出國趣

Annie 阿尼、Chloe 克洛伊

想要出國留學、打工度假還是自助旅行嗎？兩位英文老師跟你一起拓展視野、提升英文實力、討論國際時事，Let's Fun Fun 學英文，爽爽出國去！ -- Hosting provided by SoundOn

  1. 2d ago

    91-3 在歐洲的穆斯林: 該遵循回教規範還是歐洲自由作風?+小分享: 我與穆斯林的互動

    The truth and the lies about Islam in Europe Islam poses no serious danger. But Islamism and the fear of Islam do   Sep 10th 2026|6 min read   PANIC ABOUT Islam in Europe is spreading. In several European countries half the population now thinks it is incompatible with Western values. On September 6th the populist-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, its largest state-election tally yet, warning about “Islamisation” and promising forced deportations. The same weekend in Britain hundreds of balaclava-clad thugs occupied Dover, chanting “Stop the boats” and “Christ is King”. In France Marine Le Pen's call to ban Islamic headscarves from public places is backed by 60% of voters.   The obsession has also taken root in America. The fear is less of terrorists, as it was after September 11th 2001, than of an Islamic plot to take over Europe from within. Members of the Trump administration warn of “civilisational erasure”.   This perception is harming transatlantic relations. It is also wrong. Europe faces no Islamic takeover, no mass radicalisation of Muslims and no erasure of its culture. As our reporting shows, it does not have “no-go zones”, sharia is not creeping into national law and nowhere is a demographic “great replacement” under way.   The real danger to Europe is different: of extremism fuelled by Islamism (the belief that the state should enforce Islamic principles) and by social-media-driven right-wing paranoia. The left makes this worse by denying the modest but real threats Islamism poses. So do politicians in the centre, by keeping quiet lest they attract accusations of racism. This dynamic could indeed harm Europe’s liberal democracies—not by replacing them with a caliphate, but by slowing integration and favouring policies that would do lasting harm to their freedoms.   The most extreme fears are easily debunked. Even after record migration from majority-Muslim countries, Muslims now make up just 6% of Europe’s population of well over 500m. Although new arrivals typically have more children than the native-born do, fertility rates tend to converge within two generations. That is a long way from civilisational erasure.   In fact, most Muslim immigrants want to get on in their new home, not impose on it a version of the societies they have just left. Their children tend to do better than their parents at school. In Britain 67% of Bangladeshis who sat standard tests in 2021 were enrolled in university by age 19, compared with 38% of white Britons. Many Muslims are involved in mainstream politics: witness Britain’s home secretary and London’s mayor. In important ways Muslim attitudes can resemble those of other Europeans. In polling we commissioned among British Muslims, we found little resistance to women working.   What, then, is setting so many Europeans against Islam? Plenty of Muslims hold illiberal views—we report in this issue on the killing of an openly gay imam in South Africa. In Britain, our polling finds, 52% of Muslims think homosexuality is wrong, and young Muslims (41% of under-35s) are more likely than their elders (25%) to believe violence can be justified if someone insults the prophet.   Holding socially conservative views does not in itself make people a threat—some of Europe’s defenders on the right are just as anti-gay as the Muslims they decry. But some of these attitudes should trouble liberals who have long assumed that open societies eventually make people more tolerant. And if the state is too pusillanimous to confront wrongs committed by minorities, as when gangs of Muslim men abused young girls in several English cities, it rightly causes outrage.   Just as important is the conflation of Islam, a religion, with Islamism, a political ideology. Islam isn’t a problem; Islamism can be. Unlike the jihadis of 9/11, most Islamists do not advocate violence. But many practise “entryism”—infiltrating democratic institutions to promote an illiberal agenda. Well-connected Islamist groups might lobby for sweeping hate-speech laws or against counter-extremism programmes. The main danger of entryism is local. Small, well-organised networks can capture a school, a mosque, a council or a charity and use such institutions to discourage integration and impose religious conformity on other Muslims who live nearby. Concern about these non-violent Islamists has grown among Europe’s security services. In France authorities fret about** covert entryism by the Muslim Brotherhood. An official report released last year warned that Islamism could, in time, threaten secular rules and women’s rights**. But that seems unlikely. France’s interior ministry estimated that just 139 of 2,800 Muslim places of worship were linked to the Brotherhood.   Instead, the main victims are other Muslims. Half of the 12 council wards in Blackburn, in northern England, are over 60% Muslim; two are over 80%. In such areas women can feel pressure to let sharia councils govern their family lives. Gay and liberal Muslims face intimidation. Non-conformist Muslims complain that Western authorities—scared of being seen as racist—do not extend the same protections to them as they do to non-Muslim citizens.   There is broader harm, too. Islamists stir up antisemitism, not least over Gaza. They demand curbs on free speech about their beliefs. They scare politicians, comedians, academics and journalists into self-censorship. They can bully schools, student unions, charities and councils.   What turns these local threats into a continental danger is how they are exploited. It suits Islamists to claim that any criticism of their political project is an attack on Islam itself. The populist left, including Unsubmissive France and the Greens in Britain, tends to treat questions about migration, crime or Islamism as racist.   And the populist right often whips up fear by claiming that all Muslims pose a threat and accusing the state of a “woke cover-up” and “two-tier treatment”. Few have been more vehement than Elon Musk, who has used his social-media platform to shape views of Islam around the world and to boost Europe’s anti-Muslim right, from the AfD to Tommy Robinson, a British agitator whom we feature in a three-part podcast series starting this weekend.   The populist right’s remedies are as illiberal as the Islamists they claim to be protecting Europe from. Promises of mass deportation, segregation and dress bans all terrify Muslims, inhibiting integration and driving them into the arms of extremists. Any country that enacted such policies would find that the hatred they unleashed would cause enduring damage.   That is why Europe’s mainstream politicians need to offer an alternative. Violence and threats of it should be prosecuted. But there should be no taboos for the sake of cultural sensitivity. Free speech is not the enemy of tolerance but its precondition. Entryism should be called out, as should bigotry. Governments nervous about collecting, or releasing, data leave a vacuum to be filled by speculative hyperbole.   Tackling all this will not be easy or quick, but there is hope. Europe’s Muslims are assimilating, as did earlier waves of Catholic, Jewish and Caribbean migrants in the countries where they settled. The arrival of all those previous groups sparked moral panics about whether they would ever fit in. All eventually found a place. Muslims will, too—if division and paranoia are not allowed to get in the way. ■   主旨： 歐洲對伊斯蘭的真相與謊言：伊斯蘭本身並無危險，真正的威脅來自伊斯蘭主義與群眾恐慌 日期： 2026年9月10日 【第一段：群眾恐慌與政治亂象】 針對歐洲伊斯蘭教的恐慌，正在各地迅速蔓延。 在好幾個歐洲國家，已經有一半的人口認為，伊斯蘭教與西方核心價值完全無法相容。9月6號，極右翼的「德國另類選擇黨」（AfD）在薩克森-安哈特邦的選舉中，拿下了高達 44% 的選票，創下該黨在邦選舉中的歷史新高。他們在競選中不斷警告「伊斯蘭化」的危機，並承諾要實施強制驅逐出境。 同一週末，在英國，數百名戴著巴拉克拉法頭套的暴徒佔領了多佛港，高喊著「阻止難民船」和「基督為王」的口號。而在法國，瑪琳．勒龐（Marine Le Pen）主張要在公共場所禁止佩戴伊斯蘭頭巾，這個提議獲得了高達六成選民的支持。 這種執念甚至跨越了大西洋，在美國扎根。人們現在擔心的不再是像 2001 年「911 事件」那樣的外在恐怖份子，而是害怕伊斯蘭勢力正在從內部暗中掌控歐洲。川普政府的成員甚至警告，這是一場「文明的消亡」。 【第二段：事實釐清與真正的危險】 這種觀感不僅正在傷害跨大西洋的盟友關係，而且它根本是錯的。 歐洲並沒有面臨被伊斯蘭接管的危險，沒有出現大規模的穆斯林極端化，也沒有所謂的文化消亡。正如我們的調查報導所顯示，歐洲根本沒有所謂的「治安禁區」（No-go zones），伊斯蘭教法沒有滲透進國家法律，各地更沒有發生人口結構上的「大換血」（Great Replacement）。 歐洲面臨的真正危險其實另有原因：第一，是「伊斯蘭主義」（也就是主張國家應強制施行伊斯蘭教義的政治主張）所引發的極端主義；第二，則是社群媒體所推波助瀾的右翼疑神疑鬼。 左派把情況搞得更糟，因為他們選擇無視伊斯蘭主義所帶來的溫和但實質的威脅。而中間派政客則保持沉默，深怕被扣上種族歧視的帽子。這種政治動態確實會傷害歐洲的民主體制——但並不是因為歐洲會被「哈里發國」取代，而是因為它會拖慢社會融合，並促成那些對人民

  2. Sep 24

    91-2 中國若要攻打台灣會陷入地獄般的慘況 Hellscape +小分享: 我們的歸屬-台灣民主國?

    China would face a “hellscape” in a war over Taiwan New tech may give America an edge Sep 15th 2026|TAIPEI AND HONOLULU|7 min read   IN AN OFFICE block on the outskirts of Taipei, Chan Hsiang-chih opens a workshop door and offers a glimpse at the future of warfare in the Taiwan Strait. Inside sit two torpedo-shaped undersea drones, prototypes for Taiwan’s navy. “That’s where the bomb goes,” he says, nodding to the rear of one. It can identify targets and drop its payload or launch a kamikaze strike, alone or in a swarm. Dr Chan started his business, AwareOcean, in 2015 to supply offshore windfarms. Now he builds the kind of low-cost autonomous weapons that Taiwan and America need for their new plan to thwart a Chinese invasion.   Dubbed “Hellscape”, the plan draws on lessons from Ukraine and Iran in using large numbers of low-tech drones, combined with artificial intelligence, to frustrate a far more powerful adversary. It envisions flooding the Taiwan Strait with relatively cheap aerial, sea-surface and underwater drones just as Chinese forces launch an attack. Assuming that China jams communication links with these weapons, they will strike Chinese ships using inertial guidance, image recognition or on-board AI that prioritises targets, evades counter-measures and co-ordinates attacks with other drones. That will not stop an invasion. But it would raise the costs and buy time and space for American warships and planes to reach Taiwan.   Whether America would actually intervene is an open question, especially since Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Visiting Beijing in May, he questioned the logic of fighting so far from America and said he would use arms sales to Taiwan as a bargaining-chip with Mr Xi. Sure enough, in the run-up to Mr Xi’s visit to Washington on September 24th, Mr Trump has held off approving a $14bn arms package for Taiwan that was cleared by Congress in January. Taiwanese officials worry that more concessions to China may follow to secure deals on trade and technology. And they fear that deliveries of earlier American arms packages could be delayed by shortages due to the war against Iran.   Yet American and Taiwanese military commanders are quietly forging ahead with Hellscape, a plan originally conceived when Joe Biden was president. They think China is unlikely to attack before the end of the decade, when America will have a new leader. And they believe their odds of success have improved in the light of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, even accounting for China’s growing capabilities. American strategists have long taught that an attacking force needs three times the firepower of a defender to secure victory. They now think the attacker needs an advantage of more like 20 or even 30 to one.   “Uncrewed systems are to today’s conflicts what the machine gun was in World War I and the tank in World War II: a game-changing technology that redefines the battlefield,” Raymond Greene, America’s de facto ambassador in Taipei, told a conference there on September 9th. Taiwan could easily exploit the lessons from Ukraine and Iran because of its world-leading semiconductor industry, strong manufacturing base and booming economy. It also has access to battle-tested American aerial drones (of which Taiwan bought 2,000 in August). And it is collaborating with America on sea drones and AI-enabled swarming technology, he said. The problem is not the lack of a good plan. It’s that to make it work, America needs the political will and all the drone and missile capacity it can get. Proponents of the plan are looking beyond Mr Trump, banking on bipartisan congressional support for Taiwan (which remains strong) and the island’s importance to America’s AI industry. But some fear the influence within the Republican Party of a “restrainer” camp that favours abandoning Taiwan. Others worry that Mr Trump has deepened public opposition to overseas wars and done lasting damage to relations with Asian allies, whose support they would hope to have to make Hellscape work.   America’s efforts to build more low-cost drones have borne some fruit. It reverse-engineered an Iranian aerial-strike drone in 18 months. And the Pentagon plans to buy 200,000 cheap UAVs by 2027. But progress has been slowed by testing backlogs and shortages of non-Chinese components. Hellscape needs far fewer sea drones: a single successful strike can sink or cripple a warship, as Ukraine showed in the Black Sea. Some American models designed for a war over Taiwan have been used against Iran. And American troops tested a Ukrainian kamikaze boat in the Philippines in April. Still, these are still mostly experimental systems, produced in negligible numbers, says Professor Michael Horowitz of the University of Pennsylvania, who led the Pentagon’s drone drive under the Biden administration.   He and others also warn that such drones cannot replace bigger, older and more expensive weapons. The plan is for drones to exhaust China’s missile interceptors and damage its invasion flotilla sufficiently to make it easier for American aircraft-carriers, submarines and other platforms to hit their targets. The worry is that the Iran war has diverted America’s forces from the Pacific and depleted its weapons stockpiles, especially of precision missiles and missile interceptors. Restocking America’s magazines will take years. Some worry that Mr Xi might try his luck before then, possibly as soon as 2028, when Taiwan holds its next presidential election—about 10 months before Mr Trump leaves office.   “The other thing to keep in mind”, says one former Pentagon official, “is that it would not be consistent with American policy…to put large quantities of American weapons in Taiwan that we would then come in and use.” Changing that policy would invite an unholy row with China. That is why, says the former official, “it is all the more important to sufficiently train and equip Taiwanese forces.”   Taiwan presents other challenges. Chief is its capacity to produce enough drones. Soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Taiwan launched a programme to develop a drone industry free of Chinese components. It aims to buy 208,000 locally produced aerial-attack drones and 1,320 suicide boats by 2032. Output and exports have grown in the past two years. But the plan has been delayed by squabbling over funding, which was only approved in August. The main obstacle was the Kuomintang, Taiwan’s biggest opposition party, which favours closer ties with China. Should it return to power in 2028, there could be further delays. “If a real crisis hits, the timeline would probably be compressed significantly, just like in Ukraine,” says Chen Ping-hei, a professor at Taiwan National University who works on the drone programme. But as of now “the manpower and funding is clearly insufficient.” He thinks Taiwan needs 4m UAVs and 10,000 marine drones.   There are also sceptics within Taiwan’s armed forces. They worry that investment in drones could come at the expense of bigger-ticket items, such as Patriot missiles for a new air-defence system. Some also want fighters and warships to help counter Chinese actions that fall short of an invasion, such as a blockade. (Chinese customs vessels recently began regular patrols east of Taiwan.) Others place more emphasis on striking the Chinese mainland early and preserving Taiwanese forces for a counter-attack.   China’s response raises troubling questions too. It initially mocked Hellscape, with one official military outlet branding it a “psychotic plan” and calling America a paper tiger unable to produce the necessary drone swarms. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) still enjoys an overwhelming advantage in drone numbers and production capacity. It has been testing its own unmanned systems in drills around Taiwan, while studying developments in Ukraine and the Middle East. It has also sent officers to Russia to train with Russian counterparts in drone and counter-drone operations and to gain access to relevant data from the front lines. Recently, however, there have been signs of concern within the PLA. Mr Xi’s purges have made it harder to meet his order for it to be ready to execute an invasion, if instructed, by 2027. Some Chinese military experts now suggest that Hellscape requires the PLA to update its invasion plans, and to invest more in shipborne weapons that could identify and destroy drones.   Hellscapers concede that the obstacles are daunting. But to deter conflict, its proponents say, Taiwan and America do not need to demonstrate that they could defeat China outright. They just need to convince Mr Xi that he would struggle to achieve the quick and relatively cost-free victory that he hopes for. ■   在台北郊區的一棟辦公大樓裡，詹翔智打開工作坊的大門，讓人窺見台灣海峽未來戰場的一角。房間裡擺著兩艘雪茄狀的水下無人機原型，正準備交付給台灣海峽的海軍。「炸彈就是裝在這裡，」他點頭指向其中一艘無人機的後方說道。這款無人機可以自動辨識目標、投放彈藥，或者以單機、群飛的方式發動自殺式襲擊。詹博士在 2015 年創立了「智海科技」（AwareOcean），原本是為了服務離岸風電產業；如今，他轉而製造這類低成本的自律型武器，而這正是台灣與美國為了挫敗中國入侵計畫，所急需的關鍵配備。 這項名為「地獄景觀」（Hellscape）的戰略計畫，汲取了烏克蘭與伊朗的實戰經驗，主張利用海量低成本無人機結合人工智慧，來反制實力懸殊的強大對手。它的核心構想是：一旦中國發動進攻，美台將立即在台灣海峽鋪天蓋地投放大量相對便宜的空中、水面及水下無人機。考量到中國屆時必然會進行電磁

  3. Sep 19

    91-1 你對公司&部門&小團體有多大的認同感?+ 小分享: 人生第一份工作的小圈圈 @~@"

    Are you committed to your company or your team? Employees have overlapping identities at work. That’s a challenge for bosses   Sep 10th 2026|4 min read Humans are conditioned to form allegiances extremely quickly, a type of behaviour sometimes called the “minimal group effect”. In a famous series of experiments, a social psychologist called Henri Tajfel found that you can divide strangers into groups on totally arbitrary grounds—how good they are at estimating the number of dots on a chart, say, or how much they like a certain type of abstract art, or even just on the basis of a coin toss—and they will immediately start to favour members of their own group when then asked to distribute rewards. If people are prepared to start dividing the world into “us” and “them” based on whether someone likes Mondrian, it’s no surprise that they form strong identities and loyalties based on where they go to work every day. One of the small diversions of office life is watching to see how quickly joiners start using the word “we” to refer to their new employer: it’s usually instantaneous and occasionally takes place during the interview. But if you work for a large enough company, you do not belong only to the organisation. You have “nested identities”: you are also a member of a department, and of a team within that department, and perhaps of smaller groups as well. These other in-groups can really matter. A research meta-analysis by Michael Riketta of the University of Tübingen and Rolf van Dick of Goethe University finds that on average employees identify more strongly with their work group than with their organisation. That ought not to be a huge surprise. Proximity, familiarity and shared routines bind people from a specific team together. Identities at work also depend largely on which department you are in. If you are at a staff event for Widget & Sons and a colleague asks what you do, you don’t say “I work for Widget & Sons” but tell them which group you work in. Identifying with a sub-group is not necessarily bad. It makes perfect sense for organisations to divide labour up among departments. A bit of friendly competition between teams can be useful. But a strong sense of group identity can also impede co-operation across the wider organisation. It becomes natural to blame the general uselessness of other departments if things go wrong. Budget allocations are framed as victories and losses. Information may well be hoarded in silos rather than shared. A paper by Jeanine Pieternel Porck of Oklahoma State University and her co-authors finds, for example, that a strong sense of group identification is associated with reduced understanding of an organisation’s strategy. For executives, therefore, the challenge is to reconcile strong bonds within teams with a sense of commitment to the organisation as a whole. An example from outside the office helps explain how to go about this. A long long time ago, when Manchester United was a dominant football club, a group of researchers wondered whether being a fan of the team would affect someone’s willingness to help a supporter of a rival outfit. Mark Levine of Lancaster University and his co-authors ran an experiment in which self-identified fans were first reminded of their allegiance to Man Utd and later encountered a jogger who deliberately slipped and fell in front of them. The participants were more likely to offer help if the stranger was wearing a Man Utd football shirt than if they were sporting a Liverpool one or a plain top. The thought-provoking part came next. The researchers ran the same experiment with another group of United supporters, but this time the participants were primed to think of themselves as fans of the beautiful game rather than of a specific club. Now, when they saw someone appear to injure themselves, they were equally likely to offer help to anyone wearing a football shirt, their own or Liverpool’s. It’s not a watertight experiment. Nor is it a heart-warming story: whatever happens, some poor soul in a plain top is left hurt and unaided. But it is an instructive one. Employees will naturally form in-group relationships with their closest team-mates. Bosses often have to work harder to ensure that people also feel like members of the wider organisation. That might mean making efforts to bring people from different teams into contact with each other, through project-based work or social events or the physical layout of the office. It definitely means explaining to members of departments how their work contributes to the health of the overall organisation. People are quick to divide into “us and them”. “Us and us” takes a bit more thought. ■   你忠於公司，還是忠於團隊？ 員工在職場中擁有重疊的身份認同，這對管理者的領導能力是一大考驗。 2026年9月10日｜閱讀時間：4分鐘 人類天生具備極快建立陣營的傾向，這種行為有時被稱為「最小分組效應」（minimal group effect）。著名社會心理學家亨利·泰菲爾（Henri Tajfel）在一連串經典實驗中發現，即使根據完全隨機的標準將陌生人分組——例如估算圖表上點數的能力好壞、對某種抽象藝術的喜好程度，甚至只是丟硬幣——一旦要求他們分配獎勵，人們就會立刻開始偏袒自己組內的成員。 如果人們只因對方是否喜歡蒙德里安（Mondrian）的畫作，就準備好把世界劃分為「我們」與「他們」，那麼他們根據每天上班的場所建立強烈的身份認同與忠誠度，也就不足為奇了。辦公室生活的一大樂趣，就是觀察新進員工有多快開始用「我們」來稱呼新雇主：這種轉變通常是立竿見影的，有時甚至在面試過程中就已發生。 然而，如果你在一間規模夠大的公司上班，你所屬的絕不單單只有這家企業本身。你擁有「嵌套身份」（nested identities）：你同時屬於某個部門、該部門裡的某個團隊，甚至更小的群體。這些部門與小團體（內群體）影響至關重大。圖賓根大學的麥可·里凱塔（Michael Riketta）與法蘭克福大學的羅爾夫·範·迪克（Rolf van Dick）在一項後設分析中指出，平均而言，員工對自己「工作團隊」的認同感，遠強於對「公司整體」的認同感。 這其實並不令人意外。近距離的接觸、熟悉感以及共同的工作日常，緊密地將特定團隊的成員凝聚在一起。此外，職場上的身份認同很大程度上取決於你所在的部門。如果在 Widget & Sons 公司的員工活動中，有同事問你是做什麼的，你不會說「我在 Widget & Sons 上班」，而是會直接告訴對方你在哪個部門或團隊工作。 認同次級群體未必是一件壞事。企業將勞動分工落實到各部門完全符合情理，團隊之間保持適度的良性競爭也大有裨益。然而，過於強烈的群體認同感也可能阻礙跨部門的合作。一旦事情出錯，自然而然就會歸咎於其他部門「總是不給力」；預算分配演變成非贏即輸的角力；資訊也極可能被困在各自的「組織氣蜂」（silos）中無法共享。奧克拉荷馬州立大學的讓寧·皮特內爾·波克（Jeanine Pieternel Porck）及其合作者在一篇研究論文中指出，強烈的團隊認同感往往與員工對公司整體戰略理解度的降低存在相關性。 因此，對企業高層而言，挑戰在於如何將團隊內部的緊密纽帶，與對公司整體的凝聚力相調和。一個來自球場外的例子有助於說明該如何達成這一點。很久很久以前，當曼聯（Manchester United）還是英超霸主時，一組研究人員很好奇：成為某一球隊的球迷，是否會影響一個人援助宿敵球隊支持者的意願？蘭卡斯特大學的馬克·萊文（Mark Levine）及其團隊進行了一項實驗，受試者皆為自證身份的曼聯球迷。在實驗中，研究人員先提醒他們對曼聯的忠誠，隨後讓他們目擊一名跑者在面前故意滑倒。結果顯示，如果受傷的陌生人身穿曼聯球衣，受試者伸出援助之手的機率，遠高於對方身穿利物浦球衣或素色上衣的情況。 意想不到的轉折出現在下一步。研究人員對另一組曼聯球迷進行了相同的實驗，但這次，受試者事先被引導將自己定位為「足球這項運動的熱愛者」，而非「特定球會的擁護者」。這一次，當他們看到有人似是受傷時，無論對方穿的是曼聯還是利物浦的球衣，他們提供幫助的機率完全相同。（這並非一個天衣無縫的實驗，也稱不上是個溫馨的故事：無論如何，那個穿著素色上衣的無辜受害者總是得不到援助。但這確實是一個極具啟發性的實驗。） 員工自然會與最親密的團隊夥伴建立同陣營的關係；而主管們則往往需要付出更多努力，來確保大家同樣覺得自己是廣大公司的一份子。這可能意味著要透過專案合作、社交活動或辦公空間的彈性規劃，來促成不同團隊之間的互動；這也絕對意味著必須向各部門成員說明，他們的工作是如何為整個公司的健康發展做出貢獻。人們總是能輕易劃分出「我們與他們」，但要打造出「我們與我們（大家都是自己人）」，則需要投入更多的巧思。 -- Hosting provided by SoundOn

  4. Sep 12

    90-4 中國的職業媽媽在職場上越來越不利+小分享: 台灣,中國, 芬蘭和美國的母親福利

    The pressure to have children collides with a fierce work culture Aug 24th 2026|5 min read   For those unaccustomed to truth in advertising, employers in China can be astonishingly forthright in their help-wanted notices. Huangshi, a city in Hubei, recently sought investment-promotion officers under 35 years old, specifying “men preferred”. A high-speed rail operator in Lanzhou wanted women, but only so long as they were under 25, over 160cm tall and with a “good appearance”. A Suzhou packaging firm, by contrast, stretched to the geriatric reaches of 45 in its search for a sales representative, adding that female candidates should already be married with children—in other words, please no maternity leave.   These are just a few blatant examples of discrimination that women face in the Chinese labour market. More extensive discrimination is largely out of sight. It includes pressure on women to avoid pregnancy, higher pay for male colleagues and fewer opportunities as women’s careers progress.   In the 1950s, when Mao Zedong declared that “women held up half the sky”, in narrowly economic terms China looked egalitarian. Men and women had similar jobs as well as incomes, though both were miserable—and that was if you were lucky enough to escape becoming victims of Mao’s revolution-without-end. Today women in China more than match men in educational terms: 51% of university students are female, up by 14 percentage points since 1995. The picture at work, by contrast, has grown worse. Men on average now earn roughly a third more. In 1990 nearly 80% of women aged between 15 and 64 were in the labour force, one of the highest rates anywhere in the world. Today that has slipped to under 70%, below both Japan and the European Union. China’s business leadership is overwhelmingly male. Women are even rarer at the top of politics. For a quarter-century until 2022, the Politburo, the Communist Party’s top body, boasted a woman or two. Since then there have been none.   Sexism is part of the problem. For businessmen and officials, the banqueting table is often where deals get done. But long boozy dinners (officially forbidden under Xi Jinping) can be offputting to women, or worse. A senior cadre and a property executive in Hangzhou, a wealthy east-central city, were recently accused of assaulting a young female employee after such a dinner. The incident provoked public outrage, including renewed calls to clean up the practice of banquets. A more common experience for women is less aggressive, though still demeaning. “Our bosses wouldn’t say it directly but they hope we act as decoration,” says Ms Dou, who worked in tech. Yet nothing is straightforward. Erica, a woman in her 20s in the events industry, says she has had more friction with female bosses than male ones. “We’re a patriarchal society, so when women break through and get power, they tend to be more controlling,” she says.   The more pervasive problem is less that of outright sexism and more how women’s role, or potential role, as mothers clashes with work. A “motherhood penalty” is common nearly everywhere. But in China the penalty is especially high, owing to a fierce work culture, an outdated retirement system and an intensifying state-led fertility push colliding with entrenched career patterns.   Compared with other countries at its level of development, China has generous maternity leave: mothers can get about half a year off work, on full pay. But the state covers only part of the salary on leave, with employers paying for the bulk. Five women in their 30s and 40s told Chaguan that their bosses expected to be informed should they be trying to get pregnant. “Speaking as a former manager, I myself wasn’t all that willing to hire women under 35,” said Ms Chen, who used to work in media. “What if she comes in and gets pregnant right away?” The government’s recent push for two-child families, aimed at reversing a fast-declining fertility rate, adds to employers’ concerns that married women are liable to take extended breaks from work.   The little brats After pregnancy, women face other hurdles. A common expectation that they will guide their children through school is hardly compatible with the long hours expected in many Chinese jobs. “Men the same age as me are in a better position,” says Ms Dou, in her early 40s. “There’s an assumption that they don’t have as much responsibility at home.” Job ads often state that candidates should be able to tolerate high stress, regularly work overtime and always be reachable. Such requirements do not discriminate specifically against women, but are deterrents to any parent with their hands full with young children—usually the mother.   Nor is there much runway left for a woman returning to work, perhaps in her early 40s. In white-collar jobs the official retirement age is just a few months over 55 for women and 60 for men (by 2040 these will be raised gradually to 58 and 63, respectively). Companies have less incentive to invest in mid-career women who have taken time off for children. “The job market is already biased enough against women,” says Ms Wu, a former web designer who left to have a child. “After 35 it is like frost on top of snow.” She is taking matters into her own hands, retraining as a drone pilot.   Policy tweaks would help, including making maternity and paternity leave more equal (many places give fathers 15 days, if they take any). More state funding for paid leave would ease the financial strain on companies. Men and women should also have the same (higher) retirement ages.   Yet what women are up against is less skewed policy than powerful social norms, especially the weight placed upon mothers. Until that changes, China is undermining its own potential. In educational terms, Chinese women already hold up more than half the sky today. In the world of work, they are getting just about a third of it. ■   催生壓力和狼性加班文化互相衝突 2026 年 8 月 24 日 | 閱讀時間約 5 分鐘 對不習慣徵才廣告吐露真言的人來說，中國雇主的徵才啟事有時坦率得令人吃驚。湖北黃石市近期招募 35 歲以下的招商人員，明確註明「男性優先」；蘭州一家高鐵營運商想招募女性，但要求年齡必須在 25 歲以下、身高 160 公分以上，且「形象氣質佳」；相比之下，蘇州一家包裝企業在尋找銷售代表時，將年齡門檻寬限到堪稱高齡的 45 歲，但附帶條件是女性求職者必須「已婚已育」——換句話說，請別來休產假。 這些不過是女性在中國職場遭遇歧視的冰山一角。更多且更普遍的歧視通常隱藏在螢光幕後，包括逼迫女性避免懷孕、給予男性同事更高的薪資，以及在女性職涯發展的過程中提供較少的晉升機會。 1950 年代，當毛澤東喊出「婦女能頂半邊天」時，單從經濟層面來看，中國似乎相當平權。當時男女從事的職業和收入相去不遠，儘管大家的苦日子都不好過——而這前提還是你夠幸運，沒有成為毛澤東那場「無休止革命」下的犧牲品。如今，中國女性在受教育程度上早已不輸男性：大學生中有 51% 是女性，比 1995 年增加了 14 個百分點。然而，職場上的景況卻每況愈下。平均而言，現在男性的收入比女性高出約三分之一。1990 年，15 至 64 歲的女性中有將近 80% 投入職場，名列全球最高水平之一；如今這一比例已下滑至 70% 以下，比日本和歐盟都还要低。中國企業的高層領導絕大多數是男性，而在政治頂層，女性更是鳳毛麟角。在截至 2022 年長達四分之一個世紀的時間裡，中共最高權力機構政治局至少還保有一至兩位女性席次，但自此之後，便是一片空白。 性別歧視是問題的一部分。對商人和官員來說，餐桌應酬往往是促成交易的場合。但漫長且酗酒的飯局（雖然在習近平主政下官方名義上禁止）常讓女性退避三舍，甚至引發更糟糕的後果。東部富庶城市杭州的一名資深幹部與一名地產高管，最近就被指控在一場飯局後性侵了一名年輕女員工。這起事件引發社會公憤，也再次讓大眾呼籲肅清應酬飯局的陋習。對大多數女性而言，更常見的遭遇雖不至如此具攻擊性，卻同樣令人難堪。曾從事科技業的竇小姐表示：「我們老闆不會明說，但他們希望我們充當門面花瓶。」然而，情況並非單一維度。二十多歲、從事活動企劃的 Erica 表示，相比於男主管，她與女主管之間的摩擦反而更多。「我們是一個父權社會，所以當女性打破天花板獲得權力時，她們往往會展現出更強的控制欲，」她說道。 比起赤裸裸的性別歧視，更根深蒂固的問題在於女性身為（或潛在身為）母親的角色，與工作產生了嚴重衝突。「生育懲罰」在世界各地屢見不鮮，但在中國，由於高壓激烈的加班文化、過時的退休制度，以及國家主導的催生政策與既有職涯模式產生強烈碰撞，使得這種懲罰尤為沉重。 與同等發展水平的其他國家相比，中國提供了相當優渥的產假：媽媽們可以休假約半年，且領取全薪。然而，國家僅負擔產假期間的部分薪資，大頭仍須由雇主支付。五位三四十歲的女性告訴《茶館》專欄，她們的老闆要求如果打算備孕必須提前告知。曾任職於媒體業的陳小姐說：「站在前主管的角度，我自己當時也不太願意招募 35 歲以下的女性。萬一她一進公司就懷孕怎麼辦？」政府近期為了扭轉陡降的出生率而推行「三孩政策」（註：原交稿提及 two-child，意指多胎鼓勵政策），反而進一

  5. Sep 5

    90-3 2016年英國政府計畫廢除衛生棉稅, 動機好但是對經濟有好處?+小分享: 我在美國,芬蘭買衛生棉~

    THE British government currently slaps a 5% Value Added Tax (VAT) on sanitary products. But some view the “tampon tax” as an affront to women, who have little choice but to bear the burden of the levy. The government has been prevented from reducing the rate to zero by European Union rules, which limit how much countries can lower VAT rates on some goods. But on March 17th, George Osborne rummaged around for a rabbit in his post-budget hat, and revealed progress towards a new VAT arrangement with the EU that would give him the freedom to ditch the hated tax. Mr Osborne will be glad to end the political headache; in November last year he compromised by pledging to give the £15m ($22m) raised from the tax to charity. This pleased some, though others pointed out that as some of the funds would go to domestic violence charities, this amounted to women paying to solve problems caused by men. More recently, eurosceptics grumbling about EU power have been threatening to embarass the government by supporting an amendment to a government bill that would scrap the 5% tax. Any new deal with the EU would show that the transfer of power between Britain and Brussels can run both ways. Scrapping the tax makes for more palatable politics, but leaves economic questions. Working out a rationale within the British system of VAT is a fool’s errand; products that enjoy the reduced rates are meant to be necessities, but the definition of a necessity is loose. Tampons would join things like ostrich meat and helicopters in the zero rate category, whereas toothpaste and toilet paper will face a rate of 20%. Normally economists worry about applying different rates of tax to similar products, for fear of distorting behaviour. Why should the government nudge customers towards jaffa cakes and away from chocolate-covered digestive biscuits by applying a lower rate of VAT to the former? It also wastes resources as companies battle for their product to meet the zero-rated category criteria. The justification is normally made on distributional grounds: the poor spend more of their income on zero-rated goods, so moving towards a uniform rate would hurt them more. A VAT on tampons is paid for by women rather than men, so any move to get rid of it would redistribute towards women. (Men’s razors attract the full 20% VAT rate, not 0% as some campaigners have claimed in the past.) The bigger question is whether VAT is the best way to redistribute. One vision of an ideal tax system applies a uniform rate of VAT on all final consumption, and then uses the direct tax and benefit system to do the heavy lifting when it comes to redistribution. This would minimise ugly distortions, remove any government meddling over which types of consumption are favoured over others, and focus different bits of the tax and benefit system on what they do best. But even a purist economist can see that this would be difficult politics. 廢除棉條稅政治上討喜，但經濟效益如何？ 英國政府目前對衛生用品課徵 5% 的增值稅（VAT）。但有些人認為「棉條稅」是對女性的侮辱，因為她們別無選擇，只能承受這筆稅負。此前，受限於歐盟限制各國調降特定商品增值稅稅率的規定，政府一直無法將稅率降至零。但在 3 月 17 日，喬治·歐斯本（George Osborne，時任英國財政大臣）從他預算案發布後的帽子裡變出了一隻兔子，宣布與歐盟在新的增值稅協議上取得進展，這將讓他得以自由廢除這項深惡痛絕的稅目。 2016 年 3 月 18 日｜閱讀時間 3 分鐘 英國政府目前對衛生用品課徵 5% 的增值稅（VAT）。但有些人認為「棉條稅」是對女性的侮辱，因為她們別無選擇，只能承受這筆稅負。此前，受限於歐盟限制各國調降特定商品增值稅稅率的規定，政府一直無法將稅率降至零。但在 3 月 17 日，喬治·歐斯本從他預算案發布後的帽子裡變出了一隻兔子，宣布與歐盟在新的增值稅協議上取得進展，這將讓他得以自由廢除這項深惡痛絕的稅目。 歐斯本先生會很樂意結束這個政治頭痛問題；去年 11 月，他曾做出妥協，承諾將該稅種籌集到的 1,500 萬英鎊（約 2,200 萬美元）捐給慈善機構。這讓一部分人感到滿意，但也有人指出，由於部分資金將流向防止家庭暴力的慈善機構，這無疑是讓女性付錢來解決由男性產生的問題。近來，對歐盟權力心生不滿的疑歐派人士一直威脅要支持一項政府法案修正案以廢除這項 5% 的稅率，藉此讓政府難堪。與歐盟達成的新協議將能表明，英國與布魯塞爾之間的權力轉移可以是雙向的。 廢除該稅種在政治上比較討喜，但卻留下了經濟問題。試圖在英國增值稅體系內理出合理邏輯根本是徒勞無功；享受優惠稅率的商品本應是生活必需品，但「必需品」的定義卻相當寬鬆。衛生棉條將與鴕鳥肉和直升機一同歸入零稅率類別，而牙膏和捲筒衛生紙則面臨 20% 的標準稅率。 通常情況下，經濟學者會擔心對類似商品套用不同稅率，因為這樣有可能會扭曲消費者行為。政府為什麼要對爪哇蛋糕（Jaffa cakes）課徵較低的增值稅，從而誘導消費者選擇它而非巧克力消化餅乾？當企業竭力爭取讓自家產品符合零稅率標準時，也會浪費資源。給予優惠稅率的理由通常是基於「收入分配」考量：窮人將更多收入花在零稅率商品上，因此轉向統一稅率對他們的傷害更大。衛生棉條的增值稅是由女性而非男性支付，因此任何廢除該稅種的舉動都會將財富重新分配給女性。（男士刮鬍刀適用的是 20% 的全額增值稅率，並非如過去某些倡議者所聲稱的 0%。） 更根本的問題在於，增值稅是否為進行財富重分配的最佳方式。理想稅務體系的其中一種藍圖，是對所有最終消費課徵統一的增值稅，然後利用直接稅和福利體系來承擔財富重分配的重任。這樣可以最大限度地減少扭曲現象，消除政府對特定消費偏好的干預，並讓稅務和福利體系的不同環節各司其職。然而，即便是最純粹主義的經濟學者也能看出，這在政治操作上極具難度。 -- Hosting provided by SoundOn

  6. Aug 29

    90-2 中國神秘的億萬富翁正在征服全世界並低調行事+ 小分享: 從冰島旅行得到中國人賺錢的思維~

    China’s mysterious new billionaires are conquering the world And refusing to talk to the press   Jul 19th 2026|Shanghai|7 min read   Early last year, when DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial-intelligence lab, was causing panic among its Western rivals, almost nothing was known about Liang Wenfeng, its founder. Mr Liang remains a mysterious figure, but at least one thing is clear. As DeepSeek closes a funding round valuing it at $71bn, its founder’s personal wealth has soared to roughly $38bn—making him far wealthier than Anthropic’s Dario Amodei or OpenAI’s Sam Altman.   Mr Liang will not be spotted on the conference circuit. He has never appeared live on Chinese TV, and there are few photos of his unpolished, wiry figure. That puts him at home among the new generation of young Chinese billionaires. The country is cranking out more of them than anywhere else bar America. According to Hurun, which tracks the riches of the world’s wealthiest people, there are at least 29 self-made billionaires aged 40 or under in China. Adding Mr Liang, who will turn 41 at some point this year, brings the total to 30. That is nine more than last year.   China’s new tycoons differ from their predecessors in striking ways. They have abandoned property speculation and boozy dinners with officials for video games and meet-ups over Japanese anime. But they are also adept at taking imaginative ideas and scaling them into global businesses faster than any before them. The history of China’s uber-rich is short. In the 1980s tycoons figured out how to wrest assets from the state. Zhang Ruimin, a member of a troupe of students who terrorised teachers and intellectuals during Mao’s era, got hold of a state-owned refrigerator business called Haier and turned it into what is now the world’s largest home-appliance maker. The opening of the property market in the 1990s minted another early group of billionaires including Xu Jiayin, founder of Evergrande, a now-collapsed property developer. In the early 2000s industrialists such as Wang Chuanfu of BYD, originally a battery maker, launched a wave of manufacturing firms as China entered the World Trade Organisation. And then in the 2010s the consumer internet produced China’s first generation of tech moguls, including Jack Ma of Alibaba, an e-commerce giant, and Pony Ma of Tencent, maker of WeChat. The founders of ByteDance, creator of TikTok, and Shein, the online fast-fashion firm, who are both now in their early 40s, built their fortunes a few years later.   China’s new generation of tycoons are charting out a different path. More than two-thirds of the young billionaires on Hurun’s rich list made their money from consumer goods or media. Seven created video games; four built tea or coffee businesses. After Mr Liang, the wealthiest is Wang Ning, founder of Pop Mart, maker of the strange-looking Labubu dolls. Only three have struck it rich with AI, including Yang Zhilin, the baby-faced 34-year-old founder of Moonshot AI, which on July 17th released a new model that is said to rival the best from America. No property mogul makes the list—perhaps unsurprisingly, given how the sector has fared in recent years.   The businesses built by China’s new billionaires are also far more global than in the past. It once took a decade or more for Chinese entrepreneurs to figure out foreign expansion. No longer. Zhang Junjie, the 33-year-old founder of Chagee, a milk-tea shop, launched his firm in 2017 and opened his first overseas shop just two years later. The company is now listed in New York and operating in nine countries.   The new tycoons’ heavy reliance on foreign markets partly reflects the slump in consumer spending at home. Around 80% of sales at Dreame, a consumer-electronics brand founded by 39-year-old Yu Hao, come from overseas. Insta360, which sells small waterproof cameras, is almost as reliant on foreign demand. Pop Mart made more than $2bn in sales outside China last year, about 40% of its total. Chagee’s sales at home have slumped, but overseas they are growing healthily.   Attitudes to work are also different among this cohort. A controversial part of Chinese business culture for the past decade or so has been the so-called “996” routine, working from 9am to 9pm six days a week. The idea was championed by Alibaba’s Mr Ma and embraced by other local tech giants. At Pinduoduo, another e-commerce platform, young white-collar staff have died from overwork on their way home from the office. China’s new entrepreneurs, by contrast, have adopted a more relaxed approach to management. Many are relatively flexible about working times. Liu Wei, the 39-year-old billionaire co-founder of miHoYo, a gaming firm, has eschewed presenteeism. He has overseen what the company calls its “happy work, steady growth” approach, which prioritises mental health (though one employee also recently died from complications related to overwork, suggesting that cultural norms are hard to shift). DeepSeek’s Mr Liang has reportedly said that the human brain can concentrate only for 6-8 hours a day, and that overwork leads to mistakes.   The willingness of workers to put in longer hours than anyone else in the world is what has built the Chinese economy over the past 30 years, huffs one private-equity investor, who recently visited an up-and-coming consumer brand and did not like what he saw. Some blame the relatively laid-back attitude of China’s young founders on cushy upbringings. Gone are the tales told by earlier tycoons of struggling for survival amid the country’s political and economic convulsions. Among China’s young billionaires, only Mr Liang and Mr Zhang of Chagee grew up poor. The three founders of miHoYo originally bonded over Japanese cartoons and formed their company as a celebration of gaming and comics. The founder of MiniMax, an AI lab, is so fond of a multi-player game called “Dota 2” that his staff refer to him as “IO”, a character from it.   To get rich is perilous   It is not all rosy for China’s young billionaires. The relationship between China’s government and its wealthiest people has deteriorated over the past few years. Older magnates once viewed themselves as part of a nation-building project. The property sector, which contributed up to a quarter of China’s GDP at its peak, was a collaborative effort between private entrepreneurs and local officials. Mr Ma was instrumental in building China’s digital economy. But the central government has now punished many prominent figures in these areas. Leverage has been sucked out of the property industry. Mr Ma’s business empire became the subject of a state crackdown in 2020 after he criticized regulators. Xi Jinping, China’s ruler, has sought to tamp down inequality under the slogan of “common prosperity”.   In 2021 Zhong Shanshan, the 71-year-old founder of Nongfu, a bottled-water company, reached a net worth of nearly $100bn. No one has since come close, including Mr. Zhong, who has seen his wealth plunge to around $39bn as the share price of his company has slumped. Mr. Ma is worth roughly a fifth as much as in 2021, and many other internet moguls have suffered similarly. Still, they have fared better than property magnates, a number of whom have been detained.   This environment has created a sense of disillusionment among China’s young billionaires. Many are eager to engage in industrial policy but are given little opportunity to do so, notes Steven Hai of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Their global ambitions also leave them exposed to souring relations between China and America. Xiao Hong, the 33-year-old founder of Manus, another AI firm, would have become a billionaire earlier this year if the Chinese government had not stopped him from selling his company to Meta, an American tech giant.   These innovators live with the sense that the businesses they have built could be derailed at any time by sudden policy changes in China or America, notes Rupert Hoogewerf of Hurun. By shunning publicity they seem to believe they can survive for longer, he says. Most young Chinese billionaires have never spoken to foreign media. (None would speak to The Economist.) Many avoid the Chinese press as well. The result is a generation of tycoons that is both China’s most global yet—and its most enigmatic. ■ 中國神秘的新億萬富豪正在征服世界，卻拒絕接受媒體採訪 2026年7月19日｜上海｜閱讀時間：7分鐘 去年年初，當中國人工智慧實驗室 DeepSeek 讓西方競爭對手陷入恐慌時，外界幾乎對它的創辦人梁文鋒一無所知。 如今，梁文鋒依然是一個相當神秘的人物，但至少有一件事已經很清楚：隨著 DeepSeek 即將完成一輪募資，公司估值達到 710億美元，其創辦人的個人財富也暴增至大約 380億美元。這讓他的身家遠遠超過 Anthropic 的 達里奧・阿莫迪（Dario Amodei），以及 OpenAI 的 山姆・奧特曼（Sam Altman）。 梁文鋒不會出現在各種商業會議或產業論壇的巡迴活動上。 他從未在中國電視節目上公開現場露面，而網路上流傳的照片也寥寥可數，能看到的通常是他那副不修邊幅、身材瘦削的模樣。 這讓他與中國新一代的年輕億萬富豪十分相似。 中國正在大量培養這一代年輕富豪，數量僅次於美國。 根據追蹤全球富豪財富的胡潤研究院（Hurun），中國至少有 29名40歲以下的白手起家億萬富豪。 如果把今年某個時候即將滿41歲的梁文鋒也算進去，總數就來到 30人，比去年多了9人。 中國的新一代企業大亨，和他們的前輩有著非常明顯的不同。 他們拋棄了房地產投機，也不再熱衷於和官員吃豪華宴席；取而代之的，是打電玩、聚在一起聊日本動漫。 但另一方

  7. Aug 22

    90-1 放假的心理六階段(簡直跟分手階段有得比!)+小分享: 韓國釜山打造成科技未來城市

    The six stages of holiday-making Two weeks off, but how many days of relaxation? Aug 13th 2026|4 min read   It’s summer, in the northern hemisphere at least, which means emptier offices and fuller airports. In theory, a holiday is a time to properly relax. In practice, there are several stages to pass through before that moment arrives, and several more to experience before you are fully immersed in work again.   1.    The preparation phase. You badly need a holiday. In your final couple of days before leaving, you complete your most urgent tasks, like tidying your desk. You tell people on your team that you trust them completely and in the same breath, that they should contact you if anything comes up, no matter how trivial. As a result, they don’t feel trusted at all. You think about setting up an out-of-office message and decide not to: it’s really not a problem to check your phone occasionally. As you leave the office, you think you feel a cold coming on. 2.    The relax-like-hell phase. You spend the first few days approaching the holiday like it’s work. You spend loads of time asking AI models for places to go that are off the beaten track. In a typical morning, you drive two hours to eat breakfast at a place recommended by ChatGPT which turns out to be closed, and then visit a museum devoted to the ancient craft of curing fish.   At lunch, you drink wine and then fall asleep. You think of this period of unconsciousness as time that could have been spent relaxing. You are acutely aware of time passing, your days of freedom slipping away. You pick up a book and instead of reading it, worry that you could be enjoying your leisure in even more leisurely ways. You feel very tense for someone on holiday.   3.    The letting-go phase. Meanwhile, you check your email every so often, and intervene in things you don’t need to. You get a couple of WhatsApp messages and are asked to join a call, and feel both irritated and pleased. Can’t you do it without me? You can’t do it without me! As you triage messages, sorting them into things that have to be dealt with quickly and those that can wait, you gradually realise just how much of what goes on each week a) doesn’t require you at all and b) has no lasting value. You start to ignore most messages; if it’s important, they will find a way to contact you. You switch on your out-of-office message.   4.    The delusional phase. Finally, you start to relax. You lie in a little longer. You don’t look at your phone quite as much. You realise that back in the office the weekly sales meeting is happening right at this very minute, and you laugh out loud at the smallness of your old life. Fairly soon, you start to lose your grip on reality. You think about moving to wherever it is you are, forgetting that you are enjoying yourself because the weather is nice and you are not working. You start trying to figure out how soon you can retire. You fantasise about working outdoors, perhaps in sea-kayaking or doing something artisanal to a dry-stone wall.   5.    The motivated phase. The end of the holiday is fast approaching. You realise that sea-kayaking gives you blisters and that the things you are best equipped to do don’t involve dry-stone walls. You start to look at emails again, but only the ones that matter. You feel motivated to return. You have seen how much time is spent on unimportant things and are determined to prioritise much more ruthlessly. You have some really good ideas about how to improve the weekly sales meeting.   6.    The recidivism phase. You return to the office full of vim. You look and feel healthier than your colleagues. Then you have the same conversation 800 times. “How was your holiday?” “Wonderful.” “Where did you go?” [Insert answer.] “What did you do there?” [Insert details.] You soon realise that no one is interested in where you went and start to make up responses. “Where did you go?” “Wakanda.” “What did you do?” “We visited the vibranium mines.” “Oh, I’ve always wanted to do that.”   It’s nice to see people. It’s good to have a sense of purpose. But you quickly revert to old habits. An empty calendar feels less like ruthless prioritisation and more like a public display of redundancy; the slots soon fill up again. When emails come in, you answer them indiscriminately. Your desk becomes more cluttered. You attend the weekly sales meeting and dimly recall that you once had an idea for improving it. Colleagues come back from their own breaks and you ask how their holidays were. You are not listening to the answers. They seem so well, so energetic. You think you feel another cold coming on. You badly need a holiday. ■ 度假的六個階段 兩週假期，但真正放鬆的又有幾天？ 2026年8月13日 | 閱讀時間 4 分鐘 夏天到了——至少在北半球是如此——這意味著辦公室空了，機場卻擠滿了人。理論上，度假是一個能讓人徹底放鬆的時刻；但在現實中，在那個時刻到來之前，你必須先經歷幾個階段，而在你重新完全沉浸於工作之前，還有另外幾個階段等著你。 準備階段。 你急需放個假。在離辦公室前的最後兩天，你完成了最緊迫的工作，比如整理乾淨你的辦公桌。你告訴團隊成員你完全信任他們，但緊接著又說，如果有任何事情發生，不管多麼微不足道，都可以隨時聯繫你。結果，他們根本感覺不到自己被信任。你考慮要設定「不在辦公室」的自動回覆信件，但最後決定不設：偶爾看一眼手機真的沒什麼大不了的。當你離開辦公室時，你覺得自己好像有點感冒了。 拼命放鬆階段。 你把前幾天的假期過得像是在上班一樣。你花了大量時間詢問 AI 模型有哪些遠離喧囂的冷門景點。在一個典型的早晨，你開了兩個小時的車去吃一家 ChatGPT 推薦的早餐，結果發現它根本沒開，接著你又去參觀了一間展示古代醃魚工藝的博物館。 午餐時，你喝了葡萄酒，然後睡著了。你把這段無意識的時間視為「本可用於放鬆」的時間。你極度敏感地意識到時間的流逝，自由的日子正在悄悄溜走。你拿起一本書，但沒有閱讀，反而擔心自己本可以利用更悠閒的方式來享受閒暇時光。作為一個在度假的人，你感到非常緊張。 放手階段。 與此同時，你隔三差五地檢查郵件，干預一些你根本不需要插手的事情。你收到幾條 WhatsApp 訊息，並被邀請加入視訊會議，這讓你感到既煩躁又高興。沒有我你們就辦不成事嗎？你們還真的沒我不行！當你對訊息進行分類 triage，將它們分為「必須快速處理」和「可以等等再說」時，你逐漸意識到每週發生的事情中有多少是：a) 根本不需要你；b) 完全沒有長遠價值。你開始忽視大多數訊息；如果真的重要，他們總會找到方法聯繫你。你終於開啟了「不在辦公室」的自動回覆。 幻想階段。 終於，你開始放鬆了。你睡得稍微久了一點，看手機的次數也沒那麼頻繁了。你意識到此時此刻，辦公室裡正召開著每週銷售會議，你對自己過去那渺小的生活發出陣陣會心的冷笑。很快地，你開始脫離現實。你想著搬到你現在度假的地方生活，卻忘了你之所以開心是因為天氣很好且你不用工作。你開始嘗試計算自己多久之後可以退休。你幻想著在戶外工作，也許是划海上皮划艇，或是對著乾砌石牆做些手工藝活。 動力階段。 假期的尾聲迅速逼近。你意識到划皮划艇會讓你起水泡，而你最擅長做的事情根本與乾砌石牆無關。你重新開始看郵件，但只看那些真正重要的。你感到有一股返回工作的動力。你看到了有多少時間被浪費在不重要的事情上，並決心要更狠心地排出優先順序。對於如何改進每週銷售會議，你產生了一些非常棒的想法。 舊病復發階段。 你滿懷活力地回到辦公室。你看起來、感覺起來都比同事們更健康。然後你把同一段對話重複了 800 次。「假期過得怎麼樣？」「太棒了。」「去哪裡了？」（插入答案）「在那裡做了什麼？」（插入細節）。你很快意識到根本沒有人對你去哪裡感興趣，並開始編造回答。「你去哪裡了？」「瓦干達（Wakanda）。」「做了什麼？」「我們去參觀了汎合金（Vibranium）礦山。」「噢，我一直想去那裡。」 能見到大家真好，擁有目標感也很不錯。但你很快就重蹈覆轍。空白的行事曆看起來不再像是狠心排序優先順序的成果，反而更像是公開展示自己是個贅員；日程很快又被排滿了。當郵件寄來時，你不加篩選地一一回覆。你的辦公桌變得越來越凌亂。你參加每週銷售會議，隱約想起自己曾經有一個改進它的好主意。同事們陸續休假歸來，你問他們假期過得如何。你根本沒有在聽答案。他們看起來那麼健康、那麼精力充沛。你覺得自己好像又有點感冒了。你急需放個假。■ -- Hosting provided by SoundOn

  8. Aug 14

    89-4 生出一個聰明的孩子,你願意花多少錢?+小分享: 韓國釜山人的性格 XD

    How much would you pay for a smarter baby? Startups claim they can screen embryos for everything from genetic diseases to IQ. Not everyone is convinced   Aug 10th 2026|San Francisco and New York|9 min read   Late last year New Yorkers noticed a series of strange advertisements on the subway. “Have your best baby,” one promised. “IQ is 50% genetic,” noted another. Predictably, they stirred controversy. Yet Kian Sadeghi of Nucleus, the embryo-screening startup behind them, was pleased. “This is a mass-market product. What’s a better way of showing that it’s a mass-market product than the subway?”   Nucleus is one of a growing number of Silicon Valley startups pushing the nascent technology. Noor Siddiqui of Orchid, a competitor, likes to say that “sex is for fun; embryo screening is for babies”. Herasight, another rival, began offering a screening service last year that allows parents to examine an embryo’s risk of various diseases, and also estimates of its height, intelligence and longevity—at a cost of up to $50,000. Nucleus adds hair and eye colour to the mix. The burgeoning industry aspires to reshape the way humans are made.   Not everyone is pleased. In many jurisdictions, including Britain, screening embryos for sex, let alone for polygenic conditions such as hypertension or physical traits such as height, is illegal. Many geneticists and doctors’ groups are sceptical that the technology works. Others say it is unethical. In America, where regulation is looser, religious conservatives and adherents of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement are vehemently opposed.   The startups’ visions may seem otherworldly. But change is coming fast. Cash is pouring into fertility research, leading to potentially rapid advances in genetic testing. Polygenic screening, particularly for common diseases, is popular among Americans, nearly three-quarters of whom say they would use it if they were already undergoing in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). A fight is brewing over the future of these technologies—and the businesses promoting them.   For the moment, only a tiny share of babies are born via IVF, as is necessary for embryo screening. In 2024, the most recent year for which figures are available, 100,000 American babies were created using the process, representing 2.8% of the total. David Sable, an investor and formerly a practising reproductive endocrinologist, says the global fertility market is commonly estimated to be worth just $25-30bn a year.   Yet Silicon Valley’s interest in fertility could expand access to IVF. Several years ago Peter Thiel and Elon Musk began to speak about low birth rates as a threat to America, and started putting money into fertility startups. They were joined by other investors. American venture-capital (VC) investments in fertility enterprises nearly doubled between 2019 and 2022, jumping from $254m to $496m, according to PitchBook, a data provider, even if they have since slowed a bit.   Many of these startups are focused on making IVF cheaper. At present, only 15 American states require the treatment to be included in insurers’ maternity benefits, meaning most Americans pay out of pocket. To reduce costs, a number of startups are selling fertility insurance and payment plans. Nader al-Salim of Gaia, one such firm, says its services save patients an average of $15,000 over the entire fertility process, largely by pooling risk.   Dr Sable reckons that if IVF does become much more widely available, the embryo-screening market could grow to $400-500bn annually. His estimate assumes the cost will fall to around $15,000 for the entire process; currently, just one cycle of IVF in America costs $15,000-20,000. Dr Sable reckons that prices will drop thanks to technological innovations which may increase success rates, allowing people to go through fewer cycles. Falling labour costs, as a result of automation and economies of scale, as well as greater standardisation should also help.   Some screening is already common among IVF patients. One example is PGT-A, which checks embryos have the right number of chromosomes, and which some studies claim lowers the miscarriage risk (many experts are sceptical). Certain clinics also offer PGT-M, which checks for disorders caused by a single gene, such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s. Now startups are adding a third screen: PGT-P, which scores embryos for conditions and traits determined by multiple genes, potentially ranging from certain cancers to eye colour and IQ. Demand for such tests could be substantial. A survey published in 2023 in *Science *found that 43% of all IVF participants would use polygenic screening to increase their child’s chance of getting into an elite university, provided it were safe and free. A third said the same for genetic editing.   Consider Arthur Zey, a software engineer, and his husband Chase Popp, a teacher. Mr Zey says he has always been a “tech nerd” and wanted to apply his skills to the process of having a child. “Most of my professional career I’ve been a product manager in tech, and so in some ways this is just like another product to manage,” he says. Earlier this year the couple had a son using an embryo selected from a group of six on the basis of the results of polygenic screening provided by Herasight. That allowed them to see risk scores for monogenic diseases and more than a dozen polygenic diseases. The startup also gave them predicted ranges for IQ and height.   Messrs Zey and Popp say they hoped to maximise their son’s lifespan, rather than his height or IQ. Yet Mr Zey knows there are advantages to being tall and smart. “All I could do is look at the results for my six embryos and say: ‘Okay, it kind of seems like this one is better.’”   The burden of perfection   For now, Messrs Zey and Popp are unusual. Commercial PGT-P screening is a niche industry. Startups like Herasight cater to a small population of typically very rich people, mostly in America. Even so, that has not stopped them from drawing plenty of criticism.   Some concerns the underlying science. Polygenic risk scores are based on genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which use data from large populations to try to discern associations between genetic variants and specific conditions and traits. Companies that offer screening claim that comparing embryos’ genomes to risk scores derived from these databases, sometimes with adjustments based on ancestry and family history, allows them to come up with individual assessments.   That is disputed, however. Although selecting on the basis of polygenic risk scores works across many offspring, as in animal breeding, it is less sure to have the desired result for a single child, notes Kevin Mitchell of Trinity College Dublin. For example, an embryo’s genome may have a single rare variant that has a large effect on its likelihood of developing a certain condition, but which would be unlikely to surface in population-level correlations.   Herasight attempts to deal with this issue by validating its risk scores using sibling data from GWAS datasets to ensure its models retain predictive value within a single family. It claims that, if it tests ten embryos for a couple where both parents have type-2 diabetes, it can reduce their child’s absolute risk of developing the condition by 12-20 percentage points, from a baseline of 40-60%. Herasight has been critical of competitors, particularly Nucleus, for not providing more detailed public information about their methodology. (Nucleus, for its part, says it is working constantly to ensure its scores are accurate.)   Some also argue that the magnitude of the benefits from embryo screening are overstated. If parents picked from ten viable embryos, the median boost to their child’s height would be 2.9cm, according to a paper in *Cell *in 2019, based on technology at the time. If they selected for IQ, the gain would be three points—unlikely to be life-changing. Moreover, for those picking among fewer than five embryos, the expected gains drop precipitously. Although the average number of viable embryos depends on the patient’s age, in many cases it is closer to two or three from each IVF cycle. Dagan Wells of the University of Oxford adds that, for many conditions, genes are less important than environmental factors such as diet. Selecting against some traits could also have unintended consequences. Genetic material can have different effects in different parts of the body, a phenomenon called pleiotropy. If parents select an embryo intending to lower their child’s risk of a certain disease, they may be neglecting or exacerbating problems for which providers do not (or cannot) offer a score.   Yet many of the technical issues, not least the lack of training data among certain populations, should improve with time. The *Cell *paper estimated that increasing the sample size of the underlying databases could double the median gain in IQ points from polygenic scoring. Or consider the effects of rare genetic variants. As databases grow, artificial-intelligence models may be better able to account for the effects of individual variants. With pleiotropy, some studies suggest that most genetic correlations between pairs of polygenic diseases are either positive—meaning cutting the chance of one decreases the chance of others—or insignificant. At present, the technology is “kind of a promissory note”, says Trinity’s Dr Mitchell. “They say, ‘Trust us, this is a bit shit right now, but it’ll be good soon’.”   If technological problems are resolved, ethical ones will only grow. Disability-rights groups are already wary of PGT-M, worrying it suggests lives with certain genetic conditions are not worth living. The rise in use of PGT-P widens that debate to many more traits. Then there are opponents who are concern

See All (345)

Ratings & Reviews

About

想要出國留學、打工度假還是自助旅行嗎？兩位英文老師跟你一起拓展視野、提升英文實力、討論國際時事，Let's Fun Fun 學英文，爽爽出國去！ -- Hosting provided by SoundOn

Information

  • Creator
    Annie 阿尼、Chloe 克洛伊
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    345
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 個人黃靖詒, 李亘筑
  • Show Website
    出國趣