timelets

“On January 28, 1996, Ren Zhengfei held Huawei’s first “mass-resignation ceremony.” Each head of a regional sales office was told to prepare two reports: a work summary and a written resignation. “I will only sign one of the reports,” Ren said.

Huawei had started out in rural markets, and many of its early sales managers were provincial in their experience and network of contacts. As Ren sought to go national and international, he decided to make the entire sales staff resign and reapply for their jobs. “The mountain goat must outrun the lion to not be eaten,” he had told them ahead of the event. “All departments and sections must optimize and eat the lazy goats, the goats that do not learn or progress, and the goats with no sense of responsibility.”

They were following the strategy that Mao had used to win the Chinese Civil War of “encircling the cities with the countryside.”[9] They’d won over villages and towns in the beginning, building their strength to take on the big cities.

Ren told his followers that demotions built character and that the demoted would only be stronger when they worked their way up again.... “Even Deng Xiaoping could go down and up three times. Why can’t you go down and up three times?”

-- Eva Dou. “House of Huawei.”

Chevron снова начала работать в Венесуэле с конца 2022 года, и благодаря ее проектам добыча с тех пор действительно выросла, хотя и не особенно сильно. Более реалистичными выглядят расчеты, предполагающие ежегодный рост добычи на 200–250 тысяч баррелей в день в течение четырех-пяти лет при инвестициях от 10 миллиардов долларов в год.

Все это в основном касается традиционной нефти. Перспективы расширения добычи сверхтяжелой нефти при цене Brent 50–55 долларов за баррель совсем туманны. Для окупаемости таких проектов нужны цены на 20–30 долларов выше.
...
Возрождение нефтяной отрасли Венесуэлы не обещает мгновенных гигантских прибылей, а значит, американские нефтяные компании оказываются перед непростым выбором. У них и без Венесуэлы есть подготовленный конвейер проектов. Ресурсы — технические, человеческие, финансовые — расписаны на годы вперед.

Переключаться на Венесуэлу в такой ситуации означает отказываться от каких-то других вложений. Причем делать это придется в обстановке низких цен на нефть, когда у компаний снижен аппетит к риску и сильно желание блюсти финансовую дисциплину.

Mr. Trump seems to view the oil proceeds as a personal executive account, beyond the control of Congress’s purse-strings, to dole out as he sees fit.

It elides U.S. national security interests with Mr. Trump’s personal power, much like his gambit to let TikTok keep operating in the U.S. in violation of the law on the condition that the Treasury get a cut of its eventual sale to American investors. To the victor go the oil spoils won’t improve U.S. standing in the world, and it sends a bad message to the world’s rogues about the way to buy U.S. support.
...
U.S. companies are unlikely to invest in Venezuela until a political transition creates stability and respects property rights. Oil investment is measured in decades, not the next three years. Merely maintaining current output will require billions of dollars a year, and a hundred billion or more to return production to the levels of the early 2010s.

U.S. companies have other attractive opportunities that carry less political risk, such as offshore Guyana where ExxonMobil and Chevron are making big investments. Harold Hamm’s Continental Resources is expanding in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale formation. Don’t forget America’s own resources, including in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. Mr. Trump may be able to coerce Chevron to invest more in Venezuela, or dangle subsidies as he has suggested, but this is dubious industrial policy.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-venezuela-oil-tankers-nicolas-maduro-67c4775c

“Books also had a “shelf life.” In a seventeenth-century bookseller’s shop, they could wait patiently for readers to come and purchase them. But staged plays were big events that happened at set times. They required an immense investment of both funds and labor: a paid company of actors and a theater, which must be built, purchased, or rented. They also needed to bring in the broadest cross-section of society if they were going to meet expenses. This difference in the technology and marketing of these two narrative media has only grown with time. ”

-- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”

“...once revealed, the action of the story of the murder of Councilman Stubbs can be described in “terms of a linear chain: A->B->C->D (where D is the Death of Stubbs).
...
Characters are, usually, harder to understand than actions. They are themselves some of narrative’s most challenging gaps.
...
..we have to move from a horizontal to a vertical analysis, descending into the character to construct a plausible sense of her complexity.”

“The model, then, for the construct“tion of character in fictional narrative might look something like this:

reader/viewer + narrative -> reader/viewer’s construction of a character