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Tech company VK makes Russia's contribution to the Internet with Max to rival WeChat and Whats App. Max has the backing of the Russian government and is a messaging, ecommerce, all aspect platform. Russia learned over the years that its governmental processes could be subverted by apps from overseas. This is also the experience in India where democratic processes can be subverted by apps from overseas. As a result the idea of one internet is not real, internet not of the world, not of the US, not of India, not of China or Russia, but of one company monopoly of Google with a sub monopolist of Meta with its control of Whats App and social media- clearly unacceptable. 

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For decades without the leadership needed and the collaboration of the entire tech sector and health systems the goal of getting a patients record on the computer or on a phone app anywhere in the US across all health systems was out of America's grasp. This was happening even in countries such as Indonesia and India which were vastly improving health outcomes through their apps of patient health records available across the entire country. The US finally is making that effort which should help not only treat patients but give patients better control of their food, alternative ideas on what to eat and for exercise, other ways to improve their health. CMS Medical Records Interoperability Framework brings together 21 networks to align to it, 60 companies to work collaboratively, and 30 companies to try and improve patient health outcomes and their health in general. Australia, Indonesia and countries in Europe have done this, says Health Secretary Robert Kennedy. It is time the US did so also. ...

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Tech is not going to fix this, say software experts from tech companies. Google and Apple's efforts in coming up with an app have fizzled out, says this report in thee WSJ. Has the U.S. lost precious time in waiting for an app by tech companies to be developed, instead of doing what India and Britain have done. India introduced its own app Aarogya Setu app from the Indian government. Britain had the National Health Service develop its app. India acted quickly. Is an app needed or essential? Germany decided that contact tracing based on Asian country experience was mainly about human contact tracers with skills to make the phone calls. All they needed was a centralized database on a computer and a phone. Germany set up teams at offices in each district in Germany and quickly plodded ahead even if all the offices were not fully staffed. In fact a third of the offices needed more people and resources. Yet the speed of action is something like 80 to 90% of the contact tracing effort when the team has the skill set to call. This is because clusters of infections do not wait - they spread. There is simply no time to waste. The German effort has produced the best results so far of any country of this size- Germany has 85 million people. The reproduction ratio is at 1.13 and Germany remains vigilant. It is the first country to reopen in Europe, and is methodically doing the right actions, much that the world can and should learn from. Contact tracing teams worked round the clock in the early days, they are still hard at work today, using their human skills to talk to people and find out who they were in contact with, calling the contacts in turn, at each step working to isolate where needed with followup calls from the state health departments. ...

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Germany has shown that low tech contact tracing efforts work- no apps needed, a phone, a desktop computer with a centralized database, and most important the human relations skills of the person doing the calls. The  sensitivity to the situation facing each person being called, being able to talk to the person in the language they speak in a multilingual environment such as California, is shown here. A 40 person team operates in San Francisco consisting of public health officials, clinicians, medical students and librarians. They call the contacts of people with coronavirus, arrange tests, and as needed send packages of food and medicines to hotel rooms or homes. Every call is expected to last 15 minutes but all sorts of questions are handled.  English and Spanish are used. Here one of the persons doing the contact tracing says she does not use apps, just an open source software used in the fight against Ebola. Definitely low tech, no waiting, get going is the message to every city in the world. She says apps software such as what Google and Apple are putting out can tell you whether the person went to some place, but cannot tell you more about that person, cannot tell you about problems the person is having being tested, and how they are having difficulty providing for families. One of the big lessons from Germany and efforts such as this one in San Francisco, and in other places such as Paris, Singapore, Taiwan, is that there is a complex nature to contact tracing that cannot be solved by tech. In fact the best thing to do is to get started immediately, with a phone and a database on a computer, as long as you have a person who has the motivation and skills, empathy with people, a lot can be done. Waiting for apps is a dangerous waste of time is shown by the low tech German experience, and the experience in other places. Most important is starting immediately. The example shown here of working with migrant workers in contact tracing shows in the most vulnerable places it is these human relations skills that count, that no tech app can do. It requires detective skills to find out and get people to share their history of movements and contacts for 14 days . In Singapore crowded dormitories house 300,000 of 1.4 million migrant workers. Singapore using an app also but its use is secondary. Apps don't work in many situations but fail in the most critical situations such as these dormitories and other eccentric or atypical situations such as faced by South Korea with religious groups and gay communities, elderly people in Europe, that generate the worst dangers of spread and need to be cluster isolated quickly. Human contact tracing has a history of being an effective method and was used in China and South Korea during the 2003 SARS epidemic. More countries need to adopt the method used in Asia and in Germany, particularly Britain, the U.S., France and India. It is OK that Britain's NHS and India's national government with Aarogya Setu app have put out their own apps which balance privacy concerns with the need to act immediately and cover the entire country, but the hard slog of human contact tracing teams in each district is indispensable. This is why the former Health minister in Britain calls it Britain's national mission to do this. Speed is key- putting together teams across the country in every district from skilled volunteers or government workers, and pulling together the phone and a centralized database on a computer as basic equipment. The fact that this is easily doable and people with human skills needed can always be recruited as they have been in Germany- from public officials in local government who are less busy in lockdowns, medical students, clinicians, volunteers, people from different professions- makes it inexcusable not to learn from others experience and get going. Just Do It. You want to reopen business, professions, offices and public services- Just Do It, it makes this possible. You want to prevent spread of the virus- Just Do It, it makes this possible. You want to limit damage to the economy and get the recovery going- Just Do It, it makes this possible. People of all shades of opinion can agree on this- its the only thing that works, even when there is a lack of enough proper accurate testing. ...

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This NYT article on India's Olympics preparations focuses on Neeraj Chopra, in javelin. In actual fact the Indian Olympics efforts is now supported by the government of prime minister Modi with his personal involvement at many levels. Funding is now provided by the government to athletes on a scale and in ways that never happened before. India;s Olympics athletes batch was personally invited to the prime minister's residence and Modi gave apep talk to the athletes including some useful advice from him and from seniro Olympians. One of the pieces of advice from Modi was to concentrate on the task at hand and not get distracted by the many things happening in Paris and the excitement of being at the first Olympics. Modi has also told athletes as he has for India's Space program to the Moon that a loss or a failure to achieve on the first try means you only try harder and learn the discipline required to achieve what you set out to do.

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Amazon is tackling the Indian market by addressing the need of rural shoppers in all parts of India- home to nearly 800 million people. Here WSJ shows how this works with a customer in Dhowachal, in the northeastern state of Assam, who had no access to stores except by travelling for hours to the nearest town.  The customer is a teacher who received an Amazon delivery of pairs of jeans, socks, curtains, glasses and other items. Rural shoppers in India spent about $400 billion in 2017. Barclays estimates Amazon had $7 billion in gross merchandise sales volume in India in 2017, about 2% of what it does worldwide. More than 80% of customers in 2018 are from outside India's largest cities.  To do this Amazon has changed its app to work on cheaper smartphones and patchy cellular networks, added hundreds of thousands of Indian language descriptions of products and videos. It has also opened physical Amazon stores to teach people how to order online. Tens of thousands of distributors were added to deliver packages and take cash or digital payment. Amazon is spending $5 billion in India to set up a logistics network and warehouses, including staff and content development for Amazon Prime. In doing this Amazon has learned from China where Alibaba and other online retailers have grown seven fold by reaching rural areas. Amazon could not compete with Alibaba in China. In India Amazon has no strong local competitors like Alibaba. It is learning how to operate in India. The app offer tips on how to order, no email is needed, only a phone number, machine learning translates all descriptions into Hindi. Icons work well. A digital wallet lets customers without bank accounts or cards to pay or get money back. Amazon is investing aggressively using an advertising campaign and discounts to pass Flipkart which WalMart bought for $16 billion in 2018. Amazon is trying new ideas in India's situation where small stores often closet sized sell a limited number of products often going through multiple middlemen resulting in high prices. Amazon is now enlisting these small stores as package depots in its own unique distribution network. The small store gets an 8-10% commission on sales for helping guide shoppers make a purchase. In Amazon's unique "I Have Space" program 20,000 mom and pop stores in remote areas of India offer to take packages and deliver in neighborhoods for a commission. They get a uniform, a bag and a week of training. Many of these store owners know the addresses in their neighborhood having lived there a long time. The entire effort shows Amazon has adapted its delivery effort, logistics and payment systems to Indian conditions in a well planned way. Compare this to the failed effort by Apple in India, with high management turnover and lack of understanding of Indian conditions and pricing, and no real plan to tackle the Indian market.     ...

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There are problems with TikTok as social media app that are shown under The Enemy Within in Movement for Global Literacy of Lyrarc.com that relate to global literacy of children spending many hours on the app taking time away from homework and reading, when over half of American children 12-18  perform below basic requirements on reading proficiency tests. Similar loss of reading comprehension in UK and France. China can regulate its internet by restricting it in ways that won't hurt literacy in China. India has banned the app.  There are problems with TikTok that relate to literacy and cultural literacy that Democrats or Republicans or the Supreme Court have failed to bring up let alone address. These concerns should grow in the minds of Americans concerned about preserving the cultural literacy that has existed in the US for the last 200 years- it is about who Americans are as a Nation of immigrants from Europe of the Renaissance and the Modern World. US is a mix of population from European nations of 204 million, of a black population of about 48 million in 2025, 7 million native Americans, and Spanish speaking Americans of 62 million, Asian population of 25 million. The US is at a critical juncture in deciding what kind of a nation it will be. Will it lose it's basic character of a nation which draws its inspiration from European civilization's defining characteristics of the Renaissance, the evolution of science and democratic forms of government leading to creation of the Modern World. The 25 million Asians immigrated to the US for a large part seeking this kind of modernization of society from what they left behind and this is largely true of Spanish speaking immigrants and Spanish settlers who settled California, Texas and Florida as Spain settled the American colonies before the English and French. TikTok ban opposed decreased from 2023 to end of 2024 by 18% from 50% to 32%, according to Pew Research. Pew does not say that this is the result of growing use of TikTok by teenagers and children for entertainment by 12-15% in the period 2023-2025. Between 2021 and 2023 use of TikTok in the US increased by 12% from 21% to 33% from which we can extrapolate that it increased by about 12-15% between 2023 and 2025 if it is growing at the same pace. Politicians oblivious of the effects on cultural literacy in the US are allowing it to be embedded in the US in ways that hurt basic reading and cultural literacy skills. ...

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The purpose of the National Education Policy was to prepare India's young people for India as a developed modernized country and to meet the educational needs of such an economy. The idea was to break the idea of silos based education that separate the science, engineering, medicine, law, arts, humanities, languages based education into separate non mixable parts. It is based on the idea that in modernized economies one needs critical thinking abilities, creative thinking, that mixes the humanities and arts with sciences, with engineering, and other scientific fields.  Because of India's diveristy, history of disadvantaged populations, to build an inclusive economy is also a goal to tap into the widest pool of human potential and talent in a country with 1.2 billion people. For this to happen the goals are set for inclusivity for gender and disadvantaged populations.  What is not in NEP is the investment part, and the governance part, both critical for it to be effective. Investment at 4-6% of GDP is inadequate, as this Brookings report point out. For healthcare and education, India has to expand its share of GDP dedicated to these two areas to make it comparable to other advanced nations. This will pay off in infrastructure development and exports led growth as inputs of education are key to get productivity up in manufacturing and in R&D. Governance is essential part of this overall plan as the public school system in India as in Brazil, Mexico and other countries suffers badly from a lack of attention- with discipline, transparency, good government, increasing incomes and rewarding teachers at every level. ...

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What is the difference between South Korea and the U.S., Europe in the handling of coronavirus? It is tracking and testing.  President Trump and health adviser Dr. Fauci, see South Korea as the successful model to be followed in controlling the coronavirus. What has happened till now it is accepted with shortage of basic medical supplies and equipment, stress on hospital systems, are merely mitigation actions. South Korea was prepared for the coronavirus crisis because of the MERS and other epidemics, and failures resulting in corrective actions. Labs were centralized and better equipped for testing and tracking the infected. One of the key tools is testing. President Trump says the goal is for the U.S. to exceed and far surpass tests per capita in South Korea. Five million tests are planned by the end of April in the U.S. Where the U.S. falls short is in use of multipronged digital tracking using data from people's use of mobile phones, credit card usage, and use of apps designed to separate infected people from others. South Korea is a democracy with a population of 52 million people, about the size of France. People who were student activists in the democratization era in South Korea say the use of digital technology is a need today. We have to adapt in emergency situation they say. Ki Mo-ran, epidemiologist, and adviser to South Korean government says this is a key part lacking in the European and U.S. efforts to control coronavirus. She says in South Korea we know the patient's contacts, where he goes and stays, so we don't have to lock down everybody. Without digital tracking one cannot know which place is contaminated, which place is clean, so that there can be a lockdown of just that area and not the whole country, says Ki Mo-ran. She asks the question- is one person's privacy more important than the lives of a family or other people who are affected. Is it OK to lockdown every child in the country in a home as in Spain for over a month so that particular people's privacy is respected? These are serious questions for western society, are they exceptions or is democracy not just a western idea but equally cherished in Asian societies, people talk about Confucianism in China and the Asian culture forgetting that the biggest democracies are quite large and functioning well in India in addition to South Korea, Taiwan Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Japan, far larger in area and population than China. The French government has chosen the app TraceTogether as the least intrusive one adaptable to France for use there. The U.S. is having Google and Apple develop one of its own. India will be developing one of its own. The NYT raises the question will it be watered down so much in France or in the U.S. and UK to be less effective than the  dire need for an alternative to lockdowns? ...

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Joanna Stern of the WSJ uses the original iPhone that came out in 2007 for one day in June 2017 and sees how it felt to use the introductory version. The original one worked on a 2G cellular network. It took about a minute for the president's Twitter feed to fully load in the old phone's Safari browser, it now takes 5 seconds. A lot has changed with the smartphone revolution in ten years. Lunch spot search results, Stern points out, might take longer than the time to eat lunch in the Maps App with that old phone. No emojis, predictive text, no Siri, and no third party apps, no Apple Music or Spotify, all that came later. The 2 megapixel camera took decent shots but not without good light. What is useful in Joanna Stern's little experiment is that it makes one reflect on how quickly people forget, how so much is now taken for granted as smartphones change the way people live their lives and interact with technology on a daily basis. Not mentioned here is how common smartphones have become with the Android versions made in China offering so much more for the budgets of ordinary people. And how it has changed the lives of billions of people in China, India, other parts of Asia and Latin America, bringing them into contact with the outside world. What is also interesting in this sense is that what took a huge effort over many years and many disappointments- the idea of a touchscreen that works- shows what an idea and the courage to persist in the face of innumerable hurdles can accomplish. See the link to how  Steve Jobs accomplished this. Daisuke Wakabayashi talked with Apple engineer Greg Christie in his article-"Apple Engineer on iPhone's Birth," Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2014. Christie had worked on a digital personal assistant at Apple in 1996, one that had tried the first touch screen Apple made. The device failed in the market. In 2004, eight years later the touch screen is the idea Jobs had Christie work on again. Many frustrations and obstacles later the first smartphone was developed by 2007. It took 10 years and undaunted effort which is the Apple story under Jobs. ...

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In commenting on Rishi Sunak, a former hedge fund manager's sudden rise from anonymity three years ago when Boris Johnson became prime minister to leadership of the Tory party and prime minister, The Hindu cautions that it is of limited symbolic value, this kind of connection between India and the UK. The Tories are a house divided against itself, with many factions. Truss was brought down by Gove and others on the backbench who were not included in the government. Other Conservatives on the backbenches today, and Johnson, Jacob Rees Mogg, represent factions that are not represented in this government as was evident in questioning by Opposition leader Starmer in QA in the House of Commons. Other problems remain also evident in Starmer's questioning for Labour in parliament, including questioning about non domicile status in the family for tax purposes. Privileged Tories with connections to free markets such as Jacob Rees Mogg or Sunak without an awareness of the pain of ordinary working families, are not what a country with a cost of living crisis sees as leaders who can point to the way forward for Britain. As The Hindu points out he faces the same difficulty that Johnson with his style and personality was able to sidestep, that Truss naively tackled with quick unraveling of tax cuts for the upper incomes, and which Sunak with his experience with financial hedge funds may appear to have grasped but find escaping his grasp. This is the difficulty of matching traditional Tory policy of tax cuts and austerity, at a time when all major countries of Europe and the US are providing significant cost of living assistance to working families. Even small bits of austerity policy, or lack of conviction to help working families may now be seen by the Opposition, Labour, and even within some part of the Tory party and the vast majority of working families as oppressive.  Starmer is keen to remind working people of where Sunak stands as he did with the question in parliament Q&A about the comments made by Sunak at a small gathering that he had transferred money from poor districts to more affluent Tory districts. Would Sunak correct these erroneous funding formulas, Starmer asked. The Hindu also mentions Suella Braverman's appointment as Home Secretary only weeks after her resignation. It was poor judgement shown by Johnson in an appointment that cost him Tory support a few weeks before his resignation. Starmer brought this up from the beginning of parliament Q&A- asking whether a deal was made for her appointment to get far right wing Tory support from Braverman's faction in the party. For India and the Indian people there are so many genuine connections with Britain and the British people, some set when Mohandas Gandhi won the hearts of English working families during his visit for negotiations with the British that are are a better basis  and that will be remembered forever in the hearts and minds of the British people. ...

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A sense that the U.S. and Britain have still not got contact tracing right. Contact tracing is key to controlling the pandemic and letting jobs come back to normal. We've got to get contact tracing right say communities and experts across the U.S.  About 30 per every 100,000 people are needed. but the U.S. has got only a fraction of this. By the time it is organized more people can get infected, and this is a very serious problem. Indiana for instance needs 2000 contact tracers for six million people. With this so disorganized communities are taking up the task themselves. The Mt. Carmel Indian fire department is putting its 171 fire fighters on this job as additional work as contact tracers.States need to take up this task and do this quickly following the German example where speed is what counts and low tech is the way to go, requiring only a computer with a central database and a phone, and most important the good human relations skills to make calling work with people facing a strange formidable virus. Too much time is being wasted on high tech apps. See the German example by searching for "Germany contact tracing." ...

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A ban on TikTok in 270 days is plausible, with credit going to Republican senators in Congress, as they insisted on it being incuded in the Ukraine aid bill package. Not only because of security and democratic process concerns- then one asks why what other real even larger concerns?  A ban on TikTok by restricting its use that does not affect education is already in place in China, yet such a ban is easier implemented in state power centralized government for the benefit of China's young generation and not in the US system of government. Excessive time spent on social media apps in the US including TikTok as the largest are a serious problem in America today -for young people's educational activity such as reading, studies, and for mental health. Taking a large part of the young generation in a direction that is not beneficial for the US, for democratic process to function with young people taking time to be better informed and for the health of the younger generation.  People assume that TikTok audiences will shift to other social media apps such as Facebook, but a large part of the TikTok population may engage in other activities that promote health as the consciousness for food and its preparation increases, for the value of exercise, engagement in sports and viewing sports or music, engagement in Nature and hobbies, and in time spent on travel, all happening as the Nation shifts its attention and consciousness after these troubled decades from financial crisis of 2009 to the pandemic, a period of dismal failure to deliver public services with funding diverted and misallocation in capital markets collapsing or near collapsing infrastructure around us sapping the Nation's spirit and its energies.  A new spirit is emerging in the Nation and a shift in the attention of the younger generation as it feels the fatigue that is now felt for music idols such as Taylor Swift is entirely plausible so that TikTok would have risen and faded away both in the US, India, and even in China as it shifts its attention in a different world. ...

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King points out that trade agreements are not what they used to be as most tariff barriers are whittled down. He says more than 70% of imports come into the U.S. duty free, and the average tariff is about 1.5% declining significantly in the last 2 decades. If all import restraints are lifted it would increase U.S. economic output by less than 0.05% by 2017, according to the International Trade Commission. This figure is also cited by Krugman in the NYT with a column saying the Trans Pacific Partnership(TPP) trade agreement pushed by the Obama administration is no big deal. King also points out that the U.S. already has free trade agreements with Australia, Peru, Chile, Singapore and other TPP countries. Some experts see China's success with setting up the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) attracting India, UK, Germany, France and other countries, is creating pressure on the U.S. to come up with its own response in the form of TPP with Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Peru, Chile and other countries....

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In a country with 70% inflation and debt of $83 billion, the NPP party leader Anura Dissanayake  who had only 3% of votes in the 2019 election wins by a landslide. Sri Lanka's economy is stabilizing with IMF assistance and negotiation, yet the economy has left the people in great difficulty to meet basic needs. Dissanayake led the JVP party in 1989-1997 period with considerable disturbances for which he has apologized. The Rajapaksa government also won with a landslide but failed during covid and the debt buildup crippled the economy and left the central bank without funds for essential imports. Ranil Wickremasinghe of a centre right party the UNP led a government after the economic collapse and negotiated a deal with the IMF, which included raising taxes to stabilize finances. Corruption and depletion of funds that are allocated for infrastructure and essential economic improvement, is a perennial problem in Sri Lanka since independence, making it impossible to build a modern economy from what the British left- rubber and tea plantations, an educated citizenry, good administration without the investment it deserved.  This problem also exists in India, Malaysia and many parts of Asia. The Modi government in Gujarat and the federal level was the first to break away from this by making every infrastructure dollar count and well spent with delivery in 3-4 years of highways, hospitals, airports, bridges, and logistics infrastructure for exports. ...

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Ed Finn, president of Barron's for 19 years from 1998 has observed the economy for decades and comes to the conclusion that the 2007-2008 banking crisis from Reagan style deregulation was the one principal factor the US economy and the people suffered from a lost decade that was extended to 15 years by the pandemic. This has ended under president Biden says Finn, with he says about 10% growth in S&P 500 every year since 2020 and expects growth at that rate for another 4 years under president Biden. What this says about ultra low interest rates is that it was bad for America and a result of the need for tackling the 2009 financial crisis. Interest rates need to be at the moderate level of about 4-5%, the level today, where savers are rewarded, retirees are rewarded, bondholders are rewarded, and excessive risk taking is penalized, says Finn. Moderate interest rates help mortgage holders and new companies start businesses. In short says Finn- this is the way a economy should be run. We were sold the idea of ultra low interest rates because no one wanted to talk about the bad effects of Reagan style deregulation that inevitably lead to lack of the financial oversight of regulatory authorites. Financial oversight by regulatory authorites needed for modern economies to run, whether this is the US, India, China, or any large European economy, it is an essential condition for stable long term growth that serves the needs of the people of every major economy in the world. The idea must be cast aside that economic policy must be determined by the swings in sentiment  every few decades in one direction to too little government from to too much government or reverse, and be determined by essential truths of how a sound and good economy is run. As the US enters 2024 what Powell a Republican, and Biden a Democrat, and the bipartisan group of Senators in the US Congress are saying is that we get it, and are with single minded determination making it happen. ...

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This commentary in the WSJ says it is essential that the U.S. get back manufacturing of all technological goods back to the U.S. or its allies. The dangers of depending on China or other countries not clearly allied with the U.S. is quite clear especially after the pandemic. The U.S. and European supply chains need to be completely remade, restructured, to avoid dependence on China or countries that are not allies. This is what supply chain renewal is about. Yet initiatives alone with hundreds of billions of dollars price tag re not the answer to the problem. What is needed are specific targeted actions such government direct assistance to key sectors to ensure U.S. technological advantages in worldwide competition. Giving a hole range of incentives and direct financial support to industries making everything from electronic and computer components to high tech parts that go to defense and civilian production.   The U.S educational component in this puzzle is university students in all high tech courses which should be kept for U.S. citizens or from key allied nations at American universities. The manufacturing base would mean securing incentives and aid to manufacturing industries, component by component, part by part, to secure American leadership and distinct advantage.  Job losses have to be reversed and industries relocated back to the U.S. And only in cases where it is advantageous to manufacture overseas to relocate in allied countries India, Japan or South Korea. U.S. labor has to be brought into the picture as a key participant in the national interest and given an important role. R& D efforts have to be developed component by component, technological part by part, and technology by technology, so that a systematic plan can be followed to secure American leadership for the rest of this century, is what experts including this one say is required today. ...

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As the pandemic continues to spread and numbers grow with reopening of the economy the question remains -what can we learn from other countries positive experience in controlling spread? Here the Times provides the example of German contact tracing- chancellor Merkel has emphasized that a lot depends on "total" contact tracing, and contact tracing "above all else." Germany's experience is that even if you don't get everything right, you make an honest effort with everything you've got and do it early it makes a real difference. Some of the offices across Germany are stretched and short of staff but they have been working since the beginning of March, sometimes in the early days 7 days a week. Only 33% or one third of the offices throughout Germany for contact tracing have the required 5 person team for every 20,000 people, and 35% are overstretched or at their limit, according to one survey. No apps, just a low tech effort with people from the state administrations who were not working during lockdown trying doing something else, or volunteers. Mainly using the phone, talking to people and tracing the contact chain of people testing positive. Putting this information on the computer with a central database.  The Berlin office has 115 workers and has tracked down every one of 666 virus cases it was given. Because of privacy concerns at the Munich office sometimes even the patient's name is not given and office staff have to locate the name and the person. It requires dedication, flexibility and above all resilience, says Harold Rau, the deputy Mayor of the Cologne office, cited in this Times report. The doctor alerts the local office with a test result. The office calls the person and finds out who he has been in contact with for the last 14 days. Then the people who were in contact with are grouped based on the directness of contact, face to face, so on. These people are asked to quarantine for 14 days, sometimes with the rest of their household. They get daily call to find out how their doing for symptoms. The effort goes back to Robert Koch in the 1892 cholera epidemic in Hamburg. Robert Koch, microbe hunter in Germany, was called in after the epidemic spread from Moscow. It devastated Moscow and Tokyo, but Hamburg suffered far less about 8605 deaths as a result of the contact tracing and strict closing off quarantining of affected chains after isolating them, closing off affected parts of the city. Bit by bit the cholera epidemics sparks were put out before turning into flames, says Koch. In the current pandemic Germany has suffered 8241 deaths and 178,000 confirmed cases. So far this is in line with the cholera epidemic in Hamburg 1892, and this for all of Germany. And it is not just affluent nations that can do this. where there is a will there is a way. In Kerala state in southwestern India, similar efforts have worked to limit spread  with even better results than Germany. ...

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Toutiao and the growing mobile segment for news aggregated from thousands of sources for tech, politics, and other local news. Toutiao and Tencent QQ are taking advantage of the growing need for news in China. Toutiao's algorithm targets new internet users in rural areas and small towns who are looking for news and do not need the use of global news sites as is done by Google and Apple. The deep learning of computers is used to study user habits such as learning about the main soccer teams, watching funny videos,as habits of users. Beijing Bytedance Technology has come up with the new site. The highest growth rate is now for news on mobile, growth is 73% year over year far surpassing travel and mobile video, according to QuestMobile.

China restricts use of Google and Facebook News and other sites and favors local content and news sites to give international news, and news about China.

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In a first at Davos World Economic Forum, China's president Xi Jinping uses the 2017 meeting to give a one hour long spirited defense of the world trading system, critical of U.S. president elect Trump's protectionist views without naming him. Xi pointed out that "no one will be winners in a trade war." And went on to add that restricting world trade was like "locking oneself in a dark room, keeping out wind and rain from outside but also light and air." For the first time Jinping stated that China would take the U.S. role of defending the world trading system from attack as needed. On climate change Xi defended the Paris accords, and gave China's commitment to pursue changes regardless of what the U.S. under president Trump does. This follows Chancellor Merkel of Germany's statements on the issue critical of the views of president elect Trump, and taking the lead to defend the world trading system. Xi also pointed out that many of the ills that led to voter discontent in the West were not really from the freeing up of trade but from the pursuit of excessive profit with the financial crisis of 2008.   ...

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Entergy is one of the largest energy companies. Its CEO for nine years, Wayne Leonard, talks to Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal. Its the No.2 generator of nuclear power in the USA, and uses coal for only 7% of its energy. He has made his name in nuclear energy, and here he talks about the government's cap and trade program and nuclear energy. He points to today's technology as far superior to the technology that was used in the Failed Three Mile plant, that put back nuclear energy plants in the USA for decades. He believes that price signals are needed for CO2, and the cap and trade program helps to do this, so he supports the cap and trade program. He admits that self interest colors perception of Entergy, compared to coal using utility producers like Duke Energy and American Electric Power. With coal only 7% in its portfolio of plants, and big in nuclear energy, it stands to gains from a cap and trade program, whereby Congress will set a ceiling on emissions, then allows businesses to sell any of its extra allowances that stand for the right to make emissions. And in doing so creating the largest commodity market, in carbon backed securiites. He and the government agree on the point that the allowances should be auctioned off, rather than given away as the companies with many coal plants believe. And the billions in new revenue from these allowances would be returned to the public. He understands that the view of companies like Duke and AEP, that use coal and would have to increase rates, and face the anger of ratepayers as they pay more for the allowances. He also thinks the bill should be written with a fine pen, so that if Congress mandates 20% of energy come from renewables. That it should specify replacing coal not natural gas as what this replaces, to get rid of the most polluting sources. He points to the real need for looking at things globally, as doing things locally, even to show responsible leadership in the world community, can lead to no progress in the global picture. The reason is that China is going ahead with the rapid construction of conventional coal plants. It has surpassed USA coal capacity, and is on track to double it sometime in the next decade. If the USA closed down every single coal plant, and all the time new coal plants are going up in China and India, then we would have ruined our economy, and it was'nt making much difference globally. And he says, if we just say lets lead and people will follow us, "its silly", because China isn't going to follow us, especially when they have $2 trillion invested in their coal plants, and they still aren't feeding feeding all their people. So how to deal with this? Develop the new technology for carbon capture for existing conventional coal plants, and help the Chinese with retrofit technology to curb emissions in a realistic manner. At this time most current funding is devoted to technology for second generation systems, that are still 10-20 years away....

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Steve Jobs anticipated a post PC period when he told a technology conference in 2010 that PC's would retain a lot of their value, but he said they will be used only by one out of so many users. Tim Cook told a Goldman Sachs investor conference recently: "From the first day it shipped, we thought- not just me, many of us thought at Apple- that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market, and it was just a matter of time that it took for that to occur." Analysts see this happening sometime between 2013 and 2017.

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Kessler in the WP corrects Obama's claim that he created 800,000 jobs. He says this is clever arithmetic as it takes a low point in Feb. 2010 following the financial crisis. Kessler points out that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. manufacturing jobs were 12.56 million in Jan. 2009 when Obama became president. In Nov. 2016, early estimates show there were 12.26 million manufacturing jobs, a loss of 300,000. This loss does not reflect the problems in the U.S. auto industry and older industries in the midwestern states as a result of trade and globalization that speeded up with the rapid industrialization of China. And led as Greg Ip pointed out in a recent WSJ report to a rapid acceleration of job losses in a decade that did not happen in the same scale during Japan's industrialization and urbanization in the sixties. This aggravated the situation in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, and was met with a feeble response from Democrats. Even a economist like Krugman favoring the Obama administration's efforts came to the conclusion that TPP did not add much to gains from trade as most of the gains had already been realized. More of the gains went to tech and IT in California, at the expense of the auto industry based in the midwest. A report in WP show a president too close to IT in California and failing to grasp the situation in the midwest. Voters punish whoever is in power, regardless of being Conservative or Liberal, in Canada the hollowing out of manufacturing under Harper in Ontario and Quebec led to the win by Trudeau's Liberals.  ...

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The recent appointment of fast food executive Andrew Puzder as Labor Secretary has caused great concern among union leaders. Puzder supports a $9 minimum wage compared to $15 supported by Democrats. Unions now represent 7% of the labor force, down from a high of 20% during Reagan's time when Reagan appointed a construction company executive as Labor Secretary and cut regulations.  Globalization has thinned the ranks of workers in unions. And the failure of Democratic administrations to stem the shift of factories overseas to China, Mexico and other places, as part of global supply chains focussed on cost, has weakened Democratic support among workers since the period of Bill Clinton. It eroded to the point where Obama won 65% of support among unions and Hillary Clinton won 56% in 2016. Interestingly the Republican Romney gained 33% versus 37% for Trump, showing voters were more inclined to move away from Democrats and only a smaller number willing to support Republicans, but the shift enough to give Republicans a win in 2016 for the presidency. The figures are from a Election Day survey of trade union AFL-CIO, and a larger proportion in midwestern states showed disaffection with policies from Clinton to Obama. In fact Obama spent years promoting another free trade agreement TPP that favored tech more than auto and older industries, just as Bill Clinton had promoted NAFTA, without giving thought to what this was doing to its worker base of support. A similar situation happened with Social Democrats in Germany as a SPD administration moved to the centre and handed Christian Democrats led by Merkel a win in parliamentary elections. As Democrats such as former Labor Secretary Reich, a professor at UC Berkeley who served under Bill Clinton, describe the problems of working class people their is less reflection on the impact of the changes from globalization and how Democrats handled or mishandled it, and more on the politics between the two parties.   ...

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Researchers David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego, and David Dorn of the Center for Monetary and Fiscal Studies in Madrid, in independent research, studied the impact of trade on 722 clusters of interrelated counties in the U.S. They focussed on the surge in Chinese imports and found a pattern. Counties with higher exposure to Chinese import growth showed higher unemployment and higher expenditures by the government for unemployment benefits, food stamps and disability benefits. Their calculations show the increased government payments amount to one to two thirds of the gains from trade with China. This does not include the losses suffered by people losing jobs who deplete savings as they look for new jobs. Hanson studied the effects of trade and Chinese imports in the 1990's and found the effects were relatively small. This time the effects are large and show counties that lacked local investments in industrial machinery and technologies in which China was still playing catchup such as Caterpillar in Peoria, Illinois, and Boeing in Everett, Washington, were most susceptible to higher jobless rates and in need of government support payments. Autor and Hanson found that from 2000-2007, communities in the 75th percentile- ones with greater exposure to Chinese import growth than 75% of all communities- saw a manufacturing jobless rate of about one-third more than communities in the 25th percentile. The government payments mean higher taxes or larger deficits are needed to support these communities, and long periods of unemployment reduce the incentive to work. Michael Spence, a Nobel prize winning economist from New York University, says the world has never seen such a rapid pace of growth as China experienced between 2000-2011, with rates approaching 12% in some years, making past experience and prevailing theories on trade an insufficient guide to what is happening....