Riding The Wave Into China’s Latest Hype — Land Surfing | Jing Daily – land surfing is what a lot of people would know as a long board in skating. I first came across them 20 years ago, when I used to know a dreadlocked German photographer who got around London on one. South Korean app developer Ko Hyojoo, brought style and strong Instagram game to long boarding. From her style cutting and spinning on her board, I can see where land surfing came from. She has collaborated with a lot of fashion brands, getting an international profile with her land surfing.
Films like this one from Vogue in 2016 blew long boarding / land surfing up across Asia. I have former colleagues from Hong Kong who took up land surfing in the winter as they missed the feeling of water-skiing which they did some summer weekends.
It was only a matter of time before China’s Taobao culture picked up on the idea of land surfing.
The Professional Try-Hard Is Dead, But You Still Need to Return to the Office | Vanity Fair – It’s Malcolm Gladwell waxing emotional about how much he loves return-to-office and pleading, “Don’t you want to feel part of something?” as if the man has never heard of, like, recreational softball. It’s Mark Zuckerberg reportedly getting mad about an employee asking if Meta Days (extra vacation days introduced during the pandemic) are still on this year because, shouldn’t the pleasure of working for Meta be enough? It’s any number of investor-type herbs who’ve been warning about how quiet quitting will cause you to lose out on x dollar amount of earnings later in life
Pro-China media slam ‘minority’ of Hong Kong mourners in wake of Queen’s death — Radio Free Asia – Hong Kong historian Hans Yeung, who now lives in the U.K., said Hong Kongers’ nostalgia for colonial times was a complex emotion. “The reason we are seeing these mourning activities is that the current way of governing is different from the way it was in Hong Kong more than 20 years ago, and the emotions that result from that difference between the old and the new,” Yeung told RFA. “It’s not necessarily the idea that we miss colonial times because things were so good back then, but because the current government is so poor,” he said. Yeung said some mourners were too young to remember an era in which the Queen’s portrait was in every classroom, and TV stations shut down every night with “God Save the Queen.” He said younger people likely have read about Hong Kong before the 1997 handover to Chinese rule, and drawn their own conclusions
Ideas
Simple models predict behavior at least as well as behavioral scientists – we analyzed data from five studies in which 640 professional behavioral scientists predicted the results of one or more behavioral science experiments. We compared the behavioral scientists’ predictions to random chance, linear models, and simple heuristics like “be- havioral interventions have no effect” and “all published psychology research is false.” We find that behavioral scientists are consistently no better than – and often worse than – these simple heuristics and models. Behavioral scientists’ predictions are not only noisy but also biased. They systematically overestimate how well behavioral sci- ence “works”: overestimating the effectiveness of behavioral interventions, the impact of psychological phenomena like time discounting
How China Has Added to Its Influence Over the iPhone – The New York Times – More than ever, Apple’s Chinese employees and suppliers contributed complex work and sophisticated components for the 15th year of its marquee device, including aspects of manufacturing design, speakers and batteries, according to four people familiar with the new operations and analysts. As a result, the iPhone has gone from being a product that is designed in California and made in China to one that is a creation of both countries. The critical work provided by China reflects the country’s advancements over the past decade and a new level of involvement for Chinese engineers in the development of iPhones. After the country lured companies to its factories with legions of low-priced workers and unrivaled production capacity, its engineers and suppliers have moved up the supply chain to claim a bigger slice of the money that U.S. companies spend to create high-tech gadgets. The increased responsibilities that China has assumed for the iPhone could challenge Apple’s efforts to decrease its dependency on the country, a goal that has taken on increased urgency amid rising geopolitical tensions over Taiwan and simmering concerns in Washington about China’s ascent as a technology competitor.
Prior to reading The Power Law Mallaby wasn’t a familiar name to me. Looking into his background I could see why, Mallaby is a Washington Post columnist and specialises in international economics for the Council of Foreign Relations. A perfect CV for a policy wonk. His previous works have included a biography of Alan Greenspan, the World Bank and a book on hedge funds.
What the book doesn’t cover
The origins of modern venture capital in the pre-second world war era was through the family offices of people like the Wallenbergs and the Rockefellers. The Power Law only picks up the story post-war and has a distinct US bias in its storytelling.
Synopsis of The Power Law
George Doriot
Mallaby starts the story with Georges Frédéric Doriot and the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC). What’s interesting Doriot is how he was different from today’s VCs with a focus on patriotism. Doriot is most famous for his funding of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), an enterprise computer company whose mini-computers facilitated the early internet and many business computer systems. At the time of DEC, the Boston area seriously rivalled the Bay Area as the technology centre.
Treacherous eight
As the book goes into the story of Arthur Rock and his relationship with the treacherous eight who left Bill Shockley’s lab, this is where many Silicon Valley histories start to coalesce with The Power Law. Mallaby adds a little more, such as the 600x return that both the eight and Rock enjoyed from their investment. At 96, Rock is still alive at the time of writing. He is more recently remembered for his involvement of firing of Steve Jobs from Apple in 1985, a good deal of this came down to his distaste for Jobs informal appearance.
Sandhill Road
Arthur Rock and former Doriot student Bill Draper benefited from being in the right place and at the right time. The US government looked to spur innovation as part of the cold war and the Bay Area was were much of this innovation would happen. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins followed soon after, these names are now central to the Sandhill Road venture capital ecosystem, but in 1972 they were just starting off with businesses like Atari. Atari wasn’t started by experienced business professionals, but by a twenty something who thought meetings in the hot tub were a good idea. Atari marked a point in time when VCs had to become the adults in room, or as Mallaby put it ‘active investors’.
What I didn’t realise at the time was how early in Kleiner Perkin’s history was their engagement with biotech pioneer Genentech. I didn’t realise that Genentech was funded before Apple and was more a peer of Tandem Computers. Much of the early networking was based on a two-way door between established venture funded firms that were descendants of the treacherous eight and early venture capital firms that employed experienced executives as partners.
Apple was notable for two reasons. Firstly, venture capital firms operated for the first time rather like an insurance syndicate with several funding the business rather than one large investor. Secondly, the returns on Apple seems to have solidified the model and bought niche financing to a wider awareness beyond the geographic pockets of the technology industry. Where many books like Accidental Empires would use this as a jumping off point to tell the story of the PC industry. The Power Law instead talks about computer networking, this makes sense if one thinks of Metcalfe’s Law as the power law that matters the most in the internet age. The early east coast venture capital community were more cautious than their west coast counterparts, partly because the east coast technology corridor had less of a loose network of connections compared to the west coast. I think that the different business culture of the east coast also had an effect.
Connectors
Doerr connected Cypress Semiconductor and Sun Microsystems, two companies that Kleiner Perkins funded so that they would make the SPARC RISC microprocessor. You could put this as the starting point for the golden age of UNIX servers and workstations – which we can trace forward to today’s Mac range and modern Google servers.
Doerr had attempted other alliances before and in this way we see a different way how Metcalfe’s Law was the power law of the title. VCs has access to several nodes that they could connect together to try and build a technical vision. This is different to the idea we’re usually sold of the tech visionary / company founder a la the Google founders, Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs.
Meanwhile Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital usurped the founders of Cisco Systems and brought in a new team to run the business bilking the founders out of much of their money. Part of this was down to one of the original Cisco founders being a woman.
Government money
The VC industry of the early 1990s capitalised on government money. Netscape was a remake of Mosiac which was the first graphic internet browser software developed in the NCSA software design group. This was part of the government-funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. UUNET was a commercial ISP based on the back of the ARPANET email delivery system. As the dotcom boom took off it was the largest ISP and the fastest growing. UUNET eventually became part of MCI WorldCom and then Verizon, where UUNET remains a key part of the Verizon business offering. Both Netscape and UUNET were viewed at VC successes but as The Power Law shows, the reality was more complicated.
Irrational behaviour
I thought that the original dot.com boom was irrational behaviour, but I learned from the account of GO Computers a decade or so earlier that irrational behaviour is very much in the blood of venture capital, which explains how we had WeWork and Uber in the 2010s which is where The Power Law finishes its tale. The funny thing about the irrational behaviour is that both the dot com era and the 2010s Softbank appear to have been an accelerant with their late stage momentum approach to venture capital deals which blew valuations on businesses up far beyond what would be reasonably expected otherwise. Softbank gave birth to ‘growth equity’ as a business model that took in many existing and new VC businesses including Russian Israeli Yuri Milner and his DST Ventures business which invested in Facebook, Stripe and GroupOn.
Paul Graham and Peter Thiel
Paul Graham was a founder of an ad tech business who then moved over to investing and had a reputation for warning startup founders about the nature of VC funding. It fitted neatly into the ‘John Gaunt’ type narrative that played well with some of his peers like Peter Thiel. The impact of these people setting an ideological agenda of sorts for Silicon Valley founders, together with a plethora of other founders providing seed capital to businesses from Google onwards greatly impacted the freedom of VCs to operate using their previous models and left the industry open for the Softbanks of the world to inflate everything.
China off-note
The Power Law offers a largely truimphantist view of the role of VCs such as Sequoia Capital in China. However, this seems to ignore the impact of Chinese VC and angel investors. It also chooses to ignore the negative impact of Xi Jingping.
Conclusion
Mallaby illuminates part of Silicon Valley history that I wasn’t familiar with, in particular VCs strategic role in steering technological change during the 1990s. Time has somewhat outpaced the book. The rise of Xi Jingping and the change in attitude towards safety and innovation amongst young Chinese is likely to make the China section look overly optimistic. The end of easy money, at least for the time being will impact the VC industry globally and growth equity looks like a folly during the present time. But if you want to understand how things were The Power Law is the ideal book for you.
NASA’s administrator says cost-plus is a “plague,” just as DoD is giving up on fixed-price development | Acquisition Talk – this reminds me so much of the UK’s ministry of defence. My Dad moved over to the UK to work on the Resolution class of submarines that were designed to carry the Polaris nuclear missile. At the time the Royal Navy paid for these submarines on a cost plus basis which meant that the shipyard advertised for tradesmen in newspapers in Ireland and across the Commonwealth. A lot of people spent a lot of time drinking tea and claiming overtime. One can understand why cost plus could be seen as a plague.
https://flic.kr/p/NBTsrn
However bad cost plus is, fixed cost doesn’t seem to work either with failed projects and strong disincentives to try innovative solutions. Where NASA is at the moment I can understand why fixed price makes more sense than cost plus. But high innovation programmes like Ares or the Apollo programme would do better under cost plus. One of the current best arguments for cost plus is the likelihood that the Ajax armoured vehicle will never be issued. It is a ‘firm priced’ meaning fixed price contract. Crossrail looks more like a cost plus project, it was a mess, it cost way too much, but it runs. I wonder if the UK ministry of defence will ever consider cost plus again?
Opinion | Boris Johnson Is in Trouble, and So Is Britain’s Conservative Party – The New York Times – First through austerity, then through Brexit and Mr. Johnson, the Conservatives have left Britain in the ruins of their ambition. Each one of their proposed solutions, offered in the name of national renewal, has made the situation worse. No one in the party can escape blame for this baleful legacy. One of the pretenders to Mr. Johnson’s throne — Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss or Jeremy Hunt — may offer a change in style. But a substantial change of course is unlikely to come. An economy predicated on low productivity and low investment, buttressed by a self-defeating lack of seriousness about Britain’s condition, is all the Conservatives seem to be able to offer.– Worthwhile reading in association with this: Grim times lie ahead for UK as inflation combines with low growth | Financial Times
Russian emails appear to show ‘network’ holding $4.5bn assets linked to Putin | Russia | The Guardian – An anti-corruption expert in Russia, who requested anonymity given the political situation in Moscow, said the findings raised questions as to whether there was a level of “common management”. “LLCInvest looks most of all like a cooperative, or an association, in which its members can exchange benefits and property,” they suggested. For nearly two decades, Putin has been accused of secretly accumulating vast wealth through proxies, fuelled by a series of disclosures in leaks such as the Pandora papers about the fortunes of those closest to him. Sergey Kolesnikov, a businessman, claimed 10 years ago that he had been behind a scheme that allowed a group of Russia’s top oligarchs to pool billions of rubles into a type of “investment fund” for the benefit of Putin, who was then serving as prime minister. The claims were denied and Kolesnikov fled from Russia. – Interesting how this has been set up
It’s time for data-first diversity, equity, and inclusion | Fortune – In 2010, using nationally representative data on thousands of individuals in their 40s, I estimated that Black men earn 39.4% less than white men and Black women earn 13.1% less than white women. Yet, accounting for one variable–educational achievement in their teenage years––reduced that difference to 10.9% (a 72% reduction) for men and revealed that Black women earn 12.7 percent more than white women, on average. Derek Neal, an economist at the University of Chicago, and William Johnson were among the first to make this point in 1996: “While our results do provide some evidence for current labor market discrimination, skills gaps play such a large role that we believe future research should focus on the obstacles Black children face in acquiring productive skill.”
Incoming Hong Kong leader John Lee unveils team, while Beijing lays out key expectations | South China Morning Post – John Lee pledges to win people’s trust and make policies that meet demands as State Council approves his governing team. Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office lays out five expectations for incoming administration, including tackling housing and addressing wealth gap – this explains the big gaps in Lee’s previous policy document. What’s less apparent is how Lee will deliver on these intractable challenges when every previous chief executive haven’t managed to address them
Edelman Launches Global Gen Z Lab | Edelman – Today, Edelman announces the formation of The Gen Z Lab, a global offering comprising 100 Gen Z employees, a roster of internal and external on-call advisors, and data hub dedicated to generational insights. Under the watch of Edelman’s Global Chief Brand Officer, Jackie Cooper, the Gen Z Lab will lend expertise, perspective and counsel clients looking to effectively engage the Gen Z consumer. In a breakthrough move, Edelman is also appointing the world’s first ZEO as a cultural and creative advisor for the Gen Z Lab. Stepping into this inaugural consultative role from July 1st, will be gender fluid fashion designer, Harris Reed. He will be supported by Amanda Edelman as Gen Z COO. The Gen Z Lab will harness their generation’s perspective and ambitions to solve issues such as race and diversity, sustainability, and climate change, and align with brand interests to become catalysts for change. – I’d totally trust them managing my brand reputation…………….. NOT!
Meta’s new digital fashion marketplace will sell Prada, Balenciaga and Thom Browne | Vogue Business – Balenciaga CEO Cédric Charbit in a release. “Web3 and Meta are bringing unprecedented opportunities for Balenciaga, our audience and our products, opening up new territories for luxury.” Balenciaga, along with Prada and Thom Browne, is among the first to sign on to sell digital fashion in a new Meta-created avatar store where people can buy clothing for their avatars to wear on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger. Eventually, other designers will be able to independently offer digital clothing for sale in the marketplace. The items for sale in the avatar store will range from $2.99 to $8.99 to start. A Meta spokesperson said that it did “not have details to share” on if or how it would share revenue with designers. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram VP of fashion partnerships Eva Chen, who announced the updates via Instagram Live on Friday, said these capabilities will be available next week, starting with the US, Canada, Thailand and Mexico. – Worthwhile reading this piece also: Inside The Metaverse Strategies Of L’Oréal And LVMH | The Drum
What Chinese media reveals about Shein’s secretive operations – Rest of World – There are two main kinds of suppliers: “free on board,” those that make simple designs they haven’t devised themselves, and “original design manufacturers,” those that do both. They all feed into Shein’s sprawling manufacturing execution system (MES). The designer-suppliers will find pictures online and send a selection to Shein’s internal buyers for consideration; the buyer and their manager settle on a final pool. Once samples have been received, there might be two, or even three, rounds of changes before manufacturing can commence. (The entire time, everything needs to be recorded in the MES — materials, pricing, even chat logs — something suppliers balk at, because, if the deal falls through, all the information sits in Shein’s records, and there’s nothing to stop them from producing it elsewhere.) – I could see Amazon acting in a similar way
China’s Expanding Surveillance State: Takeaways From a NYT Investigation – The New York Times – DNA, iris scan samples and voice prints are being collected indiscriminately from people with no connection to crime. The police in China are starting to collect voice prints using sound recorders attached to their facial recognition cameras. In the southeast city of Zhongshan, the police wrote in a bidding document that they wanted devices that could record audio from at least a 300-foot radius around cameras. Software would then analyze the voice prints and add them to a database. Police boasted that when combined with facial analysis, they could help pinpoint suspects faster. In the name of tracking criminals — which are often loosely defined by Chinese authorities and can include political dissidents — the Chinese police are purchasing equipment to build large-scale iris-scan and DNA databases. The first regionwide iris database — which has the capacity to hold iris samples of up to 30 million people — was built around 2017 in Xinjiang, home to the Uyghur ethnic minority. Online news reports show that the same contractor later won other government contracts to build large databases across the country. The company did not respond to The Times’s request for comment. The Chinese police are also widely collecting DNA samples from men. Because the Y chromosome is passed down with few mutations, when the police have the y-DNA profile of one man, they also have that of a few generations along the paternal lines in his family. Experts said that while many other countries use this trait to aid criminal investigations, China’s approach stands out with its singular focus on collecting as many samples as possible. – and more here: Police in China Stalk Citizens With Surveillance That Predicts Future Crime
Why brands are burning NFTs | Vogue Business – Burning NFTs, which are tokens stored on a blockchain, is the process of permanently removing a token from circulation. This can be done to eliminate unsold or problematic inventory from an NFT drop, or it can be used to engage collectors and fans through “upgrades” that replace an original NFT with something else. For fashion and beauty brands, burning NFTs could offer a way to manipulate scarcity, and therefore price. It could also lead to more intriguing NFT projects, in which consumers must weigh risk and reward by burning an NFT in exchange for something else. These scenarios, among others, are already playing out among artists and gaming startups, paving the way for fashion. Already, Adidas is using a burn mechanism to change the state of its NFTs when NFT owners make a purchase. Apparel brand Champion recently partnered with Daz 3D’s NFT collection, Non-Fungible People, and will use burning to enable peoples’ profile picture NFTs to digitally dress in Champion gear, while Unisocks invites NFT owners to burn them in exchange for physical products. – burning NFTs sounds like a dangerous precedent
Environment | Gallup Historical Trends – interesting longitudinal data set. Environmental messaging effectiveness is proportional to consumer disposable income and financial security at the time
When will the music stop? | Financial Times – bill being called due on financialisation and post-industrialisation of western economies and a move from globalisation to regionalisation
US embassy warns TU Dublin about risks of ties with Chinese university | Ireland | The Sunday Times – China wants Ireland to host international campus of Harbin University. Ireland should be looking at the experience of Hungary who were made to foot the bill for a campus that only benefit Chinese students – In 2020 HIT was added to an “entity list” by the US Department of Commerce, which identifies people or organisations that it believes are involved in activities contrary to US security or foreign policy interests. Last week the American embassy in Dublin said it was still concerned about HIT’s ties with the People’s Liberation Army and its efforts to acquire foreign technology in support of its defence aims
British research ‘could help China build superweapons’ | News | The Times – The number of research collaborations between scientists in the UK and Chinese institutes with deep connections to the country’s defence forces has tripled to more than 1,000 in six years, a figure that lays bare the scale of cooperation with the hostile state. The university funding includes £60 million from sources now sanctioned by the US government for supplying the Chinese military with fighter jets, communications technology and missiles. The article was published with this opinion piece: Is getting into bed with President Xi for science . . . or just sleazy? | News | The Times – It is 1914 and our scientists, encouraged by government and big business, have been co-operating with their German opposites on machine-gun technology, ballistics and aeroplane design — all in the name of exciting new technology and with a rising country with an important market and close ties with the UK. Now return to the present, but with an eye to the future. As The Times reveals today, UK scientists are working closely with Chinese scientists from institutes intimately associated with weapons development
Why gamers hate crypto, and music fans don’t – gamers feel that they are being ripped off, music fans look at NFTs like as if they are souvenirs or trading cards. This has important implications for mechanisms governing the metaverse
Facebook Changes Corporate Name to Meta – The New York Times – Zuckerberg has been committed to building the metaverse, a composite universe melding online, virtual and augmented worlds that people can seamlessly traverse. He has said the metaverse can be the next major social platform and that several tech companies will build it over the next 10-plus years. The name Meta is indicative of Facebook’s ambition for being the platform that is the metaverse.
The problems facing the metaverse aren’t going to be just solved by Moores law and software alone. There are needed to be technology improvements in battery chemistry and optics. Hardware engineers from Meta have their own concerns about developing the metaverse.
Facebook’s Meta mission was laid out in a 2018 paper on The Metaverse – Oculus executives highlighted what a commercial metaverse would look like, that some think is a blueprint for Meta’s ambitions today. Meta won’t be a move away from Facebook’s current problems with regards privacy and social cohesion. Though one of the first moves of Meta was to shut down Facebook’s legacy facial recognition system.
Interesting debate on the competing viewpoints of the Biden administration and China
Asia Society panel discussion featuring Lingling Wei, chief China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and co-author of Superpower Showdown; Ryan Hass, senior fellow and the Michael H. Armacost Chair in the foreign policy program at Brookings; and Yasheng Huang, Epoch Foundation Professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT Sloan School of Management
What if Xi Jinping just isn’t that competent? – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – you can’t argue that Xi Jingping isn’t at least competent as a political operator, but some of the other points in here are valid to a point. But part of it is better understood if one asks if Xi Jingping is a true believer in Stalinism and the answer would be yes. You could also use it to argue that we’re close to hitting peak China and then the country will decline disgracefully rather like the UK did post British empire
Sex Differences in Work Aspirations – Marginal REVOLUTION – more developed and gender equal nations are better than less developed nations in attracting boys to more established things-oriented (often blue-collar) occupations, but they fail to attract girls to these areas. This problem is also occurring for the subset of things-oriented STEM occupations. In fact, the problem for STEM is even more profound, given that interest in STEM declines for both boys and girls in more developed, innovative, and gender equal nations.
Mobile internet and political polarization – Marginal REVOLUTION – the mobile internet polarized the Left, but not so much the Right. What polarized the Right was…the polarization of the Left, and not the mobile internet. And please do note this sentence: “This increase in polarization largely did not take place among social media users.” It seems that on-line versions of older school media did a lot of the work
Data Shows Younger People Aren’t Reporting Cybercrimes / Digital Information World – members of the younger generations, namely Gen Z and Millennials, are less likely to report a cybercrime once it gets committed against them. Baby boomers are the most likely to report a cybercrime since 64% of them said that they had done so, and the proportion was much lower for Millennials who only report cybercrime 32% of the time. Things become even more dismal when you look at Gen Z, colloquially known as “zoomers” in internet parlance, who only report cybercrimes 21% of the time. One reason for this might be the fact that, having grown up with the internet, Millennials and Gen Z members don’t realize that online security is not something that you can take for granted – or that they believe that insecurity is part and parcel of internet life now
Culture
‘Italo Disco’ Was About More Than Boogie Nights: Alessandro Melazzini – Variety – his analytical doc makes clear, it’s easy to underestimate the importance of independent, non-ideological escape music. The 80s have been seen as a superficial decade,” Melazzini says. “With time you have another approach to that period, which was more than just silly. It was also a time of optimism, experimentations, promises, illusion. And genius creativity.”
Design
New Japan-Only Miata Asks You To Trade Power For Lightness | Jalopnik – I love this design philosophy: “horsepower and fun are not proportional, but lightness and fun are proportional, and if horsepower is increased, the body etc. must be strengthened, so it will inevitably become heavier. The lighter the car, the more fun the car is, and I think this Roadster is the best now if you enjoy driving.”
Secretive MoD ‘banking’ unit helps UK wage economic warfare | Financial Times – “People who worked in banking in the late 1980s will tell you that between Friday and Monday when the Berlin wall came down, people they thought were West Germans working on trading floors and in M&A departments just disappeared,” Keatinge said. “They were actually working for [East Germany’s] Stasi, gathering information about the financial activity in the City of London. You can be sure the same thing is happening now with the Chinese.”
Opinion: Everybody Is Still Greenwashing, But That’s Not What ESG Stands For. – the recent announcement from Kering banning the use of fur from all its collections and all its brands. It clearly did not have the impact that Kering would have hoped for. Although this would have been a big move internally, the public is now expecting more and is calling for a genuine rethinking of global systems and metrics that define success beyond financial gains to shareholders. Banning fur just isn’t enough for the Greta Generation – but how important are they for customers?
Germany’s Economy, Once Europe’s Engine, Is Holding It Back – WSJ – After years of belt-tightening aimed at honing competitiveness, German businesses and the country’s public infrastructure are suffering from underinvestment, economists say. Germany’s net investment rate has been around 0.5% of economic output since the turn of the century, compared with about 1% for Italy and 1.5% for the U.S., according to the World Bank. German net public investment has fallen below zero as existing assets depreciate
Reforms in Hong Kong Encourage Homecoming of Offshore Funds | Winston & Strawn LLP – In July 2021, the Hong Kong government gazetted a fund re‑domiciliation mechanism to encourage offshore funds set up in corporate or limited-partnership form to register in Hong Kong as OFCs and LPFs, respectively. This mechanism does not create any new legal entity; therefore, it does not require the dissolution of the original funds or require investors to exchange their interests from the old fund to the new fund. Upon re‑domiciliation, these funds would be de‑registered in the original place of incorporation and would have the same rights and obligations as any other newly established OFCs and LPFs in Hong Kong. The Wealth Connect, which formally commenced trading on September 10, 2021, allows Hong Kong-domiciled funds to be offered to mainland Chinese investors in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. This adds to the Mutual Recognition of Funds scheme, which started in 2015, allowing Hong Kong-domiciled funds to be distributed in mainland China. These connect schemes serve as another incentive to encourage fund managers to re‑domicile offshore funds to Hong Kong
The soft bigotry of America’s cultural left | Financial Times – imposing conformity through intimidation is not what is supposed to happen in democracies, still less on their most-prized campuses. Crushing free thought is McCarthyism. This new consensus is profoundly illiberal. It treats a person’s race as their primary fixed identity and assigns roles on that basis. This obliterates the individual moral autonomy on which liberalism rests. Since everything in society boils down to race, everything must change. California, for example, is trying to alter its mathematics curriculum to downplay the idea there are right and wrong answers in the science. The debate is fuelled by a proposal for new math standards called “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction”. The framework states that “objectivity”, “worship of the written word”, and “either/or thinking” are tools of white supremacy
The Deep Dive: “Hyper-Customisation In Health and Wellness Has Become The New Luxury.” – Another is working out which kind of digital technology will enable the clinic to stay connected with its clients, for example, wearables. “This is going to be a big challenge for us in the future because we have to have a tool which really works and that is really used by our clients.” Whatever the future of health and wellness may look like, what remains certain is that it will be driven by what the client demands. And what the client demands, Clinique La Prairie delivers. “At the end of the day, what our customers want are benefits to their wellbeing, not just during their time at the clinic but when they are back home,” said Gibertoni.
Media
Banker Guy Hands: ‘I’m scared of ending my life having not achieved’ | The Times – We had an enormous number of people working on the Stones and we weren’t making much money – they are a catalogue band. The new albums didn’t sell, and the income from old CDs was small. What really worked for the Stones was touring. The bid we had in mind for their new contract – the bid we thought made economic sense – was unlikely to be what they were hoping to achieve. The only way we could pay them more was if they did some TV work for us, put their name on a computer game and gave us a share of their concert revenues
New Facebook Storm Nears as CNN, Fox Business and Other Outlets Team Up on Whistleblower Docs — The Information – Upcoming news stories based on thousands of Facebook documents—which whistleblower Frances Haugen worked to release to more than a dozen news organizations as diverse as the Associated Press, CNN, Le Monde, Reuters and the Fox Business network—aren’t likely to be as revelatory as those epic leaks of time past – this drop has been carefully thought through to maximise scrutiny of Meta
Haugen claims backed by new Facebook whistleblower filing with SEC – The Washington Post – Facebook officials routinely undermined efforts to fight misinformation, hate speech and other problematic content out of fear of angering then-President Donald Trump and his political allies, or out of concern about potentially dampening the user growth key to Facebook’s multi-billion-dollar profits.- drip, drip, drip and the Meta rebrand won’t stop it. At least in America it can rely on bipartisan disagreement to keep it from being regulated.
Facebook Conducted An Experiment In Which It Turned Off The News Feed Algorithm, To Surprising Results / Digital Information World – Engagement dropped like a stone in an ocean, Groups ended up becoming more popular than ever before, and Facebook made even more money per user, once they actually went through their News Feeds. This sort of behavior seems to almost mirror the internet landscape we have today. Platforms such as Reddit have skyrocketed in relevancy, because they provide an enhanced version of Groups. They also make a lot of money on this premise, despite having much fewer active users than Facebook did back in 2018. – It will be really hard for Meta to live these findings down
US intelligence officials warn companies in critical sectors on China | Financial Times – many businesses were not aware of the direct and hidden links between Chinese companies and universities and state security, or that Beijing was using a “whole of government approach” to obtain technology – more likely that these businesses don’t care and they will continue not to care unless financial and judicial penalties are put in place
Exclusive: Amid national security concerns, US slaps overhead time limits on satellites – Breaking Defense – Industry officials further argue NOAA’s ruling will stifle the ability of US firms to claim a leading edge in the growing global market for near real-time imagery products. The use of sat imagery to track terrestrial change has long been in use by the US government and even commercial firms. The ability to do so with ever increasing timeliness is what is new in the commercial market, and what is worrying DoD and IC officials is that those burgeoning capabilities mean there soon will be no place safe from prying satellite eyes.