Land surfing & more things

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Land surfing

Riding The Wave Into China’s Latest Hype — Land Surfing | Jing Daily – land surfing is what a lot of people would know as a long board in skating. I first came across them 20 years ago, when I used to know a dreadlocked German photographer who got around London on one. South Korean app developer Ko Hyojoo, brought style and strong Instagram game to long boarding. From her style cutting and spinning on her board, I can see where land surfing came from. She has collaborated with a lot of fashion brands, getting an international profile with her land surfing.

Films like this one from Vogue in 2016 blew long boarding / land surfing up across Asia. I have former colleagues from Hong Kong who took up land surfing in the winter as they missed the feeling of water-skiing which they did some summer weekends.

It was only a matter of time before China’s Taobao culture picked up on the idea of land surfing.

China

Tencent turns from buyer to seller in investment pivot | Financial Times – interesting that the print version of this quotes an anti-monopoly official on background and it looks more like a government shakedown in China

Consumer behaviour

The Professional Try-Hard Is Dead, But You Still Need to Return to the Office | Vanity FairIt’s Malcolm Gladwell waxing emotional about how much he loves return-to-office and pleading, “Don’t you want to feel part of something?” as if the man has never heard of, like, recreational softball. It’s Mark Zuckerberg reportedly getting mad about an employee asking if Meta Days (extra vacation days introduced during the pandemic) are still on this year because, shouldn’t the pleasure of working for Meta be enough? It’s any number of investor-type herbs who’ve been warning about how quiet quitting will cause you to lose out on x dollar amount of earnings later in life

Design

In Pictures: People flock to bid farewell to 79-year-old Hong Kong bakery’s neon sign, ‘a piece of Yuen Long history’ – Hong Kong Free Press HKFP 

Economics

Pinochet’s economic policy is vastly overrated – Chicago school takes a kicking

*The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left* – Marginal REVOLUTION 

Gadgets

The Extraordinary Sony PCM-3348HR Digital Multitrack Recorder – still probably one of the best ways of doing digital recording in a studio environment

Health

Telehealth made America’s ADHD crisis worse | Quartz 

Hong Kong

Pro-China media slam ‘minority’ of Hong Kong mourners in wake of Queen’s death — Radio Free AsiaHong Kong historian Hans Yeung, who now lives in the U.K., said Hong Kongers’ nostalgia for colonial times was a complex emotion. “The reason we are seeing these mourning activities is that the current way of governing is different from the way it was in Hong Kong more than 20 years ago, and the emotions that result from that difference between the old and the new,” Yeung told RFA. “It’s not necessarily the idea that we miss colonial times because things were so good back then, but because the current government is so poor,” he said. Yeung said some mourners were too young to remember an era in which the Queen’s portrait was in every classroom, and TV stations shut down every night with “God Save the Queen.” He said younger people likely have read about Hong Kong before the 1997 handover to Chinese rule, and drawn their own conclusions

Ideas

Simple models predict behavior at least as well as behavioral scientistswe analyzed data from five studies in which 640 professional behavioral scientists predicted the results of one or more behavioral science experiments. We compared the behavioral scientists’ predictions to random chance, linear models, and simple heuristics like “be- havioral interventions have no effect” and “all published psychology research is false.” We find that behavioral scientists are consistently no better than – and often worse than – these simple heuristics and models. Behavioral scientists’ predictions are not only noisy but also biased. They systematically overestimate how well behavioral sci- ence “works”: overestimating the effectiveness of behavioral interventions, the impact of psychological phenomena like time discounting

We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business – Eye on Design – interesting analysis on technology adoption

deaInnovation

American workers need lots and lots of robots 

Ireland

Mass hoppers’ giving us anxiety, say Irish priests | Ireland | The Guardian – I had missed this story completely when it was originally published in 2020. Performance anxiety while performing online mass. My Mum and Dad still use a service so that thy can get ‘mass from home’

Materials

Brabus’ Armored Invicto G-Wagens Are Insanely Over-Engineered 

A UN agency okayed the first major sea floor mining project — Quartz 

Security

Ukraine’s hackers: an ex-spook, a Starlink and ‘owning’ Russia | Financial Times 

How China Has Added to Its Influence Over the iPhone – The New York TimesMore than ever, Apple’s Chinese employees and suppliers contributed complex work and sophisticated components for the 15th year of its marquee device, including aspects of manufacturing design, speakers and batteries, according to four people familiar with the new operations and analysts. As a result, the iPhone has gone from being a product that is designed in California and made in China to one that is a creation of both countries. The critical work provided by China reflects the country’s advancements over the past decade and a new level of involvement for Chinese engineers in the development of iPhones. After the country lured companies to its factories with legions of low-priced workers and unrivaled production capacity, its engineers and suppliers have moved up the supply chain to claim a bigger slice of the money that U.S. companies spend to create high-tech gadgets. The increased responsibilities that China has assumed for the iPhone could challenge Apple’s efforts to decrease its dependency on the country, a goal that has taken on increased urgency amid rising geopolitical tensions over Taiwan and simmering concerns in Washington about China’s ascent as a technology competitor.

Yandex Taxi Was Hacked, Causing Traffic Jams In Moscow 

WeChat warns users their likes, comments and histories are being sent to China — Radio Free Asia 

US$40,000 bounty offered for Malaysian fugitive ‘Fat Leonard’ convicted in navy bribery case 

Taiwan

China using ‘cognitive warfare’ to intimidate Taiwan, says president Tsai | Taiwan | The Guardian