Ged Carroll

Category: oprah time | 書評 | 서평 : 文芸批評

Welcome! I guess the first question that you have is why oprah time? Well in my last year of college I used to sit in the house that I shared with my landlord and write my essays whilst watching cable TV.

There I would be sipping tea, writing away and referencing from text books spread around me on the couch and coffee table. One of the programmes on the in the background was Oprah Winfrey. A lot of the show was just background noise. But I was fascinated by Oprah’s book club.

She’d give her take on a book, maybe interview the author. And then it would be blasted up the New York Times bestsellers list. This list appears weekly in the New York Times Book Review. Oprah’s book club was later emulated by other talk show hosts, notably the UK’s Richard Madeley and Judy Finegan.

On the high end you had Melvyn Bragg‘s South Bank Show when they profiled an author of the moment.

When I came to writing my own review of books that I’d read, I was was brought back to that time working on a sofa. Apple laptop in hand. It made sense to go with Oprah time.

You might also notice a link called bookshelf. This is a list of non-fiction books that I have kept. And the reasons why I have kept them.

If you’ve gone through my reviews and think that you’d like to send me a book to review. Feel free to contact me. Click this link, prove that you’re human and you will have my email address.

  • Enquire Within + more things

    Enquire Within Upon Everything

    Enquire Within tends to appear in book collections for people of a certain age, or, where the book collector has inherited part of their collection. Spending time on the family farm in Ireland during my childhood, I used to see a copy of an early 20th century vintage sit next to a dog-eared copy of Old Moore’s Almanac (not to be mistaken for a separate UK publication: Old Moore’s Almanack), Old Moore’s was used for deciding what to plant in the garden besides potatoes.

    During the bank holiday weekend, staying with my parents, emergency works on a water main managed to take out the broadband and electricity along their road. I went back though my Dad’s boxes of books and leafed through my parents copy of Enquire Within. My Dad thinks he had received the copy as a gift from a the owner of a second hand book store in Birkenhead market right after he had moved into the first house that my parents had bought. But he can’t be certain. Given that the outer gloss paper wrap around the hardback inner cover uses a font that looks similar to Eurostile and the price is in decimal – I guess it’s from the early to mid-1970s.

    Enquire Within could be thought of as a primer for everyday life. Topics included how to play a variety of card games, basic first aid, the basics on taxation and education with the addresses of the UK government departments responsible. There was a travel section with a few paragraphs on every western European country, which had been written by the Financial Times travel correspondent. The gardening section went into much more depth explaining what a hardy annual and hardy perennial were, alongside the correct way to build a compost heap, how to dig drills and prune roses.

    At the back there is an exhaustive list of children’s names together with their meanings.

    Enquire within

    Enquire Within and the origins of the web

    What I didn’t find out until later on was that Tim Berners-Lee was partly inspired to create a predecessor to what would become the world wide web by a Victorian vintage copy of Enquire Within that was in his parents house when he was growing up. The system was called ENQUIRE and seemed to be similar conceptually to HyperCard or a Wiki. The World Wide Web came out of Berners-Lee’s efforts to integrate disparate systems including ENQUIRE together to facilitate better collaboration between CERN research projects.

    Beauty

    Digital culture is changing our face: How South Korea is inspiring new cosmetic trends | Culture | EL PAÍS English 

    Economics

    MIT Economist Daron Acemoglu Takes on Big Tech: “Our Future Will Be Very Dystopian” – DER SPIEGEL – The rich and powerful have hijacked progress throughout history, says Daron Acemoglu. They did so back in the Middle Ages and also now in the age of artificial intelligence.

    Decoupling isn’t phoney – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion

    Energy

    The Japanese Companies Pursuing a Hydrogen Economy – The Diplomat 

    Bosch starts production of 800V EV technology | EE News Europe 

    Finance

    This video on money laundering is as much of interest for the phenomenon of quality documentaries on YouTube as it is for recycling known truths about HSBC.

    Gadgets

    Global Smartphone Shipments Will Hit Lowest Point in a Decade, IDC Says – CNET – likely to be a mix of market maturity and indicative of inelastic pricing in the premium sector

    Hong Kong

    Language Log » Language and politics in Hong Kong: National Security and the promotion of topolect and Hong Kong national security police target Cantonese language | Quartz 

    Bigger, better, smoother? Hong Kong, Shenzhen border zone blueprint hopes to offer best of both worlds, as Beijing ‘exerts pressure’ to spur cooperation | South China Morning Post – Leonard Chan Tik-yuen, chairman of the Hong Kong Innovative Technology Development Association, said the blueprint amounted to directives from Beijing that told both cities to become more integrated.

    Innovation

    Startup uses MEMS ultrasound to improve audio speaker | EE News Europe 

    Japan

    The Japanese student dorm that governs itself – The Face 

    Marketing

    First-Party Data Is Retail’s Next Growth Engine | BCG and CPGs may have embraced data collaboration, but they need to take it further | LiveRamp | Open Mic | The Drum. Yet more from The Media Leader: Retail media: were we right to get so excited? – The Media Leader  

    Media

    Podcast: Why OOH audiences have not hit a ‘new normal’ yet – with Route’s Denise Turner – The Media Leader

    Changes in the nature of the music industry

    Goldman Sachs Exchange

    Online

    Yahoo, taken private by Apollo Global, finds a new renaissance 

    Retailing

    The Forrester Wave™: Commerce Search And Product Discovery, Q3 2023, Surfaces The Challenges Of AI Unchecked – Don’t let buzzwords distract you from what your customers — and your business — need. Vendors often use their own terminology, especially in a market that hasn’t had a Forrester Wave evaluation in place already. One will talk about how extremely relevant their results are, while another will scoff at “relevancy” as outdated methodology. You’ll hear semantic, vector, hybrid, ML, AI, and all sorts of branded names for products and functions

    Security

    The Cheap Radio Hack That Disrupted Poland’s Railway System | WIRED – the ability to send the command has been described in Polish radio and train forums and on YouTube for years. “Everybody could do this. Even teenagers trolling. The frequencies are known. The tones are known. The equipment is cheap. – This reminds me of the blue boxes used for phone phreaking decades ago.

    I Tracked an NYC Subway Rider’s Movements with an MTA ‘Feature’

    Software

    Adobe’s AI diversity auditor | Patent Drop – is seeking to patent a system for “diversity auditing” using computer vision. Essentially, this system uses facial detection and image classification to break down photos of employees and slot them into categories based on certain physical traits and characteristics. Adobe’s system looks through several images and detects faces in each one, then classifies each face based on a predicted “sensitive attribute” relating to “protected classes of individuals,” such as race, age or gender. For example, Adobe noted, this system may classify images from a company’s website, then compare its predictions to a “comparison population.”

    Technology

    Mexico’s Microchip Advantage | Foreign Affairs – there are significant hurdles to making Mexico a bigger player in supply chains for chips and advanced technologies. The country lacks its Asian rivals’ existing networks of high-technology firms. Until now, investments in the sphere have been sparse. To change this situation, Mexican political and business leaders need a clearer strategy for attracting semiconductor investment. The dividends, both for Mexican industry and for U.S. supply chain security, could be significant. Today’s large-scale shift away from China-focused assembly operations offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a more fully integrated North American semiconductor and electronics supply chain. Despite the United States’ major involvement in many segments of the chip industry, there is at present hardly any semiconductor packaging or assembly in the country and very little anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. The United States maintains a leading role in R&D-intensive segments of the semiconductor industry, including chip design and manufacturing equipment. The CHIPS Act is intended to increase the amount of chip fabrication in the United States. Yet neither the United States nor any country in the Western Hemisphere plays a major role in the final stages of the chip manufacturing process—assembly, testing, and packaging (ATP)—in which semiconductors are tested and assembled into sophisticated packages. The Western Hemisphere also does relatively little assembly of advanced electronic systems that require a lot of chips, such as consumer electronics.

    Web of no web

    Surfings equivalent of a dive computer: Search GPS Test User Signup

  • Deluxe – how luxury lost it’s lustre

    I had this copy of Deluxe on my shelf for a while and finally managed got round to reading it. Deluxe – how luxury lost its lustre was written by Dana Thomas. Dana knows the subject that she’s talking about.

    Deluxe by Dana Thomas

    Dana Thomas

    Dana Thomas is a Paris-based journalist who covered the fashion industry. Thomas started her journalistic career writing for the ‘style’ section of The Washington Post. For a decade and a half Thomas was a cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek in Paris. She has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Architectural Digest. Deluxe is one of three books that she has written, the other is Fashionopolis, which focuses on the fast fashion industry and Gods and Kings covered the career of fashion designers Alexander McQueen and John Galliano.

    Deluxe – How Luxury Lost its Lustre

    In the introduction starts with a scatter gun approach. She bemoans Gucci and Burberry factory seconds on sale in China, revealing the global supply chain used by luxury brands now. She also criticises that luxury goods are used as currency by some sex workers from compensated dating to ‘returning gifts’ and pocketing the difference minus a restocking fee.

    I get the sense that Thomas would like to see these companies remain small ‘secrets’ only known by a cosmopolitan cognoscenti, obviously including herself. What my younger peers would call ‘gatekeeping’ in a derogatory way.

    Parasite singles

    Most of Thomas’ ire focuses on Louis Vuitton early on. She describes Bernard Arnaud in unflattering terms and makes the globalisation of the brand sound like a mix of a happy accident and opportunity. Along the way she critiques the weakness of Japanese society’s love for luxury goods down to subtle social signalling and ‘parasite singles’ – young women living at home with their parents who spend their disposable income on luxury goods.

    (The reality is that could be young people with a job in Spain or Italy either as east Asians and Southern Europeans tend to only move out of home to marry or to follow work or education.)

    Japanese tourists took their luxury shopping abroad, taking advantage of duty-free shopping. It’s no coincidence that LVMH owns DFS (Duty Free Shopping) outlets across America and the Pacific rim. Some of the lessons that DFS and LVMH learned selling to Japanese luxury buyers, such last late closing, you can still see in showrooms across the Asia Pacific region.

    Jumping from Japanese duty free shoppers in Hawaii, Thomas moves on to the connection between a generation of Italian designers and Hollywood. Richard Gere’s star power was as much down to his styling making him look the part by Giorgio Armani as it was to his considerable acting prowess.

    From Hollywood, the book delves into the perfume operations of the design houses. It highlights how perfume formulation moved from being an in-house activity for design houses to being outsourced to a few specialists companies who work with a ‘creative brief’.

    Quality issues

    The area where I can agree most with Thomas is around the decline in quality of luxury goods. Deluxe approaches this from the different tactics that luxury companies have used to conceal their use of Chinese factories. However as Apple has shown, made in China doesn’t necessarily mean cheap or poorly made. Indeed, a decade and a half after Deluxe was written, we’re seeing local luxury brands displacing international luxury brands in the Chinese market for several reasons, usually explained using the term ‘guo chao‘.

    Thomas estimates that there at least four factories in China who manufacture most of the luxury industry’s handbags and leather goods – alongside private label brands for department stores and supermarkets. I was surprised that even back in 2004, manufacturing in China only saved 30 percent of the bill of materials.

    The book goes on to cover the cost cutting that has gone into luxury products, from clothes with cheap stitching, skipped tailoring such as no lining in jackets and dresses. Thomas highlights that these changes happened to allow luxury to go mass market. Luxury then followed customers out of the office or the salon into all aspects of their life including sportswear and ‘streetwear’. What my friend Jeremy calls the ‘Supremification’ of luxury.

    The reliance on the mass market bought about two challenges in Thomas’ eyes:

    • Counterfeit products that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing by experts
    • Rockier finances for the large luxury corporates who are no longer sheltered from economic cycles by the continued spending of ultra high net worth individuals.

    The future

    Thomas left us with two parts to what we saw the future of luxury looking like:

    • The continued pursuit of emerging markets with India replacing China due to demographics.
    • The new luxury of industry specialists spinning off and creating new houses, because they were jaded with the existing business practices and structures. The book highlights Tom Ford; who recently gave up his label and sold it on in November 2022 to cosmetics business Estée Lauder and fellow fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna.

    In summary

    Dana Thomas’ Deluxe is a book of its time in the early to mid 2000s. Thomas clearly has some bias’ due to history with some of the protagonists, which is worthwhile bearing in mind. The historical part of the book is useful; but the luxury industry has moved on and in some ways the problems are now much worse. With those provisos in mind, I can recommend the book as a background read on the luxury sector.

    More book reviews here.

  • The Code – Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

    The Code

    The Code – Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara is the second book I have read recently about Silicon Valley, this review follows my review of Chip War by Chris Miller. The Code covers the history of Silicon Valley from the post-war to the present.

    Margaret O’Mara

    In terms of her background, O’Mara is a Clinton administration era policy wonk. When O’Mara left policy circles, she became an academic and is now a history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle – at the other end of the country. Her area of focus is on the history of the modern technology industry. She spent five years researching the book in the mid-2010s, just as Silicon Valley was going under a technological and social change.

    The lens shaping everything else that I have written here

    I am a sucker for books on the history of technology and like Chip War, The Code was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.

    Like Miller’s Chip War, O’Mara brought a degree of distance from her material to her writing. She has done a lot of research and surfaced lesser known characters like community computing pioneer Liza Loop in her work, she doesn’t have the inside track.

    Bob Cringely with his work on InfoWorld‘s Notes From the Field column got an inside track from the Valley’s engineers before he went on to write is magnus opus Accidental Empires. Like Cringely, Michael Malone was brought up in the Silicon Valley area and then worked the business section beat as a reporter for the local newspapers. Cringely and Malone lived and breathed the valley. If you are are fan of Cringely and Malone’s works, expect something that is interesting but stylistically very different.

    On to The Code itself

    Other reviewers have used words like ‘masterful’ and ‘majestic history’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality aren’t really all that helpful. In contrast to Chip War which took me six months, I managed to storm through The Code in a week. This is partly down my familiarity to the material covered and the airplane view that O’Mara takes when writing about her subject. I enjoyed O’Mara’s writing, but could also see someone coming to it with a good grasp of American political history and current affairs, but no knowledge of Silicon Valley history enjoying it just as much.

    Being an academic O’Mara worked hard to source everything in The Code, she also provides a recommended reading list that goes into different aspects of the story that she laid out in more depth including John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said and Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley.

    HP's first product, sitting outside of Bill and Dave's office (in HP's headquarters)
    H-P’s first product taken by Robert Scoble

    The book starts in the post-war period as Stanford and Silicon Valley peaked as an area for military contractors. O’Mara references the political lives of the H-P founders alongside the growth of cold war technologies and the space race.

    O’Mara leans hard into Stanford’s defence industry connections that started pre world war II. The book then veers to the decline of the military industrial complex in the area due to a number of factors. The Vietnam war demolished the defence budget. The space programme started to wind down after NASA met Kennedy’s challenge to put man on the moon. Johnson’s social programmes took spend away from scientific developments. Finally the social climate in the US changed.

    The next stage of computing was shaped by counter cultural values which O’Mara covered the libertarian instincts of Silicon Valley pioneers alongside the more community orientated views of the counterculture folks. Unlike other writers, O’Mara also covers the Boston area technology corridor that Silicon Valley eventually overshadows.

    O’Mara focuses more on the finance of Silicon Valley covering some of the highlights featured in Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law. But O’Mara also delves into the public markets and the role of lobbying in the Silicon Valley finance machine.

    O’Mara tells how immigration affected the nature of Silicon Valley through the story of Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!. As is the case with policy wonks she puts a lot of emphasis on Al Gore, the information superhighway and the Clipper chip. The Clipper chip resurrected like Godzilla the libertarian Republican party arm of Silicon Valley elites and paved the way for the likes of Peter Thiel later on.

    The Code finishes on the future hopes for autonomous driving by university research teams and Google’s Waymo business.

    You can get hold of Chip War here. More book reviews here.

  • Chip War

    It has taken me far too long to finish Chip War and write this review, so apologies in advance. Chip War was one of the FT’s best business books of 2022. In reality it’s a book about history, that happens to feature businesses.

    Chip War

    The lens shaping everything else that I have written here

    I am a sucker for books on the history of technology and Chip War was right in my wheelhouse. It complemented, rather than overlapped some of my existing favourite technology history books like Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires, John Markoff’s What The Dormouse Said or most of Michael Malone and Steven Levy’s output to date.

    The author

    The author Chris Miller wasn’t a familiar name to me. Unlike Cringely, Markoff, Malone or Levy; Miller is an academic rather than a former journalist. Miller currently teaches international history at Tufts University. Chip War wasn’t his first book, his previous ones have focused on Soviet and Russian history. As a technology sector outsider, Miller’s Chip War has a very different tone my other favourite books from the genre.

    It also allowed Miller to view the history of semiconductors in terms of a global perspective, that I hadn’t previously seen done.

    On to Chip War itself

    Other reviewers have used words like ‘outstanding’ and ‘epic’ to describe the book – which while being a reasonable guide to overall quality and length of read aren’t really all that helpful. It took me six months to read as a casual book. This is partly down to a hectic work schedule and that its a long book. I suspect that some readers when they reviewed the book seem to have thought ‘long’ as difficult to read. It’s actually 351 pages ignoring acknowledgements and the footnotes at the back of the book. Being an academic Miller worked hard to source everything in Chip War.

    The book starts in the post-war period as the defence industry moves from being focused on hammering steel to developing smarter systems using semiconductors. That road takes the book past Texas Instruments and the early Silicon Valley of Bob Noyce and other members of the treacherous eight.

    The book also zooms out to cover the Soviet Union’s failed efforts to replicate Silicon Valley as well as domestic industrial espionage and the start of globalisation which begat the current industry.

    The Japanese challenge is covered in depth as is the rise of Korea including challenges that the industry faced in the early 2000s. The rise of Taiwan and its use of semiconductors as a hedge against invasion from the mainland. European tool maker ASML gets its own section, which is a case study in how to make a virtue of necessity. Finally it covers the technology conflict with China. Bring this up to date circa 2022.

    If you are student of Silicon Valley history, then Chip War is unique in the way it puts everything in context. There were some completely new parts to me such as the political role that Sony founder Akio Morita played in advocating for a robust Japanese semiconductor industry as part of reasserting Japanese importance internationally.

    You can get hold of Chip War here. More book reviews here.

  • Bruce Mau + more things

    Bruce Mau

    I spent part of the bank holiday weekend reading and finally managed to tuck into designer Bruce Mau’s signature book MC24. For those that haven’t heard of him Bruce Mau is a Canadian designer and academic. He founded a brand design agency: Bruce Mau Design which is now part of marketing combine Stagwell. His Massive Change Network (MCN) is in the transformation business similar to Stewart Brand’s Global Business Network (acquired by the Monitor Group now called Monitor Deloitte) and The Long Now Foundation. The philosophy of Bruce Mau and feels like it had been lifted from an amalgam of TED Talks. Bruce Mau believes in a sustainable future with techno-optimist bent to his views.

    Bruce Mau's 24 principles for massive change

    The MC in MC24 is Massive Change. The 24 stands for his 24 principles for designing massive change in life and work – think Dieter Rams Ten Principles of Good Design and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies meets Robert Greene’s 48 Rules of Power.

    The 24 principles Bruce Mau expands upon are:

    • First inspire design leadership, lead by design
    • Begin with fact-based optimism
    • Always search for the worst
    • Quantify and visualise, seeing is believing
    • We are not separate from, or above nature
    • Design for the power double-double
    • Think forever design, for perpetuity 
    • Design your own economy
    • Sketch: hey somebody let’s fail
    • Think like you are lost in the forest
    • Be whole brain creative, its a talent and a skill
    • Compete with beauty
    • Design for all the senses
    • Rise above the noise
    • Design the time of your life
    • Design the difference not the object
    • Design the platform for constant design 
    • Scale for impact
    • Design the invisible
    • Design the new normal
    • Design what you do to tell your story
    • New wicked problems demand new wicked teams 
    • Those who do teach, get out there and do
    • Work on what you love

    Bruce Mau, like Robert Greene has principles that seem to contradict each other. Publisher Phaidon have wrapped the hard back cover of the book in an iridescent satin fabric that a photograph doesn’t do justice to. Regardless of whether you think the book is a self-help bible, your creative muse, an objet d’art or something nice to thumb through on a Sunday afternoon Bruce Mau and his book MC24 are ideal.

    China

    Where China is beating the world – by Noah Smith – interesting article, although it lacks some nuance about Chinese development, consider it a starting point that you can explore in more depth from, rather than the full story

    China Can’t Afford to Prioritize Security Over the Economy – Bloomberg 

    The Chinese youth unemployment phenomenon | Financial Times – 20 percent unemployment rate, which is reflected in China Economy: Recovery Disappointment Has Set In – Bloomberg 

    Malaysia detains Chinese ship linked to suspected illegal salvage of British WW2 wrecks | Reuters

    I have alluded to the impact of China’s new espionage law. VisualPolitik has pulled together a good video on how it’s being interpreted by multinationals, policy wonks and politicians. It will have precisely the opposite impact that China would like it to have on its economy.

    Consumer behaviour

    How many Britons agree with Andrew Tate’s views on women? | YouGov – so much in this. You also need to think about bias in questions, that its done online and the ‘you can think it, but you shouldn’t say it’ aspect of how Tate supporters might think about the questions

    Interesting debate on how the ‘evangelical bloc’ has evolved over time from being primarily theological to being primarily political in nature.

    Culture

    Nu-metal is cool now – The Face 

    Economics

    Immigration running at ‘unsustainable’ level, says senior Tory, ahead of publication of figures for 2022 – UK politics live – combination of post-COVID and post-Brexit

    De-risking trade with China is a risky business | Financial Times – the FT struggling to make an argument against de-risking shows how much the neo-liberal globalist argument is out of step with the times.

    Energy

    Ofgem wants your energy supplier to make more money (update) | Financial Times

    Solar power investment to exceed oil for first time, says IEA chief | Financial Times 

    Power of Siberia: China keeps Putin waiting on gas pipeline | Financial Times

    Saudi diesel imports from Russia, exports to Singapore hit records | Reuters – Saudi Arabia taking advantage of an arbitrage opportunity

    Lex in depth: the staggering cost of a green hydrogen economy | Financial Times – this is an area that Ireland can win due to its plentiful wind energy potential

    Ethics

    How doctors buy their way out of trouble | Reuters – When federal enforcers alleged in 2015 that New York surgeon Feng Qin had performed scores of medically unnecessary cardiac procedures on elderly patients, they decided not to pursue a time-consuming criminal case. Instead, prosecutors chose an easier, swifter legal strategy: a civil suit. Qin agreed to pay $150,000 in a negotiated settlement and walked free to perform more cardiac surgeries at his new solo practice in lower Manhattan. Qin faced no judge or jury. He did not admit to wrongdoing. He maintained his license to practice. What’s more, neither Qin nor government officials were required to notify patients who purportedly were subjected to vascular surgical procedures they didn’t need. Those included fistulagrams to spot issues like narrowed blood vessels or clots, and angioplasties to open clogged coronary arteries. Within months of the settlement, a registered nurse working for Qin at his Manhattan practice alerted authorities that something seemed amiss. The nurse, who ultimately turned whistleblower, alleged to federal prosecutors that the surgeon was performing unnecessary procedures on patients, mostly elderly Asian and Black immigrants whose care was covered by the public programs Medicare or Medicaid. Prosecutors indicted Qin in 2018 on a felony count of fraud, which carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. But in 2021, in a deal brokered behind closed doors, prosecutors dropped that charge in favor of yet another civil settlement, court records detailing that agreement show. Once again, Qin kept his New York license to practice with no restrictions; a restricted license is one of the few ways the public can learn that a doctor has been disciplined for bad behavior. Qin agreed to pay a total of $800,000 in annual installments ending in December 2025, deposited with the U.S. Department of the Treasury. As an added penalty, he was banned from billing public health programs until February 2025

    Finance

    Exclusive: Chinese hackers attacked Kenyan government as debt strains grew | Reuters – that China is deploying this kind of capability says a lot about how concerned it is about African and ‘Belt and Road’ debt. Act in haste, repent at leisure.

    Exclusive: From Russia with gold: UAE cashes in as sanctions bite | Reuters and Russian gold shipments to the UAE, China and Turkey | Reuters 

    Gadgets

    SanDisk Extreme SSDs keep abruptly failing—firmware fix for only some promised | Ars Technica – I have had this happen on my 2TB SSD

    Germany

    3nm AI chips and 6nm microcontrollers will be key to TSMC Dresden | EE Times – which assumes that the German automobile industry isn’t facing an existential threat. But the German automobile industry is facing a range of existential threats:

    • Their inability to live up to the past German reputation for quality
    • Chinese manufacturers at the low-end
    • German automobile makers struggles with software
    • Japanese and Korean car manufacturers challenging the luxury end of the market. I would rather have a Lexus LX than a G-Wagen. At the moment Lexus have had to shut down the list on the LX they are that oversold

    Hong Kong

    chanhiu design – really nice graphic design. I love their project reflecting on Hong Kong-made knock-off toys familiar to Hong Kong children as well as European children – where these toys turned up in markets during the 1960s through to the early 1980s. More here: Chan Hiu explores Hong Kong’s playful past – The China Project 

    Cayman Islands fights attempts by Singapore and Hong Kong to lure Asia’s wealthy | Financial Times – the sharp uptake of Singapore vehicles versus Hong Kong vehicles is very interesting – an order of 10x magnitude greater. Interesting implications for Hong Kong’s wealth management business and China’s efforts to prevent capital flight from Greater China. It also implies that Hong Kong hasn’t been as successful at attracting foreign funds for investment in China. So the Hong Kong pivot towards the Middle East investor makes sense.

    Hongkongers opt out of organ registry ‘amid fear of Chinese donations’ | The Guardian – the National Security Act might have suppressed open opposition, but Hong Kongers really don’t want to integrate with the mainland. Contrast this with Hong Kongers in Britain: ‘We are all thinking about how to contribute’: Hongkongers boost Britain’s suburbs | Financial Times

    Cathay Pacific to order Boeing 777-8F freighter -sources | Reuters – interesting implied expectations around air cargo, especially when one thinks about the softness in Chinese manufacturing numbers at the moment

    Did China Southern Airlines’ verbal abuse incident in Singapore draw less ire on mainland than discrimination row at Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific? Observers weigh in | South China Morning Post – this is as much about mainland Chinese animosity towards Hong Kongers as it is about poor customer service

    Ideas

    Why Chinese Democracy is Better than Western Democracy According to Tsinghua Prof. Yan Yilong – different realities between China and the west

    Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution | WIRED – fascinating read

    Indonesia

    Key Lessons From Indonesia’s China-Backed Mining & Infrastructure Ventures – The China Project

    Innovation

    How Japan Won the Lithography Industry – by Jon Y 

    Korea

    South Korea warns US could ‘overburden’ its chipmakers with China limits | Financial Times – concerns over the impact of US legislation on Korean chipmakers’ operations in China. The US Chips and Science Act offers $52bn in subsidies to chipmakers building new production facilities in the US, but contains “guardrails” detailing the limits on those receiving federal funds, in terms of expanding or upgrading their advanced chip capacity in China over the next 10 years. This is interesting, including: Apple and Broadcom sign multi-year deal to develop made-in-USA chips

    Samsung, SK Hynix may eventually suffer more than benefit from Micron sanction – interesting take by the DigiTimes team

    Marketing

    Effective Brand Strategies for Building Consumer Loyalty | GfK 

    Media

    The fall of Vice: private equity’s ill-fated bet on media’s future | Financial Times 

    Online

    Inside How TikTok Shares User Data – The New York Times – Driver’s licences, addresses and photos regularly shared on an internal messaging and collaboration platform called Lark

    Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor: this is how companies respond | Pragmatic Engineer

    Security

    Chinese hackers spying on US critical infrastructure, Western intelligence says | Reuters

    China said to be negotiating arms deals with Saudi Arabia and Egypt | South China Morning Post – interesting for a couple of reasons. The US has helped both countries in terms of weapons systems. Egypt used to be a Russian client state. The US might be less worried about this than Russia will be

    China says NATO’s plan for Japan office not welcomed in Asia-Pacific | Reuters 

    The Digital Pearl Harbour preparations by Volt Typhoon

    People’s Republic of China State-Sponsored Cyber Actor Living off the Land to Evade Detection | CISA, China-backed hackers spying on US critical infrastructure, says Five Eyes | US news | The Guardian and Volt Typhoon targets US critical infrastructure with living-off-the-land techniques | Microsoft Security Blog

    Singapore

    Black magic and purveyors of the occult in Singapore

    Software

    All the reasons AI may have rejected your job application | Quartz

    China sees a rise in AI-powered fraud cases | Briefing | Technode – including face swapping and voice mimicry.

    WPP teams up with Nvidia to use generative AI in advertising | Financial Times – aimed at reducing studio time on retouching and video post production, which will likely threaten Adobe creative software packages such as Premiere, After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop

    All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs | Honeycomb

    Technology

    Apple expanding supplier base in China, Southeast Asia, and India – the number of manufacturing facilities/locations of Apple’s top 200 suppliers grew in 2022 in China, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and India. However, manufacturing facilities/locations in the US and South Korea have dropped from 72 to 62 and 42 to 36, respectively. The latest list shows that Apple’s supplier base in South and Southeast Asia is growing amid Apple’s diversification move. Meanwhile, Apple keeps expanding its reliance on China, a sign that Apple is likely to prepare for a decoupled global manufacturing ecosystem. Due to Apple’s change of methodology, disclosing only “locations” instead of “facilities,” the numbers of certain geographies, including Taiwan, cannot be compared historically. For example, Apple said that TSMC had five “facilities” globally in 2021 but had three manufacturing “locations” globally in 2022. The methodology change led to fewer listed manufacturing locations of Apple suppliers in Taiwan, from 72 to 41