This Chinese Economist Was Allowed To Speak. Why? Squirrel Hill A Community Worth Xeroxing?

The above was sent to me by a progressive liberal who reads my memos.  I am not shocked and it would not surprise me if Georgia experiences increased discord and corruption should Abrams win.  She is not a healer and her election will send the wrong signal.  Kemp has run a poor campaign but is better for all Georgians than Ms. Abrams.

THEY WENT FROM BEING

AGAINST FOREIGN

INTERFERENCE IN OUR

ELECTIONS TO ALLOWING

NON-CITIZENS TO VOTE

Ah, but that is why you make them immediate citizens and turn illegality into legality.And, during the interim you give them all the benefits of citizenship so theycan use the constitution to protect themselves from violating it. Neat!

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This from a very dear friend and fellow memo reader. The history of the future?  (See 1 below.)
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George Friedman posts a speech by a Chinese Economist and wonders why the economist was allowed to do so.(See 2 below.)
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I suggested no less myself regarding the moat but not the other solutions. (See 3 below.)
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I can think of nothing better than this beautiful op ed to end on and I encourage all to read it.  Mr. Cole speaks the sentiments of our son and daughter-in-law  when it comes to Squirrel Hill where they live. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)This is an Amazing Analysis of where our world of businesses and services will be within the next decade or more…

 
An interesting talk by the Head of Daimler Benz—Mercedes. 

A bit mind blowing to say the least!  In a recent interview, the Head of Daimler Benz (Mercedes Benz) said their competitors are no longer other car companies, but Tesla (obviously), and now, Google, Apple,Amazon 'et al' are!

   PREDICTIONS:

Software will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.

Uber is just a software tool, they don't own any cars, and are now the biggest taxi company in the world.

Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don't own any properties.

Artificial Intelligence: Computers become exponentially better in understanding the world. This year, a computer beat the best Go player in the world, 10 years earlier than expected.

In the U.S., young lawyers already can't get jobs.. Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice (so far for more or less basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So, if you study law, stop immediately. There will be 90% less lawyers in the future, only specialists will remain.

Watson already helps nurses diagnosing cancer, 4 times more accurate than human nurses. Facebook now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans.

Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self-driving cars will appear for the public. Around 2020, the complete industry will start to be disrupted. You don't want to own a car anymore. You will call a car with your phone, it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination. You will not need to park it, you only pay for the driven distance and you can be productive while driving. Younger kids will never get a driver's license and will never own a car. It will change the cities, because we will need 90-95% less cars for that. We can transform former parking spaces into parks.

1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide. We now have one accident every 60,000 miles (100,000 km), with autonomous driving that will drop to one accident in 6 million miles (10 million km). That will save a million lives each year.

Most car companies will probably go bankrupt. Traditional car companies will try the traditional approach and try to build a better car, while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will take the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels.

Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi are completely terrified of Tesla.

Auto Insurance companies will have massive trouble because without accidents, car insurance will become much cheaper. Their car insurance business model will slowly disappear.

REAL ESTATE: Real estate will change. Because if you can work while you commute, people will move further away to live in a more beautiful neighborhood.

ELECTRIC: Electric cars will become mainstream about 2020 Cities will be less noisy because all new cars will run on electricity. Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean: Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, and now you can now see the burgeoning impact.

Last year, more solar energy was installed worldwide than fossil. Energy companies are desperately trying to limit access to the grid to prevent competition from home solar installations, but that can't last. Technology will take care of that strategy.

With cheap electricity comes cheap and abundant water. Desalination of salt water now only needs 2kwh per cubic meter (@ 025 cents). We don't have scarce water in most places, we only have scarce drinking water. Imagine what will be possible if anyone can have as much clean water as he wants, for nearly no cost.

HEALTH INNOVATIONS: The Tricorder X price will be announced this year. There are companies who will build a medical device (called the "Tricorder" from Star Trek) that works with your phone, which takes your retina scan, your blood sample, and you can breath into it.

It then analyses 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any disease. It will be cheap, so in a few years everyone on this planet will have access to world class medical analysis, nearly for free. Goodbye, medical establishment. 

MANUFACTURING: 3D printing: The price of the cheapest 3D printer came down from $18,000 to $400 within 10 years. In the same time, it became 100 times faster. All major shoe companies have already started 3D printing shoes.

Some common spare airplane parts are already 3D printed in remote airports. The space station now has a printer that eliminates the need for the large amount of spare parts they used to keep in the past.

At the end of this year, new smart phones will have 3D scanning possibilities. You can then 3D scan your feet and print your perfect shoes at home.

In China, they already 3D printed and built a complete 6-storey office building. By 2027, 10% of everything that's being produced will be 3D printed.

Business opportunities: If you think of a niche you want to go in, ask yourself: "In the future, do you think we will have that?", and if the answer is yes, how can you make that happen sooner?

If it DOESN’T work with your phone, forget the idea. And any idea designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st century.

Work: 70-80% of jobs will disappear in the next 20 years. There will be a lot of new jobs, but it is not clear if there will be ENOUGH new jobs in such a small time.

AGRICULTURE: There will be a $100 agricultural robot in the future. Farmers in 3rd world countries can then become managers of their field instead of working all day on their fields.

Aeroponics will need much less water. The first Petri dish that produced veal is now available and will be cheaper than cow produced veal in 2018. Right now, 30% of all agricultural surfaces is used for cows. Imagine if we don't need that space anymore.

There are several startups who will bring insect protein to the market shortly.. It contains more protein than meat. It will be labeled as “alternative protein source" (because most people still reject the idea of eating insects)..they already use as fillers in Europe for Ice cream and such. 

There is an app called "moodies" which can already tell in which mood you're in. By 2020 there will be apps that can tell by your facial expressions, if you are lying. Imagine a political debate where it's being displayed when they're telling the truth and when they're not.

Bitcoin may even become the default reserve currency ... Of the world. 

LONGEVITY: Right now, the average life span increases by 3 months per year. Four years ago, the life span used to be 79 years, now it's 80 years. The increase itself is increasing and by 2036, there will be more than one year increase per year. So, we all might live for a long time, probably way more than 100.

EDUCATION: The cheapest smart phones are already at $10 in Africa and Asia. By 2020, 70% of all humans will own a smart phone. That means, everyone has the same access to world class education.

Every child can use Khan academy for everything a child needs to learn at school in First World countries. There have already been releases of software in Indonesia and soon there will be releases in Arabic, Swahili, and Chinese this summer. I can see enormous potential if we give the English app for free, so that children in Africa and everywhere else can become fluent in English. And that could happen within half a year.

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2)

A Startling Speech in China

A prominent Chinese economist has publicly challenged a core concept in China’s policy. By George Friedman

The idea that China’s economic surge was due to conditions unique to the country has long been a core concept of Chinese ideology and policy. But in a speech published last week on Peking University’s website, prominent Chinese economist Zhang Weiying argued that China’s growth was not the result of a special “Chinese model” of development. In fact, he asserted that there is no such thing as a Chinese model and that the concept itself widens the divide between China and the West and generates hostility toward Beijing. In the past 40 years, China’s economy has certainly grown dramatically, and there are three possible explanations for its rise. The first is that it was simply the result of removing impediments to growth, such as Maoism, war and imperialism. The second explanation is that China developed economically for the same reason that other nations like the United States and Japan did: It adopted sufficient elements of a free market system. The third explanation is that China grew because of a singular model dubbed “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” This has been the main explanation backed by the Chinese government since the reforms of the 1970s. Each of these explanations elicits a different response. If China’s growth was simply the result of removing barriers to development, then there’s little the government can do now to keep up the impossibly high growth rates. It simply exceeded its own potential and will now return to a steady equilibrium through declining growth rates. That means the credibility of post-Mao China is at risk. If China’s surge was the result of liberalization, then more liberalization should bring back the country’s rapid growth. But at a time when the Chinese government is beleaguered with problems, it needs short-term solutions to contain the grumbling, and economic liberalization can be accomplished only over the long haul. The first two explanations are untenable from the Chinese government’s point of view. While one limits China’s horizons, the other might unleash forces the government can’t control, and neither addresses the politics of disappointment. The third explanation is the best approach from Beijing’s perspective. It dictates that this period of slowing growth is merely a brief lull in China’s inevitable rise. The problem is that the unique virtues this view espouses haven’t been visible for a while (perhaps because of the 2008 financial crisis and the resulting global decline in demand for exports). Asserting China’s uniqueness raises the question of why the Chinese economy has not continued to surge. The government has, therefore, de-emphasized the Chinese model. And with this has come the spread of suspicion in China that the 40-year surge was not the result of any particular Chinese virtues and that people should temper their expectations for continued economic growth. This leads to a general recalibration of personal hopes and fears, one with implications for the government.

 The big question is why Zhang was permitted to deliver a speech that rejected the idea of a Chinese model and implicitly supported radical economic liberalization. Last week, the head of Peking University, where Zhang gave the speech and where he is also a professor, was removed. It’s unclear whether there was a connection, but perhaps this is a sign of the beginning of a change of course in China.

A perhaps more reasonable explanation is that Chinese President Xi Jinping will be meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump at the upcoming G-20 meeting in Argentina. The Chinese may read U.S. tariffs as the result of fears over their claims to having a unique model of economic development, including a secret ingredient that makes China unbeatable. From the Chinese point of view, allowing a prominent academic to trash the idea that Xi is trying to make China great again might comfort Trump and lead to some accommodation.

The alternative explanation is that China respects academic freedom, and that means allowing a university professor to attack a core Chinese concept, despite the government’s own objections to his critique. Whatever the reason, a report on the speech appeared in the South China Morning Post, a respected and well-connected publication based in Hong Kong, so Beijing couldn’t have tried too hard to suppress it.

Given China’s economic problems, which the tariffs have only exacerbated, the answer to the questions of why Zhang gave the speech and why he hasn’t been punished for it is extremely important. It may be just a gesture for the United States, but it is a gesture that will also be felt in China. At this point, I don’t know what it means, but I do know that it means something.

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3)Direct quote from "Larry, the Cable Guy" 

This cable guy's humor is funny, but unfortunately its true!   The man's a genius! 

"Everyone concentrates on the problems we're having in our Country lately:   Illegal immigration, hurricane recovery, alligators attacking  people in Florida .. .. . Not me -- I concentrate on solutions for the problems -- it's a win-win situation. 

* Dig a moat the length of the Mexican border. 

* Send the dirt to New Orleans to raise the level of the levees. 

* Put the Florida alligators in the moat along the Mexican border. 

And:

The Constitution 

They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. 

Why don't we just give them ours? 

It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it has worked for over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore. 

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4)Squirrel Hill Taught Me About Community
 By G Marcus Cole



Three years ago, I was asked to deliver the keynote address at the American Jewish 
Committee annual dinner.  I chose to use that opportunity to explain what was so special 
about my childhood neighborhood, Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After the 
attack in Squirrel Hill this weekend, just a short walk from the front door of my childhood 
home, a number of people contacted me about that speech. It is being reprinted here 
because I think that the world should know just how special a place Squirrel Hill has always
been. What follows is the text of that speech.

When I was asked to speak about bringing communities together, my first reaction was that, I’m no expert on this subject. But I happened to be asked on an unusual day for me and my family. It was a rare day for us because it was the only Saturday in the year when neither of my two teenage sons had a football or basketball game. They wanted to do something we never get to do—they wanted us all to go see a movie together.

They were disappointed, however, because my wife had made a prior commitment. She explained that she could not go with us because she had promised to volunteer at the Diwali festival for my son’s high school. Diwali, of course, is the Hindu festival of lights. “But Mom,” my son Claude said, “you’re not even Indian.”

My sons were disappointed—but not surprised. Last month, a few Korean moms at our sons’ school rescheduled their monthly coffee to accommodate my wife’s new work schedule. She’s not Korean either.

What she happens to be is all too rare, I think. While she is, in fact, an African-American, she views her community—our community—much more broadly than that. In the 30 years in which we have been married, I never once heard her refer to our community as “the African-American community.” Instead, she always referred to “our community” as the circles in which we live our daily lives.

So it occurred to me that while I may not be an expert on bridging communities, I’m pretty sure I am married to one. So I asked her, “Angie, how do you suppose you came to view your ‘community’ this way.” To my surprise, she pointed at me and said, “I think I got it from you.”

While I was flattered, I rejected this praise. Her response was, “Who do you think took me to my first Seder, my first bar mitzvah, my first bris?”

This led to a conversation that, after 30 years of marriage, I had never imagined having with my wife. We talked about our feelings with respect to the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and of Eric Garner in Staten Island. We talked about our mutual fears of raising two African-American teenage boys in a town—Palo Alto, California—where they are about the only African-American boys for miles around. We also talked about the kind of community in which we wanted to raise our boys.

By the end of that conversation, it became clear to both of us that her appreciation for the breadth of her community didn’t come from me at all, but instead, came from the values I experienced and internalized in the shtetl in which I was raised.

Yes, I said “shtetl,” because that is the only way to describe the very special place I grew up.

As my closest friends know, I spent my early childhood in the Terrace Village Housing Projects of Pittsburgh. As a boy, I never thought much about my relative circumstances in life; we didn’t have a television, and all I really knew was the neighborhood in which I spent every day.

But one day that neighborhood changed—suddenly and dramatically.

It was my father’s birthday, and all I recall was how the candles on his birthday cake were the only source of light in our basement apartment. I also recall the fear on the faces of my parents as we huddled together in our kitchen. You see, my father’s birthday was April 4, and on that April 4, in 1968, Dr. King was assassinated. Those birthday candles were our only source of light because our neighborhood, Terrace Village, erupted in flames, rioting, and despair that night.

Shortly after that, my parents were determined that we would move out of the ghetto. But unfortunately, in 1968, families from the ghetto were not welcomed everywhere. Except for one very special place. In the summer of 1968, my family moved from the Terrace Village Housing Projects of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, to an even older “ghetto”—the historically Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill.

Squirrel Hill was like a completely different world to me. If you know it, you know that it is the heart of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community. To me, it was the first real “community” in which I’ve ever lived. Everything I’ve ever needed to know about being a member of a community, I leaned from my friends and neighbors in Squirrel Hill.

When the rest of Pittsburgh seemed closed to my parents and our family, our neighbors in Squirrel Hill welcomed us in. From our very first days in Squirrel Hill, we were embraced as both very different, but very integral members of a thriving, diverse and healthy community.

While I learned a lot of things growing up in Squirrel Hill, I think I can point to three important life lessons about bridging and building communities from the people of Squirrel Hill. And I can express these lessons in three phrases:

1. Never let your first taste of latkes be by surprise;

2. Every Shabbos is a special day, and every day can be Shabbos;

3. Kosher salt is salt.

Please bear with me as I explain what I mean by these three important life lessons.

Never let your first taste of latkes be by surprise.

When we first moved to Squirrel Hill, our neighbors made every possible effort to make us feel welcome and part of the community. One of our first visitors eventually became my closest friend. His name was Michael Goldbach, and he and his mother came to our house to welcome us. Michael was exactly my age, and loved baseball as much as I did. Michael’s mom brought us a bunch of treats from her kitchen. As it happened, my mom was cooking when Mrs. Goldbach dropped by, and she invited the Goldbachs to stay and eat with us. I remember very clearly that they graciously tried everything my mom had prepared. I, on the other hand, was really reluctant to try anything Mrs. Goldbach had brought with her: blintzes and latkes.

Had I been more open minded, I would have discovered some of my favorites foods years before I actually did. I can’t explain my original reluctance, other than the fact that these foods were unfamiliar and strange. They caught me by surprise.

What does this have to do with bringing communities together?

Well, I think that much of what we are seeing in places like Ferguson and Staten Island, in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and even in places like Dresden, Germany, is a tendency of people to be more like I was, and less like Michael Goldbach’s mom.

Do we have police encountering people in communities where their only experiences with “those” people are ones that take them by surprise?

Are these surprises always occurring in settings that are beyond their choosing? (Well, by definition, a surprise encounter has to be one that occurs under circumstances that are not of our choosing.)

Could we reduce the “Fergusons” and the “Staten Islands” of the world by being more like Mrs. Goldbach? I think so. I think that the idea behind community policing is to get police to encounter the people of the communities they protect in less confrontational, more congenial circumstances. And when we meet people where they are, and show a genuine interest in who they are, it does more than just bring people of different communities together. It forms new communities, and changes those of us in those communities.

Mrs. Goldbach was so typical of many of our neighbors in Squirrel Hill. Mrs. Goldbach didn’t wait to encounter us; she came to us, and embraced us. She made up her mind early on that we were part of her community, and she determined the time and the place of her encounter with us. In other words, she planned to expand her notion of community. She made it her purpose.

That doesn’t mean that our plans will always be successful. Sometimes they will be met with skepticism, suspicion or worse. But if we don’t take the chance, then our encounters with the unfamiliar will be under circumstances not of our choosing. They will catch us by surprise.

To be honest, not everyone in Squirrel Hill was a “Mrs. Goldbach.” But there were more people like her, and many of them were shaped by the community in which we lived, just as I was. And I may never have learned this if not for the second of my three lessons, namely, that: 

Every Shabbos is a special day, and every day can be Shabbos.

In Squirrel Hill, even to this day, Shabbos is the quietest day of the week. With a large observant and Orthodox population, there are very few cars on the streets, and most of the shops are closed. Most—but not all.

And this is an important point about Shabbos and Squirrel Hill. While a large percentage of the people of Squirrel Hill observe Shabbos, it is precisely because they observe it that you can see the true character of the people there. On Shabbos, because the majority of the people are at home, or at services, the otherwise hidden diversity of Squirrel Hill becomes readily apparent. It was on Shabbos, more than any other day, that I learned just how many people were just like us, minorities—refugees from other communities—who were taken in by the people of Squirrel Hill.

While all of the kosher butcher shops and bakeries were closed on Saturdays, those of us who did not observe Shabbos patronized the shops that were open. The best hoagies, pizza and Chinese food to be found anywhere in Pittsburgh was available in Squirrel Hill on Saturdays. In fact, Murray Avenue, the main shopping street in Squirrel Hill, looked like a true melting pot on Saturdays. The true openness of the people of Squirrel Hill was on full display on Saturdays.

But one Shabbos, more than any other, stands out in my mind. It was late on a Friday evening in 1968. As the sun began to set, my little sister expressed a craving for strawberries. My dad tried to explain to her that the shops had already closed, but she really wanted them, and he wanted to get some for her. So he piled me, my sister, and my brother who was just 3 years old at the time, into our car to drive to a different neighborhood to get strawberries.

While we were successful in getting the strawberries, we picked up something else as well. A car full of three young white males began following us, and followed us all the way back to our home in Squirrel Hill. Suddenly, as we drove up to the front of our house, these men pulled their car in front of ours and jumped out. They had a bat and a tire iron in their hands, and as my dad jumped out of our car to confront them, they beat him, crushing the left side of his face, and leaving him to bleed all over the windshield of our car, all in front of his three little children.

In moments, the men of our neighborhood, hearing the commotion, rushed out into the street, immediately defending my father, and chasing the assailants away. They called an ambulance and the police, and they stayed with us while my mother accompanied my father to the hospital.

While that night was a traumatic experience for us as children, it was never lost on us that our neighbors came to our immediate defense. I often wonder, in today’s world, whether others seeing a fight between white men and a black man would immediately jump to the defense of the black man. It happened in Squirrel Hill, and in 1968.

I don’t claim, however, that Squirrel Hill is the only place in America that this would happen. In fact, I have proof that it is not. Four years before this incident happened to my father, three “Freedom Summer” civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Chaney, were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Two of the three, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, were Jews. They were not fighting for their own right to vote. They were fighting for mine.

They gave their lives for me.

Although June 21, 1964, was a Sunday, not a Saturday, it will always be a “Shabbos”—or holy day—a holy day—to me.

Any day can be a Shabbos, and every Shabbos is a special day.

I think that all of these heroic men, both the ones in Squirrel Hill who came to my father’s rescue, and the ones who died in Philadelphia, Mississippi, understood the third lesson I learned growing up in Squirrel Hill, namely, that:

Kosher salt is salt.

Salt must be one of the most fascinating compounds ever. It is a very simple compound—NaCl—but it is essential for human existence. It was so valuable that it was once used for money; our word “sale” comes from the Latin word for salt. But it also has much more than practical power. It was Ghandi’s march to the sea for salt that threw off the yoke of British rule in India. Indeed, Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolent social change has its origins in Mahatma Ghandi’s nonviolent, but symbolic, march to the sea for salt.

But salt is also interesting because of the way it is perceived. All salt, after all, is just NaCl—sodium chloride. But Morton’s is celebrated in marketing circles as iconic for getting people to perceive their salt—Morton salt—as somehow “different”—more pure, better tasting, healthier—than any other brand of salt.

What makes kosher salt different from all other salt is not chemical. It’s spiritual. This is something I didn’t understand until we were out of salt and had to try what was available. And anyone who has tried kosher salt comes to the realization that kosher salt—is salt.

Its true that kosher salt has religious significance, and that difference is important for those who are observant. But for those of us who are not observant, we come to realize that, despite the religious significance, at its core, all salt—even kosher salt—is salt.

Despite our differences—our religious differences, our racial differences, our political differences—at our core, all of us share the same essence. We are, at core, all the same.

In fact, for the best people, those who “preserve” our communities—people like Mrs. Goldbach—we refer to them as “the salt of the earth.”

Conclusion

Actually, my wife Angie reminds me so much of Mrs. Goldbach in many ways. She takes the same view of community, and sees the unfamiliar as an opportunity for a new experience. And she impresses the importance of this on our kids every day.

As Christians, we say a prayer with our kids every morning before we send them out into the world. We pray for them, and for all of the people they will encounter during the day. We do this each and every day.

My wife often often tells our sons that “it is very important to believe in miracles, and that it is very important that we pray for miracles. But it is also just as important to recognize that sometimes God wants us to be a miracle for someone else.” She tells our boys, “Be someone’s miracle today.”

Wouldn’t it be a miracle—a wonderful miracle—if we had no more Fergusons, no more Eric Garners, no more attacks like the one on the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, no more Holocausts—no more Shoah?

I believe it can happen. But as important as I believe it is to pray for this miracle, I also believe that it is just as important to recognize our role in making miracles like this happen. Not just for ourselves, but also for our communities, as broadly defined as we can make them.

Let us each be someone’s miracle today. Thank you.

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