Ethics: moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity. I went to school with people who ended up on the wrong side of the law. I knew more of them when I used to DJ which was my hobby since before I went to college.
I probably still have some post-it notes around the place that I used as bookmarks from when I used to work at a call centre but that was about the extent of my ethical transgressions.
My business experience meant that I dealt with a lot of unpleasant unprofessional clients, but didn’t necessarily see anything unethical in nature. When I started writing this blog I was thinking about culture rather than ethics and the most part still do.
But business and work changed. Ethics became more important:
When I started in social and digital campaigns I didn’t think about ethics as a standalone thing. It was just part of doing a good job. It went without saying.
I don’t think any of us back then would have foreseen slut shaming, trolling, online bullying, dark patterns and misinformation
Now things are different. The lack of ethics is impacting all parts of business life.
How ad tech data is used
How content is created
How services are designed
How products are made
I think that much of the problems with ethics is cultural and generational in nature. The current generation of entrepreneurs have perverted knowledge in the quest of growth hacking and continual improvement and change for its own sake. Its a sickness at the centre of technology
David Kilcullen wrote a number of books on the strategic challenges faced by the west in the war on terror. His book The Dragon and The Snakes looks at the challenges that the west faces from China (the dragon), Russia and Iran (the snakes). I was finishing reading this book as the Ukraine | Russia crisis broke this month, dominating the news headlines.
Out of the cold war
The Dragon and The Snakes starts with what shaped the modern world. The modern world was shaped out of the cold war. Western doctrine was defined by meeting a numerically superior force with superior technology. At the time, China and Russia were in dispute over a number of issues. At the chime of Chairman Mao, the death of Stalin and changing posture of the Soviet Union led to a fissure that widened over time. In the cold war was not only a war for influence between capitalism and communism; but also evolved into a war between Soviet communism and Maoist communism. China and Russia both supplied North Vietnam, but China invaded Vietnam partly due to it being more in the Soviet camp than the Chinese camp (this is is somewhat simplifying a multi-causal conflict, but has a truth in it).
China and US had limited cooperation with regards Russia which was brought in by Nixon’s famous visit to China and the machinations of Henry Kissinger who believed in systems and the ends justifying the means.
The flat topography of Kuwait and Iraq, together the latest 1980s weapons systems from the cold war made the first gulf war quick and provided an eye-raising demonstration of modern warfare. The campaign was just 42 days long.
Pivotal moments of change
Kilcullen goes on to discuss pivotal moments of change for both Russia and China in The Dragon and The Snakes.
The first gulf war. China noted that integrated satellite and aerial reconnaissance with associated command and control information systems; full spectrum jamming to ensure battlefield communications superiority; better coordination of naval and ground offensive forces than ever achieved before; highly accurate missile systems; integrated command, control, communications and intelligence for directing the battle. Mechanised units with air support then won the battle. But they also noticed the economics of war were not in favour of technology. Bombers and missiles were dubbed flying mountains of gold and used to attack targets worth less than the weapons system. Secondly more technology meant a shorter weapons system life. Weapons systems average service life went from 30 years to 10 years during the cold war due to technological obsolescence.
Kosovo – NATO’s intervention emphasised the nature of modern warfare to Russia. But it also emphasised the threat that the west posed. The Russians have a cultural connection to the Serbians. One incident in particular stuck out: the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The Chinese embassy attack showed a number of things. The bombing of the embassy was a demonstration of precision bombing. Unfortunately it was the right target, wrong building and was the sole CIA designated attack of the war. The CIA gave the military the wrong coordinates for a Yugoslav storage facility, instead they were the coordinates for the embassy
It fuelled Chinese perceptions that the US and west were willing to attack them, this stoked nationalism at home and basically broke the Kissinger-era detente and trust with the US. Thus there was a common view from both Russia and China
China realised that it needed to adapt from being an Asian land army to having an expeditionary component and defending against a likely American led expeditionary force
It reinforced Chinese views about the technological nature of war
Russian invasion of Georgia. While the two Chechen wars had been a meat grinder that exhibited many of the Soviet era armies weaknesses and corruption, it was the invasion of Georgia that proved to be the emphasis to professionalise and improve. Russians learned and built doctrine from the experience. Air power had proved vulnerable to relatively cheap MANPADs (man portable air defence systems). Armour disrupted by anti-tank missiles. Neither of which would have been a surprise to students of the Arab Israeli conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s, but were relearned again. Out of this experience sprang a lot of the ideas around hybrid warfare and applying technology to area denial systems in an asymmetric way, from an economic perspective.
Afghanistan, Iraq. Both of these wars showed the limits of the western way of war-fighting. Weapons systems became expensive, the west didn’t have the stomach for deaths and insurgents were finding ever new ways of using consumer technology. Google Maps and Google Earth were used for planning, command and control of both terrorists and private military contractors. Consumer drones conducted surveillance and even delivered bombs. All of the western weaknesses were noted, most of all the perceived lack of western will. Afghanistan reinforced views in Russia and China that the west was in an accelerating slope of decline.
Ukraine and Syria. Ukraine and Syria have allowed Russia to refine its war fighting techniques from a communications and technological perspective, as well as testing asymmetric techniques and also defending against them.
Wider parameters of war
Kilcullen highlights the way hacking, espionage, propaganda, weaponised diaspora, elite capture online crime, organised crime, misinformation, bribery, soft power, sharp power and private military operators mean that we are in a war that western leaders currently refuse to acknowledge. This then further emboldens Russia, China and the likes of Iran and North Korea. It felt strangely prescient that I was reading the book when MI5 issued a security warning about Christine Lee and Russia threatened to invade Ukraine.
Byzantine outlook
Disturbingly in The Dragon and The Snakes, Kilcullen thinks that the best way that the west can handle China and Russia is learning from the Byzantine empire’s ability to forestall collapse. This implies a few things:
He doesn’t believe that the west can find its way to effectively combatting China or Russia
He doesn’t believe that western systems of governance will survive
He believes that dragon and the snakes have more durable and effective systems of governance and war
All of which indicates an increasingly dark dystopian future.
In The Dragons and The Snakes Kilcullen provides a cogent well-researched and written picture of our current situation. If his work scares the crap out of enough people, we may even get answers to the multitude of problems that he outlines. More on the book here.
The Japan – Soul Train connection can consider to have started with The Three Degrees who seemed to do consistently more successfully in Japan than the US. The Three Degrees The Sound of Philadelphia is better known to people over 40 as the theme tune of the Soul Train TV programme. The popularity of The Three Degrees was such that there was some Japan only releases like Midnight Train.
The Afro Rake discotheque opened in 1974 and a visit to the club convinced TBS to broadcast episodes of Soul Train on a Sunday night, forging a true Japan – Soul Train connection.
In 1980, Yellow Magic Orchestra played Soul Train cementing the Japan – Soul Train connection with a cover version of disco song Tighten Up. YMO also told the viewers of the Japan – Soul Train connection and its large regular audience on TBS.
The Japan – Soul Train connection trickled down into 1970s Japanese club culture like the Afro Rake night club. The Japan – Soul Train connection was made through articles and photographs of the show. This and artists like The Three Degrees built the Japan – Soul Train connection. It was ironic that the Afro Rake made the Japan – Soul Train connection for TBS.
China sportswear: Fujian Tigers earn their stripes in Nike fight | Financial Times – what’s really interesting is the collapse in share of New Balance (down to poor execution over the past five years) and adidas in China. Li Ning have had a boom and a bust and risen again. Anta have acquired brands like Arc’teryx, Suunto, Salomon and Wilson. Salomon and Arc’teryx are particularly interesting because of their use by western special forces units
Consumer behaviour
The ‘Boomer remover’: Intergenerational discounting, the coronavirus and climate change – Rebecca Elliott, 2021 – the emergence of the ‘Boomer remover’ as coherent with a longer history of fascination with the Baby Boomers, a generation that has ‘been watched, commented upon, and invested with hope and despond in equal measure’ (Bristow, 2019, p. 92). This fascination has taken a more negative turn towards ‘Boomer blaming’ in the last 15 years. The Boomers have themselves become social problems, ‘folklore demons’ who, for their sheer number, are feared for the unprecedented burdens they may place on welfare states: a ‘Boomergeddon’ created by a ‘tidal wave of retirements’, combined with longer lifespans (Bristow, 2019, p. 92; Bristow, 2016; Somers, 2017; Walker, 1990, 1996). Fears about the impacts of an ageing population have then been moralized, turned into a critique of the attitudes and behaviours of this particular generation, namely, their perceived individualism run amok and selfish, hedonistic, reckless actions that have ‘robbed’ their children of a prosperous future (Bristow, 2016; White, 2013). The Boomers are maligned for the kind of people they are believed to be, today serving as the ‘archetypal ‘villain’ in the narrative of generational conflict’ (Bristow, 2021, p. 768). Younger generations are then made out to be the true adults in the room, who have to take responsibility for the messes their elders have made (expressed also by some on Twitter, like the user above who suggested young people might ‘show ’em how it’s done’). In this case, broadly available tropes about the Boomers’ perceived sins and deficiencies get attached to ‘older generations’ generally, in a context in which the cohort most at risk of dying from the virus actually seems to be those over the age of 80 – the so-called ‘silent generation’ rather than the Boomers
Biden’s trade policy is crafted with political rewards in mind | Financial Times – “worker centred” is like the “hard-working families” long invoked in both US and UK politics: you cannot oppose a trade policy supporting workers any more than you can be biased towards feckless loners. But helping all workers equally is not what it means in practice. Nearly 10 months in to the administration, this worker-centred policy shows a disturbing focus on old-style manufacturing-centred protectionism — and not even all manufacturing, just the politically rewarding parts. Although it is also proposing to extend trade-distorting support to new sectors like electric vehicles, the Biden administration has continued the historic US obsession with steel
U.S. Housing as a Global Safe Asset: Evidence from China Shocks by William Barcelona, Nathan Converse, Anna Wong :: SSRN – This paper demonstrates that the measured stock of China’s holding of U.S. assets could be much higher than indicated by the U.S. net international investment position data due to unrecorded historical Chinese inflows into an increasingly popular global safe haven asset: U.S. residential real estate. We first use aggregate capital flows data to show that the increase in unrecorded capital inflows in the U.S. balance of payment accounts over the past decade is mainly linked to inflows from China into U.S. housing markets. Then, using a unique web traffic dataset that provides a direct measure of Chinese demand for U.S. housing at the zip code level, we estimate via a difference-in-difference matching framework that house prices in major U.S. cities that are highly exposed to demand from China have on average grown 7 percentage points faster than similar neighborhoods with low exposure over the period 2010-2016. These average excess price growth gaps co-move closely with macro-level measures of U.S. capital inflows from China, and tend to widen following periods of economic stress in China, suggesting that Chinese households view U.S. housing as a safe haven asset. – capital flight
Will Germany Depart from the Merkel Model on China? Beijing Will Have a Say. – The Diplomat – the appointment of Greens co-leader and former chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock as foreign minister has made such a break a real possibility. As an outspoken critic of China’s human rights practices and overseas economic coercion, Baerbock will advocate for a comprehensive China strategy that is more European, normative, and “rigor[ous].” She will be reinforced by FDP leader Christian Lindner, who joins the coalition government as finance minister, seen as the most powerful office next to chancellor. Lindner found himself on Beijing’s bad list in 2019 when he visited democratic opposition representatives in Hong Kong en route to the mainland
Xi fails to signal support for a second term for Hong Kong’s Carrie Lam | Financial Times – interesting earlier in the year the political insiders I knew of thought that Lam was going to run for a second time, when I thought that it might the be the security chap who had recently been moved to be her deputy. After this visit, CY Leung might throw his hat in the ring
Ideas
Maersk is no longer just a shipping company — Quartz – Maersk owns more container ships than anyone on earth, but it would be a mistake to think of the company as just a cargo shipping line. It’s also an airline, a trucking company, a port terminal operator, and a freight forwarder. Maersk has gobbled up a piece of virtually every stage of the global supply chain as part of its ambition to become a one-stop shop for logistics.
Yesterday (Dec. 16), Maersk struck a deal that offers a glimpse at the future of its business—and the future of global shipping. Starting next year, Maersk will effectively run the logistics operations of Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies. Maersk announced in a press release that it “will be providing operational management of international ocean and air transport” for Unilever from 2022 to 2026.
Normally, Unilever uses its own in-house software, dubbed the “International Control Tower Solution,” to manage its own supply chains. But as of 2022, Unilever will hand off the run of its supply chain software to Maersk. “It’s a strong indicator that Maersk’s expertise extends well beyond sailing ships,” said Eytan Buchman, CMO at the cargo booking platform Freightos, who has written about Maersks’ acquisitions and expansion. “Combined with their other assets and what they’ve been building towards, it’s not a stretch to assume that this is another rung in the ladder towards full end-to-end global supply chain ownership.”
How many people in Japan have actually worn a couple’s outfit? | SoraNews24 -Japan News – less than 20 percent of married couples have tried going on a date in a couple’s outfit. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t want to try it! The survey, which was conducted between November 18 and November 26 of this year, asked 800 married people–400 women and 400 men—about their experiences with couple’s outfits. When asked whether they’d ever gone on a date with their spouse in matching outfits, only 18.1 percent said yes. – I thought it was more of a drama trope rather than a trend
Risks to China’s Growth in Luxury Retail | Luxury Daily – China accounts for 35 percent of all luxury sales across the globe. By 2025, those sales could shoot up to 50 percent of all luxury retail revenue, according to Bain Analytics. Luxury sector concerned by China’s GDPR type laws, regulations on biometrics and common propserity
Zegna shares surge in New York after SPAC deal | Vogue Business – The company has struggled during the pandemic, with core revenue falling 23 per cent last year. This year, sales are expected to stay behind pre-pandemic levels at €1.2 billion – positioned very much as a COVID issue but also seems to be down to the wider move of luxury and streetwear going closer
China’s Big New Idea – The Atlantic – “common prosperity,” has been adopted by journalists, scholars, and corporate executives in China with a fervor only a dictator can ignite. State newspapers are routinely plastered with commentary on the topic. On November 11, a shopping holiday known as “Singles Day,” the usual conspicuous excess took a back seat to the common-prosperity spirit. The e-commerce company Alibaba, the holiday’s primary purveyor, focused its marketing on eco-friendly initiatives and charitable programs instead of sales figures. Its management, eager to get into Xi’s good graces, had already pledged billions of dollars in charitable donations to support the leader’s cause, rather than its own shareholders.Until now, common prosperity has mostly been a concept for domestic consumption in China, but it might soon be heading overseas. The idea could become a central node in the ever-expanding lexicon of language Xi is trying to use to increase Beijing’s influence in international affairs and reshape the world order to favor China’s authoritarian interests – I think its more memetic in nature than an ‘idea’ per se, something that could mean whatever people want it to mean in their head
Guidance for preventing, detecting, and hunting for CVE-2021-44228 Log4j 2 exploitation – Microsoft Security Blog – observed the CVE-2021-44228 vulnerability being used by multiple tracked nation-state activity groups originating from China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkey. This activity ranges from experimentation during development, integration of the vulnerability to in-the-wild payload deployment, and exploitation against targets to achieve the actor’s objectives. For example, MSTIC has observed PHOSPHORUS, an Iranian actor that has been deploying ransomware, acquiring and making modifications of the Log4j exploit. We assess that PHOSPHORUS has operationalized these modifications. In addition, HAFNIUM, a threat actor group operating out of China, has been observed utilizing the vulnerability to attack virtualization infrastructure to extend their typical targeting. In these attacks, HAFNIUM-associated systems were observed using a DNS service typically associated with testing activity to fingerprint systems
Huawei documents show Chinese tech giant’s involvement in surveillance programs – The Washington Post – These marketing presentations, posted to a public-facing Huawei website before the company removed them late last year, show Huawei pitching how its technologies can help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor political individuals of interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition. “Huawei has no knowledge of the projects mentioned in the Washington Post report,” the company said in a statement, after The Post shared some of the slides with Huawei representatives to seek comment. “Like all other major service providers, Huawei provides cloud platform services that comply with common industry standards.” The divergence between Huawei’s public disavowals that it doesn’t know how its technology is used by customers, and the detailed accounts of surveillance operations on slides carrying the company’s watermark, taps into long-standing concerns about lack of transparency at the world’s largest vendor of telecommunications gear – I can’t say I am surprised
Chinese Spies Accused of Using Huawei in Secret Australian Telecom Hack – Bloomberg – a key piece of evidence underpinning the U.S. efforts — a previously unreported breach that occurred halfway around the world nearly a decade ago. In 2012, Australian intelligence officials informed their U.S. counterparts that they had detected a sophisticated intrusion into the country’s telecommunications systems. It began, they said, with a software update from Huawei that was loaded with malicious code. The breach and subsequent intelligence sharing was confirmed by nearly two dozen former national security officials who received briefings about the matter from Australian and U.S. agencies from 2012 to 2019. The incident substantiated suspicions in both countries that China used Huawei equipment as a conduit for espionage, and it has remained a core part of a case they’ve built against the Chinese company, even as the breach’s existence has never been made public – so I was working on Huawei when Australia banned them from their national broadband initiative in 2013. My boss who was an ex-government guy had gone back to Australia to lobby for Huawei and three days later the guillotine dropped. This disclosure explains the why. China views Australia as its own personal colony. Am I surprised that the Chinese have a tailored access programme? No, but it shouldn’t be made any easier for them
Merck to invest NT$17 billion in Taiwan over next 5-7 years | DigiTimes – to set up production capacity for semiconductor and display materials and enhance R&D capability in Taiwan over the next 5-7 years, according to Merck Group Taiwan managing director John Lee. The investment is the largest as compared with the investment projects Merck has historically undertaken in Taiwan, Lee said. The investment is part of Level Up, Merck’s global investment plan with a total budget of over EUR3 billion (US$3.4 billion) and investment projects varying among different countries, Lee noted.
Taiwan opposition clings on for political relevance as voters shun Beijing | Financial Times – an overwhelming majority of Taiwanese reject unification with China, and over the past decade, the KMT’s support has gone into a tailspin. According to the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University, the proportion of voters identifying with the KMT has dropped to 18.7 per cent, compared with 31.4 per cent for the ruling Democratic Progressive party. – Not entirely surprising given the example that Beijing has provided with Hong Kong
A celebrity divorce spotlights declining China-Taiwan relations — Quartz – The controversies around the former couple, whose ups and downs are often compared in China to the US reality show Keeping Up With The Kardashians, paint a picture of the increasingly confrontational attitude in China towards Taiwan. For decades, citizens from both sides of the straits have sidestepped the tricky political relations of the Communist-ruled People’s Republic of China, and the democratically governed Republic of China (as Taiwan is formally called), to forge personal and professional ties. Taiwanese businesses have been integral to China’s economic advance, and music stars and actors from Taiwan have long found audiences in the mainland. That coexistence often relied on people on both sides dancing around what it means to be Taiwanese. “But as Chinese ultra-nationalism boils over under Xi [Jinping], there is no longer space for ambiguity between nationality and cultural identity,” said Joshua Yang, a doctoral student who tweets about Taiwanese identity and relations with the PRC. As opportunities for Taiwanese and Chinese residents to connect directly through study, work, or jobs shrink, it could harden attitudes in the mainland even further
Do the costs of the cloud outweigh the benefits? | The Economist – few aspects of modern life have made geeks drool more than the cloud, the cumulus of data centres dominated by three American tech giants, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, as well as Alibaba in China. In America some liken their position of impregnability to that of Detroit’s three big carmakers, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, a century ago. During the covid-19 pandemic they have helped transform people’s lives, supporting online medical appointments, Zoom meetings and Netflix binges. They attract the brightest engineering talent. Amazon Web Services (aws), the biggest, is now part of business folklore. So it is bordering on heresy to argue, as executives at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital firm, have done recently, that the cloud threatens to become a weight around the necks of big companies.
Why Apple Is Trash? Because Apple has demonstrated a moral bankruptcy in its behaviour. In the west, it is pro-LGBTQI, pro-security, pro-freedom etc. However its conduct elsewhere shows that it supports and strives to please authoritarian regimes.
The Information on Apple in China, Apple’s Deal, Evaluating Apple’s China Risk – Stratechery by Ben Thompson – This analysis of what Apple did is, of course, distinct from the question of whether or not it was right. That is certainly something worth debating, but I suspect it is more of an academic question here in 2021. The time for Apple to decide whether to start the process of decoupling itself from China was when this deal was made; the company decided to go in the opposite direction — deepening its dependence in the process — and I don’t see it reversing anytime soon. The fact of the matter is that Apple isn’t simply the preeminent example of China’s manufacturing prowess – Apple Is Trash.
Is Britain entering an age of aggravation? – The Face – “My own, lefty inclination is that this is what happens when you continue to grind people up against each other in an increasingly competitive society. That years of austerity rule and a “fuck off” discourse are really starting to show”
Do AI-Powered Mutual Funds Perform Better? – ScienceDirect – AI-powered mutual funds significantly outperform their human-managed peers. AI-powered mutual funds show superior stock selection capability and lower turnover ratios to humans. – index trackers still important
The Amazon Empire Strikes Back – Stratechery by Ben Thompson – For years, Amazon has been quietly chartering private cargo ships, making its own containers, and leasing planes to better control the complicated shipping journey of an online order. Now, as many retailers panic over supply chain chaos, Amazon’s costly early moves are helping it avoid the long wait times for available dock space and workers at the country’s busiest ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles… By chartering private cargo vessels to carry its goods, Amazon can control where its goods go, avoiding the most congested ports. Still, Amazon has seen a 14% rise in out-of-stock items and an average price increase of 25% since January 2021, according to e-commerce management platform CommerceIQ… Amazon has been on a spending spree to control as much of the shipping process as possible. It spent more than $61 billion on shipping in 2020, up from just under $38 billion in 2019. Now, Amazon is shipping 72% of its own packages, up from less than 47% in 2019 according to SJ Consulting Group. It’s even taking control at the first step of the shipping journey by making its own 53-foot cargo containers in China. Containers are in short supply, with long wait times and prices surging from less than $2,000 before the pandemic to $20,000 today.
I was sent a copy of Freedom as a gift, so I tried to come at the book with an open mind. I wrestled with a number of things reading book, which will come out a bit later on.
Is Freedom any good?
Early on this was a question that I was asking myself. Freedom clearly wasn’t a book with someone like me in mind. I have read a number of the China and Hong Kong books out there, kept up with the latest thinking and for a time lived in the city.
I could see that the book might be written for others as a primer. It is a swift tour through Mr Law’s own story, the resurgent nature of China across as an authoritarian state. China’s power projection beyond its borders and the nature of authoritarianism in general. He also tells the story from his perspective of the Hong Kong protests.
The reality is that in this ambition for Freedom, Law and Fowler have squeezed the territory of at least half a dozen books into one slim paperback.
Mr Law’s own story
Mr Law’s own story mirrors that of previous generations of Hong Kongers. His father escaped from the mainland and brought his wife and son across. The honesty of Mr Law’s story comes through his own admission of how few memories he had of life before Hong Kong. His concern about China at this time is more from the life of his parents. He only really remembers the sun on his back and hugging his Mum on her bicycle. He relies on the struggle of his parents in China, during and after the cultural revolution to tell the story of an authoritarian state.
Hong Kong like Shenzhen is a city of immigrants. Chinese people from Guangdong, Fujian and Shanghai have moved to the city over the decades in waves. As an immigrant child Mr Law is an everyman Hong Konger.
Two other aspects of Law’s story struck me. The first was the honesty with which he talked about not wanting to engage with the 2019 protests at first as he was going to Yale on a full scholarship.
The second was the way he talked about the horror of a custodial sentence. I have no desire to go to jail, but about a third of the UK population has a criminal record. It isn’t quite the ‘mark of Cain’ that it seems to be in Hong Kong. That says a lot about the kind of society that Hong Kong is.
The nature of China
I think other people have done a better job of talking about the nature of the Chinese government, in particular its approach to governance and foreign policy. Mr Law just can’t cover the ground needed in Freedom, he doesn’t have the space. I will include a list of recommended material on China at the end of this post.
The Hong Kong protests
The main thing that struck me about Mr Law’s account of the Hong Kong protests is a sense of restraint in the telling. He pulls his punches and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions, or do their own research. This is especially apparent with Mr Law’s description of the Yuen Long incident.
If you want the general gist of the Yuen Long incident, there was a good documentary that the Hong Kong government clamped down on called 7.21 Who Owns the Truth? produced by Yuk-Ling ‘Bao’ Choy
Tone of voice
I was trying to put my finger on the tone of voice in Freedom. What did it remind me of? Eventually I realised that it reminded me of the kind of content I had read previously by the likes of think tanks like Demos during the New Labour era. So far the Hong Kong protestors have managed to engage and activate right of centre politicians across Europe, the US and the UK. But more progressive voices aren’t engaging with the situation in Hong Kong. I took this book as an attempt to reach out to the wonks in this camp. Activists like Mr Law would need to create receptivity in the the people who work for progressive politicians before they can engage with the politicians themselves.
Hence the primer approach, so that these people would delve further into China. You can find out more about Freedom by Nathan Law with Evan Fowler here.
Facebook Changes Corporate Name to Meta – The New York Times – Zuckerberg has been committed to building the metaverse, a composite universe melding online, virtual and augmented worlds that people can seamlessly traverse. He has said the metaverse can be the next major social platform and that several tech companies will build it over the next 10-plus years. The name Meta is indicative of Facebook’s ambition for being the platform that is the metaverse.
The problems facing the metaverse aren’t going to be just solved by Moores law and software alone. There are needed to be technology improvements in battery chemistry and optics. Hardware engineers from Meta have their own concerns about developing the metaverse.
Facebook’s Meta mission was laid out in a 2018 paper on The Metaverse – Oculus executives highlighted what a commercial metaverse would look like, that some think is a blueprint for Meta’s ambitions today. Meta won’t be a move away from Facebook’s current problems with regards privacy and social cohesion. Though one of the first moves of Meta was to shut down Facebook’s legacy facial recognition system.
Interesting debate on the competing viewpoints of the Biden administration and China
Asia Society panel discussion featuring Lingling Wei, chief China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and co-author of Superpower Showdown; Ryan Hass, senior fellow and the Michael H. Armacost Chair in the foreign policy program at Brookings; and Yasheng Huang, Epoch Foundation Professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT Sloan School of Management
What if Xi Jinping just isn’t that competent? – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – you can’t argue that Xi Jingping isn’t at least competent as a political operator, but some of the other points in here are valid to a point. But part of it is better understood if one asks if Xi Jingping is a true believer in Stalinism and the answer would be yes. You could also use it to argue that we’re close to hitting peak China and then the country will decline disgracefully rather like the UK did post British empire
Sex Differences in Work Aspirations – Marginal REVOLUTION – more developed and gender equal nations are better than less developed nations in attracting boys to more established things-oriented (often blue-collar) occupations, but they fail to attract girls to these areas. This problem is also occurring for the subset of things-oriented STEM occupations. In fact, the problem for STEM is even more profound, given that interest in STEM declines for both boys and girls in more developed, innovative, and gender equal nations.
Mobile internet and political polarization – Marginal REVOLUTION – the mobile internet polarized the Left, but not so much the Right. What polarized the Right was…the polarization of the Left, and not the mobile internet. And please do note this sentence: “This increase in polarization largely did not take place among social media users.” It seems that on-line versions of older school media did a lot of the work
Data Shows Younger People Aren’t Reporting Cybercrimes / Digital Information World – members of the younger generations, namely Gen Z and Millennials, are less likely to report a cybercrime once it gets committed against them. Baby boomers are the most likely to report a cybercrime since 64% of them said that they had done so, and the proportion was much lower for Millennials who only report cybercrime 32% of the time. Things become even more dismal when you look at Gen Z, colloquially known as “zoomers” in internet parlance, who only report cybercrimes 21% of the time. One reason for this might be the fact that, having grown up with the internet, Millennials and Gen Z members don’t realize that online security is not something that you can take for granted – or that they believe that insecurity is part and parcel of internet life now
Culture
‘Italo Disco’ Was About More Than Boogie Nights: Alessandro Melazzini – Variety – his analytical doc makes clear, it’s easy to underestimate the importance of independent, non-ideological escape music. The 80s have been seen as a superficial decade,” Melazzini says. “With time you have another approach to that period, which was more than just silly. It was also a time of optimism, experimentations, promises, illusion. And genius creativity.”
Design
New Japan-Only Miata Asks You To Trade Power For Lightness | Jalopnik – I love this design philosophy: “horsepower and fun are not proportional, but lightness and fun are proportional, and if horsepower is increased, the body etc. must be strengthened, so it will inevitably become heavier. The lighter the car, the more fun the car is, and I think this Roadster is the best now if you enjoy driving.”
Secretive MoD ‘banking’ unit helps UK wage economic warfare | Financial Times – “People who worked in banking in the late 1980s will tell you that between Friday and Monday when the Berlin wall came down, people they thought were West Germans working on trading floors and in M&A departments just disappeared,” Keatinge said. “They were actually working for [East Germany’s] Stasi, gathering information about the financial activity in the City of London. You can be sure the same thing is happening now with the Chinese.”
Opinion: Everybody Is Still Greenwashing, But That’s Not What ESG Stands For. – the recent announcement from Kering banning the use of fur from all its collections and all its brands. It clearly did not have the impact that Kering would have hoped for. Although this would have been a big move internally, the public is now expecting more and is calling for a genuine rethinking of global systems and metrics that define success beyond financial gains to shareholders. Banning fur just isn’t enough for the Greta Generation – but how important are they for customers?
Germany’s Economy, Once Europe’s Engine, Is Holding It Back – WSJ – After years of belt-tightening aimed at honing competitiveness, German businesses and the country’s public infrastructure are suffering from underinvestment, economists say. Germany’s net investment rate has been around 0.5% of economic output since the turn of the century, compared with about 1% for Italy and 1.5% for the U.S., according to the World Bank. German net public investment has fallen below zero as existing assets depreciate
Reforms in Hong Kong Encourage Homecoming of Offshore Funds | Winston & Strawn LLP – In July 2021, the Hong Kong government gazetted a fund re‑domiciliation mechanism to encourage offshore funds set up in corporate or limited-partnership form to register in Hong Kong as OFCs and LPFs, respectively. This mechanism does not create any new legal entity; therefore, it does not require the dissolution of the original funds or require investors to exchange their interests from the old fund to the new fund. Upon re‑domiciliation, these funds would be de‑registered in the original place of incorporation and would have the same rights and obligations as any other newly established OFCs and LPFs in Hong Kong. The Wealth Connect, which formally commenced trading on September 10, 2021, allows Hong Kong-domiciled funds to be offered to mainland Chinese investors in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. This adds to the Mutual Recognition of Funds scheme, which started in 2015, allowing Hong Kong-domiciled funds to be distributed in mainland China. These connect schemes serve as another incentive to encourage fund managers to re‑domicile offshore funds to Hong Kong
The soft bigotry of America’s cultural left | Financial Times – imposing conformity through intimidation is not what is supposed to happen in democracies, still less on their most-prized campuses. Crushing free thought is McCarthyism. This new consensus is profoundly illiberal. It treats a person’s race as their primary fixed identity and assigns roles on that basis. This obliterates the individual moral autonomy on which liberalism rests. Since everything in society boils down to race, everything must change. California, for example, is trying to alter its mathematics curriculum to downplay the idea there are right and wrong answers in the science. The debate is fuelled by a proposal for new math standards called “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction”. The framework states that “objectivity”, “worship of the written word”, and “either/or thinking” are tools of white supremacy
The Deep Dive: “Hyper-Customisation In Health and Wellness Has Become The New Luxury.” – Another is working out which kind of digital technology will enable the clinic to stay connected with its clients, for example, wearables. “This is going to be a big challenge for us in the future because we have to have a tool which really works and that is really used by our clients.” Whatever the future of health and wellness may look like, what remains certain is that it will be driven by what the client demands. And what the client demands, Clinique La Prairie delivers. “At the end of the day, what our customers want are benefits to their wellbeing, not just during their time at the clinic but when they are back home,” said Gibertoni.
Media
Banker Guy Hands: ‘I’m scared of ending my life having not achieved’ | The Times – We had an enormous number of people working on the Stones and we weren’t making much money – they are a catalogue band. The new albums didn’t sell, and the income from old CDs was small. What really worked for the Stones was touring. The bid we had in mind for their new contract – the bid we thought made economic sense – was unlikely to be what they were hoping to achieve. The only way we could pay them more was if they did some TV work for us, put their name on a computer game and gave us a share of their concert revenues
New Facebook Storm Nears as CNN, Fox Business and Other Outlets Team Up on Whistleblower Docs — The Information – Upcoming news stories based on thousands of Facebook documents—which whistleblower Frances Haugen worked to release to more than a dozen news organizations as diverse as the Associated Press, CNN, Le Monde, Reuters and the Fox Business network—aren’t likely to be as revelatory as those epic leaks of time past – this drop has been carefully thought through to maximise scrutiny of Meta
Haugen claims backed by new Facebook whistleblower filing with SEC – The Washington Post – Facebook officials routinely undermined efforts to fight misinformation, hate speech and other problematic content out of fear of angering then-President Donald Trump and his political allies, or out of concern about potentially dampening the user growth key to Facebook’s multi-billion-dollar profits.- drip, drip, drip and the Meta rebrand won’t stop it. At least in America it can rely on bipartisan disagreement to keep it from being regulated.
Facebook Conducted An Experiment In Which It Turned Off The News Feed Algorithm, To Surprising Results / Digital Information World – Engagement dropped like a stone in an ocean, Groups ended up becoming more popular than ever before, and Facebook made even more money per user, once they actually went through their News Feeds. This sort of behavior seems to almost mirror the internet landscape we have today. Platforms such as Reddit have skyrocketed in relevancy, because they provide an enhanced version of Groups. They also make a lot of money on this premise, despite having much fewer active users than Facebook did back in 2018. – It will be really hard for Meta to live these findings down
US intelligence officials warn companies in critical sectors on China | Financial Times – many businesses were not aware of the direct and hidden links between Chinese companies and universities and state security, or that Beijing was using a “whole of government approach” to obtain technology – more likely that these businesses don’t care and they will continue not to care unless financial and judicial penalties are put in place
Exclusive: Amid national security concerns, US slaps overhead time limits on satellites – Breaking Defense – Industry officials further argue NOAA’s ruling will stifle the ability of US firms to claim a leading edge in the growing global market for near real-time imagery products. The use of sat imagery to track terrestrial change has long been in use by the US government and even commercial firms. The ability to do so with ever increasing timeliness is what is new in the commercial market, and what is worrying DoD and IC officials is that those burgeoning capabilities mean there soon will be no place safe from prying satellite eyes.
