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Michigan's Democratic candidate for Senate Abdul El-Sayed confronted @jamesmatthewsky, telling him he wouldn't answer his questions as he wants "zero" votes in the UK. Watch the heated exchange between the two. Watch our live coverage of the US midterms➡️ trib.al/BikRSb2

Despite a direction from me when Defence Secretary that the Skynet 6A , £2bn contract was too important to the UK space industry to offshore to Lockheed Martin it looks as if Wes is preparing to place the contract overseas. The damage it would do to Stevenage and the UK satellite industry would be irreversible and it was always assessed it could mean the end of the sector. Lockheed’s promises of factories in Newcastle were skin deep. The differences between types on offer were marginal. No.10 could, and should stop this. @AirbusDefence @wesstreeting @larisamlbrown @kevinbonavia @haynesdeborah

We’re delighted to announce that @danwwang is making his debut as a contributor, with a column for this issue of @WorksInProgress. worksinprogress.co/issue/sic… Few people understand the China–US contrast as well as Dan Wang, and fewer still write about it with so much talent. His book Breackneck has introduced the now famous meme of China as a “country of engineers” and United States as a “country of lawyers,” to explain the differences in building capacity and physical world stagnation we are seeing between the two polities. In his new column for us, he takes up one specific thread in the long-running debate over how China and the US compare and argues that both owe part of their power to being polycentric. One observation is that both the American and US capitals are not their biggest cities. Vienna, London, Seoul and Paris dwarf their countries’ second cities, by four to seven times. By contrast, Beijing isn’t China’s largest city, and DC isn’t even in the top five in the US. Does this make US and China lame, for having smol capitals? No! On the contrary, Dan thinks that this friction between political and economic centers is important and at least partially explains why both countries can combine dynamism with strong states. But the two countries are polycentric in very different ways. China’s regions are culturally distinct and are shaped heavily by geography. While coastal provinces tend to look outward, mountain areas like Sichuan and Chongqing are characterized by evading the center’s edicts. Dan also points out some misconceptions: yes, China has central control, but it is weaker than it look. Local officials often ignore or quietly subvert senseless directives from Beijing, with enforcement thinning out quickly beyond the big cities. The characteristic feature of American polycentrism is how well it sorts people into domains and “sends” them to specific cities: this is reminiscent of the point @patio11 has made around “The Sort.” In America, the smartest and most driven tend to cluster in a handful of cities, above all New York and San Francisco, with Washington and Boston are slightly behind them. More than this: each field has an obvious center: AI has its capital in SF, for policy and politics you have DC, for finance New York and for biotech Boston and more recently, SF. Different cities in America also prize different things: Miami values looking good, Boston being intelligent and bookish, LA how famous you are and New York how rich you are. There is so much variety in terms of who you can choose to become in America. And the city you decide to live in might end up shaping who you are, moreso than in any other country!

Too complex for this platform, but interesting questions never asked nor answered are what is the content of the mind of the like-minded, who is like-minded & who is not, and what/who constitutes the core of the like-minded. Even so, this Euro diplomat anon is correct about Seoul