abdoosh1000/training-batch-6 · Datasets at Hugging Face

text stringlengths 12 1k	source stringclasses 2 values
Today, with interest rates near or at record lows in many countries, it is relatively cheap to speculate in gold instead of investing in bonds.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But if real interest rates rise significantly, as well they might someday, gold prices could plummet.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Most economic research suggests that gold prices are very difficult to predict over the short to medium term, with the odds of gains and losses being roughly in balance.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
It is therefore dangerous to extrapolate from short-term trends.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Yes, gold has had a great run, but so, too, did worldwide housing prices until a couple of years ago.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
If you are a high-net-worth investor, a sovereign wealth fund, or a central bank, it makes perfect sense to hold a modest proportion of your portfolio in gold as a hedge against extreme events.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But, despite gold’s heightened allure in the wake of an extraordinary run-up in its price, it remains a very risky bet for most of us.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Of course, such considerations might have little influence on prices.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
What was true for the alchemists of yore remains true today: gold and reason are often difficult to reconcile.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
1929 or 1989?	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
PARIS – As the economic crisis deepens and widens, the world has been searching for historical analogies to help us understand what has been happening.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
At the start of the crisis, many people likened it to 1982 or 1973, which was reassuring, because both dates refer to classical cyclical downturns.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Today, the mood is much grimmer, with references to 1929 and 1931 beginning to abound, even if some governments continue to behave as if the crisis was more classical than exceptional.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The tendency is either excessive restraint (Europe) or a diffusion of the effort (the United States).	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Europe is being cautious in the name of avoiding debt and defending the euro, whereas the US has moved on many fronts in order not to waste an ideal opportunity to implement badly needed structural reforms.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
For geo-strategists, however, the year that naturally comes to mind, in both politics and economics, is 1989.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Of course, the fall of the house of Lehman Brothers has nothing to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Indeed, on the surface it seems to be its perfect antithesis: the collapse of a wall symbolizing oppression and artificial divisions versus the collapse of a seemingly indestructible and reassuring institution of financial capitalism.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Yet 2008-2009, like 1989, may very well correspond to an epochal change, whose unfolding consequences will be felt for decades.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The end of the East-West ideological divide and the end of absolute faith in markets are historical turning points.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
And what happens in 2009 may jeopardize some of the positive results of 1989, including the peaceful reunification of Europe and the triumph of democratic principles over nationalist, if not xenophobic, tendencies.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
In 1989, liberal democracy triumphed over the socialist ideology incarnated and promoted by the Soviet Bloc.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
For many of his supporters, it was President Ronald Reagan who, with his deliberate escalation of the arms race, pushed the Soviet economy to the brink, thereby fully demonstrating the superiority of liberal societies and free markets.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Of course, there are obvious differences between 1989 and now.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
First, and perhaps above all, the revolutions of 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to global bipolarity.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
By contrast, 2009 is likely to pave the way to a new form of bipolarity, but with China substituting for the Soviet Union.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Second, whereas democracy and market capitalism appeared as clear – if more fragile than expected – winners in 1989, it is difficult in 2009, with the spread of the global crisis, to distinguish winners from losers.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Everyone seems to be a loser, even if some are more affected than others.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Yet, history is unfair, and the US, despite its greater responsibility for today’s global crisis, may emerge in better shape than most countries from the morass.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
In better shape, but not alone.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
As a visiting professor at Harvard and MIT, I am getting a good preview of what the world could look like when the crisis finally passes.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
One senses something like the making of an American-Asian dominated universe.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
From the incredible media lab at MIT to the mathematics and economics departments at Harvard, Asians – Chinese and Indians, in particular – are everywhere, like the Romans in Athens in the first century BC: full of admiration for those from whom they were learning so much, and whom they would overcome in the coming decades.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But before this new order appears, the world may be faced with spreading disorder, if not outright chaos.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
What, for example, will happen to a country as central and vulnerable as Egypt when hundred of thousands of Egyptians working in the Gulf are forced to return to their homeland as a result of the crisis in the oil-producing countries?	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
When the rich get less rich, the poor get poorer.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
And what about the foreign workers who have reached for the “European dream” and are now faced with potential explosions of xenophobia in Europe’s supposedly open countries?	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The consequences of 1989 ended up being less enduring than many observers, including me, would have assumed.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
We can only hope that, in the end, the consequences of 2009 similarly prove to be far less dramatic than we now – intuitively and in our historical reflexes – feel them to be.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The End of 1945	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
NEW YORK – On May 8, 1945, when World War II in Europe officially ended, much of the world lay in ruins.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But if the human capacity for destruction knows few limits, the ability to start over again is just as remarkable.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Perhaps that is why mankind has so far managed to survive.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
No doubt, millions of people at the end of the war were too hungry and exhausted to do anything much beyond staying alive.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But, at the same time, a wave of idealism swept across the wreckage, a collective sense of determination to build a more equal, peaceful, and safer world.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
That is why the war’s great hero, Winston Churchill, was voted out of office in the summer of 1945, even before Japan surrendered.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Men and women had not risked their lives simply to return to the old days of class privilege and social deprivation.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
They wanted better housing, education, and free health care for all.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Similar demands were heard all over Europe, where the anti-Nazi or anti-fascist resistance was often led by leftists, or indeed Communists, and prewar conservatives were frequently tainted by collaboration with fascist regimes.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
There was talk of revolution in countries such as France, Italy, and Greece.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
This did not happen, because neither the Western Allies nor the Soviet Union supported it.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Stalin was content to settle for an empire in Eastern Europe.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But even Charles de Gaulle, a resistance leader of the right, had to accept Communists in his first postwar government, and he agreed to nationalize industries and banks.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The swing to the left, to social-democratic welfare states, occurred all over Western Europe.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
It was part of the 1945 consensus.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
A different kind of revolution was taking place in Europe’s former colonies in Asia, where native peoples had no desire to be ruled once more by Western powers, which had been so ignominiously defeated by Japan.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Vietnamese, Indonesians, Filipinos, Burmese, Indians, and Malays wanted their freedom, too.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
These aspirations were often voiced in the United Nations, founded in 1945.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The UN, like the dream of European unity, was also part of the 1945 consensus.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
For a short while, many prominent people – Albert Einstein, for one – believed that only a world government would be able to ensure global peace.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
This dream quickly faded when the Cold War divided the world into two hostile blocs.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But in some ways the 1945 consensus, in the West, was strengthened by Cold War politics.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Communism, still wrapped in the laurel leaf of anti-fascism, had a wide intellectual and emotional appeal, not only in the so-called Third World, but also in Western Europe.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Social democracy, with its promise of greater equality and opportunities for all, served as an ideological antidote.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Most social democrats were in fact fiercely anti-communist.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Today, 70 years later, much of the 1945 consensus no longer survives.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Few people can muster great enthusiasm for the UN.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The European dream is in crisis.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
And the post-war social-democratic welfare state is being eroded more and more every day.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The rot began during the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Neoliberals attacked the expense of entitlement programs and the vested interests of trade unions.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Citizens, it was thought, had to become more self-reliant; government welfare programs were making everyone soft and dependent.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
In Thatcher’s famous words, there was no such thing as “society,” only families and individuals who ought to be taking care of themselves.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But the 1945 consensus was dealt a much greater blow precisely when we all rejoiced at the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the other great twentieth-century tyranny.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
In 1989, it looked as if the dark legacy of World War II, the enslavement of Eastern Europe, was finally over.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
And in many ways, it was.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But much else collapsed with the Soviet model.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Social democracy lost its raison d’être as an antidote to Communism.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
All forms of leftist ideology – indeed, everything that smacked of collective idealism – came to be viewed as misguided utopianism that could lead only to the Gulag.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Neoliberalism filled the vacuum, creating vast wealth for some people, but at the expense of the ideal of equality that had emerged from World War II.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The extraordinary reception of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows how keenly the consequences of the collapse of the left have been felt.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
In recent years, other ideologies have also emerged to fill the human need for collective ideals.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The rise of right-wing populism reflects revived yearnings for pure national communities that keep immigrants and minorities out.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
And, perversely, American neo-conservatives have transformed the internationalism of the old left by seeking to impose a democratic world order by US military force.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The answer to these alarming developments is not nostalgia.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
We cannot simply return to the past.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Too much has changed.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But a new aspiration toward social and economic equality, and international solidarity, is badly needed.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
It cannot be the same as the 1945 consensus, but we would do well, on this anniversary, to remember why that consensus was forged in the first place.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
2011: My Space Odyssey	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
MOSCOW – Most people who know of me think of me as an information-technology expert, someone who probably lives in California and invests in edgy Internet start-ups.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
In fact, my formal residence is in New York City, but I am about to spend most of the next five months in Russia, training to be a cosmonaut in Star City, just outside Moscow.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
It all came about in a number of ways.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
First of all, as a kid, I just assumed that I would go to the moon, without having to do much in particular to make it happen.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
I just took it for granted that, by the time I was, say, 40, space travel would be a common thing.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
My father was involved with the United States space program, and we had some moon rocks at home, so I thought it was no big deal.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Then I got distracted for about 40 years.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
A few years ago, however, I started paying attention to space again.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
A lot of people I knew in the IT industry were doing the same: Elon Musk, a co-founder of PayPal, founded Space-X;	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Jeff Bezos of Amazon started a spacecraft company called Blue Origin;	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Today, with interest rates near or at record lows in many countries, it is relatively cheap to speculate in gold instead of investing in bonds.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But if real interest rates rise significantly, as well they might someday, gold prices could plummet.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Most economic research suggests that gold prices are very difficult to predict over the short to medium term, with the odds of gains and losses being roughly in balance.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

It is therefore dangerous to extrapolate from short-term trends.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Yes, gold has had a great run, but so, too, did worldwide housing prices until a couple of years ago.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

If you are a high-net-worth investor, a sovereign wealth fund, or a central bank, it makes perfect sense to hold a modest proportion of your portfolio in gold as a hedge against extreme events.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But, despite gold’s heightened allure in the wake of an extraordinary run-up in its price, it remains a very risky bet for most of us.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Of course, such considerations might have little influence on prices.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

What was true for the alchemists of yore remains true today: gold and reason are often difficult to reconcile.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

1929 or 1989?

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

PARIS – As the economic crisis deepens and widens, the world has been searching for historical analogies to help us understand what has been happening.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

At the start of the crisis, many people likened it to 1982 or 1973, which was reassuring, because both dates refer to classical cyclical downturns.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Today, the mood is much grimmer, with references to 1929 and 1931 beginning to abound, even if some governments continue to behave as if the crisis was more classical than exceptional.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The tendency is either excessive restraint (Europe) or a diffusion of the effort (the United States).

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Europe is being cautious in the name of avoiding debt and defending the euro, whereas the US has moved on many fronts in order not to waste an ideal opportunity to implement badly needed structural reforms.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

For geo-strategists, however, the year that naturally comes to mind, in both politics and economics, is 1989.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Of course, the fall of the house of Lehman Brothers has nothing to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Indeed, on the surface it seems to be its perfect antithesis: the collapse of a wall symbolizing oppression and artificial divisions versus the collapse of a seemingly indestructible and reassuring institution of financial capitalism.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Yet 2008-2009, like 1989, may very well correspond to an epochal change, whose unfolding consequences will be felt for decades.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The end of the East-West ideological divide and the end of absolute faith in markets are historical turning points.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

And what happens in 2009 may jeopardize some of the positive results of 1989, including the peaceful reunification of Europe and the triumph of democratic principles over nationalist, if not xenophobic, tendencies.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

In 1989, liberal democracy triumphed over the socialist ideology incarnated and promoted by the Soviet Bloc.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

For many of his supporters, it was President Ronald Reagan who, with his deliberate escalation of the arms race, pushed the Soviet economy to the brink, thereby fully demonstrating the superiority of liberal societies and free markets.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Of course, there are obvious differences between 1989 and now.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

First, and perhaps above all, the revolutions of 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to global bipolarity.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

By contrast, 2009 is likely to pave the way to a new form of bipolarity, but with China substituting for the Soviet Union.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Second, whereas democracy and market capitalism appeared as clear – if more fragile than expected – winners in 1989, it is difficult in 2009, with the spread of the global crisis, to distinguish winners from losers.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Everyone seems to be a loser, even if some are more affected than others.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Yet, history is unfair, and the US, despite its greater responsibility for today’s global crisis, may emerge in better shape than most countries from the morass.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

In better shape, but not alone.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

As a visiting professor at Harvard and MIT, I am getting a good preview of what the world could look like when the crisis finally passes.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

One senses something like the making of an American-Asian dominated universe.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

From the incredible media lab at MIT to the mathematics and economics departments at Harvard, Asians – Chinese and Indians, in particular – are everywhere, like the Romans in Athens in the first century BC: full of admiration for those from whom they were learning so much, and whom they would overcome in the coming decades.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But before this new order appears, the world may be faced with spreading disorder, if not outright chaos.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

What, for example, will happen to a country as central and vulnerable as Egypt when hundred of thousands of Egyptians working in the Gulf are forced to return to their homeland as a result of the crisis in the oil-producing countries?

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

When the rich get less rich, the poor get poorer.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

And what about the foreign workers who have reached for the “European dream” and are now faced with potential explosions of xenophobia in Europe’s supposedly open countries?

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The consequences of 1989 ended up being less enduring than many observers, including me, would have assumed.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

We can only hope that, in the end, the consequences of 2009 similarly prove to be far less dramatic than we now – intuitively and in our historical reflexes – feel them to be.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The End of 1945

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

NEW YORK – On May 8, 1945, when World War II in Europe officially ended, much of the world lay in ruins.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But if the human capacity for destruction knows few limits, the ability to start over again is just as remarkable.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Perhaps that is why mankind has so far managed to survive.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

No doubt, millions of people at the end of the war were too hungry and exhausted to do anything much beyond staying alive.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But, at the same time, a wave of idealism swept across the wreckage, a collective sense of determination to build a more equal, peaceful, and safer world.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

That is why the war’s great hero, Winston Churchill, was voted out of office in the summer of 1945, even before Japan surrendered.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Men and women had not risked their lives simply to return to the old days of class privilege and social deprivation.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

They wanted better housing, education, and free health care for all.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Similar demands were heard all over Europe, where the anti-Nazi or anti-fascist resistance was often led by leftists, or indeed Communists, and prewar conservatives were frequently tainted by collaboration with fascist regimes.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

There was talk of revolution in countries such as France, Italy, and Greece.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

This did not happen, because neither the Western Allies nor the Soviet Union supported it.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Stalin was content to settle for an empire in Eastern Europe.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But even Charles de Gaulle, a resistance leader of the right, had to accept Communists in his first postwar government, and he agreed to nationalize industries and banks.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The swing to the left, to social-democratic welfare states, occurred all over Western Europe.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

It was part of the 1945 consensus.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

A different kind of revolution was taking place in Europe’s former colonies in Asia, where native peoples had no desire to be ruled once more by Western powers, which had been so ignominiously defeated by Japan.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Vietnamese, Indonesians, Filipinos, Burmese, Indians, and Malays wanted their freedom, too.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

These aspirations were often voiced in the United Nations, founded in 1945.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The UN, like the dream of European unity, was also part of the 1945 consensus.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

For a short while, many prominent people – Albert Einstein, for one – believed that only a world government would be able to ensure global peace.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

This dream quickly faded when the Cold War divided the world into two hostile blocs.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But in some ways the 1945 consensus, in the West, was strengthened by Cold War politics.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Communism, still wrapped in the laurel leaf of anti-fascism, had a wide intellectual and emotional appeal, not only in the so-called Third World, but also in Western Europe.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Social democracy, with its promise of greater equality and opportunities for all, served as an ideological antidote.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Most social democrats were in fact fiercely anti-communist.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Today, 70 years later, much of the 1945 consensus no longer survives.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Few people can muster great enthusiasm for the UN.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The European dream is in crisis.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

And the post-war social-democratic welfare state is being eroded more and more every day.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The rot began during the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Neoliberals attacked the expense of entitlement programs and the vested interests of trade unions.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Citizens, it was thought, had to become more self-reliant; government welfare programs were making everyone soft and dependent.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

In Thatcher’s famous words, there was no such thing as “society,” only families and individuals who ought to be taking care of themselves.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But the 1945 consensus was dealt a much greater blow precisely when we all rejoiced at the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the other great twentieth-century tyranny.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

In 1989, it looked as if the dark legacy of World War II, the enslavement of Eastern Europe, was finally over.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

And in many ways, it was.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But much else collapsed with the Soviet model.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Social democracy lost its raison d’être as an antidote to Communism.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

All forms of leftist ideology – indeed, everything that smacked of collective idealism – came to be viewed as misguided utopianism that could lead only to the Gulag.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Neoliberalism filled the vacuum, creating vast wealth for some people, but at the expense of the ideal of equality that had emerged from World War II.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The extraordinary reception of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows how keenly the consequences of the collapse of the left have been felt.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

In recent years, other ideologies have also emerged to fill the human need for collective ideals.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The rise of right-wing populism reflects revived yearnings for pure national communities that keep immigrants and minorities out.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

And, perversely, American neo-conservatives have transformed the internationalism of the old left by seeking to impose a democratic world order by US military force.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The answer to these alarming developments is not nostalgia.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

We cannot simply return to the past.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Too much has changed.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But a new aspiration toward social and economic equality, and international solidarity, is badly needed.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

It cannot be the same as the 1945 consensus, but we would do well, on this anniversary, to remember why that consensus was forged in the first place.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

2011: My Space Odyssey

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

MOSCOW – Most people who know of me think of me as an information-technology expert, someone who probably lives in California and invests in edgy Internet start-ups.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

In fact, my formal residence is in New York City, but I am about to spend most of the next five months in Russia, training to be a cosmonaut in Star City, just outside Moscow.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

It all came about in a number of ways.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

First of all, as a kid, I just assumed that I would go to the moon, without having to do much in particular to make it happen.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

I just took it for granted that, by the time I was, say, 40, space travel would be a common thing.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

My father was involved with the United States space program, and we had some moon rocks at home, so I thought it was no big deal.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Then I got distracted for about 40 years.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

A few years ago, however, I started paying attention to space again.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

A lot of people I knew in the IT industry were doing the same: Elon Musk, a co-founder of PayPal, founded Space-X;

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Jeff Bezos of Amazon started a spacecraft company called Blue Origin;

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary