Over the space of 20 years, luxury changed enormously. The Japanese had been a set of new consumers for luxury, but in terms of numbers they hadn’t eclipsed the US as the biggest market for luxury.
China’s ascent into the WTO (World Trade Organisation) made a lot of business people and politicians a lot richer. China challenged the US in terms of luxury market size. On their rise, Chinese consumers changed a lot in their sophistication as they educated themselves on luxury consumption.
These new consumers picked up new traits such as wine drinking. This also meant that luxury goods became new asset classes as Chinese money looked to acquire only the best. Chinese culture in turn impacted luxury design. Chinese new year became more important than Christmas.
Then there was the second generation money. Young rather than old consumers. Consumers who were looking for something less formal, either because they didn’t wear anything but streetwear or they worked in the creative classes rather than the traditional professions and high finance.
The industry had traditionally avoided rap artists and R&B singers, now Jay Z and Beyonce are the face of Tiffanys and Fendi had collaborated with Rihanna.
They no longer wanted to have to wear a jacket and tie to have afternoon tea at the Mandarin. They took an eclectic look more attuned to the Buffalo Collective than Vogue Italia.
You had hybridisation with the street to create a new category of luxe streetwear in a way that also owes a debt to football casual terrace wear and the pain.
Now you have Zegna badge engineering approach shoes from alpine brand La Sportiva and Prada has done a similar thing with adidas’ iconic Stan Smith tennis shoes. Balenciaga with their Speed Sock looks like a mix between Nike’s flyknit football boots and the Nike Footscape sole.
Luxury has traditionally reflected status. Goods of a superior nature that the ‘wrong sort’ of people would never be able to afford. Luxury then became a symbol that you’d made it. In Asian markets, particularly China, luxury became a tool. People gifted luxury products to make relationships work better. It also signified that you are the kind of successful business person that partners could trust. You started to see factory managers with Gucci man bags and premium golfwear to signal their success. Then when the scions of these business people and figures in authority were adults, luxury has become about premium self expression.
I was thinking a lot about consumption when I came across the psychological concept of moral licensing. Doing something that is thought of as a good behaviour boosts the self image, leading to a sense of justification in a more indulgent behaviour later on.
It explains incongruity in human behaviours. One example that immediately came to mind when I first read about the concept of moral licensing occurred very early in my agency career.
Burger queen
The agency was one of an expanding number of American shops that had set up in London. I was a piss-poor excuse of client services person; but was widely read, had a sharp-thinking strategic head on my shoulders and sounded uncharacteristically authoritative in technology client presentations.
One of the London office’s senior executives was English but as part of their degree secondment had spent some time in the US. Later on, they were working in the Bay area on high technology and consumer brand accounts.
During that time, they became a Buddhist and were vegan except for the regular Big Mac meal in the office, or, going to and from a new business pitch.
Given that the global CEO functioned on sipping vodka out of a constantly topped up glass, with periodic runs to the local Starbucks for jolts of iced quadruple expressos, the Big Mac eating vegan behaviour was considered only mildly eccentric by comparison.
Wellness
While my burger queen experience is mildly amusing to recollect, moral licensing has a serious health and wellness impact. The consumer wellness market has a moral vocabulary that positions food as a “sinful” indulgence or a “purifying” virtue, and physical exercise as a moral redemption mechanism. This moral framing is a critical structural vulnerability. When wellness, nutrition, and wearable technology brands construct campaigns using moralised binaries, this trigger subconscious moral licensing.
Higher levels of moral licensing, self-licensing, or compensatory health beliefs (CHBs) are associated with elevated body weight (BMI), increased caloric intake, or heightened body image anxiety.
The fipside of this is the ‘health as an alibi’ for slim people who are often judged as excessively vain or narcissistic.
Finally research from North Caroline State University found that customer reward programmes drove long-term consumption habits. They that consumers who regularly purchased lower-calorie meals indulged more when reward opportunities occurred. They had a higher probability of trading rewards for indulgent high-calorie items and desserts. When questioned, they used their prior calorie dietary discipline to justify it.
Luxurious moral licensing
There is a well known link between relative preferences for luxury items and a previously expressed virtuous intent. This might be a donation of time or money to a charity allowing consumers to establish ‘moral’ credentials. An example that taps directly into this is Balenciaga‘s capsule collections that collaborate with the likes of the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
This boost to their virtuosity mitigates the negative feelings and anticipatory guilt typically associated with purchasing frivolous or expensive items. In research it is found to double consumer intent to purchase high-end consumer goods.
However moral licensing isn’t all plain sailing for luxury brands. There is a tension between luxury brand attributes of self-enhancement and status with moral licensing being related to self transcendence and altruism. Consumers experience the mismatch which negatively affects brand evaluation.
Moral licensing examples in advertising
Moral licensing is tapped into in indulgent advertising. A classic example is the current framing in Müller Corner yoghurts.
Moral licensing was leaned on very heavily during the golden age of TV advertising.
I am not a football fan, but I recognise the power that the 2026 World Cup has to move hearts and minds. This year it’s being hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States. The 2026 World Cup fan experience is shrouded in uncertainty.
I found it interesting that both adidas with the launch of its match ball and Panini with the launch of its sticker book both marked the start of the countdown to the 2026 World Cup season.
Chinese countryside’s quieter strains – by Yuxuan JIA – Decades of son preference have left villages full of unmarried men, driving bride prices higher and sustaining a shadow market for “Vietnamese brides” that can slide into fraud, coercion, and trafficking. Young people, especially young women, are drifting away from rural patriarchy and the obligation-heavy world of kinship and “face”, while the influencer economy and short-video apps offer fantasies of easy money to teenagers with weak school prospects.
Why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men | Washington Post – “I don’t want to be too disparaging about them because they’re our Christian brothers and sisters, but worshiping in a big former supermarket with dry ice machines and a pop band, it’s not really traditional Christianity,” Father Longenecker said. His new parishioners are attracted to “very traditional worship with lots of incense and altar boys and sacred music in the traditional style.”
More NatSec | Big Lychee, Various Sectors – From the government’s press release… Safeguarding national security is a continuous endeavour with no end point. At its core this sounds like the Stalin derived Maoist principle of struggle. National security ‘enemies’ like Jimmy Lai, Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho serve the same purpose as George Orwell’s character Emmanuel Goldstein in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ever-tightening system is allegedly concerned with leaderless lone wolves, small cells and external actors – but the reality is just control in Orwell’s novel.
Revising Hong Kong’s Past – Lingua Sinica – Among the changes noted was a complete erasure of references to the Tiananmen Massacre, which was recast as “political turmoil in the late spring and early summer of 1989.” Gone from the exhibit entirely, the Ming Pao reported, is a previous image that showed one million Hong Kongers taking to the streets in 1989 in support of the demonstrators in China.
I am skeptical about ‘gurus’. However, I found this Tony Robbins video good for getting out of a period of ‘stuckness’ in my thinking. Robbin’s ideas about priming, in particular they way he links physical activity to mental exercises works and has a good deal of neuroscience behind it.
Japan loses its thirst for vending machines | FT – Tens of thousands of vending machines are vanishing from Japan, as machines that once symbolised the nation’s love of innovation are shunned in a climate of rising inflation and deepening labour shortages.
The nation’s stock of 2.2mn drinks vending machines is down 23 per cent from its bubble-era peak in 1985, according to the Japan Vending System Manufacturers Association.
The faltering economics of running a national vending machine empire were exposed when DyDo, Japan’s third biggest operator, this month said it would scrap almost 7.5 per cent of its network of 270,000 units after posting its largest ever annual loss. – what surprised me was that the vending machines weren’t digitised.
Why do men love Stone Island | FT – “Football in the late 1980s and 1990s was a heavily policed environment under surveillance, where visibility carried risk,” says Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster. “On the terraces, clothing wasn’t decoration, it was risk management. Stone Island mattered because its garments were already structured around concealment, modulation and elective visibility. The detachable badge, reversible constructions, modular hoods and certain fabric treatments enabled wearers to calibrate how legible they were, depending on context. Football casuals were not simply performing taste; they were managing recognition.”
Apple rolls out UK age checks for iPhone users | FT – interesting move, I did notice that it assumed my account was adult due to the length it had been held. It reminded me of friends who registered email addresses, domain names and even social media handles for their newly born children – and did just enough to keep the accounts alive.
The 49MB Web Page | thatshubham – Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user’s cross-site identity together across different ad networks.
When you open a website on your phone, it’s like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.
Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is Europe’s IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles through your pockets.
So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the background
The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.
Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.
A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future | The Economist – A few years ago a participant used the conference network to hack a water-treatment facility in America (Messrs Wyler and Stump are cagey about the details). Another hid behind the din of legitimate hacker traffic to attack government websites and payment systems. The noc team traced him, sent him a message reminding him that doing illegal things from Black Hat was still illegal, then watched him close his laptop and walk away. Hackers on the other side of the world try their luck too. When the registration server was switched on, attacks began at once, including traffic that appeared to originate in Romania….
Mr Stump says the noc has seen a pattern across multiple Black Hat conferences in which Taiwanese participants show up with hacked devices. “Most of [the traffic] goes back to China,” he says. ai-powered attacks by nation-states or cybercriminals are likely to intensify… The team thinks the ai race is only beginning. For Mr Wyler, the vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos, including some that have gone undetected for decades, are to be welcomed rather than feared. “We now know they’re there.”
All the same, cautions Mr Stump, the next two years will be turbulent, as more flaws will be uncovered; more breaches will occur as firms feed sensitive data into ai systems; and more insecure code will be written.
OpenAI acquires popular tech talk show for ‘low hundreds of millions’ | FT – ChatGPT-maker moves into broadcasting with deal for TBPN after it had pledged to abandon ‘side-quests’ – I think that this is trying to balance the narrative with Anthropic which is ripping ahead. In past decades you would have dumped a lot of money into a campaign run by a PR agency, but time moves on
New Internet of Things Plan Targets Global Infrastructure – Jamestown – A new action plan for the Internet of Things (IoT) increases the possibility that Chinese-built connected infrastructure in the United States could become a platform for data access, cyber pre-positioning, and attacks on U.S. cyber-physical systems in a prolonged crisis or confrontation. The plan, launched jointly by nine ministries, defines IoT as a total cyber-physical environment that links “people, machines, and things” across sensing, networks, platforms, applications, and security, and sets targets for 10 billion terminal connections, more than 50 standards, and deployment across production, consumption, and governance. The plan indicates Beijing is moving from connected devices to connected backbone systems. It reinforces the new Five-Year Plan, suggesting that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to supply not only endpoints like sensors, appliances, and vehicles but also the next generation of AI, computing, and space-ground communications infrastructure that will underpin them.
By some miracle, I have managed to make it to issue 32. Yes this is late, my excuse was reading The Persian, more on that below. In the jargon of the bingo hall 32 came up as ‘buckle my shoe’.
https://flic.kr/p/w8zyP
As I wrote this down I was reminded of a vivid memory from my early childhood. I was staying with my Granny on the family farm in rural Ireland. I would have been pre-school, maybe three years old.
Like a magpie I was attracted to shiny things, and she had a pair of shoes with gold coloured decorative elements on them. They were horseshoe-shaped buckles, but didn’t serve any function beyond aesthetics.
I managed to remove one unintentionally, it didn’t seem to take any effort. I realised it shouldn’t be off the shoe, so I returned it to her in my mind, by posting it under the closed door of her bedroom.
I forgot about it. There was more important things to do like pat the friendly farm dog and feed soda bread crumbs from the breakfast table to the couple of coal tits that would show up at the back door after every meal.
Later on, the adults got in a state when the buckle was discovered missing and one of Granny’s best pairs of shoes were now ruined. I pointed out where I had put the buckle, but it was now nowhere to be found. The second buckle was slipped off the other shoe and both shoes matched again, no one outside the household was any the wiser until you read this.
Like the missing buckle we can often no longer return, but we can adapt and move forward by shedding extraneous items that hold us back.
Beyond bingo, 32 in Chinese sounds similar to easy growth, which is considered lucky across business, relationships and in one’s personal life. It also corresponds to perseverance or staying the course in the I Ching.
This month’s soundtrack to the newsletter is collated by The Found Sound Orchestra over on SoundCloud. Now that’s sorted, let’s get into it.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Reflecting on the different archetypes of people that you meet in an advertising agency new business pitch and how to deal with them.
A roundup of everything from Chinese innovation to Anthropic’s disagreement with the US Department of Defense.
ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
Wellness as an experiential aspect of luxury. It has become a luxury currency in its own right for both genders according to a new report by Karla Otto.
My friend Nigel Scott analysed the future of creative agencies. He thought that AI forced the agency break even point even higher, which impacts the rise of the independents.
The paradox of Gucci using generative AI to market slow luxury aesthetic / lifestyle.
International Women’s Day was marked by some sobering research on attitudes to gender equality in the UK. There was a generational aspect to it where younger cohorts men held more traditional views than other groups and optimism for their future prospects dropped.
Meta was found liable in two court cases. One was about the role of social platforms facilitating human trafficking. The second was being found liable due to creating an ‘addictive’ platform. Critics now have a roadmap to seek damages and drive design changes.
Books that I have read.
The Persian by David McCloskey – this isn’t the first book that I have read by David McCloskey, but the one that I most anticipated. Espionage novels have had a revival as the global war on terror (GWoT) wound down, Ukraine, the South China Sea and Iran wound up. The timing of the book was precipitous. It came out at the end of January and events started down their path in the Persian Gulf soon after.
The book is very cleverly written. The story told from multiple perspectives:
A Mossad department head and his staff
A prisoner held in an Iranian jail
An Iranian mother
Yes you get the tension of a spy novel, but you also get the portrait of flawed human characters, acting and reacting to the terrible incidents around them. In this respect, it reminded me of what the Apple TV series Tehran tried to do. McCloskey manages to humanise his characters in a way that few authors in the genre beyond John le Carré and Mick Herron in his own way.
Things I have been inspired by.
Japanese porcelain brand Hataman Touen graced the tables of the Imperial Royal Household. Their classical techniques became relevant of the modern world thanks to a collaboration with Ghost In The Shell Standalone Complex anime.
The result was a limited edition model of the Tachikoma autonomous intelligent ‘tank’ that plays a prominent role in the show.
I am not a big fan of TikTok, but Argos have been killing it with their ‘stockroom rave‘. The nod to raving in working class culture for over half a century from the speed-fuelled Wigan Casino all-nighters to the Boiler Room sessions today. Less so now that I work in offices, but before going to college banging tunes on Sony ghetto-blaster got me through shifts in a McDonald’s, a clothing factory and a plant hire repair workshop. And doing it all with a dash of humour.
My friend Dan Ilett‘s newsletter The Executive Summary fufils the old strategist maxim of being interesting first, being right second. Dan manages to pull both off more often than not, but he is always interesting. Sign up here.
Chart of the month.
This month due to the confluence of a client project that never happened and the latest report drop by Morgan Stanley in association with LuxeConsult, I looked into the Swiss luxury watch industry.
A few interesting trends emerge:
Independents such as Patek Philippe and Rolex have successfully held off large luxury conglomerates LVMH and Richemont.
Swatch Group has become a donor of market share to the other main players.
The K-shaped market can be seen in the relative performance of Richemont’s brands. Vacheron Constantin and Cartier outperformed while IWC, Panerai and Jaeger-LeCoultre laboured in a tightening market.
The sector-wide -3% CAGR (compound annual growth rate), was driven by economics as much as smart watches. Smart watches will exert less pressure moving forwards as they were kept and worn for longer by users.
Things I have watched.
I rewatched the original 1995 Ghost In The Shell animated film. I went in expecting for me to be thinking about the future of AI, instead the idea of the puppet master and his agent reminded me of the impact of social media and the influence that it impacts on consumers. There is one scene where a dust bin wagon driver is being questioned and is told that all his memories are false, he had been taken in by a false life. It spoke to the way people become ‘red pilled’.
Useful tools.
If like me, you have found that no matter what you do with your brightness button, your Mac’s screen is lacking, fear not Vivid is here. You don’t have to splurge on an XDR display to make it pop and keep the colour balance, Vivid is an app that doubles the brightness your display can achieve.
I am a long time fan of RSS reader Newsblur. The apps for it have recently undergone a major redesign including new features to make it even more intelligent and useful. In particular, I am really excited about a new feature that turns any website into an RSS feed that can be followed which the call Webfeeds.
We can have a larger debate about how web developers, designers and site owners have taken a backward step by not using RSS or Atom. WordPress comes with RSS built in, so you have to actively shut it down. Instead, Instead I’d like to celebrate the major level engineering that Samuel Clay and the team at Newsblur managed to achieve in developing Webfeeds as a highly usable feature within Newblur.
YouTube Search Fixer is a browser plugin for Chrome and Firefox that allows you to customise search results on YouTube. Doing research and don’t want to get music videos, or avoid related searches clutter – then you don’t have to.
The sales pitch.
I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.
With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors.
My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.
The Strategic Toolkit:
Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.
Ok this is the end of my March 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the joys of spring along with chocolate eggs.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.
Anthropic and the US Department of Defense defined the debate about AI for the start of March. Trying to understand the truth is murky.
The media pitches a clash of personalities between Pete Hegseth and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
Anthropic’s Claude LLMs have a number of points of expertise from helping programmers develop software code more quickly to assisted decision making and automation.
Anthropic had concerns about weapons with no humans in the loop, but you could consider ‘fire-and-forget’ weapons are already the same thing. This would include the FGM-148 ‘St’ Javelin anti-tank missile successfully used by the Ukrainians or the British Brimstone air-to-ground missile.
Fire-and-forget saves lives, autonomous vehicles in areas like casualty evacuation and supply runs could save more lives. The Anthropic breakdown seems to be down to trust. Anthropic felt that its models weren’t ready for full autonomy of operation and there were also concerns about facilitating mass surveillance of Americans.
There seems to be undertones of taking action against a ‘woke’ company. Why Anthropic seemed to have been able to double down is the limited impact they claim it will have on their business.
And yes the term ‘seem’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting due to difficulty in discerning what is going on.
China
China: Quieter, more fretful than I remember – by Whipling – it’s immediately obvious there is a current vibe in China. It isn’t frantic. It isn’t charged. It appears to be a collective sigh. Pride at what’s been achieved; acknowledgement that things are going to stop improving at the speed they forever have; resignation that life will be a little bit harder hereon in; and gratitude that there are messier places around the world to live. Many terms have been thrown at interpreting elements of this current behaviour in China. “Involution”. “Lie Flat”. I’ll add another: “Eh, fine.”
Why Everyone Is Suddenly in a ‘Very Chinese Time’ in Their Lives | WIRED – As is often the case with Western narratives about China, these memes are not really meant to paint an accurate picture of life in the country. Instead, they function as a projection of “all of the undesirable aspects of American life—or the decay of the American dream,” says Tianyu Fang, a PhD researcher at Harvard who studies science and technology in China.
At a moment when America’s infrastructure is crumbling and once-unthinkable forms of state violence are being normalized, China is starting to look pretty good in contrast. “When people say it’s the Chinese century, part of that is this ironic defeat,” says Fang.
As the Trump administration remade the US government in its own image and smashed long-standing democratic norms, people started yearning for an alternative role model, and they found a pretty good one in China. With its awe-inspiring skylines and abundant high-speed trains, the country serves as a symbol of the earnest and urgent desire among many Americans for something completely different from their own realities.
Alibaba’s Qwen App Commits ￥30B to Chinese New Year AI Giveaway Campaign | Pandaily – China’s tech giants are using the Lunar New Year — the world’s largest annual migration — to turn niche AI assistants into household names. They are betting billions that “Red Packet” marketing can do for AI what it did for mobile payments a decade ago.
Former Alibaba Executives Join Robot Leasing Platform BotShare as President and CSO – Pandaily – Li Liheng, former head instructor of Alibaba’s renowned B2B sales force known as the “China Supplier Iron Army,” has joined robot leasing platform BotShare as President. He will be joined by Wang Mingfeng (Tianxiang)—another Alibaba veteran previously responsible for management training under Alibaba’s “Three Axes” leadership framework—who will serve as Chief Strategy Officer.
BotShare officially launched in December 2025 and disclosed its seed funding round on January 15, 2026. The round was led by Hillhouse Ventures, with participation from Fosun Capital and other investors. According to Qichacha data, Agibot (Zhiyuan Robotics) holds a 55% stake in BotShare, while Feikuo Technology owns 15%. Founded in 2024, Feikuo focuses on deploying and operating robots in real-world scenarios such as cultural tourism, commercial performances, and guided exhibitions.
As a robot leasing platform, BotShare aggregates robots from multiple brands and models, offering rentals for scenarios including corporate annual meetings, livestreaming, store openings, and promotional events.
Available brands currently include Accelerated Evolution, Unitree, Zhiyuan, Zhongqing, Lingchu Intelligence, and Zhujie Dynamics, among others. Robot delivery, retrieval, and maintenance are handled by local leasing partners across different regions.
Platform data shows that within three weeks of launch, BotShare surpassed 200,000 registered users, with daily rental orders stabilizing at over 200.
Hong Kong’s Sogo mall operator seeks $1 billion loan refinancing | Jing Daily – Sogo malls, especially the flagship Causeway Bay one, have long been among Hong Kong’s prime retail destinations. However, traditional retailers like department stores have been facing even more pressure from the mainland’s growing e-commerce penetration, the rise of low-end stores and weak domestic consumer sentiment.
Lifestyle International was taken private by its chairman, Hong Kong billionaire businessman Thomas Lau Luen-Hung, in a HK$1.9 billion deal after the company warned of an at least 80% plunge in profit in the first half of 2022.
Still, Hong Kong’s retail landscape has shown signs of stabilizing. Government data indicates that retail sales rose 6.5% year-on-year in November 2025, citing improving local consumption amid sustained economic growth and increasing visitor numbers.
“Hong Kong continues to drive the strongest demand in the region,” Perazzi says. As a global gateway, the city draws international bidders competing for trophy pieces — particularly Rolex and Patek Philippe — and increasingly, independents.
Taiwan, meanwhile, reflects consistency rather than spikes. “Taiwanese collectors are renowned for their long-term approach. Compared to Hong Kong’s appetite for headline-grabbing lots, Taiwan is characterized by quieter but reliable demand,” Perazzi adds.
A surprise force is Southeast Asia. Vietnam and the Philippines are now producing first-generation collectors with expanding wealth pools and few legacy constraints. “Southeast Asia has emerged as a dynamic growth region,” Perazzi says, citing a younger collector profile and faster adoption of new independents.
Indonesian woman collapses after 140 lashes for sex and alcohol | South China Morning Post – A woman in Indonesia’s Aceh province collapsed after being caned 140 times last week for extramarital sex and drinking alcohol in one of the harshest sharia punishments on record. The woman and her partner were struck with a rattan cane in a public park in Aceh province on Thursday as dozens watched, Agence France-Presse reported. Each received 100 lashes for extramarital sex and another 40 for consuming alcohol, according to Banda Aceh sharia police chief Muhammad Rizal. – the move to more Gulf-orientated interpretation of Islamic rule is likely to cramp globalisation in Indonesia by western firms, despite it being the most populated Muslim country and will affect service industries such as tourism
When Real Beauty Met Reddit | LBBOnline – Reddit is very underestimated, interesting to see Dove using it in this way. Also worthwhile noting that Reddit is a key training source for LLMs.
America must follow China in treating data as an asset – In 2024, China became the first country to allow enterprises to classify data as intangible assets on their balance sheets. Beijing had already declared data a “factor of production” alongside land, labour, capital and technology. The National Data Administration now oversees dozens of data exchanges. China Unicom, one of the world’s largest mobile operators, reported Rmb204mn ($29mn) in assets in its first filing under the new rules.
Most of the major AI players went to Davos, though they weren’t the main focus due to the Trump administration. Google Deepmind founder Demis Hassabis admitted that the current AI market is ‘bubble-like’.
A post on AI sovereignty came out of one of those times when a casual conversation suddenly has you seeing the theme in your news feeds. I was having one of them conversations with a friend over a paper cup of coffee, mentioned I’d been embedded at Google and they said ‘we can’t trust the Americans with AI, the way we did with social’.
That opens opportunities. Chinese open source models are working in Singapore government data centres, Korean cloud computing company Naver is looking beyond its own country for clients who want an alternative to US big technology. France has gone it alone with its own defence AI – as the ultimate expression of AI sovereignty.
The All-Star Chinese AI Conversation of 2026 | ChinaTalk – Interesting discussions on China based AI platforms on their successes and challenges. By their nature, the give China defacto AI sovereignty. Risk taking and GPUs or TPUs performance seem to be the main sources of concern. A good deal of focus on squeezing out the maximum intelligence per watt rather than scaling to infinity and beyond. Tonality wise it’s refreshing down to earth in comparison to Altman et al.
‘South Korea’s Google’ pitches AI alternative to US and China | FT – Korea has built up positive relations in the Middle East since the 1970s when they helped on major construction and engineering projects. They would be viewed positively and as a good hedge to both the US and China from a technology dependency point-of-view. Their offer is greater AI sovereignty for Middle Eastern countries in particular, you might also winning business in Central Asia as well.
It comes as a growing number of brands are moving into the children’s, teenage and young adult skincare market. In October, the first skincare brand developed for under-14s, Ever-eden, launched in the US. Superdrug has just created a range for those aged between 13 and 28.
A number of brands have surged in popularity among very young social-media users, creating a phenomenon known as “Sephora kids”. These children share videos showcasing beauty products from Drunk Elephant, Bubble, Sol de Janeiro and similar brands.
A Theory of Dumb: Why Are IQ Scores Suddenly Falling? | Intelligencer – a century ago, if you asked someone what dogs and rabbits have in common, they might answer “Dogs hunt rabbits,” not “They’re both mammals.”Maybe, then, all the noise and novelty wasn’t rotting our minds but upgrading them. (Studies suggest that better nutrition and reduced exposure to lead may have also helped.) In any case, the Flynn effect held steady for so long and through so many apparent threats that there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t last forever, even if, someday, somebody invented a chatbot that could do homework or Theo Von started podcasting.
Or so thought Elizabeth Dworak, now an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, when she chose the topic of her 2023 master’s thesis. She decided to analyze the results of 394,378 IQ tests taken in the U.S. between 2006 and 2018 to see if they exhibited the same climb. “I had all this cognitive data and thought, Hey, there’s probably a Flynn effect in there,” she says. But when she ran the numbers, “I felt like I was in Don’t Look Up,” the movie in which an astronomy grad student played by Jennifer Lawrence discovers a comet speeding toward Earth. “I spent weeks going back through all the code. I thought I’d messed something up and would have to delay submitting. But then I showed my adviser, and he said, ‘Nope, your math is right.’” The math showed declines in three important testing categories, including matrix reasoning (abstract visual puzzles), letter and number series (pattern recognition), and verbal reasoning (language-based problem-solving). The first two, in which losses were deepest, measure what psychologists call fluid intelligence, or the power to adapt to new situations and think on the fly. The drops showed up across age, gender, and education level but were most dramatic among 18-to-22-year-olds and those with the least amount of schooling.
How Hustle Culture Got America Addicted to Work – Business Insider – in America, the long, steady march toward a more leisurely future came to an abrupt halt. Today, according to the international economic database Penn World Table, the German work year is an astonishing 380 hours shorter than ours — which means that Germans work almost 10 weeks less than we do every year.
Even stranger, Americans began to glamorize their lack of free time. As the boomer generation reshaped society in its own image, it brought its ’60s, countercultural ethos to the workplace — transforming the staid, conformist office into a vessel of self-expression. Work became the central means by which you undertook to live your best life, follow your passion, and change the world. As Goldman bankers and Google idealists alike began to toil through the nights and weekends that previous generations had fought so hard to secure for them, mental-health professionals bemoaned the rise of what became known as “hustle culture.” Working long hours was suddenly the ultimate status symbol, a peculiarly American form of humblebrag. In 2017, a clever marketing study found that if you told an American you worked long hours, they assumed you were rich. If you told an Italian the same thing, they assumed you were poor.
Waymo Has Come for the Kids in Los Angeles – The New York Times – “Here, it is not unusual for families to have multiple children attending different schools far from home. School buses, if you are deemed eligible, are limited to dropping off and picking up children at locations and times that are often unhelpful. The city bus, if there is somehow a direct route to school, comes with its own set of risks that can make parents uneasy.
Ms. Rivera, a psychiatric social worker, is stuck at work until 6 p.m. most days, while her husband, who installs and repairs glass, comes home even later.
The couple struggles to coordinate their jobs and their three children. They tried Uber, and Lyft, but found that those drivers tended to cancel after discovering their riders were minors. They turned to HopSkipDrive, a service geared toward students, but the drivers had to be scheduled in advance, and would leave if children were late.
Then, a few months ago, Ms. Rivera and Alexis did a test run with Waymo.
“It was the only option where I was like, ‘Oh my God, she can order a car, nobody’s in there, she can unlock it with her phone,’” Ms. Rivera, 42, said. “I know she’s going to be safe and she’s going to get home.” – interesting use case
Chinese luxury goes local | WARC – High-end Chinese brands are stealing a march on their Western rivals with homegrown labels that appeal to more discerning local consumers who are looking for luxury items that feel tailored to them. China’s $49bn luxury market is “changing fast”: ecommerce sales at jeweller Lapou Gold, for instance, have surged more than 1000% in the first three quarters of this year compared with two years ago. Songmont, a Chinese brand that claims to have ‘experiential’ designer bags, has grown its online sales 90% while Gucci online bag sales in China have fallen 50%, according to the Business Times. – This was inevitable when you had so many talented (and a number of mediocre) Chinese people being brought through the likes of Central St Martins.
Coca-Cola CMO Manolo Arroyo on WPP, AI and a new era for media | The Drum – Coca-Cola’s marketing ecosystem was sprawling and complex. The business was working with approximately 6,000 agency partners globally, while the majority of its multi-billion-dollar media budget was allocated to traditional channels. Arroyo wanted fewer partners, deeper integration and a shift towards digital-first execution at scale.
That ambition led to the consolidation of Coca-Cola’s global advertising account into WPP and the creation of Open X, a bespoke unit designed to manage the brand across markets and disciplines. Nine studios were established in key regions, housing a mix of Coca-Cola employees, WPP staff and specialist partners.
“It’s a marketing factory,” says Arroyo. “There are more than 2,000 employees of Coca-Cola and more than 2,000 employees of WPP […] and ultimately it’s enabled us to move from a company that in 2019 was investing close to 75% of our paid media on traditional TV, to a company that’s going to end up this year putting 70% of all our paid media on digital, particularly social and influencer led, marketing. For us, it’s our new TV.”
Outcry after French army chief’s ‘prepared to lose children’ warning | Le Monde – “We have all the knowledge, all the economic and demographic strength to deter the Moscow regime from trying its luck by going further,” said Mandon. “What we lack, and this is where you have a major role to play, is the strength of spirit to accept suffering in order to protect who we are.”
Paying tribute to French forces deployed worldwide, he added: “If our country falters because it is not prepared to accept – let’s be honest – to lose its children, to suffer economically because defense production will take precedence, then we are at risk.” – I don’t think that the west is ready or able to face Russia or China because of this. The war is lost before its fought
SOF, AI, and Changing Western Conceptions of War | Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University – Each generational shift in technology impacts military operations. Consequently, a shift in military training, command, and promotion structure should follow. Much of the conversation surrounding AI makes it seem like an unprecedented esoteric concept. While this is partly true, the same was said about steam engines during the Industrial Revolution. Simply put, AI is the next technological breakthrough and there will be more after it. As Clausewitz stated, the character of war changes, not the nature of war. A willingness to adapt while following strategic tenets will enable us to weather the storm and thrive in AI generation warfare. Failure to do so will only bring obsolescence while America’s adversaries gain global hegemonic status. Proper implementation of AI will result in faster decision making, more accurate intelligence, improved resource allocation, better spatial awareness, more effective messaging, and more impactful strategies. The key to reaching this level of success is SOF. SOF is uniquely equipped and trained to implement AI quickly and effectively, delivering results that can be scaled to the rest of the military.
A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code | WIRED – Phreeli, the phone carrier startup is designed to be the most privacy-focused cellular provider available to Americans. Phreeli, as in, “speak freely,” aims to give its user a different sort of privacy from the kind that can be had with end-to-end encrypted texting and calling tools like Signal or WhatsApp. Those apps hide the content of conversations, or even, in Signal’s case, metadata like the identities of who is talking to whom. Phreeli instead wants to offer actual anonymity. It can’t help government agencies or data brokers obtain users’ identifying information because it has almost none to share. The only piece of information the company records about its users when they sign up for a Phreeli phone number is, in fact, a mere ZIP code. That’s the minimum personal data Merrill has determined his company is legally required to keep about its customers for tax purposes.
Waking the Sleeping European Giant – by Matthew C. Klein | The Overshoot – “Europe” as a geopolitical entity does not exist. Instead of a strong and independent continent capable of securing the lives and freedoms of its citizens, Europe is divided into dozens of countries, all of which are too small individually to stand up to external threats. The problem is compounded by the mismatch between where the military resources can be found and where they are most needed. There is relatively little overlap between the places with the balance sheet capacity (mostly in the north), the places with the productive capacity (mostly in the center), the places with the largest populations of otherwise unoccupied fighting-age men (more in the south), and Europe’s front lines (largely, although not exclusively, in the east).
Bending Spoons raids the digital graveyard for paranormal returns | FT – businesses in the Bending Spoons stable: AOL, the dial-up internet service that had been most recently attached to Yahoo, and Evernote, the virtual scratch pad. – alongside Vimeo and Brightcove with Eventbrite due to join them
