The Daily Beast has the article America’s Losing Russia Strategy: Confronting Putin isn’t enough to restore peace on Russia’s borders. What’s needed is Détente Plus. This article is by Leslie H. Gelb.

What should this new diplomacy look like? To begin with, diplomacy does not mean rolling back economic sanctions against Russia or halting the promised NATO buildup in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. These are essential elements of tough diplomacy. By themselves, however, they merely invite Russian toughness and intransigence. That’s the story of the last two years.

The aim of a new diplomatic strategy—I like to call it Détente Plus—is to explore seriously whether Russia is prepared to work with the U.S. in Europe and elsewhere to solve or mitigate genuine common problems based on genuine shared or overlapping interests.

I would much rather that this influential “progressive” would have left out the first paragraph above, and have just talked about the second. If he thinks that his stand is less hawkish than some others are taking, then that is only because the others’ stands are so hawkish, that by absolute standards, Gelb’s stand doesn’t even approach a middle ground.

Why on earth would diplomacy not include rolling back things that we did that never made any sense in the first place? We seem to have started this whole mess, but want to put the blame on Putin. Those who started it, and know they started it, are awfully cynical if they now claim that Putin shouldn’t fight us as aggressively as we are fighting him. Apparently there are too many ill-informed people to protect our country from falling for such nonsense.

When Gelb says about what we have done so far, “By themselves, however, they merely invite Russian toughness and intransigence”, he is tacitly admitting my point. If these policies have been so bad by themselves over the last two years, why can’t we just stop digging ever deeper the hole we are in? Maybe we should put some of the dirt we have been digging back into that hole.

The New York Times has the article The Bad Behavior of Visionary Leaders by Tony Schwartz. His article talks about three leaders, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos.

What disheartens me is how little care and appreciation any of them give (or in Mr. Jobs’s case, gave) to hard-working and loyal employees, and how unnecessarily cruel and demeaning they could be to the people who helped make their dreams come true.

I have been thinking about why it is that I reserve a special animosity for Steve Jobs compared to the other two. I think there are two related reasons. First, I was much more aware of Steve Jobs personality from early on than I have been with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Second, Steve Jobs’ attitude and behavior affected me and what I wanted to do with the type of product each person’s company sold. With Elon Musk, there is no product of his company that I have ever bought or contemplated buying.

With Steve Jobs, I was affected by his disdain for standards and his constant reinvention of the wheel. Many of Apple’s products were and are incompatible with Microsoft Windows, Digital Equipment’s VMS, and Unix, and Linux. He purposely kept interfaces to his products and the design of his products proprietary. That made Apple the sole source of many things related to his computers. I could understand this as a good business decision for him that allowed him to charge exorbitant prices, but it wasn’t a decision that benefited me. As I used multiple different computer operating systems at various times on the same day, the incompatibility could be quite frustrating and annoying. I had similar annoyances with Microsoft’s software, but there were alternative pieces of software that would run on a windows machine that were much more standards oriented – HTML being one of the most important standards. Microsoft’s violations of the standards for Javascript were gaping holes in security, so I just used Mosaic, then Netscape, and later Firefox. I stopped using Outlook for email, and switched to Mozilla’s Thunderbird.

The wonders of graphical user interfaces made using computers easier in many cases. However, there were many things I needed and wanted to do with computers every day, even every hour, that were not well served by graphical user interfaces. With VMS, Unix, and Linux, there was no problem using the best method for the task at hand. With the introduction of Cygwin’s virtual Unix on Windows machines, I had what I needed to make Windows useful to me. MSDos was so inferior to the DEC-10 and VMS machines, that I refused to buy a PC until Windows-3 came out.

My dislike for Steve Jobs was well entrenched and many years old before I learned about his conspiring with other Silicon Valley companies to keep engineering wages low. Even if the companies I worked for were not part of the conspiracy directly, (and I have no way of being sure of that), they certainly benefited from the lack of competition on salaries.