Many other rich countries give more on a per capita basis.[1]
Indeed the U.S. has been kinda cheap, on a percent of gross national income basis.[2]
It could be countered, of course, that the U.S. has paid substantially more for defense, and for the defense of many donor countries.
This data only includes government spending, which leaves out private and NGO spending. Many Americans prefer that their charity funds be spent outside of the control of the government.
Oh no, it's in great part due to his antics. Owning a Tesla used to be about a positive future, the transition to sustainability, and with great engineering and making it sexy. Now owning a Tesla seems to be about kneeling to Moloch, paying for plutocracy, gleefully cutting basic food aid for the world's poorest starving children, undermining democracy around the world, and yes even doing a fascist salute. So, you want that as your brand? And yes, there's now much better competition, but unlike what one might gather from certain "conservative" news sources, the EV market has grown and continues to grow. [1] My guess is Tesla sales will continue to collapse.
The robo-taxi attempt is fraught and Musk's mind seems elsewhere -- swinging a wrecking ball on government, turning Twitter into his microphone (with great damage to its value and creating a real opening for competitors), posting videogame results reminiscent of the old North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung-style, where the newspaper would report on his games of golf in which he swung 18 hole-in-ones.
By hitching his wagon to political movements most despised by the consumers of EVs he's alienated Tesla's audience. By his further actions he's shocked and disgusted them so that driving a Tesla is becoming an embarrassment. The brand is kaput.
There's maybe a separate China story but it's no better. Tesla taxis in China, really?
I'm actually shocked in such a media and marketing driven society that absolutely, nobody brings up the fact that the Tesla brand has been completely destroyed in the US and EU.
Companies simply do not survive this in the long run unless very specific inelastic demand (I'm thinking bp oil spill as the only example) exists, and even then BP wasn't as international or charged or so ... Nazi.
Tesla is musk. Musk is a Nazi. Musk was a progressive environmental future in the previous media construction.
That radical shift means no brand, no customers. How many people want to drive a car that basically has a swastika on it? 4% of the population?
On top of this, musks absent leadership since the model Y, in addition to Tesla's general problems getting new designs out the door, and his marketing ignorance in the good days, means Tesla has no badge diversification a luxury marque, no extensive model diversity for all the markets of the world, no cabin options for their extreme design, no trims and body style variations.
It's just the 3 and Y basically.
Tesla should have bought another car company to gain engineer, design, oem relationships, and manufacturing capacity.
Too late. Tesla is now a pump and dump scheme, musk wants his 60 billion that Delaware is holding up and then he'll sell off just like the board is doing now.
China will seize teskas assets on a whim from a trade war or a hot war with Taiwan.
The energy sector is not one I look forward to, Tesla doesn't have any advantage in battery packaging or battery technology("battery day" is now officially a dud), and lfp lmfp and sodium ion chemistries are far more suited to grid storage and home storage.
We all know AI driving at Q4 isnt happening under musk. It's a long slog and musk fires software teams too quickly, because he treats them like hardware. That's basically all the hype.
Still, people age very differently. Some octogenarians are completing triathlons. Medicine also seems likely to increase longevity.
Think of the many who through their 80s were cogent, even masterful. Examples include Warren Buffett, John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus, George Soros, Henry Kissinger, Clint Eastwood, and with women it’s probably even more common, and we can look to Nancy Pelosi, or indeed my own grandmother. Whatever memory slowdown there may be is compensated for by depth of experience.
Then there are those who lose it in their sixties.
In many ways it seems that ageism is one of the last acceptable prejudices.
In Biden’s case, I was struck by the difference in him before and after his son Beau’s death. It seemed like he never recovered. Charisma gone. Eyes turned beady and body stiff. Despite that he was an active and successful president (should be admitted no matter one’s politics), though unpopular.
Yea people do. Some of the more recent interviews with Jimmy Carter is a good example. Recent as in pre his wife passing away. I havn't seen any interviews of him since then, so I am not sure if he is declining. It is often that in a long marriage, when one partner dies, the others start slipping. But the ones before, he was in his upper 90s and outside of the fact that me may not move particularly fast, he was (still is?) still sharp as a whip.
Funny, I've been using even primitive text-to-speech on PDFs for years and while nothing compares to an excellent human reader, I find TTS often better than a mediocre human reading. This is mainly because I don't get upset at (and then have to forgive) a machine when it says the "Loovree" instead of the Louvre or in an economic history book pronounces "Keens" for John Maynard Keynes (sound like "Kaynes"). Also the dead neutrality of a machine's reading can jar me less than a numbskull and/or phony human rendition. I must say though that excellent voice actors are to me heaven.
On Mac with a pdf I just select say a chapter and let it read. Footnotes can be a problem. I usually use iOS now and I wrote PDF before but realize I use .epub files mostly. You can set up iOS to read entire pages. I use the local iOS Books app and have it so a two-finger swipe from the top of a page starts reading. It will usually turn pages by itself but can be a bit janky. I choose a good quality voice and have spent ten or twenty minutes rigging it up in Settings.
Memories deceive; it happens to me and I'm guessing to everyone. Odd that Aristophanes would have written a comedy about this character whom Plato would only invent years later, and so also that Xenophon, a student of Socrates like Plato, also wrote about him. Indeed Socrates lived and breathed just like you and I do; he drank water and wine and took dumps in the morning, and especially asked questions. But your memory was correct in the sense that we can't know how similar Plato's Socrates as written in the dialogues was to the real man, and often in the middle and later works it becomes clear that Plato's Socrates has become almost entirely a mouthpiece for Plato's own ideas. In that sense, Plato's Socrates, especially after the early dialogues, was a indeed fictitious rendering of a real man. Most of the named characters in Plato were (largely fictitious?) renderings of real people.
Personally, I like to remind myself of the fact -- kind of meditate on it to get it into me -- that the long gone people of distant eras were indeed just as real then as you and I are now. Of course we know this consciously but I find it's easy to neglect and stop feeling. Ancient Egyptians or Song Dynasty Chinese or even 5th and 4th century BCE Athenians become flat just-so stories, and when that happens I lose touch of the deep and pregnant mystery that lives in the gulf between historical record, popular imagination, and whatever it was that the people of the past actually experienced, however they actually thought and related. When I (authentically) reconnect with that mysterious reality it lights up a sense of awe in me, and reconditions and renews my relationship with the present, myself and others. I guess, as Plato said, philosophy begins in wonder.
From Theodore Alois Buckley's introduction to Alexander Pope's translation of The Iliad:
"When we have read Plato or Xenophon, we think we know something of Socrates; when we have fairly read and examined both, we feel convinced that we are something worse than ignorant."
I’ve read of a credible person who says they use breathwork of some kind to help enter a state of flow. Does anyone here know if this sounds right? If so, how would one learn? Books? Courses? Coaches? Also, knowing nothing about it I’d assumed the breathwork would be like mindfulness or meditative breathing, but is this wrong? It might be something closer to hyperventilating?
The article mentioned Holotropic Breathwork, which is a method Stanislav Grof came up with after no longer being able to use LSD for his research in the 1960s. I haven't taken a course in it, but it does seem similar to Wim Hof's technique, which you can follow along an intro of on his YouTube [1].
All of it is pretty similar to various pranayama techniques that have existed in the yogas for thousands of years though. Iyengar's Light on Pranayama is a good resource for the various practices [2]. While Wim Hof and Holotropic Breathwork are slightly different, the closest to them from the yogas would maybe be bhastrika pranayam (and here's a random guy on YouTube that comes up when googling it -- just skimming it and it looks basically like what I was taught [3]).
Edit: I realized I didn't answer your question regarding how pranayama/breathwork compares to meditation. It's different than meditation (dhyana or jhana), but it's complimentary and there are elements that are similar. For instance, during pranayama practice you'll often have breath holds/retentions and during that time you'll be instructed to bring your awareness to something (a point on your body, on the awareness itself, etc). This is generally what you'd do in formal meditation practice too, but in this case it's for a much shorter period of time (the length of the breath hold). So in a way it gets you used to working with your awareness, to bring it internal for short periods of time many times. Many people will practice pranayama before beginning formal seated meditation practice. I personally use nadi shodhana before meditation practice, and more vigorous pranayamas like kapalbhati and bhastrika before/during/after asana practice. They're also good to do in the middle of the day when you need a bit of a reset.
Oh wow, how to answer succinctly -- it's been a long, meandering path! I'll try my best. While I'd say I first learned about meditation from my music practice as a child, my first formal introduction to meditation was through Thanissaro Bhikkhu [1] who a few of my friends practiced with in college (and later ordained as monks with). I later came to Mahayana Buddhism through Suzuki [2] and Thich Nhat Hanh [3], and then settled into a Vajrayana practice -- I'd suggest Mingyur Rinpoche's Joy of Living course for an intro to Vajrayana [4].
For yoga practice I happened to one day wander into the closest yoga studio to my house here in Brooklyn, which coincidentally happened to be one of the best yoga schools in the city at the time. The owner [5] was exceptionally challenging, all his teachers were the best around, and he really pushed everyone to expand their limits, it was a great environment to learn in. I was going at least 5x per week for a few years. It can be hard to find a yoga school, as most these days are just gym classes, and very few are going to teach pranayama, kriyas, meditation, etc. If I'm in a new place and am looking for a shala to practice in I'll typically choose the place that has Ashtanga/Mysore on the schedule, as it's likely that the owners/teachers aren't just interested in yoga as exercise. I'd really suggest finding a master teacher/s to practice with in real life, there's nothing like it. You'll know it when you find it.
I also read pretty obsessively when I started my yoga practice, some of which I'll leave below [6][7][8][9][10][11]. If you start practicing you'll find the sutras and other texts that speak to you as well, just put in the work and stay curious and open! Happy to answer any questions.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/foreign-aid-given-per-cap...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_sovere...