The Trump administration made Intel give the US government a piece of their company, and Trump is pledging many more deals of that sort. The Secretary of Commerce was on CNBC this morning praising this move and hinting at many more ways that the US government should get a piece of the businesses they support. He talked about the huge US investment in defense companies and the large amount of money that the government gives to support research at universities, which end up holding the patents for the work done with that money. On its face, I get the argument. I find it troubling that drug companies benefit tremendously from NIH funding, without sharing the profits with the NIH. I can’t say that I’ve felt that way about universities, but the logic fits there also. All that said, this is a shocking shift in philosophy for the Republican Party.
Continue reading “Socialism is on the rise”Tag: Donald Trump
Immigration
It hasn’t even been a month since Trump was inaugurated for a second term, and so many things feel uncertain. I don’t know why I felt compelled to write something about immigration, of all the topics I could have chosen, but here I am, feeling compelled and writing, still mostly for myself.
Continue reading “Immigration”Two sides to a coin
Imagine this: you’re a man sitting on a bus, next to some stranger who is also a man, and a woman gets on the bus, walks toward your seats, turns to the stranger next to you and says, “I love you.” It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to conclude two things: a) that the woman loves the man, and b) that the woman does not love you. The first can be a bit heartwarming, the second either neutral or heartbreaking. If the woman is somebody you’ve never met before, the conclusion that the woman does not love you is likely meaningless, and not anything you’d think twice about. Of course she doesn’t love you, she doesn’t know you. But, what if the woman were your wife. Now, not only is her love for the stranger next to you a betrayal, but the lack of love for you is about has hurtful as you can imagine. The point to take from this, and hold on to for what’s coming next, is that the lack of a message directed to you, while being directed to another, can be neutral or hurtful, depending on the context. Let’s adopt some shorthand for the rest of this. The situation when somebody does something nice for another (e.g., says “I love you”) and you smile because it was sweet is going to be called a “positive interpretation.” When somebody does something nice for another and you feel like you deserved something nice too, and you focus on the fact that something wasn’t done for you, we’ll call that a “negative interpretation.” Remember that jargon and let’s think about some issues in society and let’s see where this changes how we feel when we hear others say things, and how we might want to think about things we say ourselves.
Hitting Bregma 