8,000 km of green defiance stretching from Senegal to Djibouti: it’s called the Great Green Wall – a plan to stop the Sahara desert, restore dead land, and lift 100 million people.
I’ve made a deliberate decision never to publicly describe the narcissism and sadism that shaped the first eighteen years of my life. Nor will I ever transform that history into a novel. I’ve chosen to carry it privately for the rest of my life, shared only with two people from my childhood who witnessed fragments of what occurred. This decision isn’t rooted in avoidance, but in realism. No paper, book, work of art, or lecture series could ever fully convey what that particular parent was like. Complete understanding would remain impossible, even if I were to speak uninterrupted for months.
Over the past years, however, I immersed myself more deeply in the work of Carl Jung. I wrote several articles inspired by this engagement, particularly on the experience of moving through the world as an empath. The responses I received were striking. Many readers described the pieces as resonant.
What stood out most were the personal messages. People recognized themselves in the descriptions and felt understood. When I reflected on why these texts had landed so strongly, the answer felt almost uncomfortably simple. They were clear because they were lived. They carried coherence because they were shaped by endurance. They resonated because they emerged from experience that had been metabolized into insight.
This realization prompted a shift in perspective. While I remain unwilling to expose my personal experiences in detail, I began to consider whether I could speak in a different register, by articulating, in general terms, what it means to grow up with narcissistic parents. What patterns emerge. What damage systematically forms. What remains invisible for decades. What continues to shape adult life long after physical distance from the family has been achieved.
The reflections gathered emerge from that intention. This is for entertainment or infotainment purposes only. Some elements described here don’t apply to me personally but are important in the larger context of the subject. Others reflect experiences I know intimately but won’t elaborate upon. Many things that shaped my life are absent from these words by design. As stated earlier, I will carry those until my final breath. What is offered here isn’t total disclosure, but careful distillation.
This care extends especially to language. The term narcissism is used far too casually in contemporary discourse. It has become a convenient label, applied loosely and often without consequence. Such usage isn’t merely imprecise. It’s disrespectful to those whose lives weren’t simply influenced, but structurally damaged by narcissistic parenting. When a life has been formed under conditions of chronic emotional control, gaslighting, enmeshment, and role assignment, the word narcissism doesn’t describe a personality quirk. It names a formative environment. For this reason, restraint and precision are ethical necessities.
The purpose of this work is to offer structure where there has been confusion, language where there has been silence, and conceptual clarity where there has long been self-doubt. Healing, as will become clear, is a slow and demanding process. I know what I’m describing. I also know the cost of walking it alone. If these words provide orientation, recognition, or steadiness for others, then they serve their purpose.
AI and the Self You Left BehindAI isn’t stealing your intelligence, you just stopped reaching for it.
By John Nosta
KEY POINTS:AI doesn’t steal your intelligence, it makes surrendering it feel rational.The risk isn’t atrophy or addiction but estrangement from the self that thinks.
The sharpest minds are most at risk because the substitution is most convincing when the gap is narrowest.Source: Image by Christian Bodhi from Pixabay.
The surrender of your cognitive voice to AI isn’t loss of ability. It’s estrangement from the self that thinks. Let’s unpack this carefully, because the self that thinks isn’t a fixed thing. William James was right that consciousness is a stream, not a monument. It’s fluid and shaped by the dimensions of our humanity from language to culture to tools and even to the people with whom we debate this very concept.
AI may simply be the latest participant in that ongoing construction. So, if the self was never stable, what exactly are we becoming estranged from? The answer isn’t: a fixed identity. It’s: a process. It’s how you move through a problem. It’s the specific texture of your uncertainty, the way your thinking hesitates and then commits, the half-formed idea that becomes, through friction, yours.That process is recognizable and you know it when you’re in it. You know it, too, as a kind of meeting or impact with the problem, and with yourself. And you notice when the meeting doesn’t happen.
Today we’ve grown particularly comfortable with medical metaphors for this absence. Atrophy. Dependency. Addiction. They position the person as patient and the technology as agent that’s doing something to us. And this insult is amenable to intervention and treatable with better habits or stronger regulation.This perspective misses the mechanism.
AI doesn’t degrade cognition directly as a disease that targets a biological structure or function. It’s my sense that AI reshapes the cost structure of thinking. And we, as rational humans, optimize accordingly. The hard paragraph to draft is no longer something you struggle with. It becomes something you route around.The moment you reached for AI wasn’t because you couldn’t think for yourself. It’s because your thinking felt inefficient compared to what the machine returns in the click of a button.
The key point here is that this isn’t dependency; it’s preference that’s taking shape. And preferences, repeated, become the shape of a life. Until, of course, the choice disappears into habit and the habit stops feeling like a choice.What gets traded away isn’t capacity. Your intrinsic cognitive ability likely remains. What changes is the tolerance for cognitive toil or friction. These aren’t trivial inefficiencies that are just optimized away. They’re the occasion for driving development and growth. Remove the friction and you remove development and growth.I believe that this is the particular vulnerability of people who think well, because, for them, the substitution is most convincing.
The AI output may most closely resemble what they would have produced, and that gap can be harder to see when it’s very narrow. The person who struggles to write was never tempted to believe the machine’s voice was their own. The person who thinks well is precisely the one most likely to mistake the echo for the original.Yes, estrangement is the right word because it’s relational and gradual. Something that was close becomes unfamiliar as your own voice starts to feel effortful. The AI voice feels curiously more like you, or perhaps the you that you aspire to be. It’s a rational trade-off that fits nicely into this cost structure. That’s precisely what makes it hard to resist and harder to reverse.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images
Axios CEO Jim VandeHei wrote a piece in his Axios C-Suite newsletter (ask to join) to help other CEOs think about how to future-proof themselves during this moment of profound technological change.He wanted to expand it for the Axios AM audience because EVERYONE is staring down this moment together. Whether you’re the CEO or an entry-level hire, we want you to see how a really good leader can approach the AI transition.
Your employer’s job is getting harder, faster, too.
Companies are being redesigned from the top down around AI. The leaders who get it right will look very different from the ones who don’t.
A startup with a handful of people and a team of AI agents might undercut your work at any moment, at a fraction of your cost.
Why it matters: The next 18 months will sort companies into two camps — those with leaders committed to running a genuinely AI-integrated organization, and those that bought a bunch of AI tools and called it transformation.
Here’s what a future-proofed CEO is actually acting on right now:
1. Becoming an AI decision-maker. AI strategy is no longer being handed off to CTOs. Corporate leaders are becoming systems architects. They personally decide where AI agents run workflows end-to-end, where humans stay in the loop and where both work together
Nearly three-quarters of CEOs say they’re now their companies’ chief AI decision-maker, per the consulting firm BCG. Half say their job stability depends on getting it right this year.
2. Reimagining their team. The most important role in any company by 2027 won’t have a clean title. It’s someone who understands AI systems well enough to architect workflows, people well enough to keep talent motivated through the transition, and the business well enough to know what matters.
That’s a hybrid of your current CTO, CHRO and COO.
The companies that find or develop this person first will move at twice the speed of those still routing AI decisions through a committee.
3. Anticipating the politics. The pressure on leaders not to replace workers with AI is already real. The temptation to do so anyway once the tech gets good enough will be real, too.
Klarna learned this the hard way. It cut 700 customer service jobs, watched satisfaction crater and quietly rehired humans after CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski admitted he went too far.
The gap between executive optimism and employee anxiety is a powder keg most organizations haven’t figured out how to defuse.
4. Managing trust issues. Employees fear replacement. Customers fear misuse. Regulators fear concentration. Investors fear wasted spending. That’s a big balancing act to manage.
The companies getting this right aren’t winging it. PwC found that firms with formal responsible AI frameworks are 1.7x more likely to capture real ROI from the tech.
5. Running at dual speed. The planning cycle that matters now requires leaders to think on two time scales simultaneously. Keeping both in sync will be a massive challenge in the years ahead.
There’s a fast clock (weekly and monthly cycles of AI deployment, agent testing, efficiency pushes and product shifts) where companies are trying to move like startups.
And there’s a slow clock (quarterly culture shifts, trust-building, infrastructure investment and talent development) where they’re trying to build something that lasts.
6. Retaining talent. Most companies already anticipate bringing on fewer junior workers in the near term as AI absorbs that work.
That’s rough when seniority amounts to thousands of solved problems, fixed mistakes and navigated crises that accumulated over time. Leaders who shrink the pipeline now are quietly borrowing against the institutional judgment they’ll need later.
The bottom line: The leaders you trust won’t be defined by vision alone. They’ll be the ones who treated AI like a discipline — not a distraction — and stayed honest with you all the way through.If you’re a CEO or on a CEO’s team: Ask to join Jim’s new weekly Axios C-Suite newsletter.
2. The tangible AI economy: Caterpillar as AI darling
Caterpillar excavators are unloaded at the Port of Long Beach in January. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty ImagesCaterpillar — founded decades before computers and nearly a century before ChatGPT — is becoming an AI play, Axios’ Nathan Bomey writes.
Why it matters: The equipment maker is enjoying a sales boom from the surge in development of AI data centers and power plants.
Between the lines: Much of Caterpillar’s growth in power and energy is driven by data center demand and the electricity needed to support cloud computing and generative AI, CEO Joe Creed said on an earnings call.
Caterpillar makes the engines and turbines that supply both primary and backup power to those facilities, as well as the electrical infrastructure to run them.
Driving the news: Caterpillar this week recorded a 22% increase in revenue, compared with a year earlier, to $17.4 billion.
That crushed S&P Capital IQ estimates of $16.4 billion.
It included a 38% increase in construction industry revenue and a 22% rise in its power and energy segment.
Caterpillar has accumulated a “record” backlog in orders, Creed said. The backlog totaled $63 billion, up 79% from a year earlier.
The bottom line: The AI economy continues to translate into demand for actual stuff like Nvidia chips and Caterpillar machines.
That’s making it increasingly difficult to argue the AI boom is a mirage.Share this story.
The USGS estimates there’s 2.3 million metric tons of lithium oxide untapped in parts of Appalachia.Cristobal Olivares/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Lithium is everywhere: It’s in the battery powering the device on which you’re reading this article. It powers electric vehicles (EVs). It’s in your headphones, your power tools, and your TV remote. In short, lithium powers modern life.
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The ubiquity of the element is why the United States Geological Survey (USGS) deemed it a critical mineral in November. While the U.S. remains highly reliant on imports of lithium, a new report from the USGS found an estimated 2.3 million metric tons of the lithium oxide in Appalachia, enough to replace 328 years’ worth of U.S. imports at last year’s level.
“This research shows that the Appalachians contain enough lithium to help meet the nation’s growing needs,” USGS director Ned Mamula said in a statement, “a major contribution to U.S. mineral security, at a time when global lithium demand is rising rapidly.”
The discovery comes as the demand for lithium continues to snowball as manufacturers ditch conventional lead-acid or alkaline for lithium-ion batteries. The USGS expects global lithium production capacity to double by 2029 on increasing demand. While the U.S. imports the majority of its lithium carbonate—the compound critical to lithium-ion battery production—primarily from Chile and Argentina, China dominates the supply of finished lithium-ion batteries, powering everything from EVs to phones and laptops.The U.S. imported nearly $85 million worth of lithium-ion batteries from China over the past year, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity. The import of lithium-ion batteries is particularly costly as both the Trump and Biden administrations have levied tariffs on Chinese imports of the product.
The scale of the lithium found in the U.S.
Out of the 2.3 million metric tons of lithium oxide that USGS estimates may be economically recoverable from Appalachian pegmatites—large-grained rocks similar to granite—about 1.43 million metric tons are estimated to be locked in the southern Appalachians, concentrated in the Carolinas. About another 900,000 metric tons are under the forests of rural western Maine and New Hampshire.
The scale of lithium in the U.S. is massive. USGS estimates it’s enough to power 130 million EVs, or enough for more than one-third of the U.S. population to own one. It’s enough for 3 billion tablets and laptops, 500 billion cell phones, or 1.6 million electric grid batteries.
Lithium is also critical to the AI infrastructure build-out. Lithium-ion batteries last two to three times longer than conventional batteries. They recharge faster than the average battery, making them a preferred choice for data centers. The batteries are a critical backup energy source for data centers during power outages. Hyperscalers are buying into that belief. Last year, Google announced the company had deployed 100 million lithium-ion cells in its data centers.
Where the U.S. stands in lithium production
But the problem is accessing the lithium. The U.S. was the dominant world producer of lithium three decades ago, according to Mamula. While domestic demand for the material is robust, lithium production today pales in comparison to its past production levels. The U.S. hosts just a handful of lithium projects—where the element is processed and refined—concentrated in areas outside of where the 2.3 million metric tons are estimated to be, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Nevada hosts the most projects, as well as the only operating lithium mine in the country, in Silver Peak, Nev.
The U.S. produced just 610 metric tons of lithium in 2024, according to an estimate from the Energy Institute’s 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy. That’s only 0.3% of all global production.
But the U.S. is investing in lithium extraction. The Department of Energy finalized a $225 million grant for Standard Lithium and Equinor’s South West Arkansas lithium project, which is targeting an initial 22,500 metric tons of annual battery-quality lithium carbonate production. That comes as firms flock to the state to extract the element. A chemical extraction process developed by Standard Lithium is focusing on a region of Arkansas the company estimates to hold about 1.2 million tons of lithium reserves, according to company officials as reported by NewsNation.
Still, the USGS said the recent discovery offers a lifeline to the U.S. to stake a claim amid the skyrocketing global lithium demand. “This research highlights the abundant potential to reclaim our mineral independence,” Mamula said.
The Fortune 500 Innovation Forum will convene Fortune 500 executives, U.S. policy officials, top founders, and thought leaders to help define what’s next for the American economy, Nov. 16-17 in Detroit. Apply here.
How Edwyn Collins survived two strokes, returned to music and is now retiring with honors
The Scottish singer and founder of Orange Juice suffers from aphasia and partial paralysis, and is bidding farewell to the stage with a long tour of Spain
Scottish musician Edwyn Collins in a recent promotional image.Fenella Lorimar
Edwyn Collins’ retirement from the stage at age 66 has come two decades later than anyone could have imagined.In 2005, the Scottish musician survived two cerebral haemorrhages. He was left with aphasia, a disorder that affected his communication abilities, both in expressing himself and understanding information. He also suffered paralysis on the right side of his body, which disabled one arm, although he was able to walk again with the aid of a cane. According to doctors, the prospects for improvement were slim. Founder of Orange Juice, an emblematic post-punk band that was more influential than popular (their career, which began in the late 1970s, barely spanned five years), Collins later had a respectable solo career that peaked in 1994 with the success of his song “A Girl Like You.”
Returning to music wasn’t even among the most optimistic goals of his recovery plan, but this week the artist kicked off a 10-date tour of Spain called The Testimonial Tour. A Last Lap Around Spain, after completing his farewell shows in the UK this fall. “Music is my life. Both after the stroke and before, it’s critical to me,” Collins explains via video call. Grace Maxwell, his wife and manager for over 40 years, who accompanies him in interviews to help him formulate his answers, agrees: “I don’t think Edwyn could have returned to life as he has without this wonderful gift.”
Just two years after his strokes, Collins was performing again. He can’t play the guitar, but he retains his baritone voice and sings effortlessly, aided by a music stand with the lyrics, which he rehearses and recites incessantly. His retirement isn’t due to a decline in his health. “She’s the boss, and she said it was time to retire,” Collins says, pointing at his wife. Maxwell, taken aback by the remark, clarifies that it was a mutual decision. “If we continued, we’d both be over 70 by the next tour. Edwyn is brilliant and strong and copes with it all, but it’s pretty tiring.”
Edwyn Collins has survived two cerebral haemorrhages.Fenella Lorimar
Collins and Maxwell are one of those couples so in sync that they seem like a comedy duo. Although he can’t deliver a sophisticated speech, he makes a virtue of necessity with a succinct brand of humor that often surprises his wife. “Recently, I was complaining about something and he blurted out, ‘Oh, shut up, woman! You have a great life!’ It made me laugh; it’s one of those things that brings you back to reality.”This obligation to communicate in a simple and direct way, as he himself describes it, has led to an interesting process of stylistic refinement. Last year, Collins released his 10th solo album, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation, his fourth since his illness. Everything, even the title, based on an old BBC slogan, relates to what has been the theme of his life since 2005: communication.
“Before my stroke, I was a clever show-off. I used fancy words,” says the former Orange Juice frontman. Maxwell picks up the thread: “On the long journey to regaining language and communicating effectively, as Edwyn definitely does, you learn a lot about the nature of communication and that it can be more than fancy words, more than fluency, and can boil down to some strong, simple things that connect.Perhaps we need more of that in this world right now.” Does a change in communication change a person? The musician doesn’t feel he’s a different person, but rather that his process has changed his perspective. “I think I was a bit clever and a show-off. Fuck that! I’m happy with my life,” exclaims Collins, who on his comeback album, Losing Sleep (2010), dedicated a song to his learning process: Humble.
The possibilities are endless
One of the phrases Edwyn Collins repeated endlessly in the hospital, as a result of his aphasia, was “the possibilities are endless.” He doesn’t know what he meant by it, but his wife admits that the mantra lost its power to evoke memories after hearing it “about 100,000 times.” The phrase gave its title to the documentary about his life, The Possibilities Are Endless (2014), which Collins, a lover of all things analog, appreciates was filmed on 35mm. “Not digital!” he exclaims. “Another thing he tried was to pin his thoughts down on band names and members. For example, The Who. He would start: ‘Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey…’ It was his brain trying to find to fix itself,” says Grace Maxwell. Once again, music found its way in.
The couple had spent their entire lives navigating limitations. In the Orange Juice era, Collins traveled by car with Alan Horne, co-founder of Postcard Records, to manually distribute his records and clumsily pursue figures like John Peel, the most famous DJ of the time. Maxwell, in the poignant book Falling and Laughing: The Restoration of Edwyn Collins (2009), confessed that the phenomenal success of A Girl Like You was their financial security. Now, unable to play, the musician uses a cassette recorder—“No digital!” he adds again—to create songs by making the sound of the saxophone with his mouth. Then, an engineer in his studio translates it into musical notation.
“The other day I saw a guy from an AI company saying that people find it really difficult to make music. But real musicians enjoy it. Edwyn finds it very easy to compose, even though the lyrics are a challenge,” his wife asserts. They have a son, William, 35, who helps run the family business. Regarding the son’s musical tastes, Collins speaks with amusement of the “glam days” the young man experienced before coming of age: “He liked Marc Bolan and, get this, Gary Glitter.” “Don’t tell people that!” Maxwell scolds him, to which he responds by mockingly singing “I Love You Love Me Love,” one of the compositions by the disgraced singer and convicted sex offender.
Grace Maxwell, wife and manager of Edwyn Collins, alongside the musician in an image provided by the promoter of the concerts in Spain.
Among Orange Juice’s supporters is the UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. Collins was invited to meet him at 10 Downing Street. “He’s a good man and has a good heart. He’s in a difficult position right now, but there are far worse leaders on the planet,” his wife concludes. “Starmer thinks Orange Juice and Edwyn Collins are brilliant. That gives you a pretty good idea of his character.”
Regarding his retirement plans, the musician hopes to record more albums after leaving the stage. Settled in Helmsdale, a coastal town in the Scottish Highlands where they also have their studio, the couple enjoys fresh air and a pleasant environment for daily walks. “He’ll be pottering there with our son, our friends, and other people, really focusing on quality of life at this stage in the game,” explains Grace. The concept confuses Edwyn: “Quality of life? What is that?”
– “Well, just enjoying ourselves,” Maxwell replies.
– “OK, I see.”
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In Yemen, Starlink internet brings opportunities – for some
Despite Houthi resistance and affordability challenges, Starlink fuels growth in Yemen’s digital workforce.Listen (8 mins)
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Omer Banabelah, a mobile app developer from Mukalla, says Starlink has allowed him to stay in touch with clients even when visiting his home village, where poor connectivity once cost him work [Saeed Al-Batati/Al Jazeera]
Mukalla, Yemen – At the Mukalla Creative Hub, a man in a black T-shirt leans over a desk to help a colleague with his project, while other men remain fixed on their laptop screens. Nearby women sit in ergonomic office chairs, writing or scrolling on their phones. On the other side of the space in Yemen’s coastal city of Mukalla, a sleek cafe-style counter stands at the entrance, while colourful armchairs are neatly arranged and occupied by a few people working among rows of computers.
What draws entrepreneurs, remote freelancers, and students here is not just the stylish setting or uninterrupted electricity, but something far more essential: fast, reliable Starlink satellite internet.
“Four Starlink devices power the space, delivering speeds of 100 to 150 Mbps and allowing users to stay constantly connected,” Hamzah Bakhdar, a digital freelancer who also works at the hub, told Al Jazeera.
In a country where war has devastated telecommunications, eroded salaries and cut off remote areas, Starlink is helping create a small but growing digital workforce of designers, developers, teachers, and freelancers who can now work for clients abroad and earn far more than Yemen’s crumbling local economy would otherwise allow.
Internet access in Yemen has also been weaponised, with buried land cables sometimes cut, leaving parts of the country abruptly disconnected. The Houthi rebels, who are based in the Yemeni capital Sanaa and have fought the internationally recognised government since 2014, control the country’s major internet providers. That allows them to block websites they view as linked to their opponents inside and outside the country, including key platforms used by tech developers and remote workers.
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The arrival of Starlink satellite internet has provided an alternative, allowing people to bypass the Houthis’ tight grip on telecommunications and stay online even in remote areas.
Mohammed Helmi, a video editor and motion graphics designer, was juggling projects for three clients in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Thanks to the fast internet at the cafe, he no longer worries about losing connection or missing deadlines, problems he said repeatedly disrupted his work in the past.
“In the past, when I downloaded files to my laptop, it would stop as soon as my data ran out,” Helmi, a young man with a thin moustache, told Al Jazeera at the cafe. “I had to buy another gigabyte and start the download all over again. Because of this, I often had to turn down projects.”
The Mukalla Creative Hub is a rare workspace for online freelancers, many of whom are drawn by its high-speed, uninterrupted internet powered by four Starlink kits. [Saeed Al-Batati/Al Jazeera]
Control over the internet
Starlink is operated by billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, and delivers internet by linking a ground dish to low-orbit satellites owned and operated by the company.
While other satellite internet companies exist, and others are quickly entering the space, Starlink is the only low-orbit satellite internet service legally available in Yemen after the internationally recognised government signed an agreement with the company in September 2024.
Get instant alerts and updates based on your interests. Be the first to know when big stories happen.Yes, keep me updated
But it’s not for everyone.
The kits cost about $500, a price that remains unaffordable for the vast majority of Yemenis, living in one of the poorest countries in the world, where more than 80 percent of people live below the poverty line.
Owning a dish is therefore still a distant dream for many Yemenis desperate to get online.
University students, like Mariam, a student at Hadramout University, says that even buying internet vouchers from local providers who resell Starlink access is beyond her reach – let alone purchasing a device herself.
“People are using vouchers because they cannot afford Starlink devices, whose prices are very high,” Mariam, who preferred to be identified only by her first name, told Al Jazeera.
The Houthis have also reacted aggressively to the arrival of Starlink, launching a campaign warning people against using the service and threatening legal action against anyone found in possession of the device.
They have accused the company of serving as a “US espionage agent” and said it posed “a major threat to national security”. Experts have worried that data gathered over Starlink’s internet service could be used for “intelligence gathering and economic exploitation“.
There are also concerns internationally over the concentration of satellite internet services and infrastructure in the hands of Starlink, particularly in light of Musk’s ownership, with the South African-born billionaire increasingly associating himself with far-right causes in the United States and Europe.
A Starlink dish on a rooftop in Mukalla, where the service is legal. In Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen, the group has banned the device and threatened punishment for those using it [Saeed Al-Batati/Al Jazeera]
Connecting Yemen’s remote areas
But despite Houthi threats and the high cost of the devices by Yemeni standards, Starlink has spread across the country, reaching areas that had long been isolated.
Omer Banabelah, a mobile app developer, said that before Starlink arrived, a visit to his home village in Hadramout’s countryside meant disappearing from the digital world altogether. He could not make a phone call, let alone connect to the internet, leaving him anxious that clients would move on when their messages went unanswered. With Starlink now available in rural parts of the province, Banabelah said he no longer fears losing work every time he travels.
“I can reply to their messages anytime, from anywhere,” he told Al Jazeera. “Work that takes 10 minutes with Starlink could take an entire day without it.”
Similarly, Yemeni teachers, struggling with poor and delayed salaries that have stagnated for years, have also benefited from the spread of the internet service, which has allowed them to offer uninterrupted online classes and earn badly needed extra income.
Raja al-Dubae, a school director in Taiz, told Al Jazeera that her school began offering online classes based on the Yemeni curriculum to Yemeni students living abroad in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and China in 2023. It started with just 50 students, with teachers connecting through local networks.
But when internet traffic surged in the densely populated city each afternoon, the connections would collapse, forcing teachers to abandon classes mid-session.
“Teachers were often disconnected from their students, and by the time the internet stabilised, the next class had already begun, leaving them frustrated and unable to finish their lessons,” she said.
Al-Dubae said she initially rejected her nephew’s proposal to buy Starlink because of the high upfront cost, but now regrets the delay. Since installing the service, the number of students has climbed to more than 200, revenues have grown, and teachers have begun earning better additional pay.
“With Starlink, the internet is very fast and reaches every corner of the school,” she said. “Teachers no longer disconnect from their students. I never imagined it would make such a difference. Videos load quickly, we no longer turn away new applicants, and our reputation for fast internet has spread.”
For Yemenis who have grown used to Starlink’s high-speed internet, and the better incomes and business opportunities it has helped create, the worst-case scenario is a return to the slow, unreliable service of local networks.
“Go back to the headache of local networks? Perish the thought. We hope the service will continue to improve,” al-Dubae said, scoffing at the idea of reverting to local internet providers.
Helmi reacted similarly. “If Starlink were cut off, I would be devastated and forced back into the local market, which cannot cover my expenses or living costs,” he said, shifting in his seat and smiling at the thought. “I would need to take on three or four jobs just to match what I earn from a single project from abroad.”
Source: Image by Christian Bodhi from Pixabay.
If you’re a CEO or on a CEO’s team: 
Caterpillar excavators are unloaded at the Port of Long Beach in January. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty ImagesCaterpillar — founded decades before computers and nearly a century before ChatGPT — is becoming an AI play, Axios’ Nathan Bomey writes.
canisgallicus 