India, U.S. establish new trade group to bolster supply chains "Waiting for all-or-nothing comprehensive agreements will only slow our shared goal of achieving a $500 billion trade relationship," the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's U.S.-India Business Council, Atul Keshap, said in a statement......... Goyal also said the two countries are looking at larger bilateral footprints for trade and investments than mini deals, with a focus on greater market access and ease of doing business. ........ U.S. companies are also looking to invest more in India, he added. .
Russia posts a $47 billion budget deficit for 2022, its second highest in the post-Soviet era. The budget gap reached 3.3 trillion rubles, or 2.3 percent of the size of the Russian economy, according to the country’s finance minister. ........ “Despite the geopolitical situation, the restrictions and sanctions, we have fulfilled all our planned goals.” ....... the posted deficit for 2022 is second only in Russia’s post-Soviet history to the one reported for 2020, the year the coronavirus pandemic unfolded. ......... the Russian economy performed above expectations, buoyed by high commodity prices. ......... The government has financed the deficit by issuing bonds and using money from its rainy-day fund. .
With the battle for Soledar, the founder of a mercenary army seeks a bigger role in Russia’s power structure. . the head of Russia’s largest mercenary group, who had long denied ties to the military, has become in some ways the public face of Moscow’s war effort. ........... In recent months, Mr. Prigozhin has tried to position himself as the Kremlin’s indispensable military leader, even as he has stepped up his criticism of the Russian Defense Ministry. He has bolstered Russia’s decimated fighting ranks with tens of thousands of convicts recruited to his mercenary force, awarded medals, visited military cemeteries and, according to his frequent videos, appeared unexpectedly at the toughest sections of the front line. ........ This week, Mr. Prigozhin portrayed himself as the mastermind of what he presented as Russia’s biggest military success in months: a breakthrough in the eastern Ukrainian town of Soledar. ........ Mr. Prigozhin claimed that the city was fully under his control and took full credit for the apparent success. ........ “No other forces apart from PMC Wagner fighters have participated in the assault on Soledar,” Mr. Prigozhin said in an audio message published on the Telegram messaging app ............. Notably, Mr. Prigozhin’s claims were also contradicted by the Kremlin and the Russian military. The Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that its regular units were “fighting in the city,” and Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said that the capture of Soledar would be an important, but costly, tactical success, rather than a turning point. .......... there is a struggle for President Vladimir V. Putin’s favor as the military outlook in Ukraine darkens. .......... In late December, Wagner fighters released a profanity-laden video addressed to the military high command, in which they accused it of withholding ammunition and causing the deaths of their comrades. Mr. Prigozhin responded to the video by saying, “When you’re sitting in a warm office, the frontline problems are hard to hear,” in apparent reference to the generals. ............. And last week, a prominent Telegram news channel affiliated with Mr. Prigozhin, called Grey Zone, discredited the Defense Ministry’s claim that it had killed 600 Ukrainian servicemen in an aerial strike, by publishing photos of an intact building that was supposedly destroyed. ........... Mr. Prigozhin was seeking to replace Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, a longtime confidant of Mr. Putin’s, whom many Russian ultranationalists blame for Ukraine military disasters. ......... “I used to think of appointing Prigozhin as minister as craziness, but lately so much is happening in our country, that you can’t rule out anything.”
New York Has a YIMBY Governor Kathy Hochul’s modest housing plan practically counts as radical for America’s most exclusionary suburbs. .......... housing—“everyone’s largest expense.” ........ New York has created only a third as many homes as jobs over the past decade, Hochul said, can be blamed on “local land-use policies that are the most restrictive in the nation.” .......... New York has done virtually nothing to address its housing shortage over the past decade, even as California, Oregon, Washington, and Massachusetts—four other high-cost states—experiment with various ideas to override onerous local rules that restrict the supply of new homes. Not coincidentally, New York’s population has gone into decline. “People want to live here,” Hochul continued, “but local decisions to limit growth mean they cannot. Local governments can and should make different choices.” ........... “Her goal is to turn Brookhaven into the Bronx,” wrote State Assemblyman-elect Edward Flood, from Long Island, on Twitter. “Hard pass!” .........
when it comes to building places for people to live, New York City’s suburbs are the worst in the nation.
....... New York suburbs build less housing per capita than their peers around Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.—and it’s not particularly close. Nassau County, the Long Island proto-suburb where Levittown is located, is one of the slowest-growing suburbs in the country. ........ between 2010 and 2017, New York’s housing stock grew at a lower rate than Detroit’s. ....... The first big idea is to require all jurisdictions in the New York metro area to grow their housing stock by 3 percent every three years. It’s a goal so modest that Westchester and New York City are close to meeting it already, though it would prompt a more significant shift in the toniest small towns, as well as on Long Island. ............ The second obliges communities with Metropolitan Transportation Authority train stations to rezone for greater density within a half-mile of the stop. ........... The transit-oriented development rule targets the state’s underutilized commuter rail infrastructure, which has been the main focus of a decade of transit investments in New York City, at the expense of the subway. Nassau County has 53 commuter rail stations; Westchester 43. ......... His bill would ban minimum lot sizes over 1,200 square feet, abolish parking requirements, legalize fourplexes, and legalize six-unit buildings within a quarter-mile of a commuter rail or subway station. .......... if upzoning your own town is rarely a winning ticket, upzoning your neighbors might be a more attractive proposition.Playing the race card still works in many suburban communities. Sad.
— Erik Engquist (@erik_engquist) January 12, 2023
Also sad is that many self-proclaimed progressives side with conservatives like Flood in opposing new housing. Their reasons are different but the outcome is the same: a supply shortage and high housing prices.
Governor Hochul’s housing proposals would be a disaster for our community.
— Edward Flood (@Eflood29) January 10, 2023
Her goal is to turn Brookhaven into the Bronx by removing local control of zoning laws and force 3% growth in down state areas.
Hard pass!
AI’s Best Trick Yet Is Showering Us With Attention Face filters and selfie apps are so compelling because they simulate limitless interest in what we look like. ....... Digital tools can function like fun-house mirrors, feeding a wholly private fascination with ourselves. ....... but there was no denying a certain amount of freakish accuracy. I couldn’t stop looking. ....... One thing about inhabiting a face is that we can never quite see it the way others do. Mirrors give us a reversed image. Photographs freeze us in time at odd angles and, sometimes, in pitiless detail. Staring into a phone camera, preening to check our makeup or undereye circles, gives us a hyperreal mirror, but this, too, is distorted and reversed. Even video doesn’t quite capture us for ourselves, for the simple reason that we cannot watch ourselves objectively. ......... before photography, the only simple way to see a static image of yourself was through the brush or the pen or the chisel, necessarily filtered through another person’s creative intelligence. .......... Cameras have gradually made it unexceptional to see images of ourselves, but there is still something magical about having another person pay this kind of sustained creative attention to you. .......... the way the internet fuels self-obsession by pushing us to perform for others: On Facebook, people announce banal life developments and political opinions; on Instagram, we interrupt our fun to show others how much fun we’re having; on Twitter, we mine our personal lives for laughs. .........
The app tricks me into feeling seen, but really it is just me, trying once again to see myself.
.RICHARD BRANSON SAYS ELON MUSK SHOWED UP AT HIS HOUSE AT 2AM "WE MADE A POT OF TEA AND SAT OUTSIDE UNDER THE STARS AND CAUGHT UP." . .
Mom Horrified by What Her Kids Are Seeing in Roblox This is seriously messed up. ........ Roblox has established itself as one of the biggest gaming outfits in the world — nevermind arguably the most successful metaverse out there — with well over 200 million estimated monthly users. In particular, it's become the de facto place to hang out online for a staggering number of children. ........ the popular app is allowing young children to enter some seriously questionable environments that should have parents concerned. ......... "I just spent six hours playing the games meant for five-year-olds and it was freaking awful," she wrote in an alarming Twitter thread, which has since gone viral. "Something is very wrong with Roblox Corp." ......... The massive online platform allows children of practically any age to play games that it lists as being suitable for "All Ages." The list of games under this age restriction used to be manually curated by the company, but Velociraptor suspects that situation "changed in the last few months," with Roblox seemingly opening the flood gates. ......... Some of the newly listed games listed as suitable for "All Ages," she said, include bizarre roleplaying games that involves a public bathroom simulator. ........ Worst of all, the Roblox users' avatars become partially undressed while doing their business inside a virtual bathroom stall, while other players watch. ......... A mere minute into playing the game, Velociraptor found that her avatar got stuck in a reclined position outside of the stall, resulting in an unsettling scene with other Roblox players repeatedly maneuvering as to suggesting a nonconsensual sexual act. ........ While Velociraptor said she expected "NSFW stuff" to occur when playing "any game with multiplayer," she was shocked that "these games are MANUALLY chosen by Roblox to earn the 'All Ages' tag." ....... Velociraptor also came across several games allowing users to stab popular children's TV show characters to death. ....... Futurism was able to easily confirm the existence of some of the games mentioned by Velociraptor , in addition to other equally horrifying games listed under "All Ages," including one called "Murder in the Public Bathroom Simulator." ......... "You can also literally cook/eat someone’s feet in one game," Velociraptor noted in a follow-up tweet. "I didn’t even get into all the other crazy stuff I found." ........ "A multiplayer platform of user-generated content marketed to young kids is a nightmare," Velociraptor noted. "There is literally no way to make it safe." ....... Previous reporting has uncovered similarly questionable activity on the platform. Last year, an investigation by the BBC found the company's metaverse was teeming with sex games dubbed "condos," allowing users' naked avatars to gather in large numbers. ......... it's a massive game of cat and mouse, except that the victims are impressionable children, not adults, who may know better. ......... "I deleted my kids’ Roblox accounts, and recommend you guys do, too." .
Experts Alarmed by Sex, Nazism in Children's Game Roblox
How Much Netflix Can the World Absorb? Bela Bajaria, who oversees the streaming giant’s hyper-aggressive approach to TV-making, says success is about “recognizing that people like having more.” .......... “Next time, I’ll get to stay for a week, so I won’t have to eat twenty-four tacos in twenty-four hours, like last time,” she said to the room of assembled staff members. ......... Bajaria told me that the ideal Netflix show is what one of her V.P.s, Jinny Howe, calls a “gourmet cheeseburger,” offering something “premium and commercial at the same time.” She praised the Latin American group for its recent track record of making slick telenovelas that draw large audiences outside Spanish-speaking regions. .......... A onetime winner of the Miss India Universe beauty pageant, Bajaria has glossy black hair that she often pulls into a high ponytail. Her voice, which she joked is classic “L.A. Valley Girl,” contributes to the impression that she’s younger than her fifty-two years. Although she is ceaselessly on the road for work, she says that she never experiences jet lag, a claim corroborated by her invariably peppy demeanor. “Is there anything you still think we need to do in terms of making a bigger bet, or a fresh swing?” she asked. .......... “We are taking the next step, because our competitors are going to be where we were five years ago.” ........ in Colombia, where Netflix was filming a big-budget miniseries adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” they were working to secure permission to transplant a rare chestnut tree onto the set. Another executive described “La Flor Más Bella,” a comedy that would feature a spirited morena girl navigating a high school full of “Whitexicans.” ......... Under her leadership, Netflix acts like a universal power converter, plugging in and adapting successful show formats to different parts of the world. Bajaria asked the Latin American staffers whether they were “working with the Middle East” to remake some of their more popular shows. .......... “It’s not a science. It’s a big creative endeavor. But it’s about recognizing that people like having more.” .........
When Netflix was founded, in 1997, its ambition, almost quaint in retrospect, was to overhaul the movie-rental business.
.......... Netflix began looking into making original programming in 2010, after HBO declined to enter a licensing deal. .......... the company’s goal was “to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” ......... Bajaria’s team more readily embraced the company’s new objective, the executive said: not only to compete with cable but to “replace all television.” .......... Netflix made the startling disclosure that it had lost subscribers for the first time in a decade; the day after the announcement, the company’s valuation plummeted by more than fifty billion dollars. .......... At a media conference in June, Bajaria said, “It’s a good place, to be the underdog.” ......... Its projected content budget for 2023 is the same as last year’s—seventeen billion dollars, a colossal sum, but, by the warped standards that the company set for itself, anything that isn’t rapid expansion looks like stagnation. .......... a head start in the large swaths of the globe that are still dominated by traditional “linear TV.” .......... in 2015. Two years later, Hastings acknowledged that “the big growth” for the company lay abroad. Netflix today offers streaming services in more than a hundred and ninety countries. ......... in the third quarter of 2022 alone it released more than a thousand episodes of original streaming television globally—at least five times the number of any other streaming service. Almost seventy per cent of Netflix’s two hundred and twenty-three million subscriptions now come from outside the U.S. and Canada. ......... she is the “most global television executive.” The London-born daughter of Indian parents from East Africa, Bajaria can juggle the relatively parochial workings of Hollywood and the more ambassadorial demands of representing Netflix abroad. ........ she impressed him, during a business trip to Delhi early in her tenure, by insisting that they leave the grounds of the five-star Imperial Hotel to eat at a “hole-in-the-wall that had epic food.” ........... “We truly believe that great storytelling can come from anywhere and be loved everywhere.” .......... In 2017, Shonda Rhimes left ABC, where she’d made runaway hits such as “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal,” and signed a contract with Netflix for a reported hundred million dollars. ........ relationship management is “half my job, if not more” .......... “There was a simpatico idea that things could be really good and commercial” ......... Bajaria’s parents, Rekha and Ramesh, met and married in Kenya but moved to the U.K. for her birth, in 1970, so that she would have what they considered a more desirable passport. ........ “Even later, when I was on the cover of Fortune, one of my Indian aunties was, like, ‘We’re proud of you, Bela, but it’s so surprising,’ ” Bajaria said. ........ (A print in her office, by the artist Maria Qamar, shows a bindi-adorned woman asking, “Has anyone seen my sharam?!”—the Hindi word for shame.) .......... After her victory, a Bollywood studio offered her an acting contract. She instead bought a copy of the Hollywood Creative Directory and sent a slew of cover letters to studios inquiring about entry-level jobs. She got two interviews. .......... “It was so rare to work for a woman, let alone a woman of color,” Bajaria said of Yee, who was born in Hong Kong. .......... Bajaria found her first major success, in 1999, with a Joan of Arc miniseries starring Leelee Sobieski, which was made on a tight schedule, over one winter, and was nominated for thirteen Emmys. ............. Many people who have worked with Bajaria described her uncommon decisiveness. Creative decision-making can be agonizing, especially when many millions of dollars are on the line. Bajaria does not overthink. .......... “The thing is, she’s not an intellectual. She’s smart. There’s a difference. She’s bold, and that’s what it takes. I don’t have that gene, and that’s why my career only went so far. You need to be able to say yes and keep forging ahead.” ......... “I knew she was immensely capable of volume. She also had this ingratiating way about her, where people were drawn to her.” ......... but Sarandos and Holland beat the studio out by buying two seasons up front, without a pilot—an extraordinary commitment at the time—for an astronomical hundred million dollars. ........... Pioneering the “binge” model, Netflix put out all eight episodes at once. ........... “I came up from a family of car washes, and Universal was my car wash, you know? I hired everybody there, I created the culture.” .......... Netflix is oriented around “saying yes in a town that’s built to say no.” In licensing, Bajaria occasionally followed this edict by saying yes to content that others within Netflix had already rejected. ......... “Insatiable” marked a “Walmart-ization” of Netflix as the platform increasingly prioritized voracious acquisition over curatorial discernment. .......... The series made the Top Ten list in ninety-two countries. In November, Netflix announced two additional seasons centered upon other serial killers. ........... What is quality? What is good versus not? That’s all subjective. I just want to super-serve the audience.” ........ The series was shot outside Berlin on a revolving virtual production stage that can generate photorealistic 3-D backdrops of locations anywhere. ........ four core demographic “quadrants”—male and female, under and over twenty-five. .......... the success of “Squid Game” across the world came as a complete surprise. ......... Most of the local-language originals that the platform produces are smaller programs that one analyst described as a “retention tool,” to keep viewers on Netflix after they’ve watched (or not watched) the latest splashy global show. In Japan, subscribers may be served “Narcos” but also dozens of anime series; in Scandinavia, “Ozark” but also plenty of Nordic noir. In India, there are original programs not only in Hindi and English but in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada, and Bengali. ........ Outside of Europe and North America, the arpu—average revenue per user—tends to be lower. A subscription in India costs as little as a hundred and forty-nine rupees, or a dollar eighty-one. But it is relatively cheap to make shows abroad ........... Some of the most beloved TV shows were slow to catch on with audiences. “Seinfeld” was considered a failure in its first season. “The Wire” lagged in Season 2 before yielding twelve of the finest episodes of television ever made, in Season 3. ....... The Netflix algorithm insures that content “is served right up to you in front of your face, so it’s not like you can’t find it,” she told me. “At some point it’s, like, Is the budget better spent on a next new thing?” .......... “None of these individual shows are the product they are selling. They are just selling more Netflix.” .......... “As human beings we likely cry at the exact same things, but we all laugh at something totally different” .......... “There is no long tail without the big head.” ......... “People love to click on stories about us,” she said. “Netflix has great S.E.O.” ......... Rekha, her mother, cooks dinner for a couple of hundred people at a Hindu temple each week. .Congratulations to Bela Bajaria, Head of Global TV at Netflix, on being included in @TIME's list of 100 Most Influential People in the World! #Time100 https://t.co/35YsxL4fKs pic.twitter.com/qcXHML1czc
— We Are Netflix (@WeAreNetflix) May 23, 2022
Hello Mindy. Can you please get me in touch with her? I have a project I'd like to collaborate on. https://t.co/gANWhsjQRt
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) January 12, 2023
Bela Bajaria: "What we can do is be always audience-centric: Who is this show for? If you like this show, then we’re gonna give you this OTHER thing you like. If you do that, people are gonna watch the shows, and all of those things will help the stock." https://t.co/mpavvvYpd0
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 9, 2023
Hello Netflix. Trying to get in touch with Bela to collaborate on a project: https://t.co/gANWhsjQRt
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) January 12, 2023
It’s official.
— Nabeela Syed (@NabeelaforIL) January 12, 2023
Gen Z is in the (Illinois) House. pic.twitter.com/yvZr1NaSaa
That is where @BarackObama started. Much later in life.
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) January 12, 2023
