the Financial Times and its annual US Festival -- my impressions
I've long been a reader of the Financial Times, I have a registered account with them, and I especially keep up with their Alphaville blog.
The FT is a London-based newspaper that covers world financial markets much the way the Wall Street Journal does, except with a more center-left approach and none of the Murdoch family's News Corp drama. For example, FT's 2014 Book of the Year award went to Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which I read approvingly), and 2017 award went to Amy Goldstein's Janesville: An American Story (about working class struggles in Wisconsin).
But the FT is by no means a working class newspaper. 90% of its readers own real estate, 75% work for international companies, 32% are C-Suite executives, and 21% are millionaires (measured in Pounds, not counting their primary residence).
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I'd never heard of FT's annual US Festival, attending was B's idea, and he footed the cost for the three of us, though T paid for parking and lunch. I didn't pay attention to the event description, I just thought we could all3 have a day together doing something. I didn't focus on the content of the conference until the night before, when we needed to plan what time to wake up and get out the door.
I wasn't interested in attending the more star-studded panels, such as Hillary Clinton's or Salman Rushdie's. I was more interested in what I consider Important Topics. And the wine tasting of course LOL. So the panels I picked (sometimes T and B went to different panels) were super interesting to me, I felt intellectually stimulated by what I heard, and the questions from the audience were well-considered.
But, by 4pm I was ready for the wine tasting, which provided six wines from Portugal, and surprisingly -- a full glass of each. I literally could not drink six entire glasses of wine in the 45 minutes allotted, but I did scoop up the leftover #4 from all3 of us into one glass and took it with me. #4 was my favorite. #5 was Goddess-Awful. The others were fine. I'm not really a wine snob, as long as it tastes good to me I don't care how much it costs or where it came from.
After that speed tasting we'd been onsite for six hours and were ready to leave, so we skipped the final two sessions. We ordered delivery food on the way home and prepared to eat it outside, but then it started raining, so no hot tub time either. T went to bed early, B stayed up with me to watch the 3rd episode of BEEF.
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The attendees were obviously affluent, from their dress and hairstyles they all looked like well-paid professionals, wearing their Saturday best. Even if somebody dared to wear jeans like I did, they were $200+ designer jeans like mine LOL. I'd say attendees were generally middle-aged, though some brought along their tiny kids in sport-utility strollers. In general, these were people for whom capitalism works well. But they mainly fit the center-left set of wealthy people. There was a lot of concern expressed for dealing with climate change and species extinction, although not at the expense of anybody's living standard. People felt that neoliberal capitalism was unsustainable without some sort of social democratic regulation, or else workers would join the populist right and fuck everything up. Each attendee received a free book published by the Ford Foundation about a New Gospel of Wealth.
In From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth, Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, articulates a bold vision for philanthropy in the twenty-first century. With contributions from an array of thinkers, activists, and leaders including Ai-jen Poo, Laurene Powell Jobs, David Rockefeller Jr., and Dr. Elizabeth Alexander, Walker challenges and emboldens readers to consider philanthropy as a tool for achieving economic, social, and political justice.
I tried skimming this book and then literally tossed it away from me onto a table after reading one horrible quote out loud: "Practicing a New Gospel of Wealth doesn't necessitate the death of our ego, but it does require us to monitor it." I don't believe I've seen a single sentence that bastardizes both Christianity and Buddhism so efficiently.
UGH!!
-----
The theme of the conference, in my view, was how to use your wealth in smart ways to make the world a better place, while continuing to enjoy your own status without undue guilt.
One of the first set of panels was titled, "What does luxury travel mean today?" The moderator began, "'Luxury Travel', couldn't be a better topic for a Saturday!" Of course not, not when everybody in your audience can easily afford luxury travel. [I didn't attend this panel, but the video is available online for attendees.]
"There's a new demand for a different kind of luxury." "The pandemic was a pivot point, it led people to pause and consider 'What does luxury mean to me?'" "Luxury today is much more about the experience." "Real, authentic experiences where you feel like you are part of the community you're visiting."
I can't unroll my eyes, they're stuck now.
Anyway, I first went to "Can the US win the tech race with China?"
In the opinion of the panelists, OBVIOUSLY the US will WIN, especially with the help of Europe, Japan, India, South Korea, etc. It's the entire WORLD v. China (and poor incompetent Russia). And it seems that working with China to make the world a better place is not even one of our options anymore. We're so smug. But one panelist did admit that China is setting up more technology startups annually than any other country. And that in the US our VC (venture capital not the vietcong) has made a mistake by focusing too much on software and not enough on hardware, losing the hardware technology race to tiny little vulnerable Taiwan which could be easily blockaded by China any day now. They estimated it would take us 10 years to build replacement factories for the chips we get from Taiwan, if we could build them at all.
The second panel I attended, "Decoupling, a new Cold War or just teething pains between two great powers?", was really a continuation of the same discussion with a mostly different group of panelists. Neither of these two panels included ANYBODY FROM CHINA (or even anybody of Asian ethnicity), I mean, why bother having a dialogue with our supposed rival. It's mostly China's fault, BTW, because they've refused to join the rest of the world in embracing neoliberal democracy. Instead China is walking backward into their dark Marxist-Leninist past. And the rest of us must do everything we can to deter China from expanding (mainly by spending more on our military forces), while also "derisking" our bilateral relationship to avoid an "accidental" war before we're ready to defend Taiwan.
-----
Then, the third panel I attended got way more serious about all this crap: "How to stop nuclear war". For this panel, a couple of professional arms control experts talked about game theoretical approaches for reducing the risk of nuclear war. Most people went to see Salman Rushdie instead LOL. I've occasionally mused in my LJ that nuclear weapons have been a good thing, helping us to avoid a direct conflagration between world powers because of our Mutually Assured Destruction. But there is still the possibility of an accidental nuclear exchange, or even a stupidly purposeful one. With nearly 80 years since a nuclear weapon was used in wartime, on average people seem to assign the chance of a nuclear strike at 0% per day, but the panelists suggested we're in a lot more danger than most people think.
-----
We skipped the next group of panels to eat lunch. I grabbed a fortunately empty table, while T stood in the long line for prepackaged ala carte sandwiches, chips, & salads.
Then, while most of the attendees joined long lines to wait to enter the room where Hillary Clinton would eventually speak, instead we attended: "Sounds of life : how to communicate with other species".
This was the best presentation of the entire day!!! Karen Bakker did an amazing job summarizing the current science on how animals and plants use language to communicate with other members of their own species, including how many of them use sound frequencies outside of the human hearing range. With the help of state-of-the-art computing power, scientists have discovered that many species have large vocabularies for communicating with each other, including the use of unique identifiers for each individual (aka names). I had no idea the science had gone so far!! Her lecture made Star Trek's idea of a "universal translator" sound like it could actually become a real thing, and that later in this 21st Century we could be able to speak with animals and plants using software sound translation. OMG. And she was talking science, not science fiction. OMG. She said long before we discover how to communicate with extraterrestrials, we'll be communicating with other terrestrial species here on Earth.
-----
Next, while Hillary actually spoke in the largest room, we attended: "What will we be driving 20 years from now?"
And I was nearly as shocked by this panel. The technologies that are coming for cars ... ... I hadn't imagined anything like it ... ... 3-D printing of individual custom cars using far fewer parts, weighing 40% less, with improved safety and efficiency,
But, all assuming our richer families are still buying individual ground transport vehicles 20 years from now. I didn't feel like the scale of our environmental challenges is fully understood by these panelists or their audience. Although one of the panelists seemed to understand the massive environmental cost of replacing our auto fleets with electrical vehicles. EVs are not "clean" when you include their manufacturing and supply chain footprints.
-----
These were all people who are doing well by capitalism, doing well by technological advances, and their simultaneous concerns for inequality and the environment don't slow them down one bit. They're racing into a more perfect future, assuming they'll be able to solve all the problems they're actually intensifying, with better science, mindful empathy, and electing the proper center-left politicians.
Meanwhile, let's all taste some wines from Portugal! The moderator for the wine tasting asked, "How many of you have been to Portugal?" One-third of the audience raised their hands.
The FT is a London-based newspaper that covers world financial markets much the way the Wall Street Journal does, except with a more center-left approach and none of the Murdoch family's News Corp drama. For example, FT's 2014 Book of the Year award went to Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which I read approvingly), and 2017 award went to Amy Goldstein's Janesville: An American Story (about working class struggles in Wisconsin).
But the FT is by no means a working class newspaper. 90% of its readers own real estate, 75% work for international companies, 32% are C-Suite executives, and 21% are millionaires (measured in Pounds, not counting their primary residence).
-----
I'd never heard of FT's annual US Festival, attending was B's idea, and he footed the cost for the three of us, though T paid for parking and lunch. I didn't pay attention to the event description, I just thought we could all3 have a day together doing something. I didn't focus on the content of the conference until the night before, when we needed to plan what time to wake up and get out the door.
I wasn't interested in attending the more star-studded panels, such as Hillary Clinton's or Salman Rushdie's. I was more interested in what I consider Important Topics. And the wine tasting of course LOL. So the panels I picked (sometimes T and B went to different panels) were super interesting to me, I felt intellectually stimulated by what I heard, and the questions from the audience were well-considered.
But, by 4pm I was ready for the wine tasting, which provided six wines from Portugal, and surprisingly -- a full glass of each. I literally could not drink six entire glasses of wine in the 45 minutes allotted, but I did scoop up the leftover #4 from all3 of us into one glass and took it with me. #4 was my favorite. #5 was Goddess-Awful. The others were fine. I'm not really a wine snob, as long as it tastes good to me I don't care how much it costs or where it came from.
After that speed tasting we'd been onsite for six hours and were ready to leave, so we skipped the final two sessions. We ordered delivery food on the way home and prepared to eat it outside, but then it started raining, so no hot tub time either. T went to bed early, B stayed up with me to watch the 3rd episode of BEEF.
-----
The attendees were obviously affluent, from their dress and hairstyles they all looked like well-paid professionals, wearing their Saturday best. Even if somebody dared to wear jeans like I did, they were $200+ designer jeans like mine LOL. I'd say attendees were generally middle-aged, though some brought along their tiny kids in sport-utility strollers. In general, these were people for whom capitalism works well. But they mainly fit the center-left set of wealthy people. There was a lot of concern expressed for dealing with climate change and species extinction, although not at the expense of anybody's living standard. People felt that neoliberal capitalism was unsustainable without some sort of social democratic regulation, or else workers would join the populist right and fuck everything up. Each attendee received a free book published by the Ford Foundation about a New Gospel of Wealth.
In From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth, Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, articulates a bold vision for philanthropy in the twenty-first century. With contributions from an array of thinkers, activists, and leaders including Ai-jen Poo, Laurene Powell Jobs, David Rockefeller Jr., and Dr. Elizabeth Alexander, Walker challenges and emboldens readers to consider philanthropy as a tool for achieving economic, social, and political justice.
I tried skimming this book and then literally tossed it away from me onto a table after reading one horrible quote out loud: "Practicing a New Gospel of Wealth doesn't necessitate the death of our ego, but it does require us to monitor it." I don't believe I've seen a single sentence that bastardizes both Christianity and Buddhism so efficiently.
UGH!!
-----
The theme of the conference, in my view, was how to use your wealth in smart ways to make the world a better place, while continuing to enjoy your own status without undue guilt.
One of the first set of panels was titled, "What does luxury travel mean today?" The moderator began, "'Luxury Travel', couldn't be a better topic for a Saturday!" Of course not, not when everybody in your audience can easily afford luxury travel. [I didn't attend this panel, but the video is available online for attendees.]
"There's a new demand for a different kind of luxury." "The pandemic was a pivot point, it led people to pause and consider 'What does luxury mean to me?'" "Luxury today is much more about the experience." "Real, authentic experiences where you feel like you are part of the community you're visiting."
I can't unroll my eyes, they're stuck now.
Anyway, I first went to "Can the US win the tech race with China?"
In the opinion of the panelists, OBVIOUSLY the US will WIN, especially with the help of Europe, Japan, India, South Korea, etc. It's the entire WORLD v. China (and poor incompetent Russia). And it seems that working with China to make the world a better place is not even one of our options anymore. We're so smug. But one panelist did admit that China is setting up more technology startups annually than any other country. And that in the US our VC (venture capital not the vietcong) has made a mistake by focusing too much on software and not enough on hardware, losing the hardware technology race to tiny little vulnerable Taiwan which could be easily blockaded by China any day now. They estimated it would take us 10 years to build replacement factories for the chips we get from Taiwan, if we could build them at all.
The second panel I attended, "Decoupling, a new Cold War or just teething pains between two great powers?", was really a continuation of the same discussion with a mostly different group of panelists. Neither of these two panels included ANYBODY FROM CHINA (or even anybody of Asian ethnicity), I mean, why bother having a dialogue with our supposed rival. It's mostly China's fault, BTW, because they've refused to join the rest of the world in embracing neoliberal democracy. Instead China is walking backward into their dark Marxist-Leninist past. And the rest of us must do everything we can to deter China from expanding (mainly by spending more on our military forces), while also "derisking" our bilateral relationship to avoid an "accidental" war before we're ready to defend Taiwan.
-----
Then, the third panel I attended got way more serious about all this crap: "How to stop nuclear war". For this panel, a couple of professional arms control experts talked about game theoretical approaches for reducing the risk of nuclear war. Most people went to see Salman Rushdie instead LOL. I've occasionally mused in my LJ that nuclear weapons have been a good thing, helping us to avoid a direct conflagration between world powers because of our Mutually Assured Destruction. But there is still the possibility of an accidental nuclear exchange, or even a stupidly purposeful one. With nearly 80 years since a nuclear weapon was used in wartime, on average people seem to assign the chance of a nuclear strike at 0% per day, but the panelists suggested we're in a lot more danger than most people think.
-----
We skipped the next group of panels to eat lunch. I grabbed a fortunately empty table, while T stood in the long line for prepackaged ala carte sandwiches, chips, & salads.
Then, while most of the attendees joined long lines to wait to enter the room where Hillary Clinton would eventually speak, instead we attended: "Sounds of life : how to communicate with other species".
This was the best presentation of the entire day!!! Karen Bakker did an amazing job summarizing the current science on how animals and plants use language to communicate with other members of their own species, including how many of them use sound frequencies outside of the human hearing range. With the help of state-of-the-art computing power, scientists have discovered that many species have large vocabularies for communicating with each other, including the use of unique identifiers for each individual (aka names). I had no idea the science had gone so far!! Her lecture made Star Trek's idea of a "universal translator" sound like it could actually become a real thing, and that later in this 21st Century we could be able to speak with animals and plants using software sound translation. OMG. And she was talking science, not science fiction. OMG. She said long before we discover how to communicate with extraterrestrials, we'll be communicating with other terrestrial species here on Earth.
-----
Next, while Hillary actually spoke in the largest room, we attended: "What will we be driving 20 years from now?"
And I was nearly as shocked by this panel. The technologies that are coming for cars ... ... I hadn't imagined anything like it ... ... 3-D printing of individual custom cars using far fewer parts, weighing 40% less, with improved safety and efficiency,
But, all assuming our richer families are still buying individual ground transport vehicles 20 years from now. I didn't feel like the scale of our environmental challenges is fully understood by these panelists or their audience. Although one of the panelists seemed to understand the massive environmental cost of replacing our auto fleets with electrical vehicles. EVs are not "clean" when you include their manufacturing and supply chain footprints.
-----
These were all people who are doing well by capitalism, doing well by technological advances, and their simultaneous concerns for inequality and the environment don't slow them down one bit. They're racing into a more perfect future, assuming they'll be able to solve all the problems they're actually intensifying, with better science, mindful empathy, and electing the proper center-left politicians.
Meanwhile, let's all taste some wines from Portugal! The moderator for the wine tasting asked, "How many of you have been to Portugal?" One-third of the audience raised their hands.