Buffett defended his decision to keep virtually all of his fortune in Berkshire stock. The 90-year-old billionaire has pledged to give over 99% of his net worth to philanthropic causes, and has already donated about half of his nearly 475,000 "A" shares since 2006, he said.
Moreover, Buffett calculated the tax benefits from his donations to date at less than 50 cents for every $1,000 he's given away. He also prefers to hand his cash to charities, instead of giving it to the federal government to pay off the national debt.
"I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing US debt," he said.
The left starts out with a stronger bias toward the public sector in many of these areas. To which I say, prove the superior model! Demonstrate that the public sector can build better hospitals, better schools, better transportation, better cities, better housing. Stop trying to protect the old, the entrenched, the irrelevant; commit the public sector fully to the future. Milton Friedman once said the great public sector mistake is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. Instead of taking that as an insult, take it as a challenge — build new things and show the results!
They use a tax strategy known as "buy, borrow, die." It’s like the ultrawealthy are living on another planet. Average people need income to pay for basics like housing and food. But the ultrawealthy don’t. They can just live on borrowed cash.
The ultrawealthy buy an asset or build a company or inherit a fortune. As long as they don’t sell, they owe no taxes. They keep their income as low as possible, since every dollar they earn can be taxed.
So the ultrawealthy use loan money to fund their lifestyles. That’s how a billionaire can live the most luxurious life imaginable, while reporting little to no taxable income.
When they die, these lucky few often use complicated trusts and philanthropic foundations to avoid the estate tax. And their heirs can inherit stocks and other assets tax-free. A new generation is ultrawealthy, and the cycle starts all over again.
ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.
Roth IRAs were intended to help average working Americans save, but IRS records show Thiel and other ultrawealthy investors have used them to amass vast untaxed fortunes.
We are disclosing the tax details of the richest Americans because we believe the public interest in an informed debate outweighs privacy considerations.
You see it in education. We have top-end universities, yes, but with the capacity to teach only a microscopic percentage of the 4 million new 18 year olds in the U.S. each year, or the 120 million new 18 year olds in the world each year. Why not educate every 18 year old? Isn’t that the most important thing we can possibly do? Why not build a far larger number of universities, or scale the ones we have way up? The last major innovation in K-12 education was Montessori, which traces back to the 1960s; we’ve been doing education research that’s never reached practical deployment for 50 years since; why not build a lot more great K-12 schools using everything we now know? We know one-to-one tutoring can reliably increase education outcomes by two standard deviations (the Bloom two-sigma effect); we have the internet; why haven’t we built systems to match every young learner with an older tutor to dramatically improve student success?
The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things.
The right starts out in a more natural, albeit compromised, place. The right is generally pro production, but is too often corrupted by forces that hold back market-based competition and the building of things. The right must fight hard against crony capitalism, regulatory capture, ossified oligopolies, risk-inducing offshoring, and investor-friendly buybacks in lieu of customer-friendly (and, over a longer period of time, even more investor-friendly) innovation.
By WILL KENTON Reviewed by MICHAEL J BOYLE Updated Mar 1, 2021
What Is Regulatory Capture?
Regulatory capture is an economic theory that says regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the industries or interests they are charged with regulating. The result is that an agency, charged with acting in the public interest, instead acts in ways that benefit incumbent firms in the industry it is supposed to be regulating.
Regulatory capture is an economic theory that regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the interests they regulate and not by the public interest.
The result is that the agency instead acts in ways that benefit the interests it is supposed to be regulating.
Industries devote large budgets to influencing regulators, while individual citizens spend only limited resources to advocate for their own rights.
Ghost kitchen, dark kitchen, virtual kitchen, cloud kitchen, whatever you call them, they’re popping up everywhere, with estimates placing the number at 1,500 in the United States. And while it only makes sense in a COVID-19 world where at the peak of lockdowns some 90 percent of restaurant meals were taken off-site, “the development of these virtual kitchens was well underway before the pandemic,” said Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of research for the National Restaurant Association. Before the coronavirus, “the industry was talking about points of access versus the word locations,” he said, “because in many ways, location has become somewhat of a dated term.”
アメリカ著名ベンチャーキャピタルのアンドリーセン・ホロウィッツ（Andreessen Horowitz/a16z）のCo-FounderであるMarc Andreessen（マーク・アンドリーセン）が新型コロナウイルスの影響により顕在化したアメリカ政府の問題点への批評、そしてウィズコロナ、アフターコロナへの示唆をIt's time to buildというエッセイで公開した。
In Silicon Valley, “disruption” is giving way to “building.” What will be built?
By Anna Wiener
June 15, 2021
What might a new narrative for the tech industry look like? In April of last year, as covid-19 cases spiked across the country, Andreessen published a blog post to his firm’s Web site, titled “IT’S TIME TO BUILD.” “Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings,” Andreessen wrote. He went on to argue that certain shameful facts about the response to the coronavirus—shortages of swabs, reagents, gowns, and surgical masks; the absence of a vaccine or treatment; insufficient and inaccessible bailout funds—were not just failures of action and imagination but evidence of regulatory capture, “inertia,” and a “widespread inability to build.” The consequences of this inability could be seen elsewhere—in housing development, education, manufacturing, and transportation. “You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally,” he wrote. “You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life.” For many readers, the essay was a sequel to “Why Software Is Eating the World”: both a diagnosis and a mission statement.
A strain of wishful, ahistorical thinking pervaded the essay, which ran beneath a stock image of a futuristic, fictional city with gleaming skyscrapers, a blue, unpolluted sky, and no people. Andreessen ignored the role the tech industry had played in accelerating the erosion of some American institutions; his insistence that building should be separated from politics was strange, given that America’s failures in the face of the coronavirus did not occur in the absence of political will.
Between the alien dreadnoughts and debates about occupational licensing, the discourse around “IT’S TIME TO BUILD” looked markedly different from the idealistic, founder-focussed chatter of the twenty-tens. Taken seriously, the essay seemed to be suggesting an entirely new version of Silicon Valley: a movement away from making software to support existing institutions, and toward creating the institutions themselves. If Andreessen’s exhortation to build was a call for “aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward,” it was also a call to power. The era of the builder may also be the era of the Silicon Valley political actor. At the same time, “IT’S TIME TO BUILD” revealed a certain impotence. The sorts of projects Andreessen proposed don’t really make sense under the venture model; they’re unlikely to be as profitable as the products that have come out of Silicon Valley since the popularization of the commercial Internet. Building may need a different set of incentives, investment models, and values. Of course, it could all just be talk.
Media is an institution, too, and one way to change the media narrative about tech is to build a new media. Over the past two years, Andreessen Horowitz has led substantial funding rounds for Substack, the e-mail newsletter platform, and Clubhouse, the audio-based social network. When users sign up for Clubhouse, they are given a list of recommended accounts to follow, which tends to include several Andreessen Horowitz partners; Andreessen himself has five million followers on the app. The firm has about a dozen Clubhouse shows of its own, including “One on One with A and Z,” hosted by Andreessen and Horowitz, and “4B with Margit,” hosted by Wennmachers. Earlier this year, Zuckerberg and Musk both made appearances on “The Good Time Show,” a talk show on Clubhouse; one of its hosts, Sriram Krishnan, recently joined Andreessen Horowitz as a partner.
New Yorkerの記事の直後、6月15日でた彼のサイトでのエッセイでは1年後の彼の立場の変化が見て取れます。
By the way, getting a corporate job is great but there's nothing wrong with a side hustle at night. That's what millions of Americans are doing now supplements their income. And that's not going to stop the whole world has changed. It's pivoted digital. You can do two things work corporate and side hustle and bring in another 15 to 20,00 a year. It's worth doing.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, it dealt a crushing blow to the global travel industry. Flight and hotel bookings came to an abrupt halt as countries closed their borders, and government lockdowns and quarantines became the norm.
Also left in the wake was the livelihood of thousands of gig economy workers who relied on side hustle income they made working for companies like Uber UBER or Airbnb. With travel shut down, the demand for these services disappeared.
******
While Uber drivers and Airbnb hosts are hopeful for a recovery, many other work-from-home side hustles are booming. Here are just a few of them:
Shark Tank is an American business reality television series that premiered on August 9, 2009 on ABC.[1] The show is the American franchise of the international format Dragons' Den, which originated in Japan as Money Tigers in 2001.[2] It shows entrepreneurs making business presentations to a panel of five investors or "sharks," who decide whether to invest in their company
The use of ”unprecedented” during the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented but it’s not the most overused or abused word or phrase in Australia during the coronavirus crisis.
The coronavirus has created a series of phrases and words now in common usage, many of them descriptive of what’s happening, such as social distancing, lockdown, elbow bump and pivot (as in switch business models).
目を引いたのはpivot (as in switch business models)という言葉。カッコ内に補足説明してくれているように事業転換の意味で使われているようです。新語でトレンドを引き立てるのはコンサルが得意ですので、以下のような考察がありました。
At the ANA, we have used the term “pivot” extensively throughout 2020. Most notably, our portfolio of events made a quick pivot from in-person to virtual. We upgraded the virtual participation experience, and these events have generated tremendous scale. The ANA’s Masters of Marketing Week, for example, had 6,470 registrations — approximately double that of our usual in-person event.
As a great current example of a pivot, when this survey was in the field, Warner Bros. announced it will be releasing all its new 2021 movies in theaters and simultaneously on HBO Max, which it owns. In making this announcement, the Warner Bros. CEO, was quoted as saying, “We’re living in unprecedented times which call for creative solutions.”
Restaurant owners have been especially affected by pandemic lockdown orders. Here are five eateries that have successfully pivoted during these uncertain times.
Some industries are born to adapt, but for many, the changes brought on by months of shutdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic have been too much to weather, and the workforce has felt the impact.
While businesses have been scrambling to adjust to change, so must employees. Whether you are facing a forced career shift, or have taken this time as an opportunity to make a pivot, there are a few key tips to making the change a long term success.
1. Realize that your skills are applicable in more ways than one.
2. Communicate your relevant experience in any interview.
For example, consider some skills that apply to all industries:
Communication skills
Reliability
Problem solving
Punctuality
Self-discipline
3. Have a salary in mind.
4. Familiarize yourself with online tools now.
pivotという語のこのような意味はほとんどの辞典の語義には載っていません。
（ウィズダム）
pivot
1旋回[回転]軸, ピボット; 旋回運動.
2[通例単数形で]中心となる人[物]; 中心点; 要点(pivot point)
ネイティブ向けのウエブスターにはan adjustment or modification made (as to a product, service, or strategy) in order to adapt or improve（適応や改良のために（製品やサービス、戦略などに）施された調整や修正）という意味を載せていました。例文も今の動きを反映したものになっています。
4: a usually marked change
The idea of allowing a [marijuana] dispensary in the city is a pivot from the stance previously held by the council, which voted in early 2018 to ban sales in the city.
— Katie Sobko
especially : an adjustment or modification made (as to a product, service, or strategy) in order to adapt or improve
A global pandemic strikes a business. The adaptable owner assesses the situation, predicts the future, and starts their pivot.
Although the editors have documented many coronavirus-related linguistic shifts, some of their observations are surprising. They claim, for example, that the pandemic has produced only one truly new word: the acronym COVID-19.
Most of the coronavirus-related changes that the editors have noted have to do with older, more obscure words and phrases being catapulted into common usage, such as reproduction number and social distancing. They’ve also documented the creation of new word blends based on previously existing vocabulary.
if your work or a problem gets on top of you, it begins to make you feel unhappy and upset
Things are starting to get on top of him.
ケンブリッジ
get on top of someone
If a difficult situation gets on top of you, it makes you feel so upset that you cannot deal with it:
She's had a few financial problems, and I think things have just been getting on top of her.
2020年3月の頃の英国ジョンソン首相の演説でもこの表現が使われていました。
1分あたりから
What I want to do is get on top of it, at the moment the disease is proceeding in a way that does not seem to be responding to our intervention. I believe a combination of the measures we are asking the public to take and testing progress will enable us to get on top of this within the next 12 weeks.
All were able to get on top of Covid-19 in 2020 through aggressive actions like strict lockdowns and contact tracing, which were later often replicated by the rest of the world.
Yet in the second year of the pandemic, they are being challenged by new issues. Stronger variants have broken through established defences, creating the worst outbreaks yet in some countries.
After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011, Japan was forced to move away from nuclear power and, in its place, embraced coal as a major energy source. Over the past several years, Kimiko Hirata’s grassroots campaign led to the cancellation of 13 coal power plants (7GW or 7,030MW) in Japan. These coal plants would have released more than 1.6 billion tons of CO2 over their lifetimes. The carbon impact of Hirata’s activism is the equivalent of taking 7.5 million passenger cars off the road every year for 40 years.
Recognising that coal power generation is the single biggest cause of greenhouse gas emissions, and consistent with this overall approach and our strengthened NDCs, domestically we have committed to rapidly scale-up technologies and policies that further accelerate the transition away from unabated coal capacity, consistent with our 2030 NDCs and net zero commitments.
This transition must go hand in hand with policies and support for a just transition for affected workers, and sectors so that no person, group or geographic region is left behind.
To accelerate the international transition away from coal, recognising that continued global investment in unabated coal power generation is incompatible with keeping 1.5°C within reach we stress that international investments in unabated coal must stop now and we commit now to an end to new direct government support for unabated international thermal coal power generation by the end of 2021, including through Official Development Assistance, export finance, investment, and financial and trade promotion support.
This transition must also be complemented by support to deliver this, including coordinating through the Energy Transition Council. We welcome the work by the Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) and donors plan to commit up to $2 billion in the coming year to its Accelerating the Coal Transition and Integrating Renewable Energy programs. These concessional resources are expected to mobilize up to $10 billion in co-financing, including from the private sector, to support renewable energy deployment in developing and emerging economies.
We call on other major economies to adopt such commitments and join us in phasing out the most polluting energy sources, and scaling up investment in the technology and infrastructure to facilitate the clean, green transition.
More broadly, we reaffirm our existing commitment to eliminating inefficient fossil fuel subsidies by 2025, and call on all countries to join us, recognising the substantial financial resource this could unlock globally to support the transition and the need to commit to a clear timeline.
and reiterate our support for the holding of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020 in a safe and secure manner as a symbol of global unity in overcoming COVID-19.
Conservative and Democrat have exactly the same slogan for their economic-recovery plan
Adam Forrest Thursday 05 November 2020 11:05
The phrase comes from disaster relief management, rather than politics.
It was first used by the United Nations in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami — but wasn’t formalised into a structure until 2015, when Build Back Better (BBB) became part of the UN’s official “risk reduction framework” to help prevent future disasters.
It did not catch on in the world of political spin until after the pandemic stuck and lockdowns caused economies around the world to nosedive.
New York governor Andrew Cuomo was the first major politician on either side of the Atlantic to use it when talking about his own state’s recovery plan in April of this year.
サミットに合わせて行われた日米首脳会談ではBuild Back Better Worldという途上国向けのインフラ支援策としても使われているようです。日本の場合は、オリンピック開催支持を取り付けることが最優先課題のようで、ここでも盛り込ませていますね。
President Biden affirmed his support for strengthening our alliance, extending U.S.-Japan cooperation to new areas like the Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative and strengthening our shared ties with other allies and partners. President Biden affirmed his support for the Tokyo Olympic Games moving forward with all public health measures necessary to protect athletes, staff and spectators. President Biden expressed pride in the U.S. athletes who have trained for the Tokyo Games and will be competing in the best traditions of the Olympic spirit.
バイデン大統領は、日米同盟の強化、Build Back Better World(B3W)イニシアチブなど新分野での日米協力の拡充、他の同盟国やパートナーとの共通の関係強化へ向けた支持を確認した。バイデン大統領はまた、選手やスタッフ、観客を守るために必要な公衆衛生対策を万全にし、東京オリンピックを前に進めていくことへの支持を確認した。バイデン大統領は、東京大会に向けてトレーニングを重ね、オリンピック精神という最高の伝統の中で競う米国のアスリートたちを誇りに思うと述べた。
すでにWikipediaで項目が立っていて中国の一帯一路に対抗するものとあります。
(Wikipedia)
Build Back Better World or B3W is an initiative undertaken by G7 countries. Launched in 2021, the initiative is designed to counter China's strategic influence by providing an alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative for the infrastructural development of the low and middle income countries
