In my little [German] town of 32,000 people the change can be seen on the streets. In 2012 when I arrived, I did not see a single foreigner besides other EU citizens and a handful of Turks who came during 1960s. Now in the last 3 years I see Africans, Arabs, and Afghani refugees everywhere I go. I don’t see any working in jobs but lots are loitering in the town center. At work there has been a huge influx of Indians to work the IT jobs at the [multinational] company – at least they are productive tax payers. It will be interesting to see how easily they assimilate into German society. I increasingly see advertisement targeted to Indians on investing and buying real estate in Germany. Interestingly I don’t see many Chinese moving to Germany like I see in the USA. On MS teams the majority of scientists based in the USA branch of my company are mainland Chinese (e.g., recent call to data sciences team had 95% Chinese colleagues, first generation).
Home prices have shot up as well as rentals. Since 2019 both have increased by 30%, and when a rental is listed, long lines form during the open house, something you’d only see in the past in big cities like Berlin and Munich. The refugees have taken up all the low-income social housing. Even small government buildings in my residential neighborhood such as the forest registry office have been converted into housing to meet the demand.
Lines at the immigration office are also longer. Interestingly when the war broke out between Ukraine and Russia, there was a special line made just for Ukrainian refugees, to fast-track them. I didn’t remember seeing a fast track line made for the Syrians. It would be nice to see a fast-track line for employed immigrants just trying to renew their residence permit. Maybe something I should bring up the next time I go.
How about celebrating Jesus’s birthday with one’s Muslim neighbors?
Christmas market had the security blocks put in place. Two years ago that never happened.
Here’s a photo from 27 years ago of Munich’s English garden that shows a decidedly un-Islamic outfit for a female in public:
(Source: Siemens was using our open-source online community toolkit and I went over there with another software developer. They took us to a medieval-themed restaurant where forks were not provided. Any man who didn’t drink beer, e.g., me, was forced by the waitresses to wear a maid’s cap. The Siemens executives and managers thought it would be fun to see weak Americans get drunk, but my colleague was himself a heavy drinker and fairly beefy so he drank them under the table. I had a bit of mead.)
Here are a couple of crowd photos from that late 1990s trip. I don’t see anyone in a burqa or even hijab.
Cartoonist lost much of his platform in 2023 after remarks that were considered racist
On his “Real Coffee” podcast in 2023, discussing a poll that found only 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement “it’s OK to be white,” he said the data provided evidence that Black people were a hate group. “I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people,” Adams said. … Adams responded on his website that he was “speaking hyperbolically.” He already had alienated some of his fans by supporting Donald Trump.
(The WSJ implies that it might be possible to support Donald Trump without being a racist?)
Hmm… the Wall Street Journal editors and journalists say that it’s “racist” to suggest that white people might want to exert some effort or pay some money (equivalent to exerting more effort in the workplace) in order to avoid being among Black people. Can anyone think of a white WSJ editor or journalist who lives in a neighborhood that is at least 30 percent Black? If not, isn’t the WSJ staff actually doing what Scott Adams was merely suggesting as a talking point?
Here’s the executive team at the WSJ after boldly opposing Adams’s hypothetical advice:
And the folks from whom you’re getting the opinion that Scott Adams was an outlier racist:
So you didn’t avoid Blacks, you just avoided looking at any houses in places where Blacks live. You paid about 3X per square foot to live in [nearly-all-white town], which is 0.5% Black and is inconvenient, rather than in Brockton, which is 50% Black and blessed with many walkable neighborhoods.
The Federal Reserve is in the news lately for spending about $3,000 per square foot to renovate some office space in D.C. that will be used by 3,000 to 3,400 people. (source: the haters at Fox) The cost will be roughly $1 million per employee ($3.1 billion total).
I recently got off the Celebrity Ascent, a two-year-old cruise ship built by the notoriously efficient French. According to a talk that I attended by Instagram-famous Captain Tasos, she cost $1.2 billion, brand new, and can be both a home and work space for more than 5,000 people. ChatGPT estimates the square footage of the Fed’s buildings at 1.1 million and the Ascent at 2 million (cabins plus public spaces). The Ascent is fully covered with WiFi and, thus, could serve as an office building in our modern Zoom-based age (at a dock it could be hooked up to a fiber bundle instead of an apparently rather feeble Starlink subscription (throttled to 3.5 Mbps download per device; 2.5 Mbps upload).
Instead of renovating the Fed buildings, why not have our French brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters build an “office ship” to be moored in SE DC (just east of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, I guess, due to the 75′ vertical limit)? As a bonus, any time that Fed employees need to visit colleagues in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, or Miami (the latter isn’t home to a regional Fed, but maybe it should be?), the “office ship” can set sail up or down the east coast (not a Jones Act violation because the government can do whatever it wants?).
What’s the flaw with this proposal to save taxpayers at least $2 billion (maybe $3 or $4 billion if the DC project goes over budget) and give each Fed employee twice the square footage (plus an awesome buffet restaurant and a wonderful theater if the Fed is as good at putting together an orchestra as Royal Caribbean/Celebrity are; hire Jessica Gabrielle to do an employee disco night once/month and her Blue Jays band to work lunch two days per week; maybe bring in Stephen Barry a few times per year for gender diversity reeducation (he liked to borrow purses from female-identifying audience members)).
Since every American will be on GLP-1 pills, the Fed could run a “chocolate shawarma” station as Celebrity did. Imagine replacing the two foreigners below with efficient enthusiastic friendly American government workers:
(Why did Celebrity put up a sign labeling these “shawarma” rather than “crêpes”? It’s true that the legacy white Christian French population contributed the underlying pancake, but they also had a chocolate wheel from which shavings were being made.)
Sanity check on ChatGPT’s numbers: Ascent is 1071×130′ in size. That’s 139,230 square feet of space if the ship were shaped like a block. She has the equivalent of about 15 full-length decks so that works out to 2.1 million square feet. Then subtract a bit because there is some tapering.
Speaking of sanity, if the Federal Reserve truly wanted to conserve taxpayer funds, it could order a ship built in China (30-40 percent cheaper, supposedly, though apparently still not competitive in the real-world cruise industry) and skip out on the fancy Azipods and bow thrusters (the office ship won’t move too often so perhaps just use tugboats to achieve precise positioning within harbors). Speaking of Azipods, how do those clever Swedes get the slip rings to work? Enormous amounts of power are transferred and the pods can rotate continuously (i.e., a power cord won’t work). ChatGPT:
Folks: If you love cold gray weather and flying, consider coming to our FAA Ground School class at MIT, next Tuesday-Thursday (January 20-22, 2026). If you are already in Boston and already know how to fly, email me (philg@mit.edu) and we can pick a time to meet before or after the class.
Here’s the forecast for Tuesday (high of 24; low of 10 (in the units that God prefers)):
During the time when Americans cared about opioids (see Who funded America’s opiate epidemic? You did.), the scapegoats for the mostly taxpayer-funded problem were Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family that owned Purdue Pharma (also scapegoated: members of the Sackler family who had no ownership or management role in Purdue Pharma!). Seldom vilified in the press:
Medicaid bureaucrats who enabled the addictions by paying for opioids in spectacular numbers
FDA bureaucrats who approved additional uses for opioid pills
Johnson & Johnson, which grew and imported the raw materials for opioid pills (and also sold some of its own pills to compete with Purdue Pharma)
DEA bureaucrats who approved the importation of opium raw materials in growing and spectacular quantities
Pill distributors and pharmacies
Taxpayers who followed the headlines would learn that the U.S. had a near-perfect system, but that there was one bad apple within the perfect system. Once Purdue and the evil Sacklers were shut down we could get back to business as usual at Medicaid, FDA, DEA, J&J, CVS, etc.
I wonder if Tim Walz and his merry band of check-writers in Minnesota are the new Purdue Pharma/Sacklers. The U.S. welfare system is perfectly engineered for fraud, it seems, with state bureaucrats having the authority to spend federal money. Any system without a massive fraud incentive would start with state bureaucrats spending only state taxpayer money and local government employees spending only local taxes. (Imagine a bureaucrat in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He/she/ze/they would reasonably approve 100 percent of residents for SNAP/EBT because the money is coming from the federal treasury and will grow the Cambridge economy. The same bureaucrat would have an incentive to approve 100 percent of residents for state-funded programs since only a small fraction of state taxpayers live in Cambridge.)
What if fraud levels are nearly as high in some other states, but people who benefit from the U.S. running the world’s second largest welfare state (percentage of GDP; maybe we are #1 now after the coronapanic enhancements?) don’t want peasant taxpayers to look into the situation? It would then be ideal to scapegoat the Minnesotans and their Somali brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters. Once a handful of Somalis in Minnesota have been sent off to Club Fed (they’ll live at taxpayer expense for a few years as punishment for previously living at taxpayer expense), everyone can assume that the problem is solved because the bad apples (bad guavas?) have been removed from the welfare state barrel.
Back when he had visited the United States in the 1990s, Ren Zhengfei had been struck by the grand architecture of Las Vegas, modeled after Roman palaces. He’d remarked that Las Vegas might be the most beautiful city in America. Now in the hinterland to the north of Shenzhen, he began building his own version. Huawei had outgrown its Shenzhen headquarters by 2016, with 180,000 employees globally and counting, and Ren’s team was searching for more space. This was hard to find in Shenzhen, which was a thicket of skyscrapers by now, with soaring property prices. They found what they were looking for in Dongguan, Shenzhen’s up-and-coming northern neighbor, which still had stretches of undeveloped land. Eager to woo the company, Dongguan officials offered Huawei a prime 1.2-square-kilometer tract of verdant land on the south shore of a lake. Ren’s younger brother, Steven Ren, was put in charge of the construction of these new Dongguan R&D grounds, which they called Ox Horn Campus. They hired Japan’s Nikken Sekkei, the world’s second-largest architectural firm, which produced a fever dream of a design: Ox Horn would be built to look like twelve miniature European cities, including Paris, Verona, Bruges, and Oxford. They would re-create some of the greatest hits of Western civilization, including Germany’s Heidelberg Castle and France’s Palace of Versailles. “What is important is not simply to copy certain architectural styles but to make them truly beautiful,” Steven Ren wrote of the project. Huawei would overlook no detail. The architects were proud that none of the roofs of the 108 buildings were identical. Reflecting an eye for historical accuracy, some of the shingles were slate, others terra-cotta or copper. The pitches of the roofs ranged from twenty to ninety degrees. The buildings were faced in a range of materials, including granite, sandstone, limestone, dolomite, brick, and stucco (for Verona and Grenada). There were, of course, some concessions to modernity, such as treating the porous stones to prevent mildew and algae growth. Facial-recognition gates were installed at the entrances.
Huawei hired 150 Russian painters to cover the halls’ ceilings and walls with Renaissance-style murals, with the painters joking that even the Kremlin didn’t have such beautiful corridors. Someone stocked the lake by the castle with black swans—a reference to the financial term for worst-case scenarios that are hard to forecast. Ren so frequently warned his staff to look out for black-swan events that, at some point, the bird became Huawei’s unofficial mascot.
Huawei today makes the world’s best smartphone in terms of camera quality. DXOMARK:
The founder didn’t want to get into this business:
In Huawei’s early days, Ren had been less than enthused at the idea of hawking handsets—which were called “terminals” in Huawei-speak—as he considered it too far afield from the company’s core businesses of switches, routers, and base stations. “Huawei will not make a mobile phone,” Ren once insisted indignantly. “Anyone who talks this nonsense is going to get laid off!” Even after Huawei began pursuing smartphones seriously, Ren feared wasting money on marketing and was often harsh on the company’s head of consumer products, Richard Yu, or Yu Chengdong. “People always say I criticize Yu Chengdong,” Ren remarked to staff. “Actually, my criticism of him is my way of caring for him.”
How tough is it to break into the premium phone market? From 2016:
To close the gap with Samsung would be a formidable challenge: Samsung was pouring $14 billion a year into advertising, more than Iceland’s GDP.[
There is a chapter on Canada holding Meng Wanzhou, the founder’s daughter from his first marriage and Huawei CFO, hostage at the request of the U.S. government, but that’s been extensively covered elsewhere. (The allegations against Huawei had to do with selling equipment to Iran.)
The U.S. also strong-armed the Taiwanese into shutting out Huawei, which merely resulted in the improvement of Chinese domestic capabilities. May 2020:
TSMC had supplied Huawei for years, but now, under the threat of sanctions, it could not risk losing access to US technology to run its own operations. TSMC shut its doors to Huawei. Huawei’s only hope now was for China’s domestic chip foundry, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC, to learn how to produce advanced chips at lightning speeds. This was a real Hail Mary: SMIC had been endeavoring for two decades to advance its technologies but still lagged several generations behind global leaders in advanced chipmaking. This second round of US sanctions cut deep. In July 2020, citing the new US sanctions, the UK announced that it was reversing its position on Huawei and would remove all Huawei equipment from the nation’s 5G networks by the end of 2027.
Whoever was running the U.S. during the Biden-Harris was just as hostile to Huawei as Donald Trump had been:
If there had been hopes among Huawei’s executives that Biden would be softer on China than Trump, they were quickly dispelled. The Biden administration was more careful in its rhetoric to avoid fanning anti-Chinese racism. It didn’t use terms like “Clean Network” and “Clean Nations.” But in many ways, it was only picking up where the Trump administration had left off and deepening the efforts to contain China.
Finally, check out the aesthetics on this data center that Huawei built:
Happy National Cut Your Energy Costs Day to those who celebrate.
An idea for how to be simultaneously more virtuous and comfortable: a Greta Thunberg-branded tennis court shade. ChatGPT says that some fabric shades have already been made and they should be about 45′ high to avoid interference with lobs (50-65′ at the pro level). ChatGPT says that it would be stupid expensive to engineer this in rigid solar panels, especially if there is a need for the structure to survive a hurricane, but on the other hand we’re told that the only way to save Planet Earth from going Full Venus is to do stupid expensive stuff. Florida’s Broward County (home to FLL) has covered two basketball courts with solar:
They say that what was, very likely, an eye-watering outlay of tax dollars is “a visible reminder of how sustainable infrastructure investments can benefit both people and the planet while saving on energy costs.” (If there truly were net savings on energy costs wouldn’t we see these all over Florida, Arizona, Nevada, etc., and not just in this one park?)
If there is a big influx of tax base thanks to Zohran Mamdani, I’d love to see more of this in Palm Beach County. ChatGPT says that it could conceivably work for pickleball (required height only 18-22′).
Separately, some folks are working on tennis coach robots, e.g., ACEMATE and Tenniix:
ChatGPT’s explanation of why a tennis Greta Thunberg-brand shade can’t be affordably engineering to Miami-Dade hurricane standards:
Why it’s hard (and what makes it “expensive hard”)
1) Wind uplift loads get huge, and PV is a rigid “wing”
ASCE 7 treats canopies/roofs with net uplift pressure coefficients (negative pressures trying to peel the roof off). Canopies got more explicit treatment in ASCE 7-16 and later. Structure Magazine+1
For a big, flat-ish PV canopy:
Uplift (psf) scales roughly with V2.
Going from 120 mph to 170 mph isn’t “+40%”—it’s closer to (170/120)² ≈ 2.0× the pressure.
Fabric shades can “spill” wind; PV cannot. The PV roof transfers that uplift straight into:
purlins/joists
primary girders
columns
foundations (uplift + overturning)
2) Height required for tennis multiplies overturning
Tennis-friendly clearance is typically ~40–50+ ft so you don’t ruin lobs/serve sightlines. That height makes the wind problem worse because:
the structure “lever arm” increases → bigger overturning moments
columns behave like tall masts, not “carport posts”
A PV canopy that might be straightforward at 12–16 ft (parking) becomes much heavier at 45–55 ft.
Every now and then the New York Times takes a break from Trump bad/progressive Democrats good and does some actual journalism. “Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich” (December 16, 2025) answers the only interesting question, in my opinion, about Jeffrey Epstein, i.e., How does a guy who doesn’t seem to be either smart or hard-working get rich enough to operate a Gulfstream?
I know some people who’ve gotten rich by working in finance. All had more advanced educations than Jeffrey Epstein (a college dropout) and none of them had time to party on a private island, with or without a stable of paid females.
How did Epstein get rich, then? According to the NYT, he stole it all. Not the 2 and 20 stealing that a hedge fund might do every year, but grabbing most or all of the principal with which he was entrusted.
In his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road. Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power.
One funny part: in 1980, making $1 million/year was considered successful:
He was regularly flying to Palm Beach, Fla., to visit young women. That summer, Cosmopolitan named Epstein its “bachelor of the month,” describing him as a “dynamo” who “talks only to people who make over a million a year!” The magazine encouraged interested parties to write to Epstein at his work address.
It was easier to steal because the clients themselves were trying to steal from the IRS and, therefore, they couldn’t easily complain to the government that Epstein stole from them before they could steal from the government:
According to Epstein’s friend Bob Gold, Epstein and the Pottingers pitched tax-avoidance strategies to wealthy clients, including some whom Gold believes Epstein met through Bear Stearns.
Bear Stearns, which took down the entire U.S. economy with its 2008 failure, briefly employed Epstein and its managers kept helping him:
In 1982, [Clark Schubach of Bear] introduced Epstein to Michael Stroll, who ran a pinball and video-game company. Stroll trusted Bear Stearns and Schubach. He gave Epstein $450,000 — about 10 percent of his net worth — to invest in a supposed crude-oil deal that Epstein told him he was planning.
Within two years, most of the money had vanished, Stroll later said in an unpublished interview with Thomas Volscho, a professor at the College of Staten Island who has spent years researching Epstein’s early years and shared some of his notes and documents with us. Epstein began dodging Stroll’s phone calls; at one point, he sent Stroll a quart of oil in an attempt to convince him that a deal was, in fact, in the works. The dispute ended up in civil court, with Stroll arguing that Epstein had promised to return his money but never did. In 1993, Epstein prevailed on technical grounds, and a judge ruled that he wasn’t personally liable. Decades later, Stroll remains bitter. “He’s a despicable prick,” he told us.
…
But Epstein’s perfidy ran deeper. Ed Epstein discovered that dozens of the people Epstein recruited to invest in Pennwalt, including Snyder, had written to him demanding that he repay their money. In other words, Epstein had lured investors in, used their money to book big profits and then refused to return their funds. There is no record of Epstein facing any consequences — or repaying the money. A result was that by the end of 1988, he reported being worth about $15 million, according to a previously undisclosed document from a Swiss bank, which Thomas Volscho, the professor, shared with us.
Epstein got a lot of help from “daughters of famous, powerful men”:
Epstein seems to have had a keen sense of which benefactors he could quickly suck dry, leaving them angry and betrayed, and which were worth nurturing for the long haul as sources of connections and prestige. One of those was Sir James Goldsmith — a financier and European politician who was embedded in Manhattan’s upper crust. One evening, he hosted a gathering at his mansion on the Upper East Side. Among the guests was Stuart Pivar, who had amassed a fortune before becoming a renowned art collector. When Pivar arrived, he encountered Epstein playing a Beethoven sonata at a piano in Goldsmith’s spacious entrance hall. Pivar told us he was transfixed: Epstein had an irresistible “magnetism” — especially with “the beautiful daughters of famous, powerful men.”
There are no rewards for being smart and honest:
A fateful flight to Florida that year would launch Epstein from a mere millionaire into a plutocrat with palatial estates, two private islands and luxury aircraft. The transformation came about through a new client: Les Wexner, the billionaire who built brands like the Limited and Victoria’s Secret. The two were introduced by Wexner’s friend Robert Meister, an insurance executive who happened to sit next to Epstein on the plane to Palm Beach. Meister suggested that Wexner get in touch with Epstein for financial advice.
Wexner soon had a financial adviser, Harold Levin, fly to New York to meet Epstein. Levin told us that he spent an hour with Epstein in his office and immediately got a bad vibe. He found a pay phone and called Wexner. “I smell a rat,” Levin reported. “I don’t trust him.”
Wexner apparently didn’t listen. About a year later, he hired Epstein to be Levin’s boss. As far as Levin could tell, Epstein won the billionaire’s confidence by falsely telling him that Levin had been stealing. Levin decided to quit rather than work for Epstein. Before long, Wexner had given Epstein essentially free rein by granting him power of attorney over his finances. Epstein’s name began appearing in government filings as responsible for Wexner’s businesses and charities.
Another price/inflation shocker:
He bought a waterfront mansion in Palm Beach for $2.5 million, about a mile from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Washington, D.C. was a good place to hunt for the next batch of money to steal.
On a freezing Thursday in February 1993, Epstein and Wexner arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Just weeks earlier, Bill Clinton had been sworn in as the 42nd president. It was the first of many visits Epstein would pay to the Clinton White House.
Epstein had become a political donor — including, later that year, $10,000 to help refurbish the White House, earning him a spot at a reception with the Clintons — and that gave him a certain amount of cachet with the new president. But Epstein had something else going for him as well: a new connection named Lynn Forester.
Forester told us that she met Epstein at a reception for George Mitchell, the Senate majority leader, whom Epstein had befriended. Forester was a successful telecommunications executive, but she rose to greater prominence through her marriage to Andrew Stein, the Manhattan politician who in 1993 ran unsuccessfully for New York City mayor. The end of his mayoral campaign coincided with the end of their 10-year marriage. Now Forester and Stein were feuding over how to divvy up millions of dollars, and Epstein apparently convinced Forester that he could protect her from getting ripped off. It was a version of the same tactic he used to get in Wexner’s good graces years earlier.
It was an opportune moment for Epstein to ingratiate himself with Forester, whom Clinton had appointed to a White House advisory commission. On at least one occasion, Forester brought up Epstein in a brief private conversation with the president, according to a letter, first reported by The Daily Beast, that she wrote that mentioned Epstein. He became a regular visitor to the White House, sometimes with a girlfriend in tow, according to records housed at Clinton’s presidential library.
Via this photo, the NYT reminds young readers to enjoy their youth and beauty while it lasts (though maybe using youth/beauty to assist Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t the highest and best use?):
(Why is the man-bites-dog story of an apparently mediocre and lazy person getting rich enough to operate a Gulfstream the most interesting aspect of the Emmanuel Goldstein saga? I don’t understand the fascination with Jeffrey Epstein’s after-hours frolics with a stable of paid young females. The ideas that middle-aged guys would find young females attractive (example study and research summary) or that females would be interested in having sex with rich men and/or men who were paying them are dog-bites-man stories, in my view. There is a linguistic twist in that the female employees of Epstein, who got housing, health care, dental care, transportation, entertainment, cash, etc. on the job and then later got $millions each (from Epstein’s estate and from a JP Morgan settlement), all of it tax-free, are considered “victims”. Even the ones who started their paid work with Epstein at age 18 or older may have received more money than the average American woman could earn in a lifetime of 9-5 toil. Regarding the moral outrage about “underage women”, the most frequently cited victim is Virginia Giuffre and she was turning 17 in mid-2000 when she says she met Epstein for the first time, i.e., older than the Massachusetts age of consent of 16. Epstein was indicted for being involved with females “as young as 14” (justice.gov). That is more shocking to the puritan mind of a Legacy American, but fourteen is the age of consent in a lot of European countries and was the typical age of marriage in Ancient Greece. Fourteen is five years older than Aisha was when her marriage with Muhammad was consummated (according to the Hadiths). Roughly half of Americans support filling the United States with Muslims, all of whom are supposed to follow the Hadiths. Why would the same people then express moral condemnation of Jeffrey Epstein’s harem, none of whose members were anywhere near as young as Aisha? Alternatively, if they reject a culture in which women under 18 can choose to have sex, get married, exchange sex for money, etc. then why would they advocate for continued expansion of Muslim immigration?)
From Pink News: “Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old and died just a few streets away from her home, according to reporting by the Minnesota Star Tribune … Good had been married to Timmy Ray Macklin Jr., who died in 2023 at the age of 36, and had been currently living with her wife in Minneapolis alongside her six-year-old son. Good also reportedly has two other children, who live with extended family members.”
Our government says that the late Ms. Good was interfering with an ICE operation, presumably to kidnap noble Somalis who’ve done so much to enrich the U.S. But if the incident happened “just a few streets away from her home” and the ICE agents weren’t wearing conventional uniforms, is it possible that Good was interacting with ICE only by chance?
I can understand why someone who works in the Welfare-Industrial Complex (or Big Daycare) would try to stop ICE from deporting Muslims, but it doesn’t make logical sense that someone with Renée Good’s personal background would try to stop ICE from deporting Muslims. She wanted to maximize the number of Somalis who would, if they were in power, force her to become a 2nd or 3rd wife of a man instead of a lesbian partner of some other woman? And a Muslim-run nation might not let a woman unload her kids in order to enjoy more sexual freedom. (American women typically keep their kids after terminating a sexual relationship in order to harvest child support profits, but perhaps Ms. Good’s first husband didn’t earn enough money for that to make sense? (Mothers abandoning their kids to the father is much more common in Europe where child support revenue might be capped at $2,000 to $8,000 per year, depending on the country.))
Readers: What is the evidence that Ms. Good was aware of or interested in ICE operations?
Of course, I’m aware of the existence of Queers for Palestine, but I don’t think that’s quite the same. Queers for Palestine seek to impose an Islamic theocracy (Hamas rule) over Israelis. They aren’t working to subject themselves to Islamic rule.
(This post is not seeking to assign blame to anyone. With perhaps 30 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. and guns being widely distributed among both migrants and ICE agents, I’m sure that this won’t be the last death related to immigration enforcement. I’m just trying to figure out what happened. If Renée Good interacted with ICE purely by chance then her death is even sadder because of its pointlessness.)
Google AI:
consensual same-sex sexual activity is illegal in Somalia, with penalties ranging from prison sentences (up to three years under civil law) to the death penalty in areas controlled by groups like al-Shabab, all within a highly stigmatized cultural and religious environment where homosexuality is criminalized and heavily persecuted.
Related:
Killing of Justine Damond (Wikipedia), a pointless 2017 homicide by a Somali immigrant police officer in Minneapolis
How does hiring and firing work in a company that isn’t passionate about DEI?
On January 28, 1996, Ren Zhengfei held Huawei’s first “mass-resignation ceremony.” Each head of a regional sales office was told to prepare two reports: a work summary and a written resignation. “I will only sign one of the reports,” Ren said. “Dear Chairman,” the resignation letter said, “I have fought for the company’s sales development and sacrificed my youth. But in the few years that I’ve worked on the sales front lines, my technical and business ability may not have kept up…. If through the process of examination and selection, the company identifies a more suitable person for sales work, I will sincerely resign from my current position.” Huawei had started out in rural markets, and many of its early sales managers were provincial in their experience and network of contacts. As Ren sought to go national and international, he decided to make the entire sales staff resign and reapply for their jobs. “The mountain goat must outrun the lion to not be eaten,” he had told them ahead of the event. “All departments and sections must optimize and eat the lazy goats, the goats that do not learn or progress, and the goats with no sense of responsibility.” Now Ren took the podium. “Being an executive at Huawei should be understood as a responsibility, a choice to sacrifice personal happiness,” he said. The resigning sales managers were allowed to speak in turn, some choking back tears. “As a Huawei person, I’m willing to be a paving stone,” one said. “If I can’t keep up with the pace of the company’s development, I’m willing to let new people, and higher-level people, take over my job,” another offered. “My youth and ability are limited, and Huawei’s future is long,” a third said. “I can’t hold back the company because of me.”
Maybe sales will be one of the few jobs left to humans after Elon Musk gets Optimus to do everything?
Ren had grown up in the Mao years, when there was no such thing as private-sector sales. Now he presented sales to his young followers in rousing terms, almost as a mystical vocation. “Sales work is special, complex, and noble,” he told them. “You need the intelligence of a scientist, the insight of a philosopher, the eloquence of an orator, the ambition of a social reformer, and the optimism and persistent spirit of a religious man.”
Polite protocol for a business dinner involved breaking out the baijiu, a clear sorghum spirit that has an eye-watering 120-proof kick, and pouring out round after round of shots over a rotating parade of exquisite dishes. The protocol also involved getting drunker than your clients to show your respect for them. One early Huawei executive wrote about having to excuse himself for a vomit break while entertaining customers—not an uncommon occurrence. Others developed stomach or liver ailments. This seemed to happen particularly often in the far northeast, which had a reputation for heavy drinking. “The key staffer for this account is currently suffering hepatitis but refuses to come back to Shenzhen for medical treatment and insists on fighting on the front line through the ice and snow,” Ren said in 1995 about a Huawei salesperson based in Yichun, close to the northeastern border with Russia.
The story of Huawei is definitely not as simple as “it was a planned economy and the planners picked Huawei”:
Despite the interest that Huawei had received from government officials, it was only one among many contenders, and not even the most favored one. In 1995, officials had set up a state-owned switchmaking champion called China Great Dragon Telecommunication in an effort to combat the foreign switchmakers. Great Dragon was built around the military engineer Wu Jiangxing’s breakthrough 04 switch and had been formed by merging eight smaller telecom companies. The government was pouring some $2.2 billion a year into the venture. Also in 1995, the Xi’an Datang Telephone Co.—a venture set up by a state-run research institute and several Chinese graduates from US universities—began mass production of its new switch, the SP30. And across town in Shenzhen, the Zhongxing Telecommunications Equipment Company—which would later be known as ZTE—had developed its ZXJ10 switch. People called them the Big Four of China’s domestic switchmaking, and they made quick work of eating into the foreign vendors’ market share. Within a few years, the price of telephone switches in China had dropped from $300 per line to $70 per line. With so many contenders, and such thin margins, companies were always flaming out. In early 1996, a dozen of Great Dragon’s 04 switches abruptly failed due to a software problem. The company never recovered.
Huawei had started out as an underdog compared with its state-owned rivals. Now it was emerging as the frontrunner, so much so that the state-owned companies were crying foul. “They sell cheaply to get market share,” an executive at Datang complained. Great Dragon’s Wu Jiangxing griped to Shenzhen’s Science and Technology Bureau that the local government shouldn’t just support privately owned companies.
Despite the shortage of PhDs in DEI in China and overt sexist sentiments, women are able to rise to top executive positions.
The executive who rose the highest was Sun Yafang, who was elevated from marketing and sales president to Huawei’s vice-chairwoman in 1994. She was an intense woman of around forty, with a hawkish nose and a stately bearing. She had overseen Huawei’s “marriage” to the state through the joint ventures with provincial telecom bureaus and had led the mass resignation of the sales managers. People whispered that Madam Sun had worked for the Ministry of State Security, or the MSS, China’s powerful civilian intelligence agency, before joining the company. Perhaps that had something to do with her rapid rise through Huawei’s ranks, or perhaps not.
Sun ran a tight ship, cracking down on excessive golfing among the managers. “Huawei’s sales staffers all know that if Madam Sun sees you without a tie on a convention floor, your fate will be a miserable one,” a member of her team wrote about her. “Not to mention her fiery temper. The hurricane of her criticism will leave you with no possible hope to find an escape.”
Ren had proved willing to promote capable female executives, even as he sometimes expressed old-fashioned views on women in the workplace. “Many companies don’t like hiring female employees, because female employees are inefficient and can’t achieve the goals when they do things,” Ren said in a speech to Huawei’s secretaries around this time. “Female employees have a big shortcoming, which is they like to gossip and nag, which undermines unity. Originally, the purpose of hiring female employees was to add a lubricant to the management team. The main characteristic of male employees is their rigidity, and they are prone to producing sparks when they collide. With a layer of elastic sponge in between, there won’t be sparks.”
A lot of Huawei’s management and corporate practices were modeled on IBM’s and with IBM consultants’ help:
IBM’s consultants started arriving at Huawei’s headquarters in August 1998. They would remain in residence for a decade. Gary Garner, one of the early IBM consultants, recalled that his first impression of Huawei was that it was a vibrant but undisciplined company where things were sometimes just scrawled on sticky notes instead of being filed properly. “President Ren had a whole bunch of bright young PhDs,” he said, “but it was disorganized. It wasn’t ready to go to the international market.” Some of Huawei’s managers protested the new systems, which they found burdensome. Ren insisted they follow the IBM way. If the shoes didn’t fit, Ren told them, they had to “cut their feet to fit the shoes.” IBM’s output was fifty-five times Huawei’s that first year, 1998. Ren set a goal of shrinking the difference to thirty-five to forty times greater by 1999. “We are making big strides forward,” he told his staff. “We’re narrowing the gap.”
One place that Huawei didn’t follow IBM was onto a public stock exchange. The company remains privately owned, mostly by employees, to this day.
Imagine if U.S. politicians would follow Ren’s example of voluntary semi-retirement at age 67:
In December 2011, Ren, sixty-seven, announced he was stepping back to allow younger hands to steer the company. “I increasingly don’t understand the technology, increasingly don’t understand finance, and only half understand management,” he told his staff. “If I can’t treat our group kindly and democratically, and fully unleash the talents of all our heroes, I will have achieved nothing.”
Much of the rest of the book is about Huawei’s entries into various foreign markets and tussles with the U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies that either (1) wanted a back door to tap into communications, or (2) were worried that their Chinese counterparts had a back door into Huawei’s gear. I won’t cover that here because it is too involved, but I will have another post about this House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company.
