The percentage of companies that can’t afford to pay the interest on their debt has reached a new all-time high in the wake of central bank intervention.
MicroStrategy increases its bitcoin reserves by $175 million
The Oracle-TikTok deal starts to smell fishy
The SEC is investigating claims of fraud involving Nikola Corp.
Our main discussion: The rise of zombie firms.
A zombie firm is a company that can’t afford to service its debt from operating income. These companies are made possible by artificially low interest rates, and they drain resources from the economy.
Roland Pease reports from the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Seattle. At the UK Research and Innovation’s stand in the exhibition hall, he’s joined by three scientists to discuss monitoring the Coronavirus outbreak, the locusts devastating crops in East Africa and the ever increasing amount of space junk orbiting the Earth.
Professor Jeffrey Shaman of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University talks about how he is modelling the movement of Covid-19 around China and beyond.
Dr Catherine Nakalembe, of the University of Maryland and East Africa Lead for NASA Harvest explains how she uses data collected by satellites to find out where crops are thriving and where they are not. She also talks about how this technology can alert countries to approaching locust swarms.
And Professor Moriba Jah of University of Texas at Austin, tells Roland why he’s concerned about the amount of space junk that’s orbiting the earth and why so little is being done about controlling satellite launch and disposal.
(Image: Artist response to NASA Harvest discussion at AAAS Credit: Lorenzo Palloni)
The realignment of geopolitics in the Middle East has many fathers, and Donald Trump was only one of them. What the thaw in Sunni states’ relations with Israel means for America moving forward. Also, for all the talk of the president’s “white grievance” politics, he’s performing better among minority voters in polls than he did in 2016 while white voters are fleeing his coalition.
What was the most widespread infiltration of the US government? According to some sources, it came from within. Tune in to learn more about the story of Operation Snow White -- and why the Church of Scientology and the US government still don't agree on what actually happened. Join Ben and Matt for this startling -- and bizarre -- classic episode.
Amanda Holmes reads Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s poem, “I Sit and Sew.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
Whither memory: Guantanamo W. Bush paints over his legacy.
Hello from the future!
Inspired (triggered?) by last week’s commemorations of 9/11, we get a bit contemplative. How will future generations remember (or suppress) the events of the Trump era, especially the mass death of Covid-19? We discuss state-sanctioned memory in the US and China, how Trump has effectively rehabilitated George W. Bush, and Paul Krugman’s tweet threads (1, 2) about 9/11 and Islamophobia. We conclude with a listener question about how a “corporate Asian” should be.
0:00 – Yet another 9/11 anniversary provokes an imagined retrospective of the Trump era. How will we remember, or try to forget, these years under 45? Andy compares Chinese and US history and how state-sanctioned political narratives have domesticated personal memory and trauma. Tammy and Jay disagree over how we remember the 1960s, and we wonder how the explosive protest movements of 2020 will go down in history: will they be reduced to aesthetic commodity? Bonus: plugs for W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Agnès Varda’s Black Panthers.
47:38 – Economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman got in trouble for Twitterasing/ retconning the Bush administration’s Islamophobic policies and wars in the Middle East as genteel by comparison to Trump. Do his arguments have any merit? Plus, Jay previews his libretto for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s forthcoming coronavirus musical (coming to Broadway in 2026), and we examine the absurd unreliability of hate crimes statistics (tsk tsk, Krugman) in the context of anti-Asian violence.
1:19:05 – TTSG listener Gestational Yuppie asks how Asian Americans should deal with their guilt for outwardly working corporate jobs while inwardly harboring leftist politics, leading all three hosts to do some soul-searching.
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Hurricane Sally bears down on the Gulf coast. Climate change debate on the campaign trail. Rethinking a college football season on the sidelines. CBS News Correspondent Steve Kathan has today's World News Roundup.
Why is your craft beer and favorite cocktail so dang expensive? What does this have to do with America’s only mother-daughter distilling duo? Join host Jarrett Dieterle, author of Give Me Liberty & Give Me A Drink (Artisan Books), as he exposes the long-running battle between booze producers and government and explains why your drink costs more than it should.
Adam Wathan has been obsessed with computers since he was a kid. In fact, he was introduced to computers by his 1st grade librarian.. and his first programming project was using Q-Basic, following a tutorial on how to make a pro wrestling simulator.
During his time in university, he wasn't enjoying the programming curriculum and ended up dropping out to play in his band, and working odd jobs to support his music career. During this, he got into the production side of music, and started a home studio to record local bands. Four years after he quit programming, he started tinkering with the same framework used to make Winamp - called reaper - and fell in love with pogromming all over again. At this point, he tried school again, but post internship, he decided to go straight into the field without finishing his degree.
These days, he is married with a young family. Besides staying busy with that, he still finds time to play games with his remote friends, and occasionally trains for powerlifting. He met his business partner, Steve, in college, and hacked on side projects together. These side projects led to the creation of a mini CSS framework, which Wathan started using throughout other projects, growing it into something he was quite proud of. In fact, while live-streaming some coding, he was surprised by the influx of people asking what it was... and where they could get it. He decided to open source the framework in 2017, and it has steadily grown and grown in usage - to the tune of millions of downloads a month.
This is the creation story of Tailwind CSS and Tailwind Labs.
