on the number of limbs they have. A human might be described as a biped-bibrach (two legged and two armed). A few sapienti look a lot like humans, including the Olivians, Ulese, Umi, Omi, Yetrians, and Myralese. In these cases, the things that make them non-human are deeper than their appearances. Olivians will bond strongly to whoever they first have sex with. Ulese have advanced intelligence. Umi and Omi can control certain internal functions which are automatic and uncontrollable in humans. Yetrians can eat things that a human’s stomach would reject. Myralese are Ice elementals and can survive in frozen environments.

Note that I use ‘nullped’ for species without legs (Domovye, second-stage Orochijin, Poltergeists, Mizura). There is a single monoped species: the Collembola. They have a leg and a tail. They mostly get around by hopping on their tail, but their single leg helps to balance them.

Yet some of these species are so weird and nonhuman that describing them is… difficult. I still don’t have art of Päivi, who is fairly prominent in MoKaM, because I tremble at the idea of trying to describe her to an artist. xD

Many of my species are aquatic, too! Or at least *can* live and breathe underwater if they choose. Aquatic/water-breaking species include: Anemone, Daga, Ephemeropteran, Flora, Foma, Hemipteran, Kraken, Mizura, Phasmida (they can transform into other species, so a Phasmida wouldn’t drown likely because they could transform into someone else), Piniko, Poltergeist, Rubaiyan, Selachi, Sin-Derion, Thysanura, Tsuru, Vodyanoi, Zullia.

Wings are another common feature. Everything that has ‘pteran’ at the end of its name has wings. Other winged species include the Winyans, Pellas, Tsuru, Noklopae, Subrikae, and Nilians.

A few species are extinct in the time period the Merchants novels take place in. The Tellia and Pokki were exterminated by demons when the demons were first created and wanted to take over their homeland. The Mujin went extinct when the Death God Sawyer lost control of his powers in a fit of despair.

A few of these species are also so few in number that a person could go their whole life without meeting one. These include: Odonata, Iur, Mabera, and Phasmida. Technically Phasmida change into other species, so their true numbers are unknown. A Phasmida might live a lifetime in the body of another species and never tell their neighbors that they’re actually a Phasmida. The only one who has made her identity known is Mira, the Chancellor of Aloutia. Because Phasmida only age in the bodies they are currently using, they are effectively immortal. Mira has been the Chancellor since the founding of the Aloutian Empire. She has existed in the Pentagonal Dominion since its beginning. She is actually over 50,000 years old because she’s the Time Spirit’s toy, and she keeps getting put in alternate timelines.

In-world, people might refer to the sapienti species by other numbers. Some will say 87 because they’re excluding the Morenzi, who are unknown to everyone on Aloutia, Cosmo, Ophidia, and the Makai. Some will say 84 because they’re also excluding the three extinct species.

Some species have body parts that naturally produce elementrons, but they can only be used for specific types of ‘magic’ e.g. the Sin-Derion have teeth enchanted to shoot Death elemental beams. Wynnles have electric tails. Yosoe have electric horns. Most winged species have Wind elementrons to allow them to fly because otherwise their bodies would be too heavy/awkward for flight. Daga shells are gold, but enchanted to float on water. Sounites have fire for hair. It’s a whole lotta fun to design all these people!

One thing I want to be clear on, though: no species are monoliths. No species is ‘pure good’ or ‘pure evil.’ They don’t all belong to the same country or culture. They don’t all believe in the same principles, dress the same, speak the same languages, or worship their Gods in the same manner. Sometimes when I talk about my species, I may talk about the culture in which *most* of them belong. *Most* Wynnles live on the Wynndalic Plains of Cosmo’s Starsine planet, where they engage in ritual hunting, have strict sexual practices, and speak their own language which few other species speak. But… obvious not all Wynnles are that way. Amiere, Liesle, and their children are Wynnles, but they live on Aloutia, buy their meat at a market or fish it out of Deep Sea, eat a lot of tropical fruits, and speak a sort of pseudo-French patois most commonly spoken by Flora and Ebonoirs. All sapienti have individual, rational minds (some can connect to a ‘hive mind’, but they *still* retain their individuality, should they choose) and can come to their own conclusions about morality and society.

[newstfionline]

Thursday, June 24, 2021

World’s most expensive cities for expats in 2021 revealed (CNN) Ashgabat in Turkmenistan is the most expensive city in the world for overseas workers, according to this year’s Mercer Cost of Living Survey. The annual report ranks 209 cities based on the comparative cost of expenses including housing, transportation, food and entertainment, with New York City used as a baseline comparison. The Turkmenistan capital, which was number two on last year’s list, is something of an outlier in the top 10, which mostly features business hubs like Hong Kong (last year’s priciest city and this year’s second priciest), Tokyo (number four for 2021), Zurich (number five for 2021) and Singapore (number seven for 2021). Perhaps the biggest change from last year’s Mercer survey sees Beirut rising from the 45th most expensive city for international workers in 2020 to the third priciest for 2021. Mercer puts this development down to Lebanon’s economic depression, which was exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Port of Beirut explosion in August last year. Meanwhile, as the Euro gained almost 11% against the US dollar, European cities were ranked comparatively more expensive than their US counterparts. This led to New York City dropping out of the Mercer top 10 altogether, while Paris climbed the rankings from number 50 in 2020 to number 33 in 2021.

Pressure builds to open U.S.-Canada border (Washington Post) A Florida man takes out ads to call out the U.S. and Canadian governments for failing to lift border restrictions. Lawmakers use salty-ish language. Business owners worry about losing a second lucrative summer season. As restrictions on nonessential travel across the U.S.-Canada land border enter their 16th month this week, pressure is rising on both sides for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Biden to crack it open—even a little—or to provide something, anything, about what a reopening plan might look like. Ottawa on Monday did announce some changes at the border, to start July 5. They’d allow Canadian citizens and permanent residents who are fully inoculated with a Health Canada-authorized vaccine, and who test negative for covid-19 before and after arrival, to bypass some quarantine and testing requirements. But the announcement means most fully vaccinated foreigners, including Americans, who hope to enter Canada for nonessential purposes are out of luck. And a growing number of lawmakers, residents and business groups on both sides of the world’s longest undefended border are out of patience.

GOP filibuster blocks Democrats’ big voting rights bill (AP) The Democrats’ sweeping attempt to rewrite U.S. election and voting law suffered a major setback in the Senate Tuesday, blocked by a filibuster wall of Republican opposition to what would be the largest overhaul of the electoral system in a generation. The vote leaves the Democrats with no clear path forward, though President Joe Biden declared, “This fight is far from over.” The bill, known as the For the People Act, would touch on virtually every aspect of how elections are conducted, striking down hurdles to voting that advocates view as the Civil Rights fight of the era, while also curbing the influence of money in politics and limiting partisan influence over the drawing of congressional districts. But many in the GOP say the measure represents instead a breathtaking federal infringement on states’ authority to conduct their own elections without fraud—and is meant to ultimately benefit Democrats. The rejection forces Democrats to reckon with what comes next for their top legislative priority in a narrowly divided Senate.

The Cuba embargo (Foreign Policy) The U.N. General Assembly is expected to vote to condemn the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba, in a resumption of what has become an annual tradition at the body following a pandemic-related pause in 2020. Up until last year, the assembly had overwhelmingly voted to admonish the United States over the embargo each year since 1992. The United States and Israel tend to be the only two nations to reject the resolution, although Brazil joined them in 2019. The vote coincides with increased U.S. support for a temporary suspension of the embargo during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a recent poll showing 66 percent of Americans surveyed supporting a suspension in order for Cuba to export its home-grown vaccines. On Monday, Cuba announced that its Abdala vaccine—one of several vaccine candidates—was roughly 92 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 infection.

France’s Macron Pushes Controls on Religion to Pressure Mosques (WSJ) President Emmanuel Macron is redrawing the line that separates religion and state, in a battle to force Islamic organizations into the mold of French secularism. In recent months, his administration has ousted the leadership of a mosque after temporarily closing it and poring over its finances. Another mosque gave up millions in subsidies after the government pressured local officials over the funding. A dozen other mosques have faced orders to close temporarily for safety or fire-code violations. The government has taken these actions as a precursor to a much broader push to rein in the independence of mosques and other religious organizations across France. Mr. Macron has submitted a bill to Parliament, called the Law Reinforcing Respect of the Principles of the Republic, that would empower the government to permanently close houses of worship and dissolve religious organizations, without court order, if it finds that any of their members are provoking violence or inciting hatred. In addition, the bill would allow temporary closure of any religious group that spreads ideas that incite hatred or violence. Religious organizations would have to obtain government permits every five years to continue operating, and have their accounts certified annually if they receive foreign funding.

Can pandemic recovery plan end Italy’s years of stagnation? (AP) The COVID-19 pandemic hit Italy especially hard, killing more than 127,000 people and sending the European Union’s third-largest economy into a devastating tailspin. Yet out of that tragedy may come solutions for decades-old problems that have held back growth and productivity—and with them, a new sense of stability for the euro, the currency shared by 19 of the European Union’s 27 members. Backed by 261 billion euros from the EU and Italian government, the country’s plan for recovering from the pandemic calls for a top-to-bottom shakeup of a major industrial economy long hampered by red tape, political reluctance to change, and bureaucratic and educational inertia. The challenge is formidable: Italy has failed to show robust growth in the more than two decades since it joined the euro currency union in 1999. Execution of the recovery plan remains a risk given Italy’s often-fractious politics. But “if they succeed with even half, it will have a big impact,” said Guntram Wolff, director of the Bruegel think tank in Brussels.

Militias in Afghanistan’s north are taking up the fight against the Taliban (Washington Post) A sweeping Taliban offensive across northern Afghanistan, unchecked by overstretched government forces, has triggered a sudden resurgence of anti-Taliban militias in half a dozen provinces, raising concerns that the country could plunge into a prolonged civil war. President Ashraf Ghani has endorsed the sudden call to arms by former ethnic rival groups. The Ghani government hopes the added support will shore up the beleaguered national defense forces, which have struggled to send reinforcements and supplies to troops facing repeated Taliban attacks. But the prospect of unleashing a hodgepodge of rogue warriors to repel their old enemies also raises the specter of civil war, a state of violent anarchy that Afghans remember all too well from the 1990s. And although the armed groups have pledged to coordinate with government forces, it is also possible that effort could unravel into confused, competing clashes among purported allies. In the past several days, fighting has been reported in nine provinces across the north, and armed militias or civilian groups have formed to repel the insurgents, often fighting alongside state forces. All are loyal to local leaders from minority Tajik, Uzbek or other ethnic groups that have no love for Ghani, a member of the dominant ethnic Pashtun group based in southern Afghanistan.

China prepares for Communist Party centenary in secret (AP) Chinese authorities have closed Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square to the public, eight days ahead of a major celebration being planned to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Communist Party. The square, which normally attracts tourists from around the country, was barricaded Wednesday and will remain closed until July 2. The party will showcase the country’s rise from civil war and disastrous political campaigns in the early years of communist rule to market reforms that have created the world’s second largest economy, with a superpower status rivaled only by the United States. Old habits die hard, however, and arrangements for the July 1 anniversary remain shrouded in secrecy. Around Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City former palace complex and other scenic sites are also closed. Flyovers by air force squadrons suggest an aerial review is in the planning, but authorities have yet to release details. The ruling party was established in secrecy in 1921, following the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912. It held its first session at a girl’s school in Shanghai, and later moved to a lake boat to evade agents of the local warlord.

Apple Daily Shuts Down (Foreign Policy) On Wednesday, crowds of Hong Kong residents gathered in support outside the headquarters of Apple Daily, one of the last bastions of media resistance to Beijing, as it sent its final edition to print. The paper announced it would close after the arrests of senior leadership this week under the draconian national security law introduced last year. Banks froze the newspaper’s assets to avoid being charged themselves. The rollout of the national security law has seen successive groups targeted: first protest leaders, then democratic politicians, and now journalists. More than 800 Apple Daily staff have lost their jobs while Hong Kong has lost its long-cherished freedom of speech. But the impact of the closure goes far beyond journalism in Hong Kong. Each move like this raises the stakes for other sectors, especially academia and entertainment. Any challenge to the government has become a risk, making self-censorship even more likely. This kind of sweeping coercion has long been the norm on the mainland; in Hong Kong, it provides more proof China has shattered its promise to maintain “One Country, Two Systems” until 2047.

Tokyo shapes up to be No-Fun Olympics (AP) The Tokyo Olympics, already delayed by the pandemic, are not looking like much fun: Not for athletes. Not for fans. And not for the Japanese public. They are caught between concerns about the coronavirus at a time when few are vaccinated on one side and politicians who hope to save face by holding the games and the International Olympic Committee with billions of dollars on the line on the other. Japan is famous for running on consensus. But the decision to proceed with the Olympics—and this week to permit some fans, if only locals—has shredded it. The official cost of the Tokyo Olympics is $15.4 billion, but government audits suggest it’s twice that. All but $6.7 billion is public money. The IOC chips in only about $1.5 billion to the overall cost. The pressure to hold the games is largely financial for the Switzerland-based IOC, a nonprofit but highly commercial body that earns 91% of its income from broadcast rights and sponsorship.

World Powers Gather for Libya Conference (Foreign Policy) World powers gather today in Berlin to discuss a path forward for Libya, ten years after a NATO-led coalition helped oust former leader Muammar al-Qaddafi and eight months since warring factions agreed to a cease-fire in the country’s six-year civil war. The group of countries last met in January 2020. Since then, the October cease-fire has been followed by the selection in February of a transitional government. Today’s discussion will focus on the next steps in Libya’s transition, including preparations for elections in December and the removal of foreign fighters still active in the country. According to United Nations estimates, more than 20,000 foreign fighters and mercenaries from Syria, Russia, Sudan, and Chad remain in Libya. Although today’s meeting is a time to improve on positive developments, Libya is still far from a functioning state. Nearly 20 percent of the population is in need of humanitarian assistance, and the country remains a magnet for human traffickers as they move desperate migrants across the Mediterranean and into Europe.

Witnesses say airstrike in Ethiopia's Tigray kills dozens (AP) An airstrike hit a busy market in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray village of Togoga on Tuesday, according to health workers who said soldiers blocked medical teams from traveling to the scene. Dozens of people were killed, they and a former resident said, citing witnesses. Two doctors and a nurse in Tigray’s regional capital, Mekele, told The Associated Press they were unable to confirm how many people were killed, but one doctor said health workers at the scene reported “more than 80 civilian deaths.” The health workers spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The alleged airstrike comes amid some of the fiercest fighting in the Tigray region since the conflict began in November as Ethiopian forces supported by those from neighboring Eritrea pursue Tigray’s former leaders.

No laundry day in space (AP) On the International Space Station, there is no such thing as laundry day. Right now, an astronaut needs about 150 pounds of clothes in space per year, and will wear their clothes—gym, underwear, all of it—until they cannot stand the smell, and then throw the clothes away, ejecting the shirts to eventually burn up in the atmosphere. A new study, a collaboration between NASA and Procter & Gamble Co., will attempt to find a good way to clean clothes in space.

[alexsmitposts]

The China Moment China has achieved the almost impossible – a free trade agreement with 14 countries – the ten ASEAN, plus Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, altogether 15 countries, including China. The so-called Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, was in negotiations during eight years – and achieved to pull together a group of countries for free trade, i.e. some 2.2 billion people, commanding some 30% of the world’s GDP. This is a never before reached agreement in size, value and tenor. The RCEP was signed during the 37th ASEAN Summit on 11 November in Vietnam. On top of being the largest such trade agreement in human history, it also associates with and binds to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), or One Belt, One Road (OBOR), or also called the New Silk Road, which in itself comprises already more than 130 countries and more than 30 international organizations. In addition, China and Russia have a longstanding strategic partnership, containing bilateral agreements that also enter into this new trade fold – plus the countries of the Central Asia Economic Union (CAEU), consisting mostly of former Soviet Republics, are also integrated into this eastern trade block. The conglomerate of agreements and sub-agreements between Asian-Pacific countries that will cooperate with RCEP, is bound together by for the west a little-understood Asian Pact, called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), founded on 15 June 2001 in Shanghai as an intergovernmental organization composed of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The SCO’s purpose is to ensure security and maintain stability across the vast Eurasian region, join forces to counteract emerging challenges and threats, and enhance trade, as well as cultural and humanitarian cooperation. Much of the funding for RCEP and BRI projects will be in the form of low-cost loans from China’s Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) and other Chinese and participating countries’ national funding sources. In the hard times emerging from the covid crisis, many countries may need grant assistance to be able to recover as quickly as possible their huge socioeconomic losses created by the pandemic. In this sense, it is likely that the new Silk Road may enhance a special “Health Road” across the Asian Continent. The real beauty of this RCEP agreement is that it pursues a steady course forward, despite all the adversities imposed by the west, foremost the US of A. In fact, the RCEP may, as “byproduct”, integrate the huge Continent of Eurasia that spans all the way from western Europe to what is called Asia and covering the Middle East as well as North Africa, of some 55 million square kilometers (km2). The crux of the RCEP agreement’s trade deals is that they will be carried out in local currencies and in yuan – no US dollars. The RCEP is a massive instrument for dedollarizing, primarily the Asia-Pacific Region, and gradually the rest of the world. Much of the BRI infrastructure investments, or New Silk Road, may be funded by other currencies than the US dollar. China’s new digital Renminbi (RMB) or yuan soon being rolled out internationally as legal tender for international payments and transfers, will drastically reduce the use of the dollar. The new digital RMB will become attractive for many countries which are fed up with being subjected to US sanctions, because using the US-dollar, they automatically become vulnerable to being punished with dollar blockages, confiscations of resources, whenever their international “behavior” doesn’t conform with the mandates of Washington’s. Even country reserves can be stolen, a crime perpetrated by Washington with impunity and with the help of the UK, in full sight of the world, stealing 1.2 billion dollars’ worth of Venezuelan gold deposited with the Bank of England. Only a cumbersome lengthy legal process in UK courts initiated by Venezuela could eventually free the funds to be returned to the jurisdiction of Caracas. This is a warning for many countries, who want to jump the fiat-dollar-ship and join an honest trading and reserve currency, offered by China’s solid and stable economy-backed RMB / yuan. The dollar is already today in decline. When some 20-25 years ago about 90% of all worldwide held reserve-assets were denominated in US dollars, this proportion has shrunk by today to below 60% – and keeps declining. The emerging international RMB / yuan, together with a RCEP- and BRI-strengthened Chinese economy, may further contribute to a dedollarization, as well as dehegemonization of the United States in the world. Simultaneously and progressively the international digital RMB / yuan may also be replacing the US-dollar / euro reserves in countries’ coffers around the globe. The US-dollar may eventually return to be just a local US-currency, as it should be. Under China’s philosophy, the unilateral word will transform into a multi-polar world. The RCEP and New Silk Road combination are rapidly pursuing this noble objective, a goal that will bring much more equilibrium into the world. *** For the west adapting to this new reality may not be easy. Cooperation instead of competition has never been a western concept or philosophy. For hundreds if not thousands of years the western dominance has left a sad legacy of exploitation of the poor by the rich colonial masters and of bloody wars. Cooperation instead of competition and warrying for power, is a concept not easily adhered to by the west. It is clearly visible by US-instigated trade wars, and possibly a currency war between the US and China may already be in the making. The FED has vaguely expressed its plans to also launch a digital, possibly cryptic, blockchain-based currency to counter the new RMB / yuan – not yet even launched internationally. Details of the FED’s plans are at the time of this writing not clear. Having to adapt to the new RCEP, conforming to an agreement among equals, will not come easy for the west. The west will not let go and may use to the utmost possible, its creation and western biased World Trade Organization (WTO), to sabotage as much as possible the RCEP’s trade deals and BRI-infrastructure, as well as cross-border industrial development advances. The west, led by the US – and always backed by the Pentagon and NATO, may not shy from threatening countries participating in China’s projects, but to no avail. Under Tao philosophy, China will move forward with her partners, like steadily flowing water, constantly creating, avoiding obstacles, in pursuit of her noble goal – a world in Peace with a bright common future. *** In conclusion, the RCEP is a Chinese Masterpiece with Chinese characteristics and is paving the way for further progressing towards a world community with a shared future for mankind. The underlying principle is a community of sovereign nations, living, working, building, inventing, creating and culturally enriching each other in peace.

[berniesrevolution]

IN THESE TIMES

ACROSS THE COUNTRY, A NEW COHORT OF PROGRESSIVES IS RUNNING FOR—AND WINNING—ELECTIONS. 

The stunning victory of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the Democratic congressional primary in New York is perhaps the most well-known, but she is far from alone. Most of these candidates are young, more than usual are people of color, many are women, several are Muslims, at least one is a refugee, at least one is transgender—and all are unabashedly left. Most come to electoral politics after years of activism around issues like immigration, climate and racism. They come out of a wide range of social movements and support policy demands that reflect the principles of those movements: labor rights, immigrant and refugee rights, women’s and gender rights, equal access to housing and education, environmental justice, and opposition to police violence and racial profiling. Some, though certainly not all, identify not just with the policies of socialism but with the fundamental core values and indeed the name itself, usually in the form of democratic socialism.

Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American woman in Detroit, just won the Democratic primary for the legendary Congressman John Conyers’ seat. Four women, two of them members of Democratic Socialists of America and all four endorsed by DSA, beat their male incumbent opponents in Pennsylvania state house primaries. Tahirah Amatul-Wadud is running an insurgent campaign for Congress against a longstanding incumbent in western Massachusetts, keeping her focus on Medicare-for-All and civil rights. Minnesota State Rep. Ilhan Omar, a former Somali refugee, won endorsement from the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and is running for Keith Ellison’s former congressional seat as an “intersectional feminist.” And there are more.

Congressional nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked the Democratic political community recently after an upset win against Representative Joe Crowley in the New York Democratic primary. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Many highlight their movement experience in their campaigns; they are champions of immigrant rights, healthcare, student debt organizing and the fight for $15. Intersectionality has grown stronger, as the extremism of Trump’s right-wing racist assault creates significant new gains in linking separate movements focused on racism, women’s rights, immigrant rights, climate, poverty, labor rights and more.

But mostly, we’re not seeing progressive and socialist candidates clearly link domestic issues with efforts to challenge war, militarism and the war economy. There are a few exceptions: Congressional candidate and Hawaii State Rep. Kaniela Ing speaks powerfully about U.S. colonialism in Hawaii, and Virginia State Rep. Lee J. Carter has spoken strongly against U.S. bombing of Syria, linking current attacks with the legacy of U.S. military interventions. There may be more. But those are exceptions; most of the new left candidates focus on crucial issues of justice at home.

It’s not that progressive leaders don’t care about international issues, or that our movements are divided. Despite too many common assumptions, it is not political suicide for candidates or elected officials to stake out progressive anti-war, anti-militarism positions. Quite the contrary: Those positions actually have broad support within both our movements and public opinion. It’s just that it’s hard to figure out the strategies that work to connect internationally focused issues, anti-war efforts, or challenges to militarism, with the wide array of activists working on locally grounded issues. Some of those strategies seem like they should be easy—like talking about slashing the 53 cents of every discretionary federal dollar that now goes to the military as the easiest source to fund Medicare-for-all or free college education. It should be easy, but somehow it’s not: Too often, foreign policy feels remote from the urgency of domestic issues facing such crises. When our movements do figure out those strategies, candidates can easily follow suit.

Candidates coming out of our movements into elected office will need clear positions on foreign policy. Here are several core principles that should shape those positions.

A progressive foreign policy must reject U.S. military and economic domination and instead be grounded in global cooperation, human rights, respect for international law and privileging diplomacy over war. That does not mean isolationism, but instead a strategy of diplomatic engagement rather than—not as political cover for—destructive U.S. military interventions that have so often defined the U.S. role in the world.

Looking at the political pretexts for what the U.S. empire is doing around the world today, a principled foreign policy might start by recognizing that there is no military solution to terrorism and that the global war on terror must be ended.

More broadly, the militarization of foreign policy must be reversed and diplomacy must replace military action in every venue, with professional diplomats rather than the White House’s political appointees in charge. Aspiring and elected progressive and socialist office-holders should keep in mind the distinction between the successes and failures of Obama’s foreign policy. The victories were all diplomatic: moving towards normalization with Cuba, the Paris climate accord and especially the Iran nuclear deal. Obama’s greatest failures—in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen—all occurred because the administration chose military action over robust diplomacy.

Certainly, diplomacy has been a tool in the arsenal of empires, including the United States. But when we are talking about official policies governing relations between countries, diplomacy—meaning talking, negotiating and engaging across a table—is always, always better than engaging across a battlefield.

A principled foreign policy must recognize how the war economy has distorted our society at home—and commit to reverse it. The $717 billion of the military budget is desperately needed for jobs, healthcare and education here at home—and for a diplomatic surge and humanitarian and reconstruction assistance to people of countries devastated by U.S. wars and sanctions.

A principled foreign policy must acknowledge how U.S. actions—military, economic and climate-related—have been a driving force in displacing people around the world. We therefore have an enormous moral as well as legal obligation to take the lead in providing humanitarian support and refuge for those displaced—so immigration and refugee rights are central to foreign policy.

For too long the power of the U.S. empire has dominated international relations, led to the privileging of war over diplomacy on a global scale, and created a vast—and invasive—network of 800-plus military bases around the world.

Now, overall U.S. global domination is actually shrinking, and not only because of Trump’s actions. China’s economy is rapidly catching up, and its economic clout in Africa and elsewhere eclipses that of the United States. It’s a measure of the United States’ waning power that Europe, Russia and China are resisting U.S. efforts to impose new global sanctions on Iran. But the United States is still the world’s strongest military and economic power: Its military spending vastly surpasses that of the eight next strongest countries, it is sponsoring a dangerous anti-Iran alliance between Israel and the wealthy Gulf Arab states, it remains central to NATO decision-making, and powerful forces in Washington threaten new wars in North Korea and Iran. The United States remains dangerous.

Progressives in Congress have to navigate the tricky task of rejecting American exceptionalism. U.S global military and economic efforts are generally aimed at maintaining domination and control. Without that U.S. domination, the possibility arises of a new kind of internationalism: to prevent and solve crises that arise from current and potential wars, to promote nuclear disarmament, to come up with climate solutions and to protect refugees.

That effort is increasingly important because of the rapid rise of right-wing xenophobic authoritarians seeking and winning power. Trump is now leading and enabling an informal global grouping of such leaders, from Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to Victor Orban in Hungary and others. Progressive elected officials in the United States can pose an important challenge to that authoritarian axis by building ties with their like-minded counterparts in parliaments and governments—possibilities include Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, among others. And progressive and leftist members of Congress will need to be able to work together with social movements to build public pressure for diplomatic initiatives not grounded in the interests of U.S. empire.

In addition to these broad principles, candidates and elected officials need critical analyses of current U.S. engagement around the world, as well as nuanced prescriptions for how to de-escalate militarily, and ramp up a new commitment to serious diplomacy.

GEOPOLITICAL POWER PLAYS

1. RUSSIA:

Relations with Russia will be a major challenge for the foreseeable future. With 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons in U.S. and Russian hands, and the two powers deploying military forces on opposite sides of active battlefronts in Syria, it is crucial that relations remain open—not least to derail potential escalations and ensure the ability to stand down from any accidental clash.

Progressives and leftists in Congress will need to promote a nuanced, careful approach to Russia policy. And they will face a daunting environment in which to do so. They will have to deal with loud cries from right-wing war-mongers, mainly Republicans, and from neo-con interventionists in both parties, demanding a one-sided anti-Russia policy focused on increased sanctions and potentially even military threats. But many moderate and liberal Democrats—and much of the media—are also joining the anti-Russia crusade. Some of those liberals and moderates have likely bought into the idea of American exceptionalism, accepting as legitimate or irrelevant the long history of U.S. election meddling around the world and viewing the Russian efforts as somehow reaching a whole different level of outrageousness. Others see the anti-Russia mobilization solely in the context of undermining Trump.

But at the same time, progressive Congress members should recognize that reports of Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 and 2018 elections cannot be dismissed out of hand. They should continue to demand that more of the evidence be made public, and condemn the Russian meddling that has occurred, even while recognizing that the most serious threats to our elections come from voter suppression campaigns at home more than from Moscow. And they have to make clear that Trump’s opponents cannot be allowed to turn the president’s infatuation with Vladimir Putin into the basis for a new Cold War, simply to oppose Trump.

2. CHINA:

The broad frame of a progressive approach should be to end Washington’s provocative military and economic moves and encourage deeper levels of diplomatic engagement. This means replacing military threats with diplomacy in response to Chinese moves in the South China Sea, as well as significant cuts in the ramped-up military ties with U.S. allies in the region, such as Vietnam. Progressive and socialist members of Congress and other elected officials will no doubt be aware that the rise of China’s economic dominance across Africa, and its increasing influence in parts of Latin America, could endanger the independence of countries in those parts of the Global South. But they will also need to recognize that any U.S. response to what looks like Chinese exploitation must be grounded in humility, acknowledging the long history of U.S. colonial and neocolonial domination throughout those same regions. Efforts to compete with Chinese economic assistance by increasing Washington’s own humanitarian and development aid should mean directing all funds through the UN, rather than through USAID or the Pentagon. That will make U.S. assistance far less likely to be perceived as—and to be—an entry point for exploitation.

3. NATO:

A progressive position on NATO flies straight into the face of the partisan component of the anti-Trump resistance—the idea that if Trump is for it, we should be against it. For a host of bad reasons that have to do with personal enrichment and personal power, Trump sometimes takes positions that large parts of the U.S. and global anti-war and solidarity movements have long supported. One of those is NATO. During the Cold War, NATO was the European military face of U.S.-dominated Western anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism. With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, peace activists from around the world called for the dissolution of NATO as an anachronistic relic whose raison d’etre was now gone.

Instead, NATO used its 50th anniversary in 1999 to rebrand itself as defending a set of amorphous, ostensibly “Western” values such as democracy, rather than having any identifiable enemy—something like a military version of the EU, with the United States on board for clout. Unable to win UN Security Council support for war in Kosovo, the United States and its allies used NATO to provide so-called authorization for a major bombing campaign—in complete violation of international law—and began a rapid expansion of the NATO alliance right up to the borders of Russia. Anti-war forces across the world continued to rally around the call “No to NATO”—a call to dissolve the alliance altogether.

But when Trump, however falsely, claims to call for an end to the alliance, or shows disdain for NATO, anti-Trump politicians and media lead the way in embracing the military alliance as if it really did represent some version of human rights and international law. It doesn’t—and progressives in elected positions need to be willing to call out NATO as a militarized Cold War relic that shouldn’t be reconfigured to maintain U.S. domination in Europe or to mobilize against Russia or China or anyone else. It should be ended.

In fact, Trump’s claims to oppose NATO are belied by his actions. In his 2019 budget request he almost doubled the 2017 budget for the Pentagon’s “European Deterrence Initiative,” designed explicitly as a response to “threats from Russia.” There is a huge gap between Trump’s partisan base-pleasing condemnation of NATO and his administration&rdqou;s actual support for strengthening the military alliance. That contradiction should make it easier for progressive candidates and officeholders to move to cut NATO funding and reduce its power—not because Trump is against NATO but because the military alliance serves as a dangerous provocation toward war.

THE WAR ON TERROR

What George W. Bush first called “the global war on terror” is still raging almost 17 years later, though with different forms of killing and different casualty counts. Today’s reliance on airstrikes, drone attacks and a few thousand special forces has replaced the hundreds of thousands of U.S. and allied ground troops. And today hardly any U.S. troops are being killed, while civilian casualties are skyrocketing across the Middle East and Afghanistan. Officials from the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations have repeated the mantra that “there is no military solution” in Afghanistan, Syria, or Iraq or against terrorism, but their actions have belied those words. Progressive elected officials need to consistently remind the public and their counterparts that it is not possible to bomb terrorism out of existence. Bombs don’t hit “terrorism”; they hit cities, houses, wedding parties. And on those rare occasions when they hit the people actually named on the White House’s unaccountable kill list, or “terrorist” list, the impact often creates more terrorists.

The overall progressive policy on this question means campaigning for diplomatic solutions and strategies instead of military ones. That also means joining the ongoing congressional efforts led by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and others  to challenge the continued reliance on the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF).

In general, privileging diplomatic over war strategies starts with withdrawing troops and halting the arms sales that flood the region with deadly weapons. Those weapons too often end up in the hands of killers on all sides, from bands of unaccountable militants to brutally repressive governments, with civilians paying the price. Congress members should demand an end of massive arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other U.S. allies carrying out brutal wars across the Middle East, and they should call for an end to the practice of arming non-state proxies who kill even more people. They should call for a U.S. arms embargo on Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Jordan and Israel (which presents a whole other set of arms-related challenges), while urging Russia to stop its arms sales to Syria, Iran and Pakistan. Given the power of the arms industries in the United States, arms embargoes are the most difficult—but perhaps the most important—part of ending the expanding Middle East wars.

Progressives in Congress should demand real support for UN-sponsored and other international peace initiatives, staffing whole new diplomatic approaches whose goal is political solutions rather than military victories—and taking funds out of military budgets to cover the costs. The goal should be to end these endless wars—not try to “win” them.

1. ISRAEL-PALESTINE: 

The most important thing for candidates to know is that there has been a massive shift in public opinion in recent years. It is no longer political suicide to criticize Israel. Yes, AIPAC and the rest of the right-wing Jewish, pro-Israel lobbies remain influential and have a lot of money to throw around. (The Christian Zionist lobbies are powerful too, but there is less political difficulty for progressives to challenge them.) But there are massive shifts underway in U.S. Jewish public opinion on the conflict, and the lobbies cannot credibly claim to speak for the Jewish community as a whole.

Outside the Jewish community, the shift is even more dramatic, and has become far more partisan: Uncritical support for Israel is now overwhelmingly a Republican position. Among Democrats, particularly young Democrats, support for Israel has fallen dramatically; among Republicans, support for Israel’s far-right government is sky-high. The shift is particularly noticeable among Democrats of color, where recognition of the parallels between Israeli oppression of Palestinians and the legacies of Jim Crow segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa is rising rapidly.

U.S. policy, unfortunately, has not kept up with that changing discourse. But modest gains are evident even there. When nearly 60 members of the House and Senate openly skipped Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech when he came to lobby Congress to vote against President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, the sky didn’t fall. The snub to the Israeli prime minister was unprecedented, but no one lost their seat because of it. Rep. Betty McCollum’s bill to protect Palestinian children from Israel’s vicious military juvenile detention system (the only one in the world) now has 29 co-sponsors, and the sky still isn’t falling. Members of Congress are responding more frequently to Israeli assaults on Gaza and the killing of protesters, often because of powerful movements among their constituents. When Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the Israeli daily Ha’aretz acknowledged the divide: “While members of the Republican Party overwhelmingly expressed support for the move, Democrats were split between those who congratulated Trump for it and those who called it a dangerous and irresponsible action.”

That creates space for candidates and newly elected officials to respond to the growing portion of their constituencies that supports Palestinian rights. Over time, they must establish a rights-based policy. That means acknowledging that the quarter-century-long U.S.-orchestrated “peace process” based on the never-serious pursuit of a solution, has failed. Instead, left and progressive political leaders can advocate for a policy that turns over real control of diplomacy to the UN, ends support for Israeli apartheid and occupation, and instead supports a policy based on international law, human rights and equality for all, without privileging Jews or discriminating against non-Jews.

To progress from cautiously urging that Israel abide by international law, to issuing a full-scale call to end or at least reduce the $3.8 billion per year that Congress sends straight to the Israeli military, might take some time. In the meantime, progressive candidates must prioritize powerful statements condemning the massacre of unarmed protesters in Gaza and massive Israeli settlement expansion, demands for real accountability for Israeli violations of human rights and international law (including reducing U.S. support in response), and calls for an end to the longstanding U.S. protection that keeps Israel from being held accountable in the UN.

The right consistently accuses supporters of Palestinian rights of holding Israel to a double standard. Progressives in Congress should turn that claim around on them and insist that U.S. policy towards Israel—Washington’s closest ally in the region and the recipient of billions of dollars in military aid every year—hold Israel to exactly the same standards that we want the United States to apply to every other country: human rights, adherence to international law and equality for all.

Many supporters of the new crop of progressive candidates, and many activists in the movements they come out of, are supporters of the increasingly powerful, Palestinian-led BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement, that aims to bring non-violent economic pressure to bear on Israel until it ends its violations of international law. This movement deserves credit for helping to mainstream key demands—to end the siege of Gaza and the killing of protesters, to support investigations of Israeli violations by the International Criminal Court, to oppose Israel’s new “nation-state’ law—that should all be on lawmakers’ immediate agenda.

2. AFGHANISTAN: 

More than 100,000 Afghans and 2,000 U.S. troops have been killed in a U.S. war that has raged for almost 17 years. Not-Yet-President Trump called for withdrawal from Afghanistan, but within just a few months after taking office he agreed instead to send additional troops, even though earlier deployments of more than 100,000 U.S. troops (and thousands more coalition soldiers) could not win a military victory over the Taliban. Corruption in the U.S.-backed and -funded Afghan government remains sky-high, and in just the past three years, the Pentagon has lost track of how $3.1 billion of its Afghanistan funds were spent. About 15,000 US troops are still deployed, with no hope of a military victory for the United States.

Progressive members of Congress should demand a safe withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, acting on the long-held recognition that military force simply won’t work to bring about the political solution all sides claim to want.

Several pending bills also would reclaim the centrality of Congress’ role in authorizing war in general and in Afghanistan in particular—including ending the 2001 AUMF. Funding for humanitarian aid, refugee support, and in the future compensation and reparations for the massive destruction the U.S.-led war has wrought across the country, should all be on Congress’ agenda, understanding that such funding will almost certainly fail while U.S. troops are deployed.

3. IRAN: 

With U.S. and Iranian military forces facing each other in Syria, the potential for an unintentional escalation is sky-high. Even a truly accidental clash between a few Iranian and U.S. troops, or an Iranian anti-aircraft system mistakenly locking on to a U.S. warplane plane even if it didn’t fire, could have catastrophic consequences without immediate military-to-military and quick political echelon discussions to defuse the crisis. And with tensions very high, those ties are not routinely available. Relations became very dangerous when Trump withdrew the United States from the multi-lateral nuclear deal in May. (At that time, a strong majority of people in the United States favored the deal, and less than one in three wanted to pull out of it.)

The United States continues to escalate threats against Iran. It is sponsoring a growing regional anti-Iran alliance, with Israel and Saudi Arabia now publicly allied and pushing strongly for military action. And Trump has surrounded himself with war-mongers for his top advisers, including John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, who have both supported regime change in Iran and urged military rather than diplomatic approaches to Iran.

Given all that, what progressive elected officials need to do is to keep fighting for diplomacy over war. That means challenging U.S. support for the anti-Iran alliance and opposing sanctions on Iran. It means developing direct ties with parliamentarians from the European and other signatories to the Iran nuclear deal, with the aim of collective opposition to new sanctions, re-legitimizing the nuclear deal in Washington and reestablishing diplomacy as the basis for U.S. relations with Iran.

It should also mean developing a congressional response to the weakening of international anti-nuclear norms caused by the pull-out from the Iran deal. That means not just supporting the nonproliferation goals of the Iran nuclear deal, but moving further towards real disarmament and ultimately the abolition of nuclear weapons. Progressives in and outside of Congress should make clear that nuclear nonproliferation (meaning no one else gets to have nukes) can’t work in the long run without nuclear disarmament (meaning that the existing nuclear weapons states have to give them up). That could start with a demand for full U.S. compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which calls for negotiations leading to “nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament.”

(Continue Reading)

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December 13, 2019

Scott Galloway

@profgalloway

5-min read

The Dunning-Kruger effect posits that dumb people are too stupid to know they are dumb. They are not perplexed by difficult situations but overconfident — not knowing what they don’t know. As few people believe they are stupid, or a bad driver, a more relatable component of Dunning-Kruger is incorrectly believing one area of skill translates to another.

I suffer massively from this. I’m smarter than your average bear when it comes to marketing, so I’ve come to believe that makes me an expert on pretty much anything. I don’t know much about physics but constantly reference Galileo despite knowing little besides the fact that he dared challenge the church.

There is evidence of this all over the marketplace. Great P/E guys believe they would make great VCs and vice versa. Hedge fund managers believe two years of above-market returns means they are also great operators. To disabuse anybody of this notion, take them to a Sears. Billionaires running for president, actors starting skincare lines, and tech CEOs founding media firms. Being rich also naturally makes you a great film producer.

Masayoshi Son created $64 billion in shareholder value, mostly through deft acquisitions. Mr. Son can also boast of perhaps the best venture investment in history, $20 million into Alibaba that became $100 billion. That investment is tantamount to Michael Jordan hitting a grand slam on his first at bat wearing a Birmingham Barons hat.

Mr. Son has mistaken luck in venture investing for the ability to responsibly allocate billions based on a gut feeling. The size of SoftBank investments, relative to the diligence, now looks stupid, if not negligent. A writedown on an investment in a dog-walking app may have been avoided had someone in the SoftBank diligence team taken the time to discover they were investing $300 million in … a dog-walking app.

Conflating luck and talent is dangerous. As I get older, I’m struck by how big a part luck played in my life, and how much I mistook it for skill, well into my forties. The Pareto principle shows that even if competence is evenly distributed, 80% of effects stem from 20% of the causes.

Not recognizing your blessings feeds into the dark side of capitalism and meritocracy: the notion that success is a choice, and that those who haven’t achieved success are not unlucky, but unworthy. This leads to regressive policies that further reward the perceived winners and punish the perceived losers based on income level. The most recent example of our belief that poor people are guilty: The US now has the fourth-lowest tax rate in the world, and billionaires have the lowest tax rate of any cohort.

First Base

I constantly humblebrag that I was raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died a secretary. But truth is I was born on third base. My parents got me to first base before I was born, immigrating to the US. This took courage, desire, and a dose of selfishness. Both left families that needed them. My mom left London when her two youngest siblings were still in an orphanage.

In Europe I’d make much less money being an entrepreneur and challenging institutions. In China I’d likely be in jail. Having one of my companies fail would have bankrupted me in Europe, as the tolerance for risk or failure is scant. I have no idea what would have happened in China. In the US, a tolerance for failure meant a lifestyle my parents couldn’t have imagined crossing the Atlantic on a steamship in 1961.

Second Base

I have some talent and have worked really hard, but mostly my success is due to being born in the right place at the right time, and being a white heterosexual male. Coming of professional age as a white male in the nineties was the greatest economic arbitrage in history. Today’s 54-to-70-year-olds saw the Dow Jones increase an average of 445% from 25-40, their prime working years. For other ages, it doubles at most.

Economic liberalization (globalization, technology, market deregulation) coupled with social norms that clung to the past meant 31% of America (white males) were given license over a lion’s share of the spoils. In nineties San Francisco, I raised over $100 million for my start-ups. I didn’t know a single woman under 40 who raised more than a million. And it seemed normal. Even today, white men hold 65% of elected offices despite being 31% of the population.

Third Base

Rich, fabulous people are the ideal billboards for luxury brands. Our nation’s best universities have adopted the same strategy. Universities are no longer nonprofits, but the highest-gross-margin luxury brands in the world. Another trait of a luxury brand is the illusion of scarcity. Over the last 30 years, the number of applicants to Stanford has tripled, while the size of the freshman class has remained static. Harvard and Stanford have become finishing school for the global wealthy.

In the class of 2013 in the Ivy League, five of the eight colleges (Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn, and Brown) had more students from the top 1% of the income scale than the bottom 60%.

Fast and Slow Thinking

According to @thetweetofgod, intelligence looks in the mirror and sees ignorance; ignorance looks in the mirror and sees intelligence. The sectors that have enjoyed the greatest prosperity spread across increasingly few people — technology and finance — have created an unprecedented level of arrogance among people born on third base.

When we feel threatened, we are more prone to see each other as an enemy, rather than someone who has a different opinion. We want to dismiss and fight the whole person, rather than just what they said. From primeval times, our brains have been set up to identify “enemy” or “one of us,” that simple binary distinction. Do I trust them as a person or are they not “one of us.” When we are in our more evolved, slow thinking mode (Daniel Kahneman), we evaluate arguments. When we are in our knee-jerk, threatened fast thinking, we decide the person is our enemy and argue from our amygdala, not our forebrain.

When we are threatened, we are also less empathic. Altruistic behavior decreases in times of greater income inequality. The rich are more generous in times of lesser inequality and less generous when inequality grows more extreme. When the poor need our help more, we are less likely to offer it, because we don’t see the poor as one of us. They become “them.”

Michael Lewis writes, “The problem is caused by the inequality itself: it triggers a chemical reaction in the privileged few. It tilts their brains. It causes them to be less likely to care about anyone but themselves or to experience the moral sentiments needed to be a decent citizen.”

Old Age

My dad is not doing well. We think it’s dementia, but it’s more just that he’s 89. He has never asked me for much, but he needs me now. I don’t do as much for him as I did for my mom at the end of her life, as I don’t feel the same goodwill toward him — my mother raised me. It’s easier to be generous with him when I look at his life. He was physically abused by his father and had no education. Despite this, his courage and wits (immigrating to America) put his son and daughter on first base.

Life is so rich,

P.S. Last week I wrote a letter asking the board of Twitter to replace Jack Dorsey. On Wednesday, Mr. Dorsey announced Twitter is possibly moving to an open standard. This is a good strategy. However, assigning five developers to a project with no timeline feels like big-tech delay and obfuscation (“we’re working on it”) and reflects an unwillingness to make the requisite investment of time and resources in open APIs. His other actions confirm he isn’t willing to make the requisite investment of time and resources in Twitter.

[englishessaycorrector487]

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[newstfionline]

U.S. allies have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians from the air.

After 22 died at a wedding, one village asks, ‘Why us?’

By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, July 26, 2018

RAQAH, Yemen--The ground where the wedding tent once stood was covered with children’s slippers, broken musical instruments, pieces of festive clothing and other detritus of destroyed lives. Teeth, still attached to the jawbone, lay near some tattered decorations.

An airstrike hit the wedding in this remote mountain village on April 23, killing 22 civilians including eight children, and injuring dozens, according to interviews with 17 villagers in late May. More than three years into Yemen’s civil war, over 16,000 civilians have been killed and injured, the vast majority by airstrikes, the U.N. human rights office estimates, adding that the figures are likely to be far higher. The deaths are continuing unabated, with as many as hundreds of casualties per month, despite assurances by a U.S.-backed regional coalition to better protect civilians amid mounting criticism within the United States and the international community.

That coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, is backing Yemen’s exiled government in its conflict against rebels known as the Houthis, who dominate the capital and the north. The United States is playing an essential role in the war, supporting the coalition with intelligence, refueling, technical assistance, and billions of dollars in bombs and other weaponry.

The coalition is the only actor in the conflict that uses war planes, mostly American- and British-made fighter jets. The airstrikes have struck hospitals, schools, markets, motels, migrant boats, gas stations, even funeral gatherings, raising questions about the coalition’s ability to abide by humanitarian laws that calls for civilians to be safeguarded.

A month after the airstrike in Raqah, the destruction on the ground remained eerily preserved. The lives of the survivors, however, had been forever altered.

“We lost our minds that day,” said Amna Yahya, the groom’s mother. “I still can’t comprehend what happened. Why us?”

The growing civilian casualties across Yemen have led to widespread denouncement of the U.S. role and calls in Congress to halt or regulate American weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, a close U.S. ally in the Middle East. Despite the concern, President Trump announced $110 billion in new arms sales last year to the kingdom, weapons that most analysts expect will be used in Yemen.

In the hours following the airstrike in Raqah, local media published photos, provided by the Houthis, showing the bomb was a GBU-12 Paveway II precision-guided bomb, manufactured by Raytheon, the Massachusetts-based defense contractor, according to Bellingcat, an investigative website.

Visits to other bombed sites by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch confirm that American-made munitions, including banned cluster bombs and Paveway bombs, have been used in attacks that have killed and injured civilians. The Post saw remnants of U.S.-made bombs in the capital, Sanaa, and in the southwestern city of Taiz.

After the Senate narrowly approved a $510 million first installment of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia last June, the kingdom said it would launch a training program to reduce accidental targeting of civilians. But in the year since that announcement, civilian deaths were 7 percent more than the year prior, U.N. data shows. In April alone, there were 236 civilians killed and 238 injured--the deadliest month this year so far.

A U.N. report last month found 1,316 Yemeni children were killed or injured last year, and that more than half of the casualties resulted from airstrikes.

A Saudi government official disputed the U.N. figures and said the coalition is “implementing the highest standard measures to prevent civilian casualties,” including “continuous training” of its staff and efforts to improve rules of engagement.

Human rights activists welcome such efforts but say the coalition’s probing of the aftermath of airstrikes remains hollow. “There is no genuine follow-up on their international human rights obligations and their commitment to respecting humanitarian laws,” said Rasha Mohamed, Yemen researcher for Amnesty International.

Raqah is in a rugged region in the northern Yemeni province of Hajjah. The sprawling village of about 700 residents is about a three-hour drive from the provincial capital, a place so remote that to reach it requires crossing dry river beds and driving up goat paths.

The civil war that emerged from the political chaos that followed the 2011 Arab Spring revolts hardly touched the villagers, mostly farmers and herders. Many supported former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was ousted in 2012. But even after the Houthis swept into Sanaa and pushed out the internationally recognized government, the conflict never came to their area, villagers said.

They said they would often see and hear war planes and unmanned drones fly above their huts, but they never felt threatened. They had nothing to do, they said, with the Shiite Houthis or Iran, which is backing the rebels.

“There are no Houthis here,” said Yahya Ahmed, a villager whose nephew was killed in the airstrike. “Did you see any checkpoints in our area?”

Across northern Yemen, rebel checkpoints are ubiquitous. But in and around Raqah, there were none. Nor were there were any visible signs of military activity. Villagers said there were no military bases in the area and none of their men were fighting with the rebels.

The only time they had seen rebels in recent memory was the morning after the airstrike, when some Houthis officials arrived to assess the damage.

“We refused to join the Houthis,” said Mohammed Yahya, the groom’s uncle. “One side says, ‘God is Great.’ The other side says, ‘God is Great.’ We don’t know who is right.”

The wedding of Yahya Jaffer and his bride, Fatma, began auspiciously enough. They were both 20 years old, both from the al-Musabi tribe. Like their parents and grandparents, they were marrying within their community. They are cousins.

The families had spent much of their savings on the wedding. A large white tent was erected in front of their home. More than 150 guests drank soft drinks and water and feasted on lamb and other delicacies. A group of local folkloric dancers and musicians entertained, according to the recollections of villagers present at the event.

Many villagers said they heard two planes circling above their homes throughout that day, as well as just before the attack.

“An hour later, one of them hit us,” Amna Yahya said.

It was shortly after 10 p.m. By then, most parents and the elderly had left the wedding. The youth clapped to the rhythm of drums and lutes. Some sang, others chanted, as the dancers skipped and leaped in celebration. Then, a thunderous sound.

“I saw a flash of red, and I lost consciousness,” Jaffer recalled. “When I woke up, I heard people screaming in pain. People had lost arms and legs. There was blood everywhere.”

Those who could searched through the rubble for survivors, pulling them to safety. Others struggled to find the dead: Most were coated by ash or torn into pieces.

The only way Aitan Suwaed said he recognized his 17-year-old son, Hamdi, was “from his clothes, the parts that weren’t burnt.”

The 22 fatalities included 12 of the dancers, four musicians and six villagers, including one who played the lute. Most of the children killed were in the dance troupe.

The dancers all belonged to the Muhamasheen, Yemen’s most marginalized ethnic group. Performing at weddings was among the few jobs they could find.

For 10 of them, only pieces of their bodies were found, so they are buried in two mass graves. “It’s all my family,” said Ahmed Rifaei, 37, a dancer who survived.

The living, too, are in bad shape.

Some of Raqah’s residents have lost their hearing. Children have lost limbs, while others carry shrapnel from the missile inside their bodies. The nearest hospital is in the provincial capital, and most villagers cannot afford the three-hour journey.

Yahya Ahmed not only lost his nephew. His wife, Noora, was four months pregnant. When she heard the bombing, she started screaming uncontrollably. The next morning, she had a miscarriage, he said.

Other women and children in the village report having nightmares where they relive the bombing. One woman was in such shock that she feared leaving her bed. Whenever she needed to go to the bathroom, her relatives carried her. Other villagers said they now sleep outside their houses at night out of concern their homes would be targeted by airstrikes.

“What happened to us, happened to everyone in the village,” said Amna Yahya. “Everyone is full of fear.”

Many are also filled with anger, not just at the Saudi-led coalition, but at the United States. “If it wasn’t for the American aircraft, Saudi Arabia would never strike Yemen,” said Mohammed Yahya, the groom’s uncle. “America gives them weapons, and the Saudis hit us.”

Some villagers have fled to other areas rather than risk being targeted by another airstrike. But the vast majority don’t have that option, including the bride and groom. With their family house destroyed, Jaffer and Allam live in their animal shed, next to cows and goats, their abode reeking of hay and animal urine. They are married in principle but not legally: They can no longer afford to pay for their wedding certificate. So it hasn’t been signed by the local marriage official.

On a chair in the shed is the white traditional Yemeni robe that Jaffer wore at his wedding. It is now bloodstained. He has no intention of cleaning it.

“I will keep this to always remember what happened,” he said.

[olko71]

New Post has been published on All about business online

New Post has been published on http://yaroreviews.info/2020/01/walmart-sacks-56-executives-in-india-as-part-of-restructuring

Walmart sacks 56 executives in India as part of restructuring

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Walmart Inc, the world’s largest retailer, has fired 56 of its executives in India as it restructures in the country.

FILE PHOTO: Customers shop at a Walmart India’s Best Price Modern Wholesale store in Jammu May 8, 2018. REUTERS/Mukesh Gupta/File Photo

The move underscores the challenges Walmart has faced in expanding its wholesale business in India. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based company currently operates 28 wholesale stores in the Asian country where it sells goods to small shopkeepers, and not to retail consumers.

Reuters reported the firings earlier on Monday, citing three people with direct knowledge of the matter, adding the move had mostly affected executives in Walmart’s real estate division, which takes care of store expansion, as the wholesale business model did not bring in expected growth.

Eight of the 56 executives fired were in “senior management” roles and the rest from middle or lower management, Krish Iyer, President and CEO of Walmart India said in a statement.

“We are also looking for ways to operate more efficiently, which requires us to review our corporate structure to ensure that we are organized in the right way,” Iyer said, adding the fired executives had been offered enhanced severance benefits.

Walmart has placed bold bets on India’s e-commerce sector. In 2018, it paid $16 billion to buy a majority stake in India’s online marketplace Flipkart, in its biggest global acquisition.

“It’s happening because focus is shifting to e-commerce rather than physical (stores),” according to one of three people, who spoke to Reuters ahead of the company announcement.

A second source said Walmart could slow down the pace of opening new wholesale stores in India as it focuses on boosting sales through business-to-business and retail e-commerce.

Iyer, however, said Walmart remained committed to developing physical stores as well.

“We have recently made significant investments to serve our members better and will continue to do so. This includes investments in our brick-and-mortar stores as well as e-commerce,” Iyer added.

Walmart has around 600 staff in its India head office out of a total of around 5,300 nationally, one of the sources said.

Reporting by Aftab Ahmed and Aditya Kalra; Additional reporting by Chris Thomas in Bengaluru; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Himani Sarkar

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

[smartwebhostingblog]

You're hired! Thai startup fills gap in tech talent recruiting

New Post has been published on http://hosting-df.net/youre-hired-thai-startup-fills-gap-in-tech-talent-recruiting/

You're hired! Thai startup fills gap in tech talent recruiting

BANGKOK (Reuters) – When app developer Sattha Puangput was looking to move from a startup to a new role, he updated his profile on GetLinks, a website that pairs technology professionals with companies looking to beef up their tech teams.

The GetLinks logo is seen at the startup’s office in Bangkok, Thailand November 22, 2018. REUTERS/Chayut Setboonsarng

Within days, he says, he was called to several interviews and eventually accepted an offer with hypermarket chain Tesco Lotus to develop Android software using Kotlin, a language based on Java that uses fewer lines of code and makes for more efficient app development.

Knowledge of new languages and programming tools helps build software faster and allows developers to easily work together.

Customers say what sets GetLinks apart is its focus on matching specific tech skills such as app development and programming languages like Flutter and Docker – not just general programming – to meet the needs of Asia’s fast-expanding tech companies and also more traditional companies seeking tech talent that in-house recruiters are not able to find.

Chinese tech giant Alibaba, Thai conglomerate Siam Cement Group and Australian employment marketplace SEEK Group, participated in a funding round for GetLinks, headquartered in Bangkok, last year which raised “eight figures” in U.S. dollars, said the startup’s co-founder, 26-year-old French-born Djoann Fal.

The funding will help GetLinks set up local offices in Indonesia, Malaysia, Shenzhen and Taiwan, Fal said.

Sattha, 30, says he looked at other job sites, but couldn’t find companies that were looking for his specific skills.

“Usually, the (job) search is long, so I was impressed with GetLinks,” Sattha said. “The offer was fast. There are good opportunities.”

So far, three-year-old GetLinks has placed over 1,000 candidates across companies such as Tencent, Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank and Indonesia’s travel startup, Traveloka, Fal said.

GetLinks is a “good model” for matching companies with candidates, but could face challenges if trying to recruit more seasoned executives, said Punyanuch Sirisawadwattana, a director with UK recruiter Robert Walters in Thailand.

Companies could lose good candidates when there isn’t somebody in between to work out a solution on sensitive matters like salary that require a “soft skill” to negotiate – something technology cannot immediately address, she added.

TRADITIONAL COMPANIES

Still, the explosion in demand for tech skills in Asia should serve the website well, Fal said. “The digitization that we saw in Europe is basically happening now,” in the region, he said.

Chinese tech giants and regional startups like Grab and Go-Jek have been expanding aggressively in digital payments and e-commerce, pushing up demand for progammers, designers and digital marketers.

A Google and Temasek study from November predicts that Southeast Asia’s internet economy will reach $240 billion by 2025, a fifth more than a previous estimate in 2016 because of increasing mobile connectivity..

Tencent-backed Sea, best known for its game publishing business, has used GetLinks to recruit.

“The good thing about this system is that we can look at candidate profiles and contact them directly,” said Anyarin Teerachawansith, Sea Thailand’s head of people search.

Sea has placed more than 10 people across its Thai operations using GetLinks, including full stack developers and search engine optimization experts. However, Anyarin said the company mostly still recruits through its own network, referrals and headhunting agencies.

GetLinks charges companies 15 percent of the candidate’s first-year salary or a monthly subscription that ranges from $1,000 for two hires per month to $10,000 for unlimited hires.

Traditional companies scrambling to invest in digital transformation and technology find GetLinks useful, Fal says.

One such company is Thailand’s largest industrial conglomerate, Siam Cement Group, which started its own digital initiative in 2017.

GetLinks CEO and Co-Founder, Djoann Fal, poses for a photo in Bangkok, Thailand November 22, 2018. REUTERS/Chayut Setboonsarng

“We were new and wanted to get into the market,” Joshua Pas, Siam Cement’s director of Digital Transformation and Corporate Technology, told Reuters.

The unit hired people through its own recruitment team, but also found its technology head through GetLinks, Pas said. So far, GetLinks has placed over 20 positions across the company.

The commercial partnership worked so well that the century-old company’s corporate venture arm, which Pas also heads, invested in the startup because the search for talent “is a bottleneck” and demand will grow.

Reporting by Chayut Setboonsarng; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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[awesomecolorfulcollectorwombat]

You're hired! Thai startup fills gap in tech talent recruiting

New Post has been published on http://hosting-df.net/youre-hired-thai-startup-fills-gap-in-tech-talent-recruiting/

You're hired! Thai startup fills gap in tech talent recruiting

BANGKOK (Reuters) – When app developer Sattha Puangput was looking to move from a startup to a new role, he updated his profile on GetLinks, a website that pairs technology professionals with companies looking to beef up their tech teams.

The GetLinks logo is seen at the startup’s office in Bangkok, Thailand November 22, 2018. REUTERS/Chayut Setboonsarng

Within days, he says, he was called to several interviews and eventually accepted an offer with hypermarket chain Tesco Lotus to develop Android software using Kotlin, a language based on Java that uses fewer lines of code and makes for more efficient app development.

Knowledge of new languages and programming tools helps build software faster and allows developers to easily work together.

Customers say what sets GetLinks apart is its focus on matching specific tech skills such as app development and programming languages like Flutter and Docker – not just general programming – to meet the needs of Asia’s fast-expanding tech companies and also more traditional companies seeking tech talent that in-house recruiters are not able to find.

Chinese tech giant Alibaba, Thai conglomerate Siam Cement Group and Australian employment marketplace SEEK Group, participated in a funding round for GetLinks, headquartered in Bangkok, last year which raised “eight figures” in U.S. dollars, said the startup’s co-founder, 26-year-old French-born Djoann Fal.

The funding will help GetLinks set up local offices in Indonesia, Malaysia, Shenzhen and Taiwan, Fal said.

Sattha, 30, says he looked at other job sites, but couldn’t find companies that were looking for his specific skills.

“Usually, the (job) search is long, so I was impressed with GetLinks,” Sattha said. “The offer was fast. There are good opportunities.”

So far, three-year-old GetLinks has placed over 1,000 candidates across companies such as Tencent, Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank and Indonesia’s travel startup, Traveloka, Fal said.

GetLinks is a “good model” for matching companies with candidates, but could face challenges if trying to recruit more seasoned executives, said Punyanuch Sirisawadwattana, a director with UK recruiter Robert Walters in Thailand.

Companies could lose good candidates when there isn’t somebody in between to work out a solution on sensitive matters like salary that require a “soft skill” to negotiate – something technology cannot immediately address, she added.

TRADITIONAL COMPANIES

Still, the explosion in demand for tech skills in Asia should serve the website well, Fal said. “The digitization that we saw in Europe is basically happening now,” in the region, he said.

Chinese tech giants and regional startups like Grab and Go-Jek have been expanding aggressively in digital payments and e-commerce, pushing up demand for progammers, designers and digital marketers.

A Google and Temasek study from November predicts that Southeast Asia’s internet economy will reach $240 billion by 2025, a fifth more than a previous estimate in 2016 because of increasing mobile connectivity..

Tencent-backed Sea, best known for its game publishing business, has used GetLinks to recruit.

“The good thing about this system is that we can look at candidate profiles and contact them directly,” said Anyarin Teerachawansith, Sea Thailand’s head of people search.

Sea has placed more than 10 people across its Thai operations using GetLinks, including full stack developers and search engine optimization experts. However, Anyarin said the company mostly still recruits through its own network, referrals and headhunting agencies.

GetLinks charges companies 15 percent of the candidate’s first-year salary or a monthly subscription that ranges from $1,000 for two hires per month to $10,000 for unlimited hires.

Traditional companies scrambling to invest in digital transformation and technology find GetLinks useful, Fal says.

One such company is Thailand’s largest industrial conglomerate, Siam Cement Group, which started its own digital initiative in 2017.

GetLinks CEO and Co-Founder, Djoann Fal, poses for a photo in Bangkok, Thailand November 22, 2018. REUTERS/Chayut Setboonsarng

“We were new and wanted to get into the market,” Joshua Pas, Siam Cement’s director of Digital Transformation and Corporate Technology, told Reuters.

The unit hired people through its own recruitment team, but also found its technology head through GetLinks, Pas said. So far, GetLinks has placed over 20 positions across the company.

The commercial partnership worked so well that the century-old company’s corporate venture arm, which Pas also heads, invested in the startup because the search for talent “is a bottleneck” and demand will grow.

Reporting by Chayut Setboonsarng; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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[lazilysillyprince]

You're hired! Thai startup fills gap in tech talent recruiting

New Post has been published on http://hosting-df.net/youre-hired-thai-startup-fills-gap-in-tech-talent-recruiting/

You're hired! Thai startup fills gap in tech talent recruiting

BANGKOK (Reuters) – When app developer Sattha Puangput was looking to move from a startup to a new role, he updated his profile on GetLinks, a website that pairs technology professionals with companies looking to beef up their tech teams.

The GetLinks logo is seen at the startup’s office in Bangkok, Thailand November 22, 2018. REUTERS/Chayut Setboonsarng

Within days, he says, he was called to several interviews and eventually accepted an offer with hypermarket chain Tesco Lotus to develop Android software using Kotlin, a language based on Java that uses fewer lines of code and makes for more efficient app development.

Knowledge of new languages and programming tools helps build software faster and allows developers to easily work together.

Customers say what sets GetLinks apart is its focus on matching specific tech skills such as app development and programming languages like Flutter and Docker – not just general programming – to meet the needs of Asia’s fast-expanding tech companies and also more traditional companies seeking tech talent that in-house recruiters are not able to find.

Chinese tech giant Alibaba, Thai conglomerate Siam Cement Group and Australian employment marketplace SEEK Group, participated in a funding round for GetLinks, headquartered in Bangkok, last year which raised “eight figures” in U.S. dollars, said the startup’s co-founder, 26-year-old French-born Djoann Fal.

The funding will help GetLinks set up local offices in Indonesia, Malaysia, Shenzhen and Taiwan, Fal said.

Sattha, 30, says he looked at other job sites, but couldn’t find companies that were looking for his specific skills.

“Usually, the (job) search is long, so I was impressed with GetLinks,” Sattha said. “The offer was fast. There are good opportunities.”

So far, three-year-old GetLinks has placed over 1,000 candidates across companies such as Tencent, Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank and Indonesia’s travel startup, Traveloka, Fal said.

GetLinks is a “good model” for matching companies with candidates, but could face challenges if trying to recruit more seasoned executives, said Punyanuch Sirisawadwattana, a director with UK recruiter Robert Walters in Thailand.

Companies could lose good candidates when there isn’t somebody in between to work out a solution on sensitive matters like salary that require a “soft skill” to negotiate – something technology cannot immediately address, she added.

TRADITIONAL COMPANIES

Still, the explosion in demand for tech skills in Asia should serve the website well, Fal said. “The digitization that we saw in Europe is basically happening now,” in the region, he said.

Chinese tech giants and regional startups like Grab and Go-Jek have been expanding aggressively in digital payments and e-commerce, pushing up demand for progammers, designers and digital marketers.

A Google and Temasek study from November predicts that Southeast Asia’s internet economy will reach $240 billion by 2025, a fifth more than a previous estimate in 2016 because of increasing mobile connectivity..

Tencent-backed Sea, best known for its game publishing business, has used GetLinks to recruit.

“The good thing about this system is that we can look at candidate profiles and contact them directly,” said Anyarin Teerachawansith, Sea Thailand’s head of people search.

Sea has placed more than 10 people across its Thai operations using GetLinks, including full stack developers and search engine optimization experts. However, Anyarin said the company mostly still recruits through its own network, referrals and headhunting agencies.

GetLinks charges companies 15 percent of the candidate’s first-year salary or a monthly subscription that ranges from $1,000 for two hires per month to $10,000 for unlimited hires.

Traditional companies scrambling to invest in digital transformation and technology find GetLinks useful, Fal says.

One such company is Thailand’s largest industrial conglomerate, Siam Cement Group, which started its own digital initiative in 2017.

GetLinks CEO and Co-Founder, Djoann Fal, poses for a photo in Bangkok, Thailand November 22, 2018. REUTERS/Chayut Setboonsarng

“We were new and wanted to get into the market,” Joshua Pas, Siam Cement’s director of Digital Transformation and Corporate Technology, told Reuters.

The unit hired people through its own recruitment team, but also found its technology head through GetLinks, Pas said. So far, GetLinks has placed over 20 positions across the company.

The commercial partnership worked so well that the century-old company’s corporate venture arm, which Pas also heads, invested in the startup because the search for talent “is a bottleneck” and demand will grow.

Reporting by Chayut Setboonsarng; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Related Posts:

No Related Posts

[hostingnewsfeed]

You're hired! Thai startup fills gap in tech talent recruiting

New Post has been published on http://hosting-df.net/youre-hired-thai-startup-fills-gap-in-tech-talent-recruiting/

You're hired! Thai startup fills gap in tech talent recruiting

BANGKOK (Reuters) – When app developer Sattha Puangput was looking to move from a startup to a new role, he updated his profile on GetLinks, a website that pairs technology professionals with companies looking to beef up their tech teams.

The GetLinks logo is seen at the startup’s office in Bangkok, Thailand November 22, 2018. REUTERS/Chayut Setboonsarng

Within days, he says, he was called to several interviews and eventually accepted an offer with hypermarket chain Tesco Lotus to develop Android software using Kotlin, a language based on Java that uses fewer lines of code and makes for more efficient app development.

Knowledge of new languages and programming tools helps build software faster and allows developers to easily work together.

Customers say what sets GetLinks apart is its focus on matching specific tech skills such as app development and programming languages like Flutter and Docker – not just general programming – to meet the needs of Asia’s fast-expanding tech companies and also more traditional companies seeking tech talent that in-house recruiters are not able to find.

Chinese tech giant Alibaba, Thai conglomerate Siam Cement Group and Australian employment marketplace SEEK Group, participated in a funding round for GetLinks, headquartered in Bangkok, last year which raised “eight figures” in U.S. dollars, said the startup’s co-founder, 26-year-old French-born Djoann Fal.

The funding will help GetLinks set up local offices in Indonesia, Malaysia, Shenzhen and Taiwan, Fal said.

Sattha, 30, says he looked at other job sites, but couldn’t find companies that were looking for his specific skills.

“Usually, the (job) search is long, so I was impressed with GetLinks,” Sattha said. “The offer was fast. There are good opportunities.”

So far, three-year-old GetLinks has placed over 1,000 candidates across companies such as Tencent, Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank and Indonesia’s travel startup, Traveloka, Fal said.

GetLinks is a “good model” for matching companies with candidates, but could face challenges if trying to recruit more seasoned executives, said Punyanuch Sirisawadwattana, a director with UK recruiter Robert Walters in Thailand.

Companies could lose good candidates when there isn’t somebody in between to work out a solution on sensitive matters like salary that require a “soft skill” to negotiate – something technology cannot immediately address, she added.

TRADITIONAL COMPANIES

Still, the explosion in demand for tech skills in Asia should serve the website well, Fal said. “The digitization that we saw in Europe is basically happening now,” in the region, he said.

Chinese tech giants and regional startups like Grab and Go-Jek have been expanding aggressively in digital payments and e-commerce, pushing up demand for progammers, designers and digital marketers.

A Google and Temasek study from November predicts that Southeast Asia’s internet economy will reach $240 billion by 2025, a fifth more than a previous estimate in 2016 because of increasing mobile connectivity..

Tencent-backed Sea, best known for its game publishing business, has used GetLinks to recruit.

“The good thing about this system is that we can look at candidate profiles and contact them directly,” said Anyarin Teerachawansith, Sea Thailand’s head of people search.

Sea has placed more than 10 people across its Thai operations using GetLinks, including full stack developers and search engine optimization experts. However, Anyarin said the company mostly still recruits through its own network, referrals and headhunting agencies.

GetLinks charges companies 15 percent of the candidate’s first-year salary or a monthly subscription that ranges from $1,000 for two hires per month to $10,000 for unlimited hires.

Traditional companies scrambling to invest in digital transformation and technology find GetLinks useful, Fal says.

One such company is Thailand’s largest industrial conglomerate, Siam Cement Group, which started its own digital initiative in 2017.

GetLinks CEO and Co-Founder, Djoann Fal, poses for a photo in Bangkok, Thailand November 22, 2018. REUTERS/Chayut Setboonsarng

“We were new and wanted to get into the market,” Joshua Pas, Siam Cement’s director of Digital Transformation and Corporate Technology, told Reuters.

The unit hired people through its own recruitment team, but also found its technology head through GetLinks, Pas said. So far, GetLinks has placed over 20 positions across the company.

The commercial partnership worked so well that the century-old company’s corporate venture arm, which Pas also heads, invested in the startup because the search for talent “is a bottleneck” and demand will grow.

Reporting by Chayut Setboonsarng; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen dies of cancer complications at 65

(Reuters) – Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) co-founder Paul Allen, the man who persuaded school-friend Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard to start what became the world’s biggest software company, died on Monday at the age of 65, his family said.

Allen left Microsoft in 1983, before the company became a corporate juggernaut, following a dispute with Gates, but his share of their original partnership allowed him to spend the rest of his life and billions of dollars on yachts, art, rock music, sports teams, brain research and real estate.

Allen died from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer, the Allen family said in a statement.

In early October, Allen had revealed he was being treated for the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which he also was treated for in 2009. He had an earlier brush with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, another cancer, in the early 1980s before leaving Microsoft.

Music-lover Allen had a list of high-profile friends in the entertainment business, including U2 singer Bono, but preferred to avoid the limelight at his compound on Mercer Island, across Lake Washington from Seattle, where he grew up.

Allen remained loyal to the Pacific Northwest region, directing more than $1 billion to mostly local philanthropic projects, developing Seattle’s South Lake Union tech hub that Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) calls home and building the headquarters of his Allen Institute for Brain Science there.

Gates described Allen as following the Microsoft partnership with a “second act” focused on strengthening communities and in a statement said, “I am heartbroken by the passing of one of my oldest and dearest friends.”

Current Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella on Monday called him a “quiet and persistent” man who changed the world.

“He is under-appreciated in Seattle,” said David Brewster, founder of local news website Crosscut.com and the Seattle Weekly newspaper. “He’s remote and reclusive. There’s too much Howard Hughes in the way he behaves for Seattle truly to appreciate a lot of the good that he does.”

Paul Gardner Allen was born in Seattle on Jan. 21, 1953, the son of a librarian father and teacher mother. He was two years older than Gates but when they met in the computer room at the exclusive Lakeside School in Seattle in 1968, they discovered a shared passion.

“In those days we were just goofing around, or so we thought,” Gates recalled in his 1985 book ““The Road Ahead.”

FROM BOSTON TO ALBUQUERQUE

Allen went on to Washington State University but dropped out in 1974 to take a job with Honeywell in Boston. While there, he pestered Gates, who was studying at nearby Harvard, to quit school and join the nascent revolution in personal computing.

Gates finally agreed and in 1975 the two jointly developed BASIC software for the Altair 8800, a clunky desktop computer that cost $400 in kit form.

The pair moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, close to the Altair’s maker, and formed a company. It was Allen’s idea to call it Micro-Soft, an amalgam of microcomputer and software. The hyphen was later dropped.

Allen was in charge of Microsoft’s technical operations for the company’s first eight years, making him one of the handful of people who created early software such as MS-DOS and Word that enabled the PC revolution and thrust Microsoft to the top.

But he had ceased to be on the cutting edge of software development by the early 1980s. He never displayed the commercial instinct of Gates, who generally is credited with powering Microsoft’s rise to ubiquity in the 1990s.

Allen left Microsoft in 1983 after falling out with Gates and his new lieutenant, Steve Ballmer, in December 1982, only months after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. As he recalled in his 2011 memoir “Idea Man,” he overheard Gates and Ballmer secretly plotting to reduce his ownership stake.

“They were bemoaning my recent lack of production and discussing how they might dilute my Microsoft equity by issuing options to themselves and other shareholders,” Allen wrote.

Slideshow (7 Images)

Gates and Ballmer later apologized but the damage was done and Allen left Microsoft, although he remained on the board until 2000.

CANCER BATTLES

Allen recovered from his cancer after radiation treatment but in 2009 was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, another form of blood cancer. He went into remission in April 2010 but the disease resurfaced in 2018.

Allen held onto his share of the company. His 28 percent stake at Microsoft’s initial public offering in 1986 instantly made him a multi-millionaire.

His wealth peaked at about $30 billion in late 1999, according to Forbes magazine, but Allen was hurt by the sharp decline in Microsoft stock after the dot.com bubble burst in 2000 and some unprofitable technology investments.

In October 2018, Forbes magazine estimated his wealth at $21.7 billion and said he was the 44th richest person in the world.

Allen, the owner of 42 U.S. patents, liked to cast himself as a technology visionary who drove Microsoft’s early success and saw the future of connected computing long before the Internet.

“I expect the personal computer to become the kind of thing that people carry with them, a companion that takes notes, does accounting, gives reminders, handles a thousand personal tasks,” Allen wrote in a column in Personal Computing magazine as far back as 1977, long before portable computers became a reality.

In the same year, he outlined an early vision of what turned out to be the Internet to Microcomputer Interface magazine.

“What I do see is a home terminal that’s connected to a centralized network by phone lines, fiber optics or some other communication system,” he said. “With that system you can perhaps put your car up for sale or look for a house in a different city or check out the price of asparagus at the nearest grocery market or check the price of a stock.”

Allen later called this sweeping idea the “wired world,” which has broadly come to fruition. He was not alone in predicting connected computing but was one of the most prominent.

Yet Allen’s technology ventures after Microsoft, which focused on areas he thought would grow with the advent of the “wired world,” were not as successful. He lost $8 billion in the cable television industry, chiefly with a bad bet on cable company Charter Communications (CHTR.O), while technology ventures he bankrolled such as Metricom, SkyPix and Interval Research were costly failures.

SPORTS TEAMS, A YACHT AND HENDRIX

He had better luck in sports and real estate. Allen bought the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team in 1988 and became a local hero in 1997 when he purchased the Seattle Seahawks football franchise after the previous owner had tried to move the team to California. The Seahawks won the Super Bowl in February 2014 and both franchises are now valued at many times what Allen paid for them.

Allen also made hundreds of millions of dollars redeveloping South Lake Union, a shabby area of downtown Seattle that became a gleaming technology Mecca and site of Amazon.com’s glass “spheres” headquarters.

All the while, the never-married Allen pursued myriad personal projects and pastimes. He owned one of the world’s biggest yachts, the 400-foot (122 meters) Octopus, which was the venue for many lavish parties and the base for scuba expeditions.

A rock ‘n’ roll aficionado, Allen had a band on call to jam with when he wanted, and spent more than $250 million building a museum devoted to his hero, Jimi Hendrix, which morphed into a music and science fiction exhibit designed by Frank Gehry.

He spent millions more on a collection of vintage warplanes and funded the first non-government rocket to make it into space. He also collected priceless antiquities and works by Monet, Rodin and Rothko to put in his extensive art collection.

Like Gates, Allen was a dedicated philanthropist, giving away more than $1.5 billion in his lifetime and pledging to donate more than half his wealth to charity.

Through various vehicles, Allen focused his giving on brain science, motivated by the loss of his mother to Alzheimer’s disease, along with universities and libraries.

Reporting by Bill Rigby; additional reporting by Ismail Shakil in Bangalore; Editing by Bill Trott

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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