The Senate just passed the next Apollo program

It’s one small step for Congress, one huge leap for American competitiveness. By passing the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) with strong bipartisan support, the Senate went a long way in countering what Secretary of State Antony Blinken called “the biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century” — China’s growing military, geopolitical, and economic aggression under the leadership of General Secretary Xi Jinping. READ MORE

How To Fix Meeting Sprawl and Transform Your Work

If we want to truly transform work for the better, meetings are a very good place to start. They’re often run poorly, and crowd our days, leading us to spend nights and weekends working to compensate.

And it’s gotten worse by most measures over the past two years. Microsoft found that workers it tracks now spend 252% more time in meetings each week on average than they did in February 2020. The meetings are often low quality, with people doing other work during them some 30% of the time or more. And meeting sprawl is costly for organizations, making it harder for people to do what they were actually hired to do. READ MORE

IRS takes shot at rising inflation with 2023 HSA limits

Amid soaring inflation, annual health savings account contribution limits for 2023 are increasing in one of the biggest jumps in recent years.

The Internal Revenue Service announced Friday that for the calendar year 2023, the health savings account contribution limits for an individual with self-only coverage will jump to $3,850—a significant $200 increase from $3,650 for this year. Last year, the amount climbed just $50 from $3,600 for 2021. For family coverage, the HSA contribution limit jumps to $7,750 next year from $7,300 in 2022. READ MORE

Trade schools see student boom for offering careers ‘within grasp’

With the number of U.S. job openings rising to 11.5 million at the end of March, trade schools are finding a growing demand for their low-cost, low-time commitment programs that produce big payouts.

Student enrollment among agriculture, construction and transportation schools has increased up to 40%, according to new data from National Student Clearinghouse. Many programs require just one year of training, and typically cost less than $16,000, while a traditional four-year collegiate institution costs on average $100,000. READ MORE

How a billionaires boys’ club came to dominate the public square

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, attacked a publication owned by the world’s third-richest man, Jeff Bezos, last month for reprinting a column published by the world’s 13th-richest man, Mike Bloomberg.

The Bloomberg opinion article, posted by The Washington Post, asked whether Musk’s recent investment in Twitter would endanger freedom of speech. “WaPo always good for a laugh,” Musk wrote in a tweet, with smiling and crying emoji. READ MORE

Apple employees refuse office return because it will make company ‘whiter, more male-dominated’

Employees of the tech giant Apple are revolting against a plan to get staff back into the office for three days a week, claiming it will make the company “younger, whiter and more male-dominated”.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, has said his proposed “hybrid working pilot” for US, Europe and UK employees is an attempt to balance the corporate benefits of in-office working with the personal advantages that working from home gives staff members. READ MORE

What Elon Musk Can Learn From Mastodon—and What He Can’t

Freedom never comes for free. In Twitter’s case, the price was $44 billion, which Elon Musk will pay to liberate the platform from its responsibilities as a public company and transform it into a free speech Xanadu. Musk wants to open source the platform’s algorithms, exile spam bots, and allow people to tweet whatever they please “within the bounds of the law.” To him, the stakes are nothing short of existential. “My strong intuitive sense,” he said in an interview at TED last week, “is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.” READ MORE

Present your China contingency plan at the next board meeting

But for a far broader set of companies, there’s a much more dangerous threat looming on the horizon: Russia’s totalitarian twin and closest military and economic ally–China.

It does not take a Ph.D. in international affairs to understand the common threads that underpin the China-Russia partnership. Both governments are known for lawless behavior, duplicity, bullying, domestic oppression, coercive economic practices, and grave human rights abuses. READ MORE