- The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding (Wired) "Among other things, it would change training for programming jobs—and who gets encouraged to pursue them. As my friend Anil Dash, a technology thinker and entrepreneur, notes, teachers and businesses would spend less time urging kids to do expensive four-year computer-science degrees and instead introduce more code at the vocational level in high school. You could learn how to do it at a community college; midcareer folks would attend intense months-long programs like Dev Bootcamp. There’d be less focus on the wunderkinds and more on the proletariat."
ART:
- This is your brain on art: A neuroscientist’s lessons on why abstract art makes our brains hurt so good (Salon) "But the mind-bending point that Kandel makes is that abstract art, which strips away the narrative, the real-life, expected visuals, requires active problem-solving. We instinctively search for patterns, recognizable shapes, formal figures within the abstraction. We want to impose a rational explanation onto the work, and abstract and minimalist art resists this. It makes our brains work in a different, harder, way at a subconscious level. Though we don’t articulate it as such, perhaps that is why people find abstract art more intimidating, and are hastier to dismiss it. It requires their brains to function in a different, less comfortable, more puzzled way."
BUSINESS:
- Companies Plow Ahead With Moves to Mexico, Despite Trump’s Pressure (WSJ) "Mr. Trump hasn't specified what taxes, tariffs or trade deals he might enact in his effort to boost U.S. manufacturing and factory employment. The continuing investments abroad underscores the scale of the economic forces that confront Mr. Trump's plans." and Should Trump Get Credit for All Those Jobs Saved? (NYT) "Keeping or creating more of these manufacturing jobs in the United States may not necessarily be a good thing for everyone. In Mexico, wages rarely cross $10 an hour, a third of what a majority of unionized workers in the United States earn. As an example, for Americans looking to buy cars, auto companies paying higher wages could add up to higher sticker prices."
NEWS:
- After Mr. Trump’s Din, the Quiet Grandeur of the Courts (NYT) "No gratuitous insults, no personal threats or childish tantrum — only judges and lawyers debating complex legal issues with respect and restraint. It was the sound of grown-ups taking responsibility for governing the country, and for people’s lives. In fact, the judges did exactly as they should, aggressively questioning both sides and demanding evidence to back up assertions — a much quicker and more reliable path to the truth than Twitter. Mr. Trump appears as uninterested in this as he is in so much else about the democratic process. He complained on Wednesday about the pace of the legal debate on the travel ban, which is not even two weeks old, saying it is 'really incredible' that it is 'going on so long.'" and 5 times when presidents besides Trump weighed in on pending court rulings (LA Times) and When Presidents Think About Defying The Courts (New Yorker)
- Bannon, Flynn and Sessions: How Trump's top advisers view Muslims, in their own words (USA Today) "Yet in the recordings from Bannon’s shows, other people who've ascended to top jobs in the West Wing and the Cabinet openly aired controversial views about Muslims, immigrants in general, and their threat to America. According to a recent Cato Institute report, out of more than 3 million refugees admitted to the U.S. from 1975 to 2015, three committed terrorist acts that killed Americans. They were Cuban refugees in the 1970s."
- Call me, maybe? Trump reaches out to China’s president in a letter (WaPo) "In the last few days, the new U.S. administration appears to have taken a slightly less confrontational approach toward China, and some experts have been expecting a call between the two leaders soon, especially after national security adviser Michael Flynn spoke by telephone last week with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi. But Trump’s focus on China’s large trade surplus with the United States, and his view of trade as a competitive, zero-sum game, may still spell tough times ahead in the relationship." and In Letter to China, Trump Says He Wants ‘Constructive Relationship’ (NYT) "During the campaign, Mr. Trump advocated a 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports to the United States, complaining that China manipulated the value of its currency."
- I ran Clinton's campaign, and I fear Russia is meddling with more than elections (The Guardian) "But there’s a deeper dimension to Russia’s actions, which deserves the free world’s urgent attention: its capacity to silently influence domestic legislation and policy-making between elections. With his success in the U.S. last year, Putin has put opponents on notice that there will be a price to pay for crossing him. This came into sharp relief this weekend when President Trump implied a sort of moral equivalence between the Putin regime and the U.S., a stunning reversal of long-standing policy. If Russia invades the Baltic states, could U.S. assistance to them die in Congress because elected officials fear Russian retaliation? It sounds unbelievable, but we saw the GOP mysteriously change its platform this summer, removing aid to Ukraine – and that was before Putin proved his influence over the election. It must be abundantly clear that attacking our elections through cyberspace will prompt a tough and proportional response."
- Connecting Trump’s Dots (NYT) "His lack of respect for institutions and truth pours out so fast, you start to forget how crazy this behavior is for any adult, let alone a president, and just how ugly things will get when we have a real crisis. And crises are baked into this story because of the incoherence of President Trump’s worldview. But Trump is a dot exploiter, not connector. He made a series of reckless, unconnected promises, not much longer than tweets, to get elected, and now he’s just checking off each one, without thinking through the linkages among them or anticipating second-order effects. It’s amazing what a mess you can make when you only check boxes and don’t link them."
- Pentagon leader assumes new role: Turning down the temperature on Trump (WaPo) "But a few weeks into his tenure, the retired general’s most visible role has been of a different sort: soothing Americans and allies unnerved by the president and some of his top advisers. But Mattis, who has already shown himself willing to disagree with the president’s preferences, now occupies a key position in the Cabinet of a man with little foreign policy experience. Trump, who has surrounded himself by former generals, has already shown that he is willing to defer to Mattis on issues such as whether the United States should employ waterboarding on detainees. The president’s apparent support for Mattis’s military judgment may enhance the new secretary’s standing in internal discussions or with allies, potentially putting the Pentagon boss in a position similar to that of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who wielded significant influence in policy debates under Obama, sometimes to the frustration of the White House, Chollet said."
- Trump tweets a red line for North Korea (WaPo) "When Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said that any North Korean use of nuclear weapons would draw an 'effective and overwhelming' U.S. response, he did not, according to Rand’s Bruce W. Bennett, 'over commit' the president by saying that the response would be nuclear. On Jan. 1, North Korea’s 33-year-old leader, Kim Jong Un, said that his regime was at 'the final stage in preparations to test-launch' an intercontinental ballistic missile, perhaps one capable of reaching the United States’ West Coast. On Jan. 2, Donald Trump tweeted: 'It won’t happen!' He thereby drew a red line comparable to his predecessor’s concerning Syrian chemical weapons. So Trump, who excoriated Barack Obama for ignoring that red line, must, Bennett believes, be prepared to threaten actions that would prevent North Korea from learning from its test actions such as shooting down the missile."
POLITICS:
- Rural Americans felt abandoned by Democrats in 2016, so they abandoned them back. Can the party fix it? (WaPo)
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- Van Halen Contract Required No Brown M&Ms? (Snopes) True. "The legendary 'no brown M&Ms' contract clause was indeed real, but the purported motivation for it was not. The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen’s contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide a simple way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read and complied with."
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