F. Scott Fitzgerald said the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time. I suggest these: The world is registering important progress, but it also faces mortal threats. The first belief should empower us to act on the second.
One of the greats confronts the pressures of fame in a most public forum.
BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
MAR 7, 2017
Originally published as a three-part series in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Esquire.
Part I: The Crack-Up
Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.
Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both. It seemed a romantic business to be a successful literary man—you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived; you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent. Of course within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied—but I, for one, would not have chosen any other.
But when people are asked about their countries, they switch from Pollyanna to Eeyore: everyone else is miserable, they insist, and the world is going to hell in a handcart.
(Nicholas Kristof)
Readers often assume that because I cover war, poverty and human rights abuses, I must be gloomy, an Eeyore with a pen. But I’m actually upbeat, because I’ve witnessed transformational change.
the donkey in the Winnie-the-Pooh books by A A Milne. He is always complaining about things in a very sad way. His name comes from the sound a donkey makes.
「理性」や「啓蒙」なんて言葉を使うのが気恥ずかしい時代になっていますが、「理性によって世界は良くなる」という信頼を取り戻そうという本が出るとか。本を書いたのは有名なスティーブンピンカー教授。英検にも出た本の続編になるそう。The follow-up to Pinker’s groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Natureとなっています。
THE CASE FOR REASON, SCIENCE, HUMANISM, AND PROGRESS
By STEVEN PINKER
ABOUT ENLIGHTENMENT NOW
“A terrific book…[Pinker] recounts the progress across a broad array of metrics, from health to wars, the environment to happiness, equal rights to quality of life.” —The New York Times
The follow-up to Pinker’s groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Nature presents the big picture of human progress: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.
Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.
Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature–tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking–which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation.
With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.
Reading the news today does not exactly leave you feeling optimistic. Hurricanes in the Americas. Horrific mass shootings. Global tensions over nuclear arms, crisis in Myanmar, bloody civil wars in Syria and Yemen. Your heart breaks for every person who is touched by these tragedies. Even for those of us lucky enough not to be directly affected, it may feel like the world is falling apart.
But these events—as awful as they are—have happened in the context of a bigger, positive trend. On the whole, the world is getting better.
This is not some naively optimistic view; it’s backed by data. Look at the number of children who die before their fifth birthday. Since 1990, that figure has been cut in half. That means 122 million children have been saved in a quarter- century, and countless families have been spared the heartbreak of losing a child.
The bad habits of media in turn bring out the worst in human cognition. Our intuitions about risk are driven not by statistics but by images and stories. People rank tornadoes (which kill dozens of Americans a year) as more dangerous than asthma (which kills thousands), presumably because tornadoes make for better television. It’s easy to see how this cognitive bias–stoked by the news policy “If it bleeds, it leads”–could make people conclude the worst about where the world is heading.
Irrational pessimism is also driven by a morbid interest in what can go wrong–and there are always more ways for things to go wrong than to go right. This creates a market for experts to remind us of things that can go wrong that we may have overlooked. Biblical prophets, oped pundits, social critics, dystopian filmmakers and tabloid psychics know they can achieve instant gravitas by warning of an imminent doomsday. Those who point out that the world is getting better–even hardheaded analysts who are just reading out the data–may be dismissed as starry-eyed naïfs.
The cure for these biases is numeracy: basing our sense of the world not on bleeding headlines or gory images but on measures of human flourishing such as longevity, literacy, prosperity and peace. Numbers, after all, aggregate the good and the bad, the things that happen and the things that don’t. A quantitative mind-set, despite its nerdy aura, is not just a smarter way to understand the world but the morally enlightened one. It treats every human life as equal, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of our problems and thereby implement the measures that are most likely to solve them.
Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor, explores the gains in a terrific book due out next month, “Enlightenment Now,” in which he recounts the progress across a broad array of metrics, from health to wars, the environment to happiness, equal rights to quality of life. “Intellectuals hate progress,” he writes, referring to the reluctance to acknowledge gains, and I know it feels uncomfortable to highlight progress at a time of global threats. But this pessimism is counterproductive and simply empowers the forces of backwardness.
President Trump rode this gloom to the White House. The idea “Make America Great Again” professes a nostalgia for a lost Eden. But really? If that was, say, the 1950s, the U.S. also had segregation, polio and bans on interracial marriage, gay sex and birth control. Most of the world lived under dictatorships, two-thirds of parents had a child die before age 5, and it was a time of nuclear standoffs, of pea soup smog, of frequent wars, of stifling limits on women and of the worst famine in history.
What moment in history would you prefer to live in?
I’ve never been “optimistic” in the sense of just seeing the glass as half-full — only in the sense of looking at trend lines rather than headlines. It’s irrational both to ignore good developments and to put a happy face on bad ones.
As it happens, most global, long-term trends have been positive. As for the future, I like the distinction drawn by the economist Paul Romer between complacent optimism, the feeling of a child waiting for presents, and conditional optimism, the feeling of a child who wants a treehouse and realizes that if he gets some wood and nails and persuades other kids to help him, he can build one. I am not complacently optimistic about the future; I am conditionally optimistic.
Bill Gates
I’m not trying to downplay the work that remains. Being an optimist doesn’t mean you ignore tragedy and injustice. It means you’re inspired to look for people making progress on those fronts, and to help spread that progress more widely. If you’re shocked by the idea of millions of children dying, you ask: Who is good at saving kids, and how can we help them do more? (This is essentially why Melinda and I started our foundation.)
Nicholas Kristof
F. Scott Fitzgerald said the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time. I suggest these: The world is registering important progress, but it also faces mortal threats. The first belief should empower us to act on the second.
Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education.
BRYAN CAPLAN JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 ISSUE
Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well that nothing the philosopher learned at Stanford will be relevant to this job.
The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you signal by mastering them. This is not a fringe idea. Michael Spence, Kenneth Arrow, and Joseph Stiglitz—all Nobel laureates in economics—made seminal contributions to the theory of educational signaling. Every college student who does the least work required to get good grades silently endorses the theory. But signaling plays almost no role in public discourse or policy making. As a society, we continue to push ever larger numbers of students into ever higher levels of education. The main effect is not better jobs or greater skill levels, but a credentialist arms race.
I’m cynical about students. The vast majority are philistines. I’m cynical about teachers. The vast majority are uninspiring. I’m cynical about “deciders”—the school officials who control what students study. The vast majority think they’ve done their job as long as students comply.
Those who search their memory will find noble exceptions to these sad rules. I have known plenty of eager students and passionate educators, and a few wise deciders. Still, my 40 years in the education industry leave no doubt that they are hopelessly outnumbered. Meritorious education survives but does not thrive.
Indeed, today’s college students are less willing than those of previous generations to do the bare minimum of showing up for class and temporarily learning whatever’s on the test. Fifty years ago, college was a full-time job. The typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying. Effort has since collapsed across the board. “Full time” college students now average 27 hours of academic work a week—including just 14 hours spent studying.
What does this mean for the individual student? Would I advise an academically well-prepared 18-year-old to skip college because she won’t learn much of value? Absolutely not. Studying irrelevancies for the next four years will impress future employers and raise her income potential. If she tried to leap straight into her first white-collar job, insisting, “I have the right stuff to graduate, I just choose not to,” employers wouldn’t believe her. To unilaterally curtail your education is to relegate yourself to a lower-quality pool of workers. For the individual, college pays.
This does not mean, however, that higher education paves the way to general prosperity or social justice. When we look at countries around the world, a year of education appears to raise an individual’s income by 8 to 11 percent. By contrast, increasing education across a country’s population by an average of one year per person raises the national income by only 1 to 3 percent. In other words, education enriches individuals much more than it enriches nations.
The conventional view—that education pays because students learn—assumes that the typical student acquires, and retains, a lot of knowledge. She doesn’t. Teachers often lament summer learning loss: Students know less at the end of summer than they did at the beginning. But summer learning loss is only a special case of the problem of fade-out: Human beings have trouble retaining knowledge they rarely use. Of course, some college graduates use what they’ve learned and thus hold on to it—engineers and other quantitative types, for example, retain a lot of math. But when we measure what the average college graduate recalls years later, the results are discouraging, to say the least.
An economist makes a powerful case against education. Suppose you always wanted to date tall and good-looking people, and believe yourself to be tall and good-looking too. There’s a club in your city called Lucky’s where all the tall and good-looking people go, so you show up there. But you can’t get in. The bouncer stops you.
“Only tall and good-looking people are allowed in.”
“I’m tall and good-looking, though.”
“Only tall and good-looking people with the proper credentials.” At this point, as he’s letting in another batch of the long and luscious, you notice that most of them are presenting the bouncer with a fancy piece of paper that says, “100% certified tall and good-looking.”
Aha, you say. I need that fancy paper. You go to the marketplace and find a confusing system of stalls and shops selling various kinds of fancy paper. Some of them won’t even look at you. Finally you notice a guy beckoning from an alley: “Psst. Tall-and-good-looking credentials right here.”
“How much?” you say.
“Only $60,000,” he says. “Plus four years of your life. Deal?”
You smell something fishy. And yet you go ahead with it. You take out loans. You spend four years of your life doing baffling chores. And you get your tall-and-good-looking credential. But when you take it back to the club, the bouncer just sneers at you. “We don’t accept credentials from this place.”
At this point you catch a glimpse of your reflection in someone’s car window. And you realize you’re 4′11″ and look like the Joker after he fell into a vat of acid. The guy you owe $60,000 is laughing.
“Education’s like John Gotti,” Bryan Caplan writes in a new broadside against the U.S. system. “Guilty as sin, but everyone’s petrified to testify against it.”
By Peter Coy
Caplan’s solution—slashing public support for public education—is what’s problematic. He argues that if subsidies were taken away, poor youths who couldn’t afford college would be unharmed, because employers would begin to view a diploma as a signal of family money, not brains. Maybe. But those strivers would also be deprived of the human capital that college builds—which even Caplan estimates at a fifth of the value of a degree and some other economists say is substantially higher. In a 2015 column for the Hechinger Report, an education website, Andre Perry, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, writes that the cliché “college isn’t for everyone” is code for “those people aren’t smart enough for college.”
Caplan is right that higher education consumes too much time and money for too little benefit. But the system needs to change in a way that would narrow society’s gaps, not widen them.
In October 1999 I was invited by the German poet Christoph Heubner on behalf of the International Auschwitz Committee to spend a few days visiting the former concentration camp. My accommodation was at the Auschwitz Youth Meeting Centre on the road between the first Auschwitz camp and the Birkenau death camp two miles away. I was shown around these sites and met, informally, three survivors. I felt I'd come close, geographically at least, to the heart of the dark force under whose shadow my generation had grown up. At Birkenau, on a wet afternoon, I stood before the rubbled remains of the gas chambers – now strangely neglected and unattended – left much as the Germans had left them after blowing them up and fleeing the Red Army. They were now just damp, broken slabs, exposed to the harsh Polish climate, deteriorating year by year. My hosts talked about their dilemma. Should these remains be protected? Should perspex domes be built to cover them over, to preserve them for the eyes of succeeding generations? Or should they be allowed, slowly and naturally, to rot away to nothing? It seemed to me a powerful metaphor for a larger dilemma. How were such memories to be preserved? Would the glass domes transform these relics of evil and suffering into tame museum exhibits? What should we choose to remember? When is it better to forget and move on?
I was 44 years old. Until then I'd considered the Second World War, its horrors and its triumphs, as belonging to my parents' generation. But now it occurred to me that before too long, many who had witnessed those huge events at first hand would not be alive. And what then? Did the burden of remembering fall to my own generation? We hadn't experienced the war years, but we'd at least been brought up by parents whose lives had been indelibly shaped by them. Did I, now, as a public teller of stories, have a duty I'd hitherto been unaware of? A duty to pass on, as best I could, these memories and lessons from our parents' generation to the one after our own?
A little while later, I was speaking before an audience in Tokyo, and a questioner from the floor asked, as is common, what I might work on next. More specifically, the questioner pointed out that my books had often concerned individuals who'd lived through times of great social and political upheaval, and who then looked back over their lives and struggled to come to terms with their darker, more shameful memories. Would my future books, she asked, continue to cover a similar territory?
I found myself giving a quite unprepared answer. Yes, I said, I'd often written about such individuals struggling between forgetting and remembering. But in the future, what I really wished to do was to write a story about how a nation or a community faced these same questions. Does a nation remember and forget in much the same way as an individual does? Or are there important differences? What exactly are the memories of a nation? Where are they kept? How are they shaped and controlled? Are there times when forgetting is the only way to stop cycles of violence, or to stop a society disintegrating into chaos or war? On the other hand, can stable, free nations really be built on foundations of wilful amnesia and frustrated justice? I heard myself telling the questioner that I wanted to find a way to write about these things, but that for the moment, unfortunately, I couldn't think how I'd do it.
How do nations handle the sins of the fathers and mothers? Take genocide, or slavery, or political mass murder. After such knowledge, what forgiveness—and what way forward?
The Germans have a word for it, of course: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “coming to terms with the past.” But the concept is applicable far beyond the Nazis—as Americans belatedly recognized when Robert E. Lee shot to the front of the culture wars last August after the riots in Charlottesville, Virginia.
To put the debates over memorializing the Confederacy in context, this issue’s lead package explores how various countries have handled similar problems. There have been all too many crimes in all too many places, but six cases stand out—two of genocide, two of political mass murder, and two of enduring racial oppression. Individually, the articles here delve into how each country has processed its tragic past. Together, they reveal interesting patterns and lessons.
（中略）
Worst practices are easy to identify: denying what actually happened. Best practices are more scattered, but one country leads the field. Germany’s crimes rank with the worst in history. But at least, over time, the right lessons were indeed learned, and responsible engagement with the past has become a new national tradition. (One example is the Stolpersteine plaques—two of which are pictured on the cover, remembering Martin and Sophie Happ, who were murdered at Auschwitz in 1943.)
Perhaps facing a problem so directly and brutally that you coin an actual word for it is a smart idea after all.
There was a limit, as well, to what the Allies could achieve in encouraging or forcing the Germans to come to terms with what they had done. West Germans, the vast majority of the formerly united country’s population, seemed to suffer from a generalized historical and moral amnesia in the postwar years; on the rare occasions when they spoke about the Nazi dictatorship, it was usually to insist that they had known nothing of its crimes and to complain that they had been unfairly victimized and humiliated by the denazification programs and the “victors’ justice” of the war crimes trials. Many still seethed with anger at the Allies’ carpet-bombing of German towns and resented the expulsion of 11 million ethnic Germans by the postwar governments of Hungary, Poland, Romania, and other eastern European countries. An opinion poll carried out in West Germany in 1949 revealed that half the population considered Nazism to be “a good idea, badly carried out.” In the East, the country’s new Stalinist leaders wanted the public to identify with the memory of the communist resistance to Nazism, which had been real enough, but which the authorities massively exaggerated. As a result, East Germans were not really forced to face up to their involvement in the crimes of Nazism at all.
A wave of memorials accompanied and encouraged this collective embrace of the truth. In 1992, the artist Gunter Demnig launched the Stolpersteine (“stumbling blocks”) project, in which small brass plaques the size of cobblestones were laid into the sidewalks of German towns and cities outside the houses where the murdered victims of Nazism had lived until their arrest. The plaques carry the names of the victims and the dates and places of their birth and death. The project quickly became popular as a way of memorializing the dead. To date, more than 56,000 Stolpersteine have been placed in urban locations in some 22 countries, the vast majority in Germany itself. By placing them where people would walk over them, the artist intended to remind passersby of the complicity of ordinary Germans in the violence. Although some towns still resist their placement, the number of these small but powerfully evocative memorials continues to grow.
Larger, more elaborate forms of memorialization took shape, as well. The sites of former concentration camps were turned into large-scale memorials to the victims, with elaborate exhibitions that now took a more comprehensive approach to their subject, replacing the partial view of the Cold War years. The modern Neuengamme prison was closed in 2006. A supermarket built on the grounds of the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp was never opened after widespread protests (although the building itself was not demolished). The camp at Sachsenhausen, to the north of Berlin, in the former East Germany, was cleared of rubble, and a new exhibition center was opened there in 2001. And in 2005, perhaps the highest-profile of these projects opened: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, located in the center of Germany’s new capital, Berlin.
The artist Gunter Demnig remembers the victims of National Socialism by installing commemorative brass plaques in the pavement in front of their last address of choice. There are now STOLPERSTEINE (lit. “stumbling stones or blocks”) in over 610 places in Germany as well as in Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Norway and Ukraine.
Gunter Demnig cites the Talmud saying that "a person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten". The Stolpersteine in front of the buildings bring back to memory the people who once lived here. Each “stone” begins with HERE LIVED… One “stone”. One name. One person.
For 120 euros, anybody can sponsor a stone, its manufacture and its installation. Please contact info(at)stolpersteine.eu for more information.
過去の暗部とどう向き合うのか。その難しさはイシグロの言葉によく現れています。
I found myself giving a quite unprepared answer. Yes, I said, I'd often written about such individuals struggling between forgetting and remembering. But in the future, what I really wished to do was to write a story about how a nation or a community faced these same questions. Does a nation remember and forget in much the same way as an individual does? Or are there important differences? What exactly are the memories of a nation? Where are they kept? How are they shaped and controlled? Are there times when forgetting is the only way to stop cycles of violence, or to stop a society disintegrating into chaos or war? On the other hand, can stable, free nations really be built on foundations of wilful amnesia and frustrated justice? I heard myself telling the questioner that I wanted to find a way to write about these things, but that for the moment, unfortunately, I couldn't think how I'd do it.
イギリスでは昨年の8月に出た本ですが、ようやくGhosts of the Tsunamiを読み始めました。著者の Richard Lloyd Parry さんはイギリス人女性ルーシー・ブラックマンさんの事件を追った本も書いているので動画では二つの本について触れています。この動画でParryさんにとって二つの本が繋がっていることがわかりました。
I think the truth is with stories like this that even though the court case came to an end and the criminal received justice. The truth is rather like the tsunami emotionally these stories don't just end, they never wrap up. There's no...
Lucy's mother once said to me, "People talk to me about finding closure and I don't know what that means, what am I going to close? And how am I going to close it?
When you suffered a loss like that, when you've lost your home and your family in the tsunami, or you've lost your daughter to a killer in a foreign country, there's no catharsis, really. There's no closure. The best you can do is accommodate the new reality that you face.
Its government is virtual, borderless, blockchained, and secure. Has this tiny post-Soviet nation found the way of the future?
By Nathan Heller
Up the Estonian coast, a five-lane highway bends with the path of the sea, then breaks inland, leaving cars to follow a thin road toward the houses at the water’s edge. There is a gated community here, but it is not the usual kind. The gate is low—a picket fence—as if to prevent the dunes from riding up into the street. The entrance is blocked by a railroad-crossing arm, not so much to keep out strangers as to make sure they come with intent. Beyond the gate, there is a schoolhouse, and a few homes line a narrow drive. From Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, you arrive dazed: trees trace the highway, and the cars go fast, as if to get in front of something that no one can see.
Within this gated community lives a man, his family, and one vision of the future. Taavi Kotka, who spent four years as Estonia’s chief information officer, is one of the leading public faces of a project known as e-Estonia: a coördinated governmental effort to transform the country from a state into a digital society.
E-Estonia is the most ambitious project in technological statecraft today, for it includes all members of the government, and alters citizens’ daily lives. The normal services that government is involved with—legislation, voting, education, justice, health care, banking, taxes, policing, and so on—have been digitally linked across one platform, wiring up the nation. A lawn outside Kotka’s large house was being trimmed by a small robot, wheeling itself forward and nibbling the grass.
It was during Kotka’s tenure that the e-Estonian goal reached its fruition. Today, citizens can vote from their laptops and challenge parking tickets from home. They do so through the “once only” policy, which dictates that no single piece of information should be entered twice. Instead of having to “prepare” a loan application, applicants have their data—income, debt, savings—pulled from elsewhere in the system. There’s nothing to fill out in doctors’ waiting rooms, because physicians can access their patients’ medical histories. Estonia’s system is keyed to a chip-I.D. card that reduces typically onerous, integrative processes—such as doing taxes—to quick work. “If a couple in love would like to marry, they still have to visit the government location and express their will,” Andrus Kaarelson, a director at the Estonian Information Systems Authority, says. But, apart from transfers of physical property, such as buying a house, all bureaucratic processes can be done online.
So far, twenty-eight thousand people have applied for e-residency, mostly from neighboring countries: Finland and Russia. But Italy and Ukraine follow, and U.K. applications spiked during Brexit. (Many applicants are footloose entrepreneurs or solo venders who want to be based in the E.U.) Because eighty-eight per cent of applicants are men, the United Nations has begun seeking applications for female entrepreneurs in India.
“There are so many companies in the world for whom working across borders is a big hassle and a source of expense,” Siim Sikkut, Estonia’s current C.I.O., says. Today, in Estonia, the weekly e-residency application rate exceeds the birth rate. “We tried to make more babies, but it’s not that easy,” he explained.
New Yorkerの記事を紹介するつもりだったのが日経もやるじゃんという形になってしまいましたが、日本での取り上げられ方は日本の（政府）ニーズに合わせた切り取られ方をしやすく断片的で全体像はなかなか掴みにくいものです。その点、8000語近くの長さのあるNew Yorkerの記事なら実情をある程度全体像で理解できます。
Taylor Swift proves, once again, that she knows how to make music magic with the brand new video for her hit single “End Game.”
Released in the early a.m. hours on Friday, the Joseph Kahn-directed clip features Swift living her best life across three countries, with scenes shot in Tokyo, Japan, Miami, Florida and London, England.
Manufacturers sometimes refer to companies in their supply chain as tier one and tier two suppliers. The terms indicate the commercial distance in the relationship between the manufacturer and supplier. Although supply tiers can apply to any industry, the terms most commonly describe manufacturer and supplier relationships in the automotive industry.
*******
Tier One
Tier one companies are direct suppliers to OEMs. The term is especially common in the automobile industry and refers to major suppliers of parts to OEMs. For example, Sensata Technologies is a tier one supplier of exhaust gas sensors to automotive OEMs.
Tier Two
Tier two companies are the key suppliers to tier one suppliers, without supplying a product directly to OEM companies. However, a single company may be a tier one supplier to one company and a tier two supplier to another company, or may be a tier one supplier for one product and a tier two supplier for a different product line.
Locals recall singer who brought Limerick to the global stage and forefront of world music
about an hour ago Updated: 52 minutes ago
David Raleigh
There was widespread shock in Dolores O’Riordan’s native Limerick following the announcement of her untimely death. The Cranberries lead singer had been rehearsing in Limerick venue Dolan’s Warehouse last month and had been planning a home town gig, said staff.
A book of condolence is expected to open from 10am, Tuesday morning, at Limerick City and County Council’s headquarters at Merchants Quay. Local singer-songwriter Brian O’Connor said he was in “shock” following news of her death.
冒頭の動画はカナダのメディアですがに、カナダに移住していたので扱いが大きいのでしょうか。そこで紹介されていたツイートでxo=hug and kissという表現を知りました。
The Cranberries@The_Cranberries
2017年12月20日
Hi All, Dolores here. Feeling good! I did my first bit of gigging in months at the weekend, performed a few songs at the Billboard annual staff holiday party in New York with the house band. Really enjoyed it! Happy Christmas to all our fans!! Xo
(Wikipedia)
Hugs and kisses or xoxo is a term used for expressing sincerity, faith, love, or good friendship at the end of a written letter, email or SMS text message.
90年代に世界的にヒットしたバンドなので若い人は知らないかもしれませんね。でも昨年活動を再開したときのニュースでThe Cranberries were the most successful Irish band since U2.と紹介されています。
With a ‘Best Of’ album on the way, The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan and Noel Hogan talk about past regrets, future plans
Fri, Apr 14, 2017, 06:15
Within a year, however, all was to change: in the US as support to (the then much better gamble) Suede, MTV put the videos for Linger and Dreams into, as they said back then, “heavy rotation”. Before O’Riordan could do a dainty jig, The Cranberries were the most successful Irish band since U2. The level of achievement, she admits, came much too quickly.
“It would have been easier if we had had more experience with the actual music industry – we were very young and very naïve, sheltered. Fame was extraordinary, really.”
O’Riordan is similarly enthused, but not at any price, which seems fair enough considering her previous experience at being on the top while feeling rock bottom. Lessons learned, and all of that.
“Hopefully, after this tour we’ll write new material, but at the same token I genuinely don’t expect to be as successful as we once were. The 1990s was our time for that, I think – we were hungry and on fire. Now, we’re older, we have kids, and I know we’ll never get those earlier moments back again. Not that I want them.”
Yes, markets are soaring and the economy isn't bad, but citizens are divided. Governments aren't doing much governing. And the global order is unraveling.
The scale of the world's political challenges is daunting. Liberal democracies have less legitimacy than at any time since World War II, and most of their structural problems don't appear fixable. Today's strongest leaders show little interest in civil society or common values.
In the 20 years since we started Eurasia Group, the global environment has had its ups and downs. But if we had to pick one year for a big unexpected crisis—the geopolitical equivalent of the 2008 financial meltdown—it feels like 2018. Sorry.
“The sword of Damocles is hanging over the head of the credit markets. After two years rallying, credit markets now look expensive on every metric.” So say credit analysts at French bank Societe Generale.
They argue markets have gone from averagely priced last year to very expensive now. Current ratings and default trends look pretty encouraging, but that will change as the year progresses as investors start to price in lower U.S. growth in 2019.
Two specific sectors are areas for concern: Chinese property market wobbles could turn into something far more serious, while U.S. tech firms are leveraged too high and rely too heavily on advertising.
(literary) a bad or unpleasant thing that might happen to you at any time and that makes you feel worried or frightened
From the legend in which Damocles had to sit at a meal at the court of Dionysius with a sword hanging by a single hair above his head. He had praised Dionysius’ happiness, and Dionysius wanted him to understand how quickly happiness can be lost.
Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.
THE 19TH PARTY CONGRESS MARKED A TURNING POINT in China's contemporary history, and the speech President Xi Jinping gave there will eventually be recognized as the most geopolitically noteworthy event since Mikhail Gorbachev formally dissolved the Soviet Union. Until last year, China had avoided talk of global leadership. Its diplomatic rhetoric was seldom ideological, let alone evangelical, but in 2017, Beijing publicly shifted its official strategy. China is no longer biding its time. Xi has now consolidated enough domestic power to redefine China's external environment and set new rules within it. He benefits from lucky timing: Trump has renounced the US commitment to Washington-led multilateralism and generated much uncertainty about the future US role in Asia, creating a power vacuum that China can now begin to fill.
タイトルでChina loves a vacuumとあってすぐにピンと来なくてもどのようなものか第一パラグラフの最後に説明してくれています。
He benefits from lucky timing: Trump has renounced the US commitment to Washington-led multilateralism and generated much uncertainty about the future US role in Asia, creating a power vacuum that China can now begin to fill.
中国がリスクというからには何かしらの危険を伴うもの。その危険性については以下のように書いています。The dangers are three-fold. First, / Sedond, / Lastlyという書き方はそのままライティングにパクれますね。
The dangers are three-fold. First, the global business environment will have to adapt to a whole new set of rules, standards, and practices pushed by China and diverging regulatory environments that will raise the cost of doing business. （中略）
Second, there will be pushback against China's further expansion that polarizes Asia by pitting China on the one hand against the US and its regional allies on the other. （中略）
Lastly, Xi's growing assertiveness risks negative effects at home and creates a long-term threat to the Chinese model. （後略）
Technology. China and the US are leading the charge on investment in new technology—in artificial intelligence (AI), in particular. For the US, leadership comes from the private sector. In China, it comes from the state, which aligns with the country's most powerful companies and institutions, and works to ensure the population is more in tune with what the state wants. That's a powerful stabilizing force for the authoritarian and state capitalist Chinese government. Other governments will find the model compelling, especially those most worried about potential social unrest within their borders. And China's economic clout will align tech sectors within smaller nations with Chinese standards and firms.
New Yorkerはそのあたりの具体例として顔認証の技術について触れています。国家権力が個人のプライバシーよりも優越しているからできることがわかります。ここからはNew Yorkerの記事の抜粋です。
SenseTime’s offices have a sleek, industrial look. Nobody wears an identification badge, because cameras recognize employees, causing doors to open. I was met there by June Jin, the chief marketing officer, who earned an M.B.A. at the University of Chicago and worked at Microsoft, Apple, and Tesla. Jin walked me over to a display of lighthearted commercial uses of facial-recognition technology. I stepped before a machine, which resembled a slender A.T.M., that assessed my “happiness” and other attributes, guessed that I am a thirty-three-year-old male, and, based on that information, played me an advertisement for skateboarding attire. When I stepped in front of it again, it revised its calculation to forty-one years old, and played me an ad for liquor. (I was, at the time, forty.) The machines are used in restaurants to entertain waiting guests. But they contain a hidden element of artificial intelligence as well: images are collected and compared with a facial database of V.I.P. customers. “A waiter or waitress comes up and maybe we get you a seat,” Jin said. “That’s the beauty of A.I.”
Next, Jin showed me how the technology is used by police. She said, “We work very closely with the Public Security Bureau,” which applies SenseTime’s algorithms to millions of photo I.D.s. As a demonstration, using the company’s employee database, a video screen displayed a live feed of a busy intersection nearby. “In real time, it captures all the attributes of the cars and pedestrians,” she said. On an adjoining screen, a Pac-Man-like trail indicated a young man’s movements around the city, based only on his face. Jin said, “It can match a suspect with a criminal database. If the similarity level is over a certain threshold, then they can make an arrest on the spot.” She continued, “We work with more than forty police bureaus nationwide. Guangdong Province is always very open-minded and embracing technology, so, last year alone, we helped the Guangdong police bureau solve many crimes.”
In the U.S., where police departments and the F.B.I. are adopting comparable technology, facial recognition has prompted congressional debates about privacy and policing. The courts have yet to clarify when a city or a company can track a person’s face. Under what conditions can biometric data be used to find suspects of a crime, or be sold to advertisers? In Xi Jinping’s China, which values order over the rights of the individual, there are few such debates. In the city of Shenzhen, the local government uses facial recognition to deter jaywalkers. (At busy intersections, it posts their names and I.D. pictures on a screen at the roadside.) In Beijing, the government uses facial-recognition machines in public rest rooms to stop people from stealing toilet paper; it limits users to sixty centimetres within a nine-minute period.
New Yorkerの記事は長いので興味ある人は一緒に掲載されていた一帯一路の写真を見ながら自分のペースで読んでいくのがいいでしょう。
This ETS publication is designed to expand the language you can understand and use with other English speakers. We are happy to provide you the tools to help you succeed.
丁寧に調べてみると英和辞典でもこの語形を取り上げています。
（ウィズダム）
▸ provide those children with food≒provide food for those children
その子供たちに食物を与える
(!｟コーパス｠｟まれ｠にwithを省略した形も見られるが正用法とは考えられていない)
（オーレックス）
｟+[目A]+[目]A｠ ｟米｠AにB（必要なもの）を与える
Our hosts provided us food and drink.
主催者は我々に飲食物を提供してくれた
（ジーニアス）
《◆時にS V O1 O2の形でも用いる；単に足りない物を補充する場合はsupply》
（ルミナス）
【言い換え】 Bees provide us with honey. <V+O+with+名･代>＝《米》 Bees provide us honey. <V+O+O> みつばちは私たちにはちみつを与えてくれる
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