Nathan Levine: “[The war against bureaucracy in the US] is the culmination of a once marginalized, now transformative strand of political thought about who really holds power in the modern American system. Namely, that our democracy has been usurped by a permanent ruling class of wholly unaccountable managers and bureaucrats. Anti-managerialism is back. Well positioned to answer decades of frustration with mainstream conservatives’ failure to deliver results, this old idea has become the central principle of the New Right. In fact, much of what is commonly called populist politics can be more accurately described as part of an anti-managerial revolution attempting to roll back the expansion of overbearing bureaucratic control into more and more areas of life.”
Business Standard: “With over 230 companies operating from Sri City, the zone has attracted investments upwards of $5 billion and has facilitated exports exceeding $4 billion. Among the firms that have a presence here are Alstom, which makes rolling stock for Metro trains, consumer durables companies like Blue Star, Panasonic, Daikin, and Havells, fast-moving consumer goods players such as Mondelez India Foods, Tata Foods, Colgate-Palmolive, and Kellogg’s, besides Sundram Fasteners, Thermax, JSW, and so on.”
FT: “With stablecoins, the promise is that a dollar is a dollar. They are meant to be backed one for one with reserves of equal value. Holders do not receive interest (but the operators often do, to the tune of billions of dollars a year) or any adjustment for inflation. But they do get to shoot something that smells a bit like real money around the cryptosphere with great ease. For years, this has been an intriguing sideshow on the periphery of global finance. Stablecoin operators have shown varying degrees of willingness to spell out exactly what they own…Back in 2021, warnings were emerging about the risk this poses to normal markets. Rating agency Fitch pointed out that if a stablecoin were to fold for any reason, it could be forced to sell all of its holdings — the dollar assets held in reserve — upsetting the underlying markets.”
WSJ: “A radical new kind of desalination technology is finally on the cusp of helping to slake the world’s thirst. The pitch: Put desalination plants on the ocean floor. First proposed in the early 1960s, this deep-sea process would benefit from both the crushing water pressure and relatively pure seawater more than 1,000 feet down. It has been unworkable until now. Only the recent commercialization of enabling innovations—including deep-sea robots from the oil-and-gas industry, and advanced reverse-osmosis filters now standard in terrestrial desalination—make it viable. Water scarcity is projected to become much more acute in the coming decades, owing to more extreme weather patterns, the decimation of the world’s aquifers, saltwater incursion, and growing urban populations. This threatens humanity at a fundamental level—not just because we need water to drink, but because without it there’s no food or manufacturing, and precious little electricity.”
