David Brooks | The Cold War With China Is Changing Everything – The New York Times

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist,  阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

“So I guess we’re in a new cold war. Leaders of both parties have become China hawks. There are rumblings of war over Taiwan. Xi Jinping vows to dominate the century.

I can’t help wondering: What will this cold war look like? Will this one transform American society the way the last one did?

The first thing I notice about this cold war is that the arms race and the economics race are fused. A chief focus of the conflict so far has been microchips, the little gizmos that not only make your car and phone work, but also guide missiles and are necessary to train artificial intelligence systems. Whoever dominates chip manufacturing dominates the market as well as the battlefield.

Second, the geopolitics are different. As Chris Miller notes in his book “Chip War,” the microchip sector is dominated by a few highly successful businesses. More than 90 percent of the most advanced chips are made by one company in Taiwan. One Dutch company makes all the lithography machines that are required to build cutting-edge chips. Two Santa Clara, Calif., companies monopolize the design of graphic processing units, critical for running A.I. applications in data centers.

These choke points represent an intolerable situation for China. If the West can block off China’s access to cutting-edge technology, then it can block off China. So China’s intention is to approach chip self-sufficiency. America’s intention is to become more chip self-sufficient than it is now and to create a global chip alliance that excludes China.

American foreign policy has been rapidly rearranged along these lines. Over the last two administrations, the United States has moved aggressively to block China from getting the software technology and equipment it needs to build the most advanced chips. The Biden administration is cutting off not just Chinese military companies, but all Chinese companies. This seems like a common-sense safeguard, but put another way, it’s kind of dramatic: Official U.S. policy is to make a nation of almost a billion and a half people poorer.” . . . .

Nicholas Kristof | Human Trafficking May be Strong, but a Mother’s Love Is Stronger – The New York Times

KOLKATA, India — This is a story of human trafficking, but mostly it’s a story of a mother’s love, the adoring son she raised and the highest-return investment in the world today.

Nearly two decades ago, I interviewed a woman named Maya Gayen who had been trafficked at the age of 12 to a brothel here. She had not yet reached puberty then, but a man bought her virginity. She wept and pleaded, but the man raped her.

For the next few years, Maya was locked inside the brothel, beaten with sticks, threatened with death if she tried to escape, and raped constantly. She had her first period only after eight months of these rapes.

This went on for years, but one of Maya’s regular customers was a taxi driver who felt badly for her when she wept. One day he helped her escape the brothel. “It may not have been love, but he was sympathetic,” she related.

Or perhaps it was love, for he married her even though his family despised her background and disowned him. The couple rented a one-room hovel in the Kalighat red-light district, and Maya reluctantly sold sex, but as her own boss, while her husband drove for a taxi company.

Image

Maya at her old house in the red-light area of Kalighat in Kolkata.

I will never forget their shack. It was the size of a walk-in closet on the bank of a sewage-laden river that periodically flooded their home. A bed took up most of the room, and Maya had nowhere else to take customers — so her four sons would try to sleep under the bed while she conducted her business.

I was impressed by her oldest son, Avijit, then a scrawny, shy boy of 12 who attended school through an outstanding local nonprofit called New Light. On subsequent trips to Kolkata over the years, I visited Maya and Avijit and witnessed their struggles. Maya always displayed a beatific smile and said she was just happy that she was no longer enslaved in the brothel.

I lost track of Maya and her family, and then on a visit to the Kalighat slum this month I was startled to be greeted by a strapping 29-year-old man who introduced himself in fluent English as Avijit.”

Nicholas Kristof | Can’t Read? Here’s a ‘Barefoot College’ for You. – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

TILONIA, India — It’s the Harvard of rural India, minus wingtips or heels: a 50-year-old institution called Barefoot College that offers lessons for empowering people worldwide. Maybe even in America.

Barefoot College does empowerment as well as any institution I’ve ever seen, and here’s what that looks like in the rural state of Rajasthan: An illiterate woman named Chota Devi who never attended a day of school is hunched over a circuit board, carefully using color-coded instructions to solder resistors and diodes into place.

Chota, who has no idea how old she is, is a Dalit, those at the bottom of the caste system once known as untouchables, and from a particularly low-ranking group called the Valmiki who often cleaned human waste.

But now Chota is learning how to be a solar power technician. Barefoot College trains illiterate, low-status villagers like her to make solar-powered lanterns and install solar lighting systems. After three to six months of training, they return to their communities and earn a decent living as they bring solar power to communities without reliable electricity — and in the process, they upend the social hierarchy.

Chota, who comes from a very low-status group in India, is learning how to be a solar power technician.

“I will have more knowledge than my husband,” Chota noted slyly. When she goes home, villagers now call her “Madam.” It’s partly a joke, partly a show of respect.

With a new income of perhaps $80 a month, Chota plans to pay off debts, buy a simple cellphone and build an outhouse.”

Thomas L. Friedman | Our New Promethean Moment – The New York Times

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

“I had a most remarkable but unsettling experience last week. Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, was giving me a demonstration of GPT-4, the most advanced version of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI and launched in November. Craig was preparing to brief the board of my wife’s museum, Planet Word, of which he is a member, about the effect ChatGPT will have on words, language and innovation.

“You need to understand,” Craig warned me before he started his demo, “this is going to change everything about how we do everything. I think that it represents mankind’s greatest invention to date. It is qualitatively different — and it will be transformational.”

Large language modules like ChatGPT will steadily increase in their capabilities, Craig added, and take us “toward a form of artificial general intelligence,” delivering efficiencies in operations, ideas, discoveries and insights “that have never been attainable before across every domain.”

Then he did a demonstration. And I realized Craig’s words were an understatement.”

PEPFAR | In This Story, George W. Bush Is the Hero – The New York Times

“When President George W. Bush invaded Iraq 20 years ago this week, I was in the middle of the smoke and chaos of that cataclysmic war that became his best-known legacy. I wrote countless columns opposing an invasion, then I was scathing as I covered the war, and I still see it as a practical and moral catastrophe.

But wait — what if there’s something Bush did that was even more consequential than the invasion of Iraq? And what if it was something astonishingly good?

This is awkward, but I have to acknowledge that Bush deserves credit for the single best policy of any president in my lifetime. It’s called PEPFAR and if you haven’t heard of it, that’s part of the problem.”

“What is PEPFAR? The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is the largest commitment by any nation to address a single disease in history, enabled by strong bipartisan support across ten U.S. congresses and four presidential administrations, and through the American people’s generosity.” According to the video, it has saved 25 million lives.

HIV.gov

https://www.hiv.gov › federal-response › pepfar

David Wallace-Wells | How Big of a Climate Betrayal Is the Willow Oil Project? – The New York Times

By David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

“On Monday, when President Biden approved ConocoPhillips’s $8 billion plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from federal lands in Alaska, the announcement landed simultaneously with the thud of betrayal and the air of inevitability. On the campaign trail, Biden had promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.” But for all the talk about the renewables boom and the green transition, and all the money pouring into them as well, there has been little concerted effort, in the United States at least, to really draw down our profligate use of the stuff that is actually poisoning the climate: fossil fuels.

The green transition is indeed rapidly underway — more rapidly than many advocates believed possible just a few years ago. But on its own, even infinite clean energy doesn’t change anything about emissions trajectories or global warming. For that, it has to replace the dirty kind. And as Mark Paul and Lina Moe write in a new report for the Climate and Community Project, renewable subsidies can get you only so far, no matter how generous they are; at some point, if you are serious about any of our stated climate goals, you have to move on to a program of drawdown. In their report, Paul and Moe call this a “supply side” approach to decarbonization. You may recognize the principle from the old activist slogan “Keep it in the ground.”

American emissions have been declining steadily since 2005, primarily because of natural gas replacing coal for electricity generation. But the decline has been relatively slow and pockmarked by concessions to the fossil fuel industry and climate hypocrisy. Last year, as the U.S. climate envoy John Kerry lectured the nations of sub-Saharan Africa about the risks of fossil fuel development, the United States approved more oil and gas expansion than any other nation in the world, according to Oil Change International. It is already the world’s largest producer of oil and gas and the third-largest consumer of coal. This year, it will also become the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas.”

Paul Krugman | Guns, Ships and Chips: On Economic Inflexibility – The New York Times

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

“What do shipping containers and artillery shells have in common? This isn’t a trick question. The answer is that both have been in very short supply at some point over the past three years. And these shortages tell us something disturbing about modern economies: They aren’t nearly as flexible as many people, myself included, had thought.

About those artillery shells: Like many people, I’ve been closely following the war in Ukraine. Everyone knows the broad outlines of the story so far: Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded in February of last year, expecting a quick victory over Ukraine’s much weaker army, but the Ukrainians, astonishingly, defeated the would-be blitzkrieg and the war has turned instead into a brutal slugging match.

No matter how valorous, Ukrainians on their own would have no chance in such a match. But they have received crucial aid from Western nations that see Ukraine — as do I — as a crucial front in the defense of democracy.”

“. . . .   That is, in contrast to the story told by Samuelson’s curve, it may be very hard to produce more guns in the short run even if you’re willing to give up a lot of butter.

The revelation that economies aren’t as flexible as we thought has many implications for policy. Supply-chain constraints weren’t the sole reason inflation took off in 2021, but they were clearly an important part of the story, with implications for future monetary policy. And in general, economic inflexibility suggests that we should be taking more precautions against the possibility of future disruptions, especially for strategic goods, but possibly more widely.

But all of that demands a much longer discussion. The main point for now is that it turns out that the Rolling Stones may have had it backward: Modern economies generally do a very good job of getting people what they want, but sometimes you just can’t get what you need.”

Thomas L. Friedman | American Jews, You Have to Choose Sides on Israel – The New York Times

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

“Ever since Israel’s founding in 1948, supporting the country’s security and its economic development and cementing its diplomatic ties to the U.S. have been the “religion” of many nonobservant American Jews — rather than studying Torah or keeping kosher. That mission drove fund-raising and forged solidarity among Jewish communities across America.

Now, a lot of American Jews are going to need to find a new focus for their passion.

Because if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu succeeds with his judicial putsch to crush the independence of the country’s judiciary, the subject of Israel could fracture every synagogue and Jewish communal organization in America. To put it simply: Israel is facing its biggest internal clash since its founding, and for every rabbi and every Jewish leader in America, to stay silent about this fight is to become irrelevant.”

Peter Coy | The Case Against (Some) Buybacks – The New York Times

By Peter Coy

“Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is determined not to let America’s tech giants play her for a fool. If they want taxpayer money under the CHIPS and Science Act, they will need to promise not to turn around and give the money to their shareholders through dividends or share repurchases.

I think that makes good sense. On the other hand, sometimes companies should pay dividends or buy back shares. Those are two of the main ways that they reward their shareholders — who are, after all, the owners — rather than sit on excess cash or spend it wastefully.”

Margaret Renkl | The Beautiful and Terrifying Arrival of an Early Spring – The New York Times

By Margaret Renkl

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.

NASHVILLE — At first I thought this winter’s strange weather was merely part of the boomerang pattern we contend with more and more frequently in these climate-troubled days — warm spells that might rightly be called hot spells, hard freezes that descend so quickly the plants don’t have time to adjust. On one January day, the temperature fell so far so fast here that many nonnative evergreen trees and shrubs froze to death. On one February day the high hit 85 degrees, destroying records and causing my woolly-haired dog to stretch out on the hardwood floor, panting. I hadn’t thought to schedule the groomer so early in the year.

But the uncommonly warm days of winter turned out not to be a warm spell, or even a hot spell. The uncommonly warm days of winter turned out to be spring.