• A 4-DAY WORKWEEK – 32 hours, not four days of 10 hours – is growing in momentum for companies and governments around the globe. Spurred by trade unions and the feminist movement, multiple large-scale pilot programs have consistently (purportedly) found that a shorter working week is “better for both employees and employers.” Key factors include: (1) Reduction of stress and burnout levels among workers who, during pandemic lockdowns, “struggled to keep up their jobs while balancing increased demands of domestic life; (2) Operational efficiencies from streamlined internal processes and cutting out unnecessary meetings; (3) 45% of participating workers claiming higher ‘job satisfaction’ and 60% saying it improved their ‘work-life balance’; (4) Reduction in wasted and frustrating ‘commuting’ hours, along with climate benefits from reduced vehicle travel (somehow projected at nearly 700 million miles saved weekly). A California legislature bill requiring overtime pay after 32 hours was stalled last spring, but the trend may be unstoppable. Over 40% employees in organizations adopting the shorter work week experiments said the “would need a 25-50% salary increase to return to a 5-day work week, and some said ‘you just couldn’t pay me enough’.”  [TIME – 1/19/23]
  • ALL THE FAKE POSTURING OVER THE ‘CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS’ SCANADALS IS ABSURD, even by Washington standards. The Office of the Presidency has the unique role of ‘classifying’ some million documents every week, with capacity to hide any kind of information, ignore the principle & promises of ‘transparency,’ without any kind of review or interference from any bureaucrat, and without anyone else in government being directly accountable to the American people. “Actual possession of such documents is more of an administrative slap on the wrist violation, and less of a national scandal” being played out for presumed influence of Party voters. “Trump certainly should not have had classified docs in his Florida compound, but the mob-style raid and overwrought reaction by many (including Biden) was truly unhinged. Now, facing a similar circumstance, the whole thing is coming back to bite the Administration. Norms were shattered, and now the country and the Administration will live with the consequences.” [TOWNHALL – 1/20/23]
  • AMERICA’S GLOBAL INDUSTRIAL POLICY HAS SIGNIFICANTLY SHIFTED over the past several years to ‘America First’ – from promoting an Open Trading world, to one of tariffs on foreign products with export control sanctions, and subsidizing certain industries (most recently, semiconductors) through tax credits and requirements for local production of components used in manufacturing. “Motivations include China’s ascendancy, supply chain disruptions, need to boost middle-class jobs, and desire to reduce carbon emissions via renewable energy… The major concern of subsidies is provocation of retaliation, leaving everyone globally worse off, particularly at a time when sophisticated goods are produced along cross-border supply chains which may end up funding duplicative uneconomical plants, and/or orphan industries without access to foreign components they need to compete.”  [ECONOMIST – 1/14/23]
  • “ALL TELECOMMUNICATION DEPENDS ON ENCRYPTION, from emails to bank transfers to control systems for power plants. But, based on a just published paper, a group of researchers from seven Chinese institutions using a 372-qubit computer which already exists, claim that their quantum computer method will be able to break existing Encryption for all forms of communications/ website traffic/ social media cryptocurrencies, and processes upon which most enterprises, digital infrastructures & economies rely – including nuclear weapons, intelligence agencies, banks, intellectual property, and rendering cybersecurity useless… On a global scale, we have an arms race happening behind closed doors.” In the meantime, DCG can help you best protect.  [WASHINGTON EXAMINER – 1/10/23] 
  • THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:    Artificial Intelligence is the pathetic direction of popular music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IV29YNTH3M

Annual ‘Ranking’ of Medical and Law Schools by U.S. News & World Report has been a majorly influential factor is student decisions to attend, impacting “meaningful & thoughtful” process. In recent months, many Schools (including Yale & Harvard) have opted to ‘withdraw’ from this Ranking, based on ‘philosophical’ issues stemming from Wokeness. The Dean of Harvard Medical also attributes this action to Ranking having “created perverse incentives for institutions to report misleading or inaccurate data, which diverts financial aid toward high-performing students instead of financial need.”  [THE HILL]

‘What if Diversity Trainings are doing more harm than good?’ queried a NY Times op ed this week. Diversity Workshops purportedly “foster intergroup relations, improve retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps, and so on. But there’s little evidence, based on more than a decade of research studies, that these initiatives work… The grifters who run them, collecting Billions of dollars annually, have merged DEI training into Critical Race Theory crap – tenets of the religion of anti-racism, where demanding evidence of racism makes you a Racist.”   [PATRIOT POST]

Wonder what the ‘City of the Future’ should look like (for the rest of us), according to the elite experts at Davos WEF?   https://twitter.com/DrewHLive/status/1616116247518908417