Sara’s Weekly Update #6
Welcome to my newsletter! I write down my thoughts & opinions on the topics I read/watch in the last week. My topics of interests are wide, please feel free to skip to the topic you like.
China’s Population
China death rate is higher than the birth rate for the first time in the last 60 years. It’s not immediate threat, but in long run it could slow the growth. Never know, they might automate everything to increase the supply & grew the demand by selling services & products to Africa. In the meantime India is going to beat China in population for the first year, and has more young population. If India taps it right may be India can have similar growth in next decade what China had in the last decade.
China has followed a trajectory familiar to many developing countries as their economies get richer: Fertility rates fall as incomes rise and education levels increase. As the quality of life improves, people live longer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/business/china-birth-rate.html
TikTok Ban
Government Agencies are concerned about TikTok and this week its banned in Texas government devices, I think it’s valid. But I guess we don’t have to ban for entire society unless it sees a threat that China is indirectly pushing contents to influence the people here. I find US/TikTok story interesting to watch.
“TikTok harvests vast amounts of data from its users’ devices—including when, where, and how they conduct Internet activity—and offers this trove of potentially sensitive information to the Chinese government,” Abbott’s letter read.
Abbott acknowledged that TikTok has said its data is stored in the U.S., but he expressed concern that the Chinese government could use the app to surveil American citizens.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/12/07/greg-abbott-tiktok-ban/
Reed Hastings stepping down from CEO
I have been using Netflix since I came to this country in 2008 and was using DVD mailing at that time. I saw the company transitioning from DVD to streaming, and started producing their own content and challenging many big production houses. Reed Hastings is a highly accomplished leader & inspiring one. He is stepping down as CEO & taking the Executive Chairman role.
https://about.netflix.com/en/news/ted-sarandos-greg-peters-co-ceos-netflix
Layoffs in tech
Google & Microsoft also announced layoffs this week. It’s tough for everyone, hope things will settle in a year or so. But glad these companies are considerate in giving 2 moths notice period & above market severance packages & health benefits.
It does looks like a repeat of 2008, tech company revenues are falling but an important technology shift is happening at the same time. In 2008 it was mobile & cloud, this time it could be AI.
https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update/
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-focusing-on-our-short-and-long-term-opportunity/
Create Luck
Its’ an old blog but I came across only this week. I have read about LSA (luck surface area) before but this one has put it more nicely.
luck (surface area) = doing more things * telling more people about it
https://www.swyx.io/create-luck/
Books
I completed the book “How to Raise Successful People” last week.
As I mentioned in last week, we are getting ready for our Texas move and so wanted to read something about moving to a new place & starting all over again. And found this book interesting “This Is Where You Belong” by Melody Warnick. Read chapters 1 & 2, below are some of the highlights from these chapters.
1. Lost Art of Staying Put
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image. —Joan Didion...
As lonely as moving sometimes feels, it’s a shared loneliness. Americans have long been among the world’s most insistently mobile people. Each year around 12 percent of us move—a national game of musical chairs with 36 million players. To get a sense of the scale of it, imagine every single resident of the twenty-five largest cities in the country—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and so on—boxing up the bed linens and pulling up stakes.
Researchers suspect that a primary factor in whether we feel at home in a town is the length of our stay there. (Peak season for place attachment: three to five years after moving.)
I find this true in myself as well as with my friends. We tend to get attached to a place if we live there for longer. It was a hard decision for us to move out of Minnesota, as we have lived here for a decade and made so many connections & memories.
I managed to distill what I’d learned into a master list of ten basic place attachment behaviors that were relatively doable and potentially enjoyable and that I hoped would help me put down roots. 1. Walk more. 2. Buy local. 3. Get to know my neighbors. 4. Do fun stuff. 5. Explore nature. 6. Volunteer. 7. Eat local. 8. Become more political. 9. Create something new. 10. Stay loyal through hard times.
My friend Jen, who as an army wife knows a thing or two about moving, told me, “It is an incredibly conscious decision to love where you live. I have seen so many families become miserable because they hate where they are when they move to a new place. You have to choose to love it.”
Agree to this, it just personal commitment to the place, it’s a conscious decision to love it.
2. Lace Up Your Sneakers
Jeff Speck, a city planner and author of Walkable City—a key source for this chapter—told me that the way you get around determines your relationship to your environment by determining what you see. Driving a car, you’re so focused on not killing yourself or others that you only notice the big stuff, like road signs. Biking allows you to experience your place’s topography and weather (Hills! And it’s raining now!), but you’re still going too fast to notice minutiae. “Only walking,” says Speck, “is an invitation to socialize, as well as the slowest productive pace for observing the details of the buildings, landscape, humans, and other animals around you.”
People who walk a lot feel better about their lives, and one of the principles I was coming to understand about loving where you live is that feeling good in general often translates to feeling good about where you live. When you’re happy, for whatever reason, you also happen to be happy in the place you live.
Planning to walk more in the neighbor hood, to better connect with the environment & the surroundings.
Family Updates (#family)
Nila & Surya participated in Pongal Dance program in Tamil Sangam in MN. Their dances are cute to watch :-)
We finished watching Wednesday series from Netflix, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. When we started the first episode, we were like maybe this is for teens not for us. After couple episodes we couldn’t stop it & want to binge watch it