Gongol.com Archives: March 2021
March 15, 2021
Tesla has filed a Form 8-K with the SEC granting the CEO the additional title of "Technoking". And it's titled its CFO as the "Master of Coin". But...why? ■ No one has ever needed a sidekick quite like Elon Musk needs one right now. Like most good top-tier leaders, he needs a right-hand person who can be implicitly trusted to veto the #1 person's worst impulses. Musk is imaginative, smart, aggressively innovative -- and also quite clearly impulsive. Perhaps he's a genius, but intellect alone isn't enough to achieve the greatest results. Temperament is essential, too. ■ Most great business geniuses have done better by working with partners. Bill Gates had Paul Allen. Soichiro Honda had Takeo Fujisawa. Warren Buffett has Charlie Munger. Part of the value of a great partner is in balancing one's ideas or offering a broader perspective on tough questions. Another part, though, is in offering a temperamental counterweight. And it's hard to imagine that a "Technoking" doesn't need to add a little bit of yin to his yang.
The people of Hong Kong have a right to their opinions...
...but only if they're already the opinions that Beijing wants them to have. That's the basic message coming from the Chinese government, as it pretends to be "all ears" about changes to the legal and government system while imposing radical changes without the people's consent. ■ Condoleezza Rice wrote, "Democracy is imperfect at the beginning and will remain so. But men and women still crave it: It alone affords human beings the dignity that comes when those who would govern them have to ask for their consent. There is simply no alternative." There's scarcely a better way to put it. And there is no possible way to interpret the behavior of China's Communist Party as "asking for consent". Thus, they afford the people of Hong Kong exactly no dignity. Sooner or later, any system that fails to respect human dignity is bound to collapse. ■ Whoever runs the social media tools for Radio-Television Hong Kong deserves an award for cramming devastating commentary into a brief story summary: "HKMAO deputy Zhang Xiaoming says the central government is 'all ears' when it comes to views on the planned overhaul to #HongKong's electoral system, as long as people's opinions are based on the decision that Beijing has already made."
Of all the strange things to see at a gas station...
Like the sands through the hourglass
How should we start measuring time? The period between required password resets? Or by notifications that your credit card has been compromised?
Government troops kill 20 pro-democracy protesters in Myanmar
20 people were murdered because they expected their government to obtain their consent first. 20 lives stolen.
