Southport + more things

Southport

At the time, when the stabbing of three little girls happened in Southport, I was in Merseyside. Even though I was just miles away from the town, it felt like another country. The locals I was with and I watched on with detached shock as riots unfolded on newsfeeds.

Thuggery

The general sense was that ‘it couldn’t happen here’ But it had. This was usually followed by ‘despite what people see, this isn’t the kind of people that we are’. Yet Merseyside has long had a well-deserved reputation for organised (and disorganised) crime. Apart from a pier and a sea view that on a clear day allowed you to see oil rigs on the horizon, Southport is very similar to most of Merseyside. Rumours had swirled on neighbourhood WhatsApp groups about the attackers background. Secondly the vast amount of rioters being prosecuted, were not neo-nazis from out of town but local trouble-makers whose guiding idea was the joy of the fight. The police were able to arrest many of them as easily identifiable known faces. Pair the trouble-makers with good weather and an inciting incident and chaos ensued. There is continued latent anger for various reasons just waiting for an excuse to break out and the Southport stabbings were a vehicle.

The thin membrane of civility was punctured. The chaotic nihilism on display mirrored the 2011 riots, with less opportunity for profitable looting. Southport is ‘everyneighbourhood’. It represents an underlying volatility in UK society that is deeper than the hundreds of rioters on Merseyside. There is probably more Southport in many people than we would care to admit.

Consumer behaviour

The People Who Quit Dating – The Atlantic

Energy

Implications of the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment | FTI

How one South Korean garage fire could affect the EV market | FT – transparency in battery sourcing and real truths on strategic resilience.

Finance

Meaningless board games at HKEX, and how the UK FCA has just made an awful mistake – comments on LSE are particularly interesting

FMCG

The Katsuification of Britain – Vittles

Middle East turns to non-alcoholic beers, healthier than colas and not tainted by Gaza war | South China Morning Post – Alcohol-free beer sales grow in the Middle East, for health reasons and because, amid Gaza war, Pepsi and Coca-Cola are seen as pro-Israel

Gadgets

Chromecast is Dead. Long Live the 12th Attempt at a Streaming Box.

Logitech’s ‘forever’ mouse isn’t happening – The Verge

Hong Kong

US Firms Warn Against ‘Unprecedented’ Hong Kong Cyber Rules – Bloomberg – technology firms have warned that proposed cyber regulations could grant the Hong Kong government unusual access to their computer systems, highlighting the latest challenge to Western tech giants in the city. The Asia Internet Coalition, which includes Amazon, Google and Meta is among the bodies that have in recent weeks criticized new rules that officials say are designed to protect critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. Critics argue the proposals give authorities overly broad powers that could threaten the integrity of service providers and rock confidence in the city’s digital economy.

Ideas

Wired | Encyclopedia of the New Economy – probably one of the most influential things that I read during the first internet boom

Innovation

AI creates acoustic metamaterials | EE Times Europe – interesting work at Pusan University to reduce noise pollution

London

No. This is NOT just “far right thuggery” – Matt Goodwin

Luxury

Macau’s tourism transformation: Luxury brands left behind? | Jing Daily

Auction houses aim to lure Asia’s ultra-rich with new openings | FT – this had been happening since before 2019. A more cynical observer might point out how useful auction houses are to faciliate capital flight from the mainland.

Marketing

WFA discontinues GARM – World Federation of Advertisers

Attribution is Dying. Clicks are Dying. Marketing is Going Back to the 20th Century. – SparkToro

All Airlines Are Now the Same – The Atlantic – a lack of distinctiveness in US airline offerings

Steven Bartlett Huel and Zoe adverts banned by ASA – BBC News

Most brands fail becaue they never do this – The Strat Labs

The Future of the GE Brand – STRONGBRANDSSTRONGBRANDS

Google threatened tech influencers unless they ‘preferred’ the Pixel | The Verge – that’s some straight up vintage Microsoft tactics right there.

Media

Prime Video Ads Have Yet to Pay Off | The Information

Brands Love Influencers (Until Politics Get Involved) – The New York TimesWith the presidential election looming, some marketing agencies have started to pitch advertisers on new tools that grade the so-called brand safety of social media personalities. Some of the tools even use artificial intelligence to predict the likelihood that a particular influencer will discuss politics in the future.
A tool recently introduced by Captiv8, a marketing firm that helps advertisers like Walmart and Kraft Heinz connect with influencers, uses artificial intelligence to analyze mentions of social media stars in online articles, and then determines whether they are likely to discuss elections or “political hot topics.” The firm also assigns letter grades to creators based on their posts, comments and media coverage, where an “A” means very safe and a “C” signals caution. The grades incorporate categories like “sensitive social issues,” death and war, hate speech or explicit content.

The Race Is On to Build The Next Profitable Streaming Service – Bloomberg

Online

Misleading TikTok alerts include false Taylor Swift claim and old tsunami warning | FT

X Sees Decline In Users And Most Of Them Are From Europe | Digital Information World

Palantir CEO: Trump’s Rise Is Tied to the ‘Excesses of Silicon Valley’ – Business Insider

Retailing

Pitney Bowes sells its global e-commerce segment – Parcel and Postal Technology International

7-Eleven owner receives Japan’s biggest ever foreign takeover approach | FT – huge for Asian grocery retailing. 7-Eleven is the neighbourhood grocery store for Japanese and many other countries across Asia. In Japan, 7-Eleven is the dominant brand, combining it with Circle K would radically change the marketing dynamics. In a market like Hong Kong it’s effectively a duopoly with Circle K. The approach is likely more about 7-Eleven’s US filling station network. Expect the Asian business to be sold on (to private equity) if the deal goes through.

Security

Almost unfixable “Sinkclose” bug affects hundreds of millions of AMD chips | Ars Technica

Intel failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering • The Register – interesting analysis of Intel Semiconductor at the moment

Royal Mail launches new ‘fake stamp scanner’ | Money Saving Expert

Germany blames China for ‘serious’ cyber attack

Software

Change blindness – by Ethan Mollick – One Useful Thing – the change in LLM performance over the past two years

Digital Equivalent of Inbreeding Could Cause AI to Collapse on Itself : ScienceAlert more on this here.

Style

Ambition doesn’t need permission* – by Brian Morrissey – Nike’s multitude of business issues

Web-of-no-web

Immersive Technologies and the Metaverse: Recommendations and Overview – BBC R&D

Amazon to acquire Perceive for $80M from Xperi, expanding its AI technology for edge devices – GeekWire

China will launch first satellites of constellation to rival Starlink, newspaper reports | Reuters – A Chinese state-owned enterprise (Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology) is launching the first batch of satellites for a megaconstellation designed to rival Starlink’s near-global internet network, a state-backed newspaper reported on Monday.It matches Beijing’s strategic goal of creating its own version of Starlink, a growing commercial broadband constellation that has about 5,500 satellites in space and is used by consumers, companies and government agencies.