Materials are as important as technology and innovation. Without access to hydrocarbons you wouldn’t just lose access to the car as transport, but the foundational products of modern life.
Added to the materials list of importance would be the likes of:
Lithium – current battery technology and in some alloys
Helium – inert atmosphere for chemical reactions and lighter than air craft including blimps, airships and weather balloons
Silicon – semiconductors
Cobalt – a key material in batteries
Titanium – similar applications to steel but with a higher weight to strength ratio. Also hypoallergenic in nature
Carbon fibre – high strength light weight materials
Rare earth metals and key materials including:
Dysprosium- magnets, lasers, nuclear control rods
Erbium – lasers, particularly in telecoms fibre optics cables and optronics
Europium – interest in using it to develop memory for quantum computers
Holmium – magnets, lasers and quantum computer memory
Neodymium – high strength magnets
Praseodymium – magnets
Yttrium – catalyst in some chemical processes
Thorium – future safer nuclear fuel source
Thulium – portable x-ray devices, ceramics used in microwave equipment
Scandium – high strength lightweight alloys
Ytterbium – manufacture of stainless steel, atomic clocks
Uranium – nuclear fuel
In addition to innovation in material science and chemistry with these raw materials. There is also the benefit of recycling and reusing existing stuff once it has finished its useful life. The Tokyo olympics of 2020 saw an unprecedented peace time effort to find precious metals in e-waste and junk that could then be processed into the winners medals.
A desire to lower the carbon footprint will require ingenuity in systems, design and materials use for it to be successful
SCSI was a huge part of my early computer life. It was the way my Mac connected to external hard drives, printers, optical scanners and early optical drives.
Sun Microsystems computers used SCSI to and powered the dot com boom.
SCSI still lives on as a software layer in enterprise computer systems connecting storage together. It even exists within the USB mass storage device class.
SCSI is a reminder that technology is often build of layers of older technologies.
The slow death of downtown San Francisco | U.S. | EL PAÍS English – San Francisco’s problem is now as much reputational as it is economics now with the city labeled as being in a ‘doom loop’. Much of the blame seems to sit with the city administration under Mayor London Breed.
Great summary of the current state of rare earth metals processing. China appreciated the strategic nature of these materials before everyone else did and has been prepared to tolerate a high degrees of pollution in processing to build a monopoly.
Online
Skype was a thing in the early 2000s. I knew companies that used it in a similar way to FaceTime now. I used it for conference calls and video calls with friends around the world. I had completely forgot that eBay had bought Skype, I could only remember Silverlake acquired it and then sold it on to Microsoft.
Synclavier Regen Synthesizer Introduction – Synthtopia – the old New England Digital Synclavier was a floor to ceiling rack full of equipment paired with a monitor mouse, computer keyboard and musical keyboard. Synclavier was an early digital synthesiser and then evolved to create the first digital audio workstation, featuring digital tapeless recording, digital effects, sequencing of instruments, sampling and synthesis. By 1980, the Synclavier 2 was launched. Then you started to increased adoption including Michael Jackson for this Thriller album and across the US film industry for sound effects work.
Producer Michael Hoenig circa 1987
The sampling and synthesis of Synclavier helped define the sound of 1980s record production for a wide range of groups from the era including
At the time there was concern that the digital synthesis and sampling of the Synclavier would put live music out of the business, so many concert halls in the US banned the use of the Synclavier.
Mirage FM: how patten created the first LP made entirely from AI sounds | Dazed – Pattern’s album brings synthesis forward to the present day. A mix of crude pads and textures hint at how machine learning can change synthesis over time. At the moment, record labels are looking to restrict the use of machine learning, which they view as a similar threat to the MP3 format of the early 2000s and digital sampling from the early 1990s. Like earlier technologies, they will eventually make their peace with machine learning based synthesis and use the opportunity to further gouge artists and creators
Three years of National Security Law in Hong Kong: Farewell “special status”? | Merics – the NSL has severely reduced the rule of law in Hong Kong by granting the government powers to circumvent the courts and thereby deny defendants a fair trial. The case of media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai illustrates how this presents a risk to businesses and their property rights. The Hong Kong government froze Lai’s majority of shares in his company Next Media, which led to its liquidation and the end of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily. The case is highly political and does not reflect the situation of most businesses, but it does show the power the Hong Kong government can wield over business. – German think tank on the NSL
Edelman Cutting Roughly 240 Employees Amid Reorganization | Provoke Media – Edelman is just the canary in the coal mine. Beyond (part of Next Fifteen) is closing down its London office, smaller agencies have been going to the wall and another of my former agency alma mater WE are laying off just under 5 per cent of their headcount. I don’t remember this happening during the 2008 financial crisis. There are likely to be several factors blamed:
Rising interest rates combined with already lean cashflow has driven some agencies to the wall
Declining economic conditions has resulted in declining marketing budgets
Some agencies (Edelman being a case in point) bulked up on talent, expecting a fast exit from COVID driven decline
Brands are getting shaky on the commitment to brand purpose which will hit a lot of below the line agencies particularly hard
More marketing spend is being spent on innovation with an expectation of cost savings down the line (particularly in production and across B2B marketing)
MikroE welcomes back IrDA with Click board | EETimes – IrDA was first introduced in 1994 for consumer equipment but has since been used in areas such as power systems where a light-based system is safer or RF is problematic. It’s slow with data rates up to 115kbit/s at 1 metre. The reality is usually much slower. I used to use IrDA for transferring business cards of a few KB each which would take 30 seconds or more
Plenty have already covered the OceanGate Titan implosion in more detail. I will not repeat that work but wanted to bring to wider attention how marketers have jumped on the bandwagon. The following advert appeared in the print edition of the Financial Times, placed by Omega watches promoting their Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean Ultra Deep series of watches.
‘Seamaster – Precision at every level’ next to a scale going beyond 6,000 metres.
Omega
I personally thought that the advert was too soon after the implosion for good taste. Although the watch community has seen a renewed interest in deep diving capable watches after the OceanGate Titan incident.
Young Japanese are craving fast fashion. What happened? | Vogue Business – it’s the economy stupid, luxury is less accessible. Secondly, much of the youth looks like Gyaru peaked in the early 2000s due to financial issues and things haven’t improved since. Shibuya subcultures were as dependent on the ability to spend as on youth creativity.
The Threat of Decivilisation | Quillette – President Macron when having a Chatham House type discussion with sociology experts used the phrase processus de décivilisation – as a descriptor for the widespread civil and political unrest that has rocked France.
Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron
On the face of it, decivilisation is an appropriate term if Macron believed that there was something rotten at the centre of French society. But the phrase decivilisation is problematic and Macron has been capitalised by French on the political left.
Renaud Camus
The crux of the left’s criticism is a work by the author Renaud Camus. Camus became famous writing a book called Tricks about a series of up to 45 stories (depending which edition you read) about one-night stands he had travelling around the world as a gay man in the late 1970s. Decades later Camus became more famous for his contributions to ideas of the far right, notably the great replacement concept in reaction to increased immigration in France from former French colonies. While these works were published in French they were summarised for English readers in his book You Will Not Replace Us!
In his works he describes the gradual takeover of France as decivilisation.
The left
The left drew a line between Camus work and Macron’s phrase and assumed that it was a way to build a bridge to the resurgent far right in France.
The reality is more complex. The degree of change in French society has driven backlashes in French society, in a similar way that Brexit and small boat immigration did in the UK. The problem for the left is that these reactionaries would have been natural constituents of the left. The left, like in many countries, instead has pivoted to degree educated urban dwellers, abandoning the workers to the far right.
Is French society really breaking down?
It’s hard to tell whether ‘decivilisation’ is really happening. Civil disturbances tend to happen during times of economic unrest and in the past has been a reset. There is a body of opinion who believe that social media has its thumb on the scales, driving things harder and faster without a countervailing force to help balance things out over time, like happened in previous decades.
Japan Rail Companies Limit Train Passes Due to Chip Shortage – these stored value cards also allow consumers to buy things in combinis as well as travel. They are similar to Hong Kong’s Octopus cards. What’s happening to the chips through? Japanese YouTubers have published advisory videos around the debacle for tourists to Japan. It seems to be a drive towards registration as much as anything else
Cigars are still a thing. This looks like a feature length video produced in conjunction between the YouTuber and a cigar manufacturer.
Marketing
Multi-factored reasons in nature why campaigns seem to be working less well. We know that as campaigns have become more digital, campaigns have been less effective and marketers being less confident in their campaigns. Interesting the way brand building on digital is danced around. The channels often dont work and measures are BS only a technologist would love.
OPEC – the national cartel for oil producing countries is having a meeting this weekend. OPEC stands for Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. For me, OPEC is something from my childhood. I grew up in the aftermath of 1973 OPEC embargo.
The 1973 OPEC embargo
1973, a coalition of Arab countries launch an attack on Israel, with a view to regaining land that had been lost during the 1967. The OPEC embargo was targeted at nations that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War:
Canada
Japan
Netherlands
Portugal
Rhodesia
South Africa
United Kingdom
United States
The reality is that the impact was so much wider than just the embargoed countries. For instance, Ireland wasn’t targeted, yet was impacted heavily by OPEC’s action. The time was critical as well.
The oil shift
The west had moved from coal to oil after the Second World War. Societies followed the same energy path that Winston Churchill mapped out for the Royal Navy back in 1911 for many of the same reasons. Oil offered many benefits in a way that it provided double the thermal content of coal. Boilers in power stations could be smaller, trains and ships could go double the distance.
Countries like Japan and Ireland had moved from coal fired power stations towards oil fired power stations. Car ownership had taken off. Finally, the US had been on a journey from using domestically produced and nearby oil (via Canada and Venezuela), to rapidly increasing oil imports from 1970 onwards.
This gave the OPEC countries a lot of leverage. The embargo finished in 1974 but oil remained at $11/barrel.
1979 oil crisis
The Iranian Islamic revolution disrupted supplies of oil to the west. In late 1978, with the revolutionary fervour in the air foreign oil workers left Iran. Iran tried to use Navy personnel to keep things going. Then in 1979 the revolution succeeded and The Shah vacated his head of state role and left Iran with his family.
With the exception of the Gulf War oil production and pricing was stable through the 1990s.
OPEC back in the news
The Ukraine war gave Middle Eastern oil producers an increased amount of leverage as European oil and natural gas customers pivoted away from Russia as a supplier. Countries like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are investing for a post-oil economy with large infrastructure projects like Neom and need a $80/barrel in order to make their balance of payments.
Yet the oil price currently is too low. This has created a fractious relationship between OPEC and the business press, especially Reuters and Bloomberg who are banned from their meetings. A good of the reason why oil prices are so low is that China’s economy didn’t surge back, and fast growing economies like India and China are getting cheap Russian oil. And despite what the Saudis might want, the price of oil at the moment is more affected by demand, rather than supply-related issues.
Saudia Arabia itself as exasperated this as it has bought Russian diesel and resold it on in South East Asia at a higher price as an arbitrage play.
China investigated Covid lab leak claims, says top scientist | Financial Times – Professor George Gao, former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told a BBC Radio 4 podcast that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was checked by experts to see whether the facility could have been the source of the coronavirus pandemic. – to be fair just because you investigate it doesn’t mean its true. I would have expected them to consider all possible vectors
Economics
US-China trade war would hurt Britain most, says leaked analysis | Sunday Times – The analysis finds that the UK’s economy will suffer more than those of the US, EU and China in the event of a full-blown subsidies war. It says the UK cannot adopt “a wholesale activist industrial policy” like the US, EU or China because it is only a “mid-sized economy outside major trading blocs”. The UK does not have the same “fiscal capacity or economic strengths” as the world’s superpowers, the paper goes on to say – not terribly surprising given that it’s about scale. Even inside of the EU there are likely to be countries that are clear winners and losers
Does Gender Diversity on Boards Really Boost Company Performance? – Knowledge at Wharton – Despite the intuitive appeal of the argument that gender diversity on the board improves company performance, research suggests otherwise. Results of numerous academic studies of the topic suggest that the presence of more female board members does not much improve — or worsen — a firm’s performance
Japan’s leading cyber security expert Cartan McLaughlin gives an update on the current state of global cybersecurity and shares insights on how Japan can protect itself against the increasing wave of attacks. McLaughlin also answered questions on effective defense tools, whether Japan is catching up or falling behind, and Russian cyber attacks on Ukraine.
Words I never thought I would see myself writing together in the one sentence hacking and farming. Farming represents a large part of the US economy, and, food supply chain has national security aspects to it for obvious reasons.
