I suppose it's highly personal, but I'd say Carl Jung is pretty good. Also Schopenhauer, Tillich, Niebuhr, Emerson, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, St. Augustine, Will Durant, Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche.. Plato and Socrates are usually good starting points in the 'Western tradition'.
I'm actually not clear on Thiel's intent with his 'political project' or how it relates to Girard. Is it that Thiel believes Trump is an ideal scapegoat to break the cycle of violence in US politics? Or does he see Trump as the false scapegoat and is supporting him since he thinks it's a good long run bet comparable to Jesus? It's hard to cut through and in my view makes Thiel look wholly unserious given that he obtained New Zealand citizenship after the election and stated that there's a 50% chance Trump could be a disaster.
Has anyone else noticed a trend where people who tend to have an affinity for Peter Thiel tend to also profess having their mind blown by the ideas of Girard, specifically mimetic theory? It seemed like shortly after it became well known that Thiel liked Girard, many people who find his form of contrarianism as gospel suddenly migrated to viewing nearly everything through the prism of Girard. When Zero to One came out, it was certainly refreshing, but much of what Thiel does/states publicly aside from that comes across as if he's a rather dimwitted political hack. Not to mention that Girard's views on mimetic theory aren't that new to anyone who has kids and wants them to learn from others.
If you like Rilke, you'd also really like James Hollis' The Middle Passage (1993).
As for as books from the past decade go David Brooks' The Road to Character was pretty good. His follow-up The Second Mountain would have been better if he didn't recycle so much from the previous work. Sam Harris' Waking Up was pretty eye opening as Harris is a very lucid thinker.
I hate using the terms capitalist and communist since they are both pretty loaded, but I think in the case of Vietnam and China it does have something to do with their recent Communist or Socialist histories. Property rights are usually seen as the bedrock of a capitalist society for better or worse. Vietnam and China's land is technically still owned "by the people" (aka government) and since both countries have opened they have gradually loosened those rights. Singapore is often seen as an anomaly to people who see things on the capitalist/communist spectrum, but you're right they have rights similar to those seen in China and Vietnam and often cited as a model for those countries to provide more property rights without allowing for a 'Western' model.
With that said, 50 year property rights are likely a stepping stone to something "better" since no one has hit that point yet, so the laws could change before then. However a lot of other things could change before then that might work against you (e.g.increase in corruption, attitudes towards foreigners could sour, property rights policies could revert back to less rights, etc).
Because you wouldn't get your money back at the end of that 50 years. If you sold it after 35 years, you would essentially be selling a 15 year contract to own the apartment, which would likely be factored into the resale price.
One piece of information the article doesn't acknowledge is that property rights in Vietnam aren't the same as they are in the US. So if a foreigner "buys" an apartment in Vietnam, they can only have it for up to 50 years. In other words, it's an asset that is steadily decreasing in value, and not one that the "owner" can necessarily hand down to the next generation at a higher or the same value unless changes are made to those laws.
I've heard many times before that under Giuliani, NY gave homeless people a one-way bus ticket and a sandwich to get rid of their homeless population but have never been able to find information online confirming it.
I worked with a company that worked with Away, Steph in particular, and her abrasive style bled through to our entire company. Without diving into specifics, she wasn't able to manage her own expectations on an important issue and threatened to write a bad review of us. She was known by our whole company as being someone who messed up on her end and rather than take blame internally she blamed it on us. I get that founders are under a lot of pressure, but she was hard up to repeat the success she saw at Warby Parker and it was evident she was willing to be a crummy person to work with if it looked like things were not headed in that direction regardless of who was at fault.