Luxury beliefs + more things

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Luxury beliefs

Luxury beliefs is a term that I came across from the writings of Rob Henderson. Henderson has a similar kind of story to JD Vance. Addiction in the family and escaping his home environment by enlisting in the US Air Force.

After his service Henderson used funding via the GI Bill to go to Yale. He then got a scholarship to go to Cambridge to do a doctorate. Like Vance he had written a memoir: Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class that highlights the challenges faced in working class American society including violence and addiction. In his book Henderson explores the idea of luxury beliefs, how they benefit the privileged and harm the most vulnerable in society.

What are examples of luxury beliefs?

The luxury beliefs Henderson cites are seen to be widely held progressive views including:

Defunding the police
Defunding the prison system
Decriminalising or legalising drugs

Getting rid of standardised exams – Henderson sees these as helping less privileged children get into college

Rejecting marriage as a pointless concept. – Henderson claims that one of the strongest predictors of success was if they were brought up in a nuclear family.

Henderson believes that the common thread that holds luxury beliefs together is that they are held by privileged people, the beliefs make them look good (and feel good about themselves), but harm the marginalised.

Luxury beliefs allow the privileged to look good by:

Playing the victim
Protest without penalty – which is less likely to happen to more marginalised protestors
Push the less privileged down

Henderson labelled this ‘saviour theatre’. Henderson reminded of previous generation protestors like Patty Hearst and participants in the Weather Underground’s Days of Rage which would seem to fit Henderson’s definition of holding luxury beliefs.

More posts about new terms can be found on this blog.

Branding

What does Hong Kong airport smell of? Or your go-to hotel? The business of scent branding | South China Morning Post – If you are a fragrance enthusiast, you may have heard of Shiu Shing Hong, a quaint shop in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan district that has been around for more than 50 years.

The store, which recently went viral on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, not only sells house-made essential oils – must-have souvenirs for visitors from mainland China thanks to the exposure – but recreates the signature scents of popular malls and other venues in Hong Kong.

On its shelves are familiar – sometimes odd – concoctions. Bottle labels reference K11, a shopping mall in Tsim Sha Tsui, the five-star Rosewood Hotel, and the Hong Kong International Airport. Sportswear brand Lululemon has one too.

J. D. Vance Has a Point About Mountain Dew | The Atlantic – brands and identity

China

Deaths in China to reach ‘an unprecedented scale’, peak at 19 million in 2061 | South China Morning Post – due to aging population

WTO says China is backsliding on key reforms and lacks transparency on subsidies | South China Morning Post – World Trade Organization report cites studies that say subsidies could top US$900 billion – providing fuel for critics of Beijing’s practices such as the EU and US

Consumer behaviour

Inside China’s Psychoboom – JSTOR Daily – mental illness has transformed from a bourgeois Western taboo into a legitimate public health concern.

The consequences of the psychoboom are both logical and contradictory. As the Chinese economy has expanded and citizens have grown wealthier, the demands of everyday life have grown in number and kind, expanding from physiological and safety concerns to a desire for love, esteem, and self-actualization. At the same time, such desires run counter to traditional Chinese values like the age-old concept of Confucian filial piety and the relatively new ideology imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), both of which place the well-being of the collective above the happiness of the individual.

Kamala Harris, Usha Vance, and the twice-born thrice-selected Indian American elite

Design

Adidas partners with Mexican artisans for hand-embroidered soccer jerseys | Trend Watching

Economics

Maersk says Red Sea shipping disruption having global effects | Hellenic Shipping News Worldwide

Ethics

Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic Used Thousands of Swiped YouTube Videos to Train AI | WIRED

Microsoft DEI Lead Blasts Company in Internal Email After Team Is Reportedly Laid Off – IGN

Finance

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Say Recovery in Private Equity Deals and Fees – Bloomberg – Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are confident that their most important clients are about to get active after a long spell on the sidelines and help goose the long-awaited revival in investment banking fees.
The private equity deal machine has been mostly jammed up for the past two years, leaving many investment bankers twiddling their thumbs while their bosses talked up green shoots that failed to flourish. There are plenty of potential road bumps ahead, but there’s reason to put more weight on the better outlook now even compared with just three months ago: The wave of debt refinancing that has led banks’ revenue recovery this year has also been helping to fix the prospects of many companies owned by private equity firms

The Financial Instability Hypothesis* by Hyman P. Minsky, The Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College – interesting paper used in current negative critiques or private equity like Has private equity become a Ponzi scheme? – UnHerd

Gadgets

Sony is killing off recordable Blu-ray, bidding farewell to disc burning | TechSpot – Sony admitted it’s going to “gradually end development and production” of recordable Blu-rays and other optical disc formats at its Tagajo City plants in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Essentially, 25GB BD-REs, 50GB BD-RE DLs, 100GB BD-RE XLs, or 128GB BD-R XLs will soon not be available to consumers. Professional discs for video production and optical archives for data storage are also being discontinued. – the big shocker is the issue for archival formats

Alexa Is in Millions of Households—and Amazon Is Losing Billions – WSJ – a pet project of Bezos, and the Alexa voice assistant and the Echo speakers through which it communicated were inspired by his interest in the spaceship computer in “Star Trek.”

“When launching products back then, we didn’t have to have a profit timeline for them,” said a former longtime devices executive. “We had to get the system in people’s homes and we’d win. Innovate, and then figure out how to make money later.”

To do that, the team had to keep prices low. Amazon sometimes even gave away versions of the smart speaker as part of promotions in a bid to get a larger base of users.

Health

“It’s All Just F*cking Impossible:” The Influence of Taylor Swift on Fans’ Body Image, Disordered Eating, and Rejection of Diet Culture – ScienceDirect and 100-Pound Weight Loss: My health improved. My self-esteem didn’t. | Slate

Another Danish biotech can help investors’ hunger for obesity drugs | FT – this probably explains why Zealand pivoted from taking its medications to market to becoming research and selling on as its not big enough to exploit this opportunity on its own. (Full disclosure, I worked briefly on the diabetic emergency injection product until the company pivoted).

Ozempic Tracker Insights: Price Remains the Largest Obstacle – CivicScience

The economics of GLP-1 – Marginal REVOLUTION

Patients checking into rehab after abusing weight-loss jabs | The Times Online

Innovation

IKE and hyperice’s boots and vest massage athletes’ feet and keep their bodies cool

Dude, where’s my (flying) car? – POLITICO

RISC-V Thrives Through Research, International Collaboration – EE Times

Xiaomi’s ‘lights-out factory’ to mass produce new foldable smartphones | DigiTimes – but it doesn’t mean that the products will be better, just consistent. I keep thinking of the Fiat Strada, an ugly rust bucket of a car, that was ‘hand built by robots’.

Luxury

Luxury brands roll out 50% discounts as Chinese shoppers rein in spending | FT – this will destroy the intrinsic value of the brand

Italy’s competition watchdog probes Armani and Dior over alleged labour exploitation | FT – the question is more why now? It’s been known for years that Chinese workers are exploited in factories based in Italy.

Age of Ozempic: Predictions for the luxury industry | Vogue Business – Analysts agree that the pop culture influence of weight loss drugs is giving luxury labels and mass-market brands, alike, licence to refocus on straight-size. “Luxury brands have long been staunchly unwilling to cater to plus-sizes outside of the occasional token representation, but typically premium and mass players would invest more readily in plus-size,” says Marci. “Now we’re seeing the effects of Ozempic and weight loss culture on retail as a whole.”

Already, a host of US-based retailers and fashion companies including Rent the Runway are seeing boosted demand for smaller clothing sizes, and falling demand for larger sizes, according to The Wall Street Journal. Retailers have been investing in fewer products that offer larger sizing

Burberry’s new CEO has a task | FT Fashion Matters

EssilorLuxottica expands into streetwear with $1.5bn Supreme deal – the deal was a “no brainer” and had happened “very quickly” because VF was under pressure to divest its most “iconic asset”. EssilorLuxottica planned to use Supreme’s wealth of customer data and its Gen Z fans in China, Japan and South Korea to target new consumers – it shows how good a deal James Jebbia got with private equity and VF Corporation

Lewis Hamilton Named Dior Ambassador | BoF – formula 1 driver and pit lane dandy has also worked with Dior men’s artistic director Kim Jones to guest design a collection of clothing and accessories set to launch in October

Marketing

Rediscovered Absolut Blue Painting Inspires New Bottle | MarketingDaily

Focus on value pivotal for brands as consumers get more cost-conscious – The Media Leader

The King’s Speech 2024 – GOV.UK – restrictions on fast food advertising and energy drinks

Proportion of UK businesses increasing marketing spend hits 10-year high – The Media Leader

Evolution not revolution as Sorrell unveils Monks and reorganizes for easier client access | The Drum

Media

The return of piracy – net.wars

‘New model for human civilisation’: What is so unique about China’s style of modernisation? – CNA – interesting that CNA don’t provide a critical analysis on the positives and the negatives of the China model.

Online

Even Disinformation Experts Don’t Know How to Stop It | New York Times – Researchers have learned a great deal about the misinformation problem over the past decade: They know what types of toxic content are most common, the motivations and mechanisms that help it spread and who it often targets. The question that remains is how to stop it.

A critical mass of research now suggests that tools such as fact checks, warning labels, prebunking and media literacy are less effective and expansive than imagined, especially as they move from pristine academic experiments into the messy, fast-changing public sphere.

LGBT and Marginalized Voices Are Not Welcome on Threads – MacStories

Google Is Mind-Bogglingly Bad – On my Om – more ‘Google is Dead’ material – grist for the mill and Daring Fireball: Google Is Shutting Down Its URL Shortener, Breaking All Links

Apple Maps launches on the web to take on Google – The Verge