Japan now requires people entering the country to have or acquire a smartphone and install some tracking apps on it.

This is not as bad as it first appears, because the requirement is only for the duration of the mandatory quarantine. Tracking your movements is not harmful when you never go anywhere.

The harm that remains even if you're staying always in the same place is that the phone can listen to your conversations all the time.

"Relationship education" is an advance in regard to teaching people what not to do in connection with sex and romance. Still missing is teaching people in practical terms how to find their way towards joyous love. Without that, people either stumble upon it by chance, or fall into loneliness.

Mark Carney, until recently head of the Bank of England, has excoriated the cult of the invisible hand. His book, Value(s), calls for *fairness between the generations, in the distribution of income and of life chances.*

Fairness in the distribution of income is crucial — it means that nobody should be painfully poor. Without that, we would have the frequent error of believing that "social mobility" is enough to make a society good.

*Biden must punish Putin’s cyber-attacks. But [Britain's] building more nukes only makes things worse.*

The US has a strong interest in limiting nuclear weapons, and if it throws that away to punish Putin, it would put itself (and the rest of the world) in more danger. That is not a rational way to punish Putin?

Giving Germany something in exchange for its agreement to cancel the new pipeline, and with it the planned increase in fossil fuel purchase from Russia, would address two problems at once.

Corrective information about people of Asian or "Asian" descent in the US.

What is occurring seems to be bigotry and hatred directed at people of East Asian descent. Whether we call them "Asians" or describe them more accurately, the wrong of that hatred is the same. But I like to be accurate.