The Weekly Lift - February 22, 2024

This week's selection of headlines and articles*:

International Relations: Ukraine’s Zelensky Signs 10-Year Security Deals With France, Germany

The Globe and Mail (Canada) reports, "Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday signed a 10-year bilateral security agreement with France hours after he officialized a similar one with Germany. The agreements send a strong signal of long-term backing as Kyiv works to shore up Western support nearly two years after Russia launched its full-scale war.

Zelensky was greeted in Paris at the Elysee presidential palace by President Emmanuel Macron. The agreement provides an additional package worth 3 billion euros ($3.2-billion) in military aid this year, the largest annual amount France has given to Ukraine since the war began. “The outcome of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine will be decisive for our interests, our values, our security and our model of society,” Macron said. “Yes, we must further invest” to support Ukraine “at a greater scale and in the long term,” he added. Macron said he would travel to Ukraine by mid-March.

Zelensky’s stop in France comes after he met earlier in the day in Berlin with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said Berlin was providing another 1.1 billion-euro ($1.2 billion) package of military aid, including 36 howitzers, 120,000 rounds of artillery ammunition and two more air-defence systems.

Ukraine signed last month its first such bilateral agreement with the U.K. “These three agreements ... give me confidence as president that we are not alone,” Zelensky said in Paris. “It’s very important that we have specific agreements with all our partners. But I would like to emphasize that this is not an alternative to the United States, we are all together,” he said.

Zelensky earlier said more deals were in the works with other countries. “Ukraine has never yet had more valuable and stronger documents,” he said. The security agreements appear aimed primarily at sending a message of long-term solidarity as Ukraine has gone back on the defensive in the war, hindered by low ammunition supplies and a shortage of personnel.

“Two years after the beginning of this terrible war, we are sending a crystal-clear message today to the Russian president: we will not ease off in our support for Ukraine,” Scholz said. He put his country’s deliveries and pledges of military aid so far at a total 28 billion euros.

Macron said the agreements also show Europe’s commitments amid concerns that former U.S. President Donald Trump might return to the White House and allow Russia to expand its aggression on the continent. “Europe’s future cannot depend on the American election,” Macron said. “This is my idea of sovereignty and strategic autonomy.”

Both the French and the German agreements, valid for 10 years, underscore Paris and Berlin’s intention to provide “long-term” military support to Ukrainian security. They say Ukraine and its partners “will work together on ensuring a sustainable force capable of defending Ukraine now and deterring future aggression in the future.”

In case of future Russian aggression, Germany, like France, “would provide Ukraine as appropriate, with swift and sustained security assistance” and modern military equipment as needed, as well as seeking agreement on imposing “economic and other costs on Russia,” the agreements state. They go on to state that Ukraine “will continue to implement an ambitious reform program,” which is essential to its ambitions to join the European Union and NATO.

The agreements follow commitments made by the world’s most advanced economies at a NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July. Zelensky’s trip came on the same day that Russia’s prison agency announced the death of Alexey Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe. “Putin has already become one of the bloodiest dictators in European history, but unfortunately his journey is not over,” Zelensky said in Paris. “We will work with everyone in the world who is able to bring him to justice.”

On Saturday, Zelensky is set to attend the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of high-ranking security and foreign policy officials, where he plans meetings with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, among others.

European allies are appealing to the U.S. Congress in recent days to approve a package that includes aid for Ukraine, a $60 billion allotment that would go largely to U.S. defence entities to manufacture missiles, munitions and other military hardware that are being sent to the battlefields in Ukraine. The package faces resistance from House Republicans.

Scholz travelled to Washington a week ago to underscore the urgency of releasing U.S. funding. After meeting Zelensky, he renewed his appeal for Congress to release the aid.

“The U.S. is a great power, and its support is essential to the security of Ukraine and its ability to defend itself,” the German leader said. “We are making our contribution, too, but that of the U.S. should not be underestimated.”

Zelensky said he thinks the majority of the American population supports his country’s cause. “I expect that the United States will not `drop out,”' he said. “I expect that in all of this a pragmatic American approach to us, protecting the security of the world, will be found.”

Germany is now the second-biggest supplier of military aid to Ukraine after the U.S., and Scholz has called recently for other European countries to step up with more weapons deliveries.

France announced last month more planned deliveries of its Caesar artillery system to Ukraine and committed to deliver 3,000 155mm shells per month this year as well as around 40 additional long-range Scalp cruise missiles."

Climate Change: China’s Carbon Emissions Are Set to Decline Years Earlier Than Expected

The Wall Street Journal (US) reports, "China’s massive rollout of renewable energy is accelerating, its investments in the sector growing so large that international climate watchdogs now expect the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions to peak years earlier than anticipated—possibly as soon as this year.

China installed 217 gigawatts worth of solar power last year alone, a 55% increase, according to new government data. That is more than 500 million solar panels and well above the total installed solar capacity of the U.S. They appeared everywhere from the deserts of Inner Mongolia to the mountains of southwest China to rooftops across the country, including on the Great Hall of the People on the edge of Tiananmen Square.

Wind-energy installation additions were 76 gigawatts last year, more than the rest of the world combined. That amounted to more than 20,000 new turbines across the country, including the world’s largest, planted on towers in the sea off China’s east coast.

The low-carbon capacity additions, which also included hydropower and nuclear, were for the first time large enough that their power output could cover the entire annual increase in Chinese electricity demand, analysts say. The dynamic suggests that coal-fired generation—which accounts for 70% of overall emissions for the world’s biggest polluter—is set to decline in the years to come, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency and Lauri Myllyvirta, the Helsinki-based lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

China’s expanding renewables footprint is shaping the global response to climate change. Its companies are the leading manufacturers of clean-energy technology, from solar panels and wind turbines to electric vehicles. That is stoking concerns in the rest of the industrialized world about depending on China for their energy supplies in the future.

At the same time, China’s deployment of renewables at home is breathing new life into international climate diplomacy. Its rapid emissions growth long provided fodder for critics who said Beijing wasn’t committed to fighting climate change or supporting the Paris accord, the landmark climate agreement that calls for governments to attempt to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures. Now, analysts and officials say Beijing’s efforts are lending momentum to the Paris process, which requires governments to draft new emissions plans every five years.

“An early peak would have a lot of symbolic value and send a signal to the world that we’ve turned a corner,” said Jan Ivar Korsbakken, a senior researcher at the Oslo-based Center for International Climate and Environmental Research.

In 2020, Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged that the country’s emissions would begin falling before 2030 and hit net zero before 2060, part of its plan prepared under the Paris accord. He also said China would have 1,200 gigawatts of total solar- and wind-power capacity by the end of this decade.

The country is six years ahead of schedule: China reached 1,050 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity at the end of 2023, and the China Electricity Council forecast last month that capacity would top 1,300 gigawatts by the end of this year. “China’s acceleration was extraordinary,” said Fatih Birol, the executive director of the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

Chinese authorities publish regular data on energy consumption and generation but not overall greenhouse-gas emissions. Transition Zero, a U.K.-based nonprofit that uses satellite images to monitor industrial activity and emissions in China, says the official data are “broadly aligned and consistent” with theirs.

Once the peak arrives, some analysts expect an emissions plateau to follow rather than a rapid fall in the following years. That is a problem, scientists say, because the world’s major emitters must sharply cut global emissions this decade—by 43% compared with 2019—to fulfill the Paris accord.

Climate Action Tracker, a scientific consortium that evaluates governments’ emissions plans, rates China’s current policies as “highly insufficient” to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal. Its latest analysis, published in November, says China’s emissions should peak by 2025. If wind and solar installations can average 300 gigawatts a year—as they did last year—China’s emissions should fall significantly by the end of the decade, the consortium says. The actions and policies of the U.S., where emissions have been falling, were graded as “insufficient.”

Still, moving China’s timeline for an overall emissions peak forward could shave off around 0.3 to 0.4 degrees Celsius of projected global warming if emissions started to decline next decade, analysts say. Emissions plans submitted to date under the Paris accord would put the world on track to warm by 2.5 degrees Celsius this century, a United Nations Environment Program report said in November.

China is still building coal-fired power plants, fueling criticism from Western officials that it is locking in carbon-dioxide emissions years into the future. Beijing has been telling Western officials that the new plants won’t be as polluting as they fear.

They are replacing older, higher-emitting plants, and will run far below full capacity, used largely to maintain electric-grid stability as China generates more of its power from intermittent wind and solar. In November, China unveiled a system of capacity payments for coal-fired plants that will allow them to earn money even when they are running as backup power sources. Xi said in 2021 that China would begin to phase down its coal consumption starting in 2026.

The exact timing of China’s peak depends on factors such as economic growth and weather in the next few years, analysts say. Growth is expected to slow following China’s real-estate sector slump—unless Beijing undertakes a major new program of economic stimulus that would boost industrial emissions. Another spell of drought this summer would push the country’s coal plants to run harder to replace lost hydropower generation.

The most certain variable in the equation is the breakneck pace of China’s renewable-energy rollout, which analysts expect will continue to add 200 to 300 gigawatts of new wind and solar capacity a year. The investments in renewable energy have become a major driver of the Chinese economy. The country’s clean-energy spending totaled $890 billion last year, up 40%. Without that growth, investment in China would have been flat as the country reels from the slump in its real-estate sector, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

The investments include clean-energy installations and the construction of enormous factories to produce solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles—turning the country into the leading manufacturer of clean tech. Its factories in those sectors now have plenty of unused capacity. The adoption of electric vehicles is happening so rapidly that analysts say peak gasoline demand in China was already reached last year.

At the United Nations COP28 climate conference in Dubai in November, Xie Zhenhua, then China’s climate envoy, said the government would calculate the year and absolute volume of the country’s emissions peak. He also said Beijing is drawing up its next emissions plan under the Paris accord.

“Our country will do as it’s said and strive to do even better,” he said. “I have faith.”

Society: The Taliban Vowed To Change Kabul. The City May Be Starting To Change The Taliban

The Washington Post (US) reports, "more than two years after Taliban fighters streamed into the Afghan capital, seizing power here and vowing to cleanse the country of Western decadence, many of them have come to embrace the benefits of urban life.

Some spend their weekends in the city’s theme parks. Some watch cricket matches on large outdoor screens. Others are filling their Facebook pages with skyline selfies or buying self-help books published in the West. Most mornings, Kabul’s English schools are crowded with Taliban soldiers and employees in camouflage jackets, who appear as eager as other students to study abroad.

As the Taliban continues to change Kabul, some here have started to wonder if the city may also have begun to remake the Taliban.

“In many ways, they’ve been transformed,” said Abdulrahman Rahmani, 50, a former fighter who helped the Taliban conquer Kabul in 1996 and then again in 2021, speaking during a recent visit to Kabul’s zoo to see the lions.

Some of the Taliban fighters now regret the material success they sacrificed to wage their armed campaign. Just the other day, Rahmani recalled, another Taliban soldier told him he was sad because he and his brother had given up their schooling. “If we had studied, we’d be sitting in offices now,” he told Rahmani.

There are no signs that these changes have resulted in a softening of the Taliban’s repressive policies, in particular the campaign against women’s rights. And no doubt, for many of the fighters who in 2021 sped into the Afghan capital on the backs of pickup trucks, this city of about 5 million people is a disappointment. They say urban life is lonelier, more stressful and less religious than they had imagined.

Some of the Taliban fighters had grown up here before departing for rural Afghanistan to join the insurgency. Others never left and supported the Taliban as informants. But for most of the men who overtook the Afghan capital, the city’s bright lights were unfamiliar, and Kabul posed a challenge full of seductions.

Rahmani dreams that one day Kabul will become the Afghan equivalent of Dubai, the glitzy commercial hub in the United Arab Emirates. “Once the economic problems are solved, things will change massively,” he said.

Some Taliban members are already developing expensive taste. While officials in the new government initially went shopping for motorbikes, they are now increasingly interested in shiny Land Cruisers, vendors say.

City life already appears to have left a mark on Taliban soldier Abdul Mobin Mansor, 19, and his comrades. They agree that reliable internet access, for one, is of increasing importance to them.

They say they have gotten hooked on several television series that are best consumed in high definition. Their favorites are Turkish crime drama “Valley of the Wolves” and “Jumong,” a South Korean historical series about a prince who must conquer far-flung lands.

Mansor said he still prefers the countryside, where he might eventually return. “But I very much hope that there will be electricity and other modern facilities by then,” he said.

Some soldiers, like Hassam Khan, 35, say they can hardly imagine having to move back. Khan said he initially struggled to adapt to the city. He said he felt that Kabul residents feared him, and his eyes hurt when he stared at a computer for too long. But access to electricity, water, English classes and computer science lessons have changed his mind. “I like this life,” he said.

Some Afghans who had opposed the Taliban takeover say they have noticed a difference, too. Tariq Ahmad Amarkhail, a 20-year-old glasses vendor, said he has a growing feeling that the Taliban “is trying to adopt our lifestyle.” “They came from the mountains, couldn’t understand our language and didn’t know anything about our culture,” said Amarkhail.

When they arrived, he said, they condemned jeans and other Western clothes and destroyed musical instruments. But when Amarkhail and his friends recently drove up to security checkpoints with music playing inside the cars, Taliban soldiers simply waved them through, he said. While Western civilian clothes have become a rare sight on Kabul’s streets, some residents were surprised to see the Taliban embrace military uniforms that bear striking similarities to those worn by their former enemies.

In interviews, over half a dozen younger and older regime employees cited access to education as a primary reward for their struggles. “When we conquered Kabul, we vowed to become a better version of ourselves,” said Laal Mohammad Zakir, 25, a Taliban sympathizer who became a Finance Ministry employee. He said he had signed up for an intensive English course to be able to study abroad one day.

Zabihullah Misbah and his friend Ahmadzai Fatih, both 25, were among the first fighters to rush into Kabul in 2021. Misbah still primarily associates Kabul with “bad things” such as adultery. “You’re more connected to God when you’re in the village,” he said. With fewer distractions there, “one is mostly busy with praying.”

Social bonds in villages are tighter, Misbah said, and life there feels less lonely.“When you pursue jihad, it puts you at ease,” said Fatih. “But when we arrived here, we could not find peace.”

While many Afghans fled Kabul during the Taliban takeover, it has turned back into the congested capital it once was. It can take hours to cross the smoggy city from one side to the other.

Mansor and his friends acknowledged that the toxic air and the separation from their families in rural Afghanistan are making them reconsider city life. “Those who brought their families here are happier than we are,” said Mansor, who has yet to find a wife. Rent in the city is expensive and apartments are too small, he said.

When the Taliban’s soldiers need an escape, they climb a hill in the center of Kabul, where the new regime has installed a gigantic Islamic Emirate flag, or they head to the Qargha Reservoir on the city’s outskirts, where they snack on pistachios in their pickup trucks.

Kabul residents who fearfully watched the Taliban arrive in 2021 said they hope that the number of former fighters who are embracing big-city life will outweigh those who are repulsed by it and that the Taliban will become more moderate.

Many women say they haven’t noticed such an evolution. Universities remain closed to them, and girls above grade six are barred from school. From the secluded city of Kandahar, the Taliban’s top leadership has turned Afghanistan into the world’s most repressive country for women, the United Nations says.

“The Taliban won’t change,” said Roqya, 25. Sales in her women’s clothing market stall dropped abruptly last month after the Taliban-run Ministry of Vice and Virtue temporarily detained women over dress code violations, she said.

“None of the girls dared to go outside alone anymore,” said Roqya, who completed a bachelor’s degree in physics just before the takeover. When no one is looking, she still reads science books behind her counter.

The Taliban has big plans for postwar reconstruction, but restrictions on women could become the primary obstacle. Many foreign donors have abandoned the country in protest during the past 2? years. Private investors remain scarce.

Could the lure of expensive skyscrapers, imposing new mosques and pothole-free roads eventually push the Taliban to compromise, as some Afghans hope?

In recent months, the Taliban has moved ahead with plans to resume work on a model city on the outskirts of Kabul, which was first conceived of more than a decade ago under the previous U.S.-backed government but was never built. “We will name it Kabul New City,” said Hamdullah Nomani, the Taliban-run government’s minister of urban development.

Construction executive Moqadam Amin, 57, said early discussions between his company and the new government suggested that the Taliban wanted a less ambitious project with lower-cost housing options. But the Taliban now appears to have thrown its backing behind the glitzy original plans, which envision the construction of high-rise buildings, schools, universities, pools, parks and shopping malls.

If Kabul’s “New City” is ever finished, its construction may take decades. For now, the designated property is accessible only on makeshift roads, lined by brick-stone factories and lone real estate agents who sit on carpets in the sand."

Cities: How San Francisco Staged A Surprising Comeback

The Economist (UK) reports, "whenever a global economic transformation takes place, a single city usually drives it forward. Ghent, in modern-day Belgium, was at the core of the burgeoning global wool trade in the 13th century. The first initial public offering took place in Amsterdam in 1602. London was the financial centre of the first wave of globalisation during the 19th century. And today that city is San Francisco.

California’s commercial capital has no serious rival in generative artificial intelligence (AI), a breakthrough technology that has caused a bull market in American stocks, and which many hope will power a global productivity surge.

Almost all big AI startups have their headquarters in the Bay Area, which includes San Francisco and Silicon Valley (largely based in Santa Clara County, to the south). Openai is there, of course; so are Anthropic, Databricks and Scale AI. Tech giants, including Meta and Microsoft, are also spending heavily on ai in the city. According to Brookings Metro, a think-tank, last year San Francisco accounted for close to a tenth of generative-ai job postings in America, more than anywhere else. New York, with four times as many residents, was second.

This has changed the mood of San Francisco. When you live in the city, you can feel AI in the air. Drive to the airport and every second billboard tells you the various ways in which your business can improve by adopting AI. Go to a party and every second guest says that they are working on the tech or in an industry being transformed by it. Barely a day goes by without some nerdy event to satisfy your curiosity about the world’s liveliest intellectual field, from talks about the philosophy of artificial general intelligence to mlhops, a meet-up for AI folk who like beer.

How is this happening somewhere supposedly falling apart? Even before the covid-19 pandemic there was a sense that the best days of San Francisco and the wider Bay Area had passed. In the late 2010s worries about crime and rising taxes saw other cities, including Austin, Los Angeles and Miami, hyped as the “next Silicon Valley”. According to data compiled by PitchBook, a financial database, at the start of 2014 firms in the Bay Area attracted four times more venture funding than New York, the next-biggest metro area. By the end of 2020 they attracted only 2.5 times as much.

Covid made the situation considerably worse. San Francisco locked down early, hard and for a long time, crushing employment in service industries. The city’s tech elite realised that they could work from home, emptying downtown. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, many in city government turned against the police. Officers felt the city no longer had their back. From 2019 to 2022 their numbers fell by 14%. In 2021 Elon Musk left for Texas, the richest of the many thousands who vacated San Francisco that year.

Action in startup-land moved elsewhere, too. The hottest companies were foreign, such as Ant Group, a Chinese fintech firm, at least until it was forced to abandon plans to go public, and Grab, a Singapore-based ride-hailer, which listed at a valuation of $50bn. Venture dealmaking in San Francisco inflated along with a wider market bubble. But when interest rates rose in 2022, the industry shut down. Valuations of venture-backed firms halved from the end of 2021 to the end of 2022.

Across the world “San Francisco” is now shorthand for a failed city. Drug overdoses and homelessness have soared; the city’s population fell by 8% from April 2020 to July 2022. Just 52% of Americans polled by Gallup last year viewed San Francisco as a safe place to live, down by 18 percentage points from 2006. Conservatives, in particular, see the city as an example of what happens when you let social-justice warriors run amok. Today, if you so choose, you can drive through red lights at high speed with impunity—police have almost completely stopped issuing traffic citations as they prioritise other crimes. More than 30% of offices are vacant. Market Street, the city’s main drag, has an astonishing number of empty shops.

There are now signs that the local quality of life is starting to improve: overdoses have begun to fall; in the final months of 2023 car break-ins halved. Yet the start of the AI boom predated these changes. Despite headlines about an exodus of the rich, San Francisco’s tech elites mostly weathered the storm—its population decline was, in fact, mostly driven by the exit of poorer folk. As a result, inhabitants are now better paid and more educated than before covid. According to official data, San Franciscans’ average personal income per year is more than twice the American average. Even as poor residents have left, income inequality has soared.

Many of the people with the skills to ride the AI wave were already in San Francisco or nearby. Most of today’s tech giants were founded in the suburban neighbourhoods that make up the Valley. Today they, and other big tech firms, have huge campuses 20 or 30 miles south of San Francisco, but their young employees rent cupboard-sized flats in the city. Much of the funding for the AI boom is coming from these tech behemoths. In 2022 and 2023 firms such as Meta completed more Bay Area-based venture-capital investments than ever before, largely focused on AI.

Owing to a mixture of government support and creative counterculture, Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley have long been centres of AI excellence. In 2017 eight people published a paper, “Attention is all you need”, while working in the Bay Area at Google. It has become known even outside AI circles as the groundbreaking contribution to the current wave of technological progress. By 2021 San Francisco and nearby San Jose accounted for a quarter of all conference papers on the topic, according to the analysis by Brookings Metro.

Academic excellence has fed private-sector innovation, with many researchers moving between the two spheres. Nine were hired to build OpenAI. At first, they laboured in the apartment of Greg Brockman, one of its co-founders, in the Mission District. Data from LinkedIn, a job-search platform, suggest that one in five of OpenAI’s engineering staff in America attended Berkeley or Stanford. Now San Francisco’s aiconcentration has reached a critical mass, with success begetting further success. London and Paris may be ai rivals, but they are a long way behind.

Thus investors are again spending big in the Bay Area. Venture funding to San Francisco-based startups halved between 2021 and 2022, but recovered to two-thirds of its peak in 2023. By contrast, in Miami just a quarter as much funding went to startups in 2023 as in 2021. Finance types who once worked in Silicon Valley are moving into the city to be closer to the action. Y Combinator, which helps startups get off the ground, recently set up shop. Venture-capital firms from General Catalyst to Pear vchave opened new offices.

In desirable neighbourhoods competition for rental properties is fierce, as the city’s population once again grows. The arrival of lots of well-paid tech types has boosted house prices. Although they fell by more than 12% from their pandemic highs, they have risen since the start of 2023. The city has fewer restaurants than in 2019, but about the same number with two or three Michelin stars. North of the city, in wine country, there is no shortage of new, expensive hotels at which venture capitalists and founders can relax.

Some elites see San Francisco’s ai success as a precursor to a broader transformation of the city. Locals are fed up with having to call 911 because someone is overdosing in front of their children. In 2022 they ousted Chesa Boudin, a progressive district attorney, and three members of the school board who were more concerned with renaming schools than reopening them. On March 5th they will vote on measures championed by moderate Democrats, including one that will try to get homeless people suffering from mental illness off the streets. In November they will choose a raft of local officials and perhaps whether to give the mayor more power.

London Breed, the current office-holder, sounds genuine when she talks of the need to improve public safety and cut red tape: “Rather than being a city that says ‘no’ all the time,” she explains, we need “to get to ‘yes’ by getting rid of bureaucracy.” She is being pushed by political groups that have formed as tech types take a keener interest in local politics, including Growsf and Togethersf, the latter co-founded by Michael Moritz, a famed venture capitalist.

These efforts face stern resistance. Aaron Peskin, president of the Board of Supervisors, the city council, is the de facto leader of San Francisco’s progressives. He argues that Mr Moritz and his fellow campaigners are “amateurs” who are dressing up their own elite interests in the language of reform. “I generally think that people believe their own bullshit,” he says.

Unsurprisingly Mr Moritz disagrees: “It’d be easy for us to pick up roots and…go to a low-tax state or go to Europe.”) Even today plenty of the city government’s time is wasted on pointless projects such as deciding whether or not to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. The local nimby movement is extremely powerful. And cartoonish corruption remains a problem: in 2022 the former director of public works was sentenced to seven years in prison for taking huge bribes.

Yet it may not matter much to the AI boom if San Francisco remains chaotic. If you want good public schools, public transport or public safety, San Francisco is not for you. If you do not need these things, or you can buy your way around them, then the city remains a great place in which to innovate. Covid tested the “network effects” that people in Silicon Valley believed were crucial to its success.

It turned out they were as powerful as ever. That founders, firms, money and workers are returning to San Francisco suggests that remote work has not killed their importance.?The city is still the place to be if you want to meet a co-founder by chance at a party.

Can the AI-driven excitement last? For now it is attracting people to the city; in time, it could cut the workforce needed for startups. “With AI you might not need 50 developers to start a firm—maybe you just need five,” speculates Auren Hoffman, a founder who moved from San Francisco to Washington, DC a few years ago.

Another risk is that the AI boom will amount to less than the bulls hope, perhaps because fewer-than-expected businesses adopt AI tools. Yet as real as these concerns are, they are also ones that just about every other city would love to face. When it comes to governance, San Francisco breaks all the rules. At the same time, it is the richest place on Earth, and getting ever richer."

Diversity: It’s Official: Brazil Is Now More Mixed Than White

El Pais (Spain) reports, "the first time he noticed something strange was when he was a child in school, the typical Brazilian private school where the majority of the pupils are white. For his peers, a pinkish, beige marker was what they referred to as “skin color.” But his skin color was totally different: “I would grab the burnt yellow pencil — a kind of mustard — and put it against my forearm, to show them what I was talking about,” explains Gleyson Borges.

When he turned 31, he defined himself as Black, but this wasn’t always the case. A graphic designer who signs his artwork with the name A Coisa Ficou Preta (“the thing has turned Black”), he draws attention to the fact that, as a child, he specifically chose the part of his skin that was the lightest when referring to his color. “I wanted to get as close as I could to the standard [of beauty].”

Like millions of Brazilians, Borges discovered that he was Black through a long process that is simultaneously personal and collective. This social transformation accelerated when he saw through the prevailing myth in Brazil: that the country, post-slavery, is some sort of paradise of racial harmony, without discrimination. “I was always Black, but knowing it was something that happened in my adult life,” the artist explains, in a video call with EL PAíS from his house in Maceió, the capital and the largest city of the coastal Brazilian state of Alagoas.

At the end of December, the latest census data confirmed a significant chance that will likely shape Brazilian society in the coming decades. For the first time in a century and a half, those who define themselves as mestizos, or mixed-race (45% of the population, or 92 million people), have surpassed whites (43%, 88 million) as the largest racial group. This represents a profound transformation in the way Brazilians define themselves in ethnic-racial terms. In the census form, every citizen chooses from the official boxes: mestizo (or pardo, in Portuguese), white, Black (preto), Indigenous and Asian.

Lilia Schwarcz, a 66-year-old anthropologist — who defines herself as white — is one of the renowned Brazilians who has studied racial matters for decades. “The truth is that mestizoswere always the majority. I believe that the current classification reveals [more self-awareness] on the part of a society that has long been under the influence of whitewashing.

Many who once defined themselves as white now define themselves as mestizo,” she explains. For decades, those who were in limbo would mark the box that read “white,” which, historically, was associated with the beautiful, with the positive… as opposed to everything negative that still often gets associated with being Black or brown. On formal records, many Brazilian parents had the tendency to lighten their babies.

Schwarcz attributes this positive change in social perception to the struggle of Black activism, the policies of affirmative action, racial quota systems and the rise of Afro-Brazilian studies, among other things. “All of this generated a different understanding on the part of the population,” Schwarcz explains, in an email exchange with EL PAíS. She emphasizes that “the authorities are going to have to react and organize themselves based on this mestizo majority, in terms of healthcare, social [policies] and even institutional representation.”

The change has accelerated over the last two decades thanks to multiple policies promoted by successive Workers’ Party administrations (2002-2016, 2023-present). And the Black advocacy movement was crucial to getting the state to adopt its definition of a Black person as being someone with African descent — that is, to include mestizos with some African ancestry.

The implementation of quotas — which began about a decade ago — touched a nerve. Numerous white families complained when many more poor, mixed-race and Black students entered university. They felt that their children were being discriminated against. On purpose or not, outraged parents ignored the historical injustices that motivated this policy.

Five million slaves were brutally and forcibly brought to the Portuguese Empire in the Americas from Africa over the course of 350 years, laying the foundations of what would become Brazil. They labored in horrific conditions on sugar plantations or in gold mines. In no other country in America was slavery so long-lasting.

Abolished in 1888 — more than 20 years after the practice officially ended in the United States — the authorities subsequently recruited 3.5 million European immigrants to replace free labor and to whiten the national race. The dream of the eugenicists —who wanted to perfect the human species with their racist theories — was that no trace of African blood would remain. As we can see today, this vision certainly hasn’t been fulfilled.

At the beginning of the 20th century, local elites calculated that, with an influx of Italians, Germans, Spaniards and Syrians, in just 10 generations or so, Brazil would be a white country. However, when you look at Brazil today, few nations have a larger palette of skin tones (as the cosmetics multinational L’Oréal knows well, always attentive to its clientele). Brazil has “eight types of hair and 55 skin tones, among the 60 cataloged by our scientists around the world,” explained the head of its Brazilian subsidiary, Marcelo Zimet, to Veja magazine.

There are so many tones that it’s not uncommon for doubt to arise when filling in the racial portion of the census. To Brazilians who complain that they were never educated on this issue, anti-racist activists respond: “You don’t know if you’re Black or white? Ask the police: they’re quite clear about it.” And, upon suspicion of abuse of racial quotas, the candidate in question can be brought before a commission that decides whether he or she meets the specified requirements of the box they’ve checked.

All the way back when the first census was circulated — in 1872 — Brazilians were already being asked about their skin color or race. The majority declared themselves to be mestizo, but there were also far more whites (as a percentage of the total population) than there are today.

Marta Antunes — from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) — defines herself as white. She explains that the institution cannot confirm to what extent mestizosmake up the majority due to both demographic and anthropological reasons. She points to three factors specifically: demographics (such as an increase in interracial couples), changes in fertility patterns (couples having fewer children later on in life) and the way in which society discusses and thinks about ethnicity.

Until a decade ago, she recalls, “many didn’t stop to think about [race].” In the 1940s, the “yellow” category (Asian) was created, in the wake of Japanese immigration. In the 1990s, the Indigenous community was formalized on government documents. She also adds that the IBGE has perfected its methods with explanatory videos, or by approaching Indigenous people who live beyond their traditional lands —a group in which “there was once a lot of confusion between ethnicity and race.” Thanks to these adjustments, the Indigenous population has doubled (from 0.4% to 0.8%) over the course of a decade.

It’s also not uncommon to change categories over the course of a lifetime, as demonstrated by the thousands of Brazilian politicians who whiten or darken themselves between one election and another. Both the iconic singer Caetano Veloso and his colleague Gilberto Gil considered themselves to be mestizo in the 1970s, as the former explains in his autobiography, even though Veloso appears white at first glance, while Gil appears Black.

And, in 2010, Neymar told the newspaper Estad?o that he has never experienced racism “on or off the field. Because I’m not Black, you know?” He also revealed that, every 20 days, he straightens his hair. Being harassed for having “frizzy hair” has long been deployed as a racial insult.

Brazil turned being mixed-race into a sign of national identity. And it took advantage of the fact that there were no racial segregation laws in the country (unlike in the United States under Jim Crow) in an attempt to present itself to the world as a tropical paradise, sans discrimination or racial tensions. This was the myth of “racial democracy.”

The 73-year-old philosopher Sueli Carneiro — a Black woman, one of the great intellectuals of contemporary Brazil — noted in an interview from 2022 that the notion of racial democracy was “a form of sophisticated and perverse racism, because it produced a distorted consciousness for all those involved in racial relations.” The idea that there was no racism permeated society, although statistics denied the fantasy time and again. Black and mixed-race Brazilians live shorter and poorer lives, while they get sick far more than their white compatriots.

In 1900, 1920 and 1970, the census didn’t ask about race or color. But in 1976, the authorities raised it openly, without boxes. The answers were 136 skin tones, including “very white,” “very dark,” “tanned brunette,” “cinnamon-colored brunette,” “bordering on white,” or “almost Black.” There were also terms such as mulata, which have been banished due to their discriminatory connotations.

Borges — known as A Coisa Ficou Preta — doesn’t precisely remember the first time he was asked about his color or race. He believes that it was in some census. “It was a shock.” He was assailed by doubt: “I knew [the answer] wasn’t white, but I didn’t know if it was Black, which is a reddish color. And I had no conception of being a mestizo. The truth is, I don’t remember what I checked.”

In the end, it was art — especially Emicida’s raps — that helped him rediscover his Blackness. The posters he puts up in the streets seek to extend the same awareness to others, with slogans such as “if the book doesn’t say it, what color do you give the characters?”

Artist and photographer Angélica Dass, 44, defines herself as Black. She grew up in “a very colorful family” in Rio de Janeiro and has lived in Spain for many years. Her most famous project is Humanae, a collection of 4,000 portraits taken in 20 countries. Each one is matched to their exact skin tone on the Pantone color scale.

She says that living outside of Brazil gave her the distance necessary to reflect: “There are people who are treated as less human because of the color of their skin… they have fewer rights because of their amount of melanin,” she laments, in a telephone interview with EL PAíS. She feels that both she and Humanae “are the fruit of ancestors who were [both] oppressed and oppressors.”

Among her projects, Dass chooses 280 chibatadas (in English: 280 lashes) as the one that best reflects her native country. In the work, she combines images of a happy childhood in a multiracial family with a series of racist tweets. She also includes a survey carried out in 1988 by the University of S?o Paulo, which concluded: “96% [of Brazilians] affirm that there are no racial prejudices; 99% know someone who has them.” Excellent raw material for reflection and debate."

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