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The dumbest decision you can make

Your dumbest decision is believing in “experts.”

+ My friend is in hospital because his doctor prescribed a drug that made his liver toxic.

+ My other friend is walking about like the hunchback of Notre Dame because his doctor gave him a statin that messed up his knees, forcing him to hunch over.

+ The IRS once told me if I had had a better accountant, I could have saved $1 million.

+ My lawyer on a big deal forgot the tax implications. His mistake cost him his last bill, which I told him to eat. And which he did.

My third friend says his doctor is an expert and to question his decisions — on drugs, surgery, or life style — is pointless. Hence he doesn’t research his doctor’s recommendations, or come up with his own.

Too many of my friends are in hospital at present because their doctors made mistakes.

Watch the pill ads on TV. They devote ten seconds to curing the disease and 50 seconds to warning you of the gruesome side effects.

Your best life is exercise, sleep, no stress, decent food and no pills.

Your body repairs itself, if you give it time.

It’s not difficult.

Start with turning off the TV.

Go for a walk.

Here’s Manhattan yesterday afternoon, snapped on my walk to Whole Foods. Peaceful.

I can’t afford the $100 million apartment on the top of this building. But I also don’t want it.

God invented books and the Internet. He made many doctors and (too many) lawyers…

There’s always somewhere or someone to find the solution to your latest ailment.

True story: Recently I went to my doctor, Jerry Clements, of the Village Family Practice, NYC. I  had an ailment. He said he had pills. But he said if I was a good boy and waited, it would all go away.

It did.

Our bodies are amazing. They repair themselves. Give them time. And don’t do stupid.

Intel’s latest dumb decision?

The 21 Most Romantic Places to Stay in the World

I like looking at places I’ll never visit. Here are some from CondeNast’s latest roundup:

For a Slice of Bohemia: Hotel Esencia, Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico:

For the Jet Set: J.K. Place Capri, Italy

For Urbanists: The Surrey, New York, New York

For Private Butler Service: Royal Mansour, Marrakech, Morocco

I have actually been to one of them. I wasn’t that impressed. They didn’t have tennis courts at the Adare Manor, Co. Limerick, Ireland

You can check out the full list here. 

My friend who loves to travel says he’ll go anywhere except to places where you can take chickens on buses.

This whole China sanctions thing is crazy. 

Here’s a piece by Hank Paulson that explains all.

Balkanising technology will backfire on the US
China will benefit if America forces the world to choose between them
by Henry Paulson, former treasury secretary and published in the Financial Times

Washington’s decision to blacklist Huawei, preventing US companies from buying its products, may be a death sentence for China’s leading technology group. It is hard to see how Huawei can survive without a negotiated settlement between presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.

But this fight is about more than the fate of one company. After 30 years of globalisation, we now face the very real prospect that an economic iron curtain may descend. Technology has become a core problem in the US-China relationship, blurring the lines between economic competitiveness and national security. The battle is about whose economy will drive the technology of the future and set the standards for it.

These issues are among the most intractable because they strike at the core of each country’s national security and competitiveness, and there is no playbook for resolving them. Increasingly, the west and China will compete over whose technologies and standards will become dominant. The battle could fragment the world as some regions choose Chinese products and standards while others opt for infrastructure that is dependent on US and western technology and standards. One likely source of friction is the competition to build and deploy 5G architecture, which will underpin a vast array of commercial and military technologies.

Mutual efforts to exclude one another’s technologies from national supply chains would break the global innovation ecosystem. For strictly military systems, there is of course a straightforward national security basis for exclusion. But few hardware or software systems are straightforwardly military any more.

The US faces a twofold problem. First, other countries are unlikely to sever their technology relationships with China. A full-blown US push to freeze out applications with widespread or beneficial commercial uses is likely to flounder when other countries refuse to go along.

Some wealthy democracies may follow the US and seek to strip Chinese equipment out of their backbone technological systems. But most, and maybe all, developing economies will not and neither will some US allies.

America also risks isolating itself. The Huawei supply ban will reverberate well beyond China because it sets a precedent. Others may stop doing business with American companies and relying on US suppliers rather than run the risk that Washington might step in and inflict great harm on them by terminating the commercial relationship.

Understandably, Americans abhor China’s history of pervasive technology theft and forced technology transfer. They also rightly dislike the Chinese models of internet governance and regulation. But innovation cannot be separated from competitiveness. Balkanising technology could harm global innovation, hurting the competitiveness not just of Chinese firms but also of US companies around the world.

US policymakers are now focused on finding ways to hurt China and weaken its technological progress in advanced and emerging industries such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing. But they aren’t focused enough on what that effort might mean for America’s own technological progress and economic competitiveness, both of which underpin our national security.

As much as business and innovation leaders welcome the actions the US government is now taking to protect vital new technologies, they worry that government bureaucrats will introduce controls without fully considering the impact on America’s global position and its access to some of the world’s largest and fastest-growing markets.

Detaching the US from Chinese entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors — and the ecosystem in which they foster innovation – will undermine America’s own ability to innovate. China and other countries will continue to jointly make progress by working with one another.

At worst, we could sequester so much important technology in the US that American companies would no longer be able to participate in the international research collaborations and supply chains that fuel the fastest-growing industries. The US would also lose its place as the world’s most attractive investment destination.

The whole world will be watching when Messrs Trump and Xi attend the G20 meeting in Osaka on Friday. Business and government leaders everywhere hope the two leaders can reboot the trade negotiations and drive them to a successful conclusion. But as arduous as these talks have been, this challenge pales in comparison to managing the looming technology competition.

This is the paramount challenge for US economic and national security because innovation is one of America’s defining strengths. We need to protect it — but without erecting an economic iron curtain that weakens us by closing us off from other innovative economies and people.

The writer, a former US Treasury secretary, chairs the Paulson Institute. The original of the article is here.

How golf should be played (??)

A UK firm which arranges golf events has announced it will offer a men-only tournament that will include “topless buggy ladies, a foam party and a wet t-shirt competition.”

The event, titled ‘Big Boy And Bigger Golf Day‘ is expected to be held at a golf course in Essex on August 16.

Harry Newton believes flattery and grandchild adulation will cure anything. Next week I’m taking Sophie to Pinocchio at 10:30 AM at the Mac-Haydn Theater in Chatham, NY, then to lunch at Dairy Queen in Ghent for hamburgers and vanilla ice cream dipped in molten chocolate. We won’t talk about tariffs, 5G, Huawei, socialism, the stock market, taxation or Washington. Promise. None of that nonsense. We’ll focus on pigging ourselves and messing up our clothes with chocolate sauce and ketchup. Paradise.

2 Comments

  1. Lucky says:

    That picture of you with Sophie, Harry…sans tie, beats the Flower Song picture all to hell!

  2. Chris Harrell says:

    Harry…just received an email from Wealthfront that their cash account earns 2.57%. Might be a better option for you.