Author Archives: Jasper John MacKay

Quote, Unquote

Posted on by

For the last decade, administrations of both parties have treated the U.S.-China rivalry as a structural, generational contest, and the window for rebuilding outside China may not reopen after it closes. If John Ternus moves early and accepts the near-term costs, he will be able to leave Apple in a position of genuine strategic autonomy. But this path is hard. It means absorbing years of margin pressure, manufacturing disruption, and political friction in both Washington and Beijing, with no guarantee the strategy pays off before a geopolitical shock, notably a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, forces the issue anyway.
~ Isaac Stone Fish via American Affairs

:::

Quote, Unquote

Posted on by

Campaigns are always run aspirationally, but elections are referendums. For so many Americans, the stultifying small-bore, rules-bound persnicketiness of the Democratic Party became a huge turnoff. People don’t want to feel that they are being told what they can or cannot say. They’re sick of a culture of walking on eggshells. The proof is right there in the election results—and what’s a presidential election, really, if not a quadrennial performance review of an entire nation?
~ Mike Pesca

via The HR-ification of the Democratic Party
published by The Atlantic on November 12, 2024

:::

Quote, Unquote

Posted on by

Knowledge workers were already exhausted by their jobs before the pandemic arrived: too much e-mail, too many meetings, too much to do—all being relentlessly delivered through ubiquitous glowing screens. We used to believe that these depredations were somehow fundamental to office work in the twenty-first century, but the pandemic called this assumption into question. If an activity as entrenched as coming to an office every day could be overturned essentially overnight, what other aspects of our professional lives could be reimagined?
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker

:::