Hyundai have pushed out a campaign to teach British people how to pronounce the companies name properly. This is a well trodden path for foreign brands like Hyundai. My childhood featured ‘Nestle’s Milky Bars’ as the advertising jingle ignored the é at the end of Nestlé. I can only presume that it would be assumed to be too sophisticated for our palates rather than a playground staple.
More recently, I spent a couple of minutes coaching Arsenal footballing legend Ian Wright on how to say Huawei prior to him shooting some online video content for a smartphone launch. So I can relate to the challenge that Hyundai faces in gaining the correct pronunciation.
Getting the pronunciation right will allow Hyundai to use global English language assets, rather than having to do localisation. A small but important saving as it looks to compete for the UK and Irish electric car markets.
The advertising plays on the common pain-point of Siri and Google Voice failing to pick up on pronunciation in order to use humour to get Hyundai across correctly.
Older women and younger men relationships explored in this documentary. Prior to going to college in the mid-1990s I worked for a company that put coatings on materials to make stickers, stamps and labels. My boss there was a guy called Mark who married the PE teacher from school, once he’d finished his university degree. At that time Mark’s relationship was considered unusual in nature.
Design
Great film compilation of retrofuturist footage
Watching this film on the intersection of military clothing design and fashion reminded me of William Gibson’s Zero History novel.
New China-focused think tank staffed and advised by a number of prominent Hong Kong dissidents: China Strategic Risks Institute
Mainland Chinese visitors start to return to Hong Kong after Covid-19 restrictions lifted, but most tours low-cost and short stay, figures reveal | South China Morning Post – Tourism figures from February to this month show 86 per cent of tour trips from mainland China lasted one to two days and 54 per cent cost less than 500 yuan. Travel Industry Authority confirms it is investigating allegations of cigarette smuggling by mainland Chinese tour groups – it will be only a matter of time before the impact of this behaviour change ripples out to Hong Kong’s retail landlords and the luxury brands who have stores in the city. Hoteliers and the hospitality industry haven’t benefited from opening up the borders
Indonesia
Indonesia is an economic powerhouse in the making, but there are forces ripping away at its society that could leave it as inequitable as its neighbour Malaysia – which has been suffering from a brain drain and political stagnation. Indonesia like Malaysia before it seems to be coming under the sway of Gulf Arab traditions of Islam rather than the indigenous variant of the belief. Singaporean news programme CNA Insider did a good documentary on it all.
Armani, the eponymous luxury fashion label of Giorgio Armani posted advertisements in the Financial Times this week. The advertisements harked back to Armani’s looks of the 1980s and 1990s. But what I thought was most notable about the advertisements was their promotion of made-to-measure menswear.
Armani via the FT
Armani is clearly putting its weight behind a return to the office. Presumably Armani think that this move back to the office will also mean a move to formal business dress. This doesn’t seem to be supported by what I have been seeing and is in a stark contrast to the current approach of rival Zegna. Armani have called a lot of past trends right. They were one of the first brands setting up a retail network in China. They were early to putting their catwalk shows on the web to gain a wider audience. Armani were clever in the way they approached licensing of their brand. During the 1990s Armani expanded into sportswear, watches, eyeglasses, cosmetics and home which looked prescient in retrospect.
We’ll see if Armani’s views on a return to the office pan out, I am not so sure it will be.
SVB’s First Failure – The Wire China – SVB’s Board had asked me to found a brand-new bank: the Shanghai Pudong Development Silicon Valley Bank (SPD SVB), a joint venture between SVB and the state-owned Shanghai Pudong Development Bank. The board had committed $100 million to establishing SVB’s operations in China, and I was filled with goodwill and optimism about the endeavor. Although I thoroughly enjoyed my time in China and the many friends I met there, from today’s vantage point, I firmly believe we were (and are still) being played.
For female journalists, covering China comes at a cost — Radio Free Asia – The sheer volume of vitriol targeting reporters given China’s size and the nationalistic fervor of many of its citizens can set the abuse apart. Compounding their anxiety is a fear that the intimidation is sanctioned, if not coordinated, by the Chinese Communist Party itself. “When, for example, an American female journalist gets trolled, it’s probably coming from right-wing crazies or some fringe corner of society,” said Vicky Xu, a journalist in Australia, whose reporting on abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang brought a flood of death threats. “The kind of role and voice they have is very, very limited.
Opinion | Xi’s visit to Putin should worry the West – The Washington Post – If you were looking for another reason why it’s important that Ukraine succeeds against Russia, consider the photos from Moscow. “The President of Eurasia” — I fear that’s the invisible caption of the pictures of Xi that we’re seeing amid the Kremlin’s golden doors and red carpets. The idea that a vast swath of the world is dominated by a China that stands so resolutely against freedom and democracy is chilling. If this alliance succeeds, we will live in a darker world
A Campaign to Remind Us That We Love New York (City) – The New York Times – The people who came up with We ♥ NYC say it is a mark for a different time. But they see parallels to the troubled era that gave rise to I ♥ NY. “We’re hopefully going to be able to cut through divisiveness and negativity” that accompanied the pandemic, said Kathryn Wylde, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a consortium of corporations and business executives that is leading the We ♥ NYC campaign. She said that besides rejuvenating people’s spirits, “we want to remind them they can make a difference, whether it’s on the block or in the city as a whole.” She added: “We want to remind them we don’t have to maintain these divisions that have grown up between business and labor and rich and poor.” She cited surveys her group had conducted during the pandemic. “The results we’ve gotten back are people in New York want to be part of fixing what they see as broken in the city,” – Interesting choices in this. Curious to know why they didn’t rally around the previous campaign? It was atemporal in design and a personal commitment, the NY aspect of it implying inclusion? The new one has a lot of challenges: it lacks visual symmetry & balance. Ironically the original works better in digital contexts (for instance as an app logo) than the new version. The emoji heart will date very fast. The font choice I don’t understand. And what about the exclusive nature of NYC rather than the inclusive aspect of NY – even a DE&I fail. ‘Tunnel people’ are a key part of NYC too.
IPSOS noted that global inflation likely peaked in 2022 (according to IMF), and negotiations are happening at the moment between retailers and FMCG companies. Consumers will still grapple with high prices for a good while yet. Ipsos posit that the inflation creates opportunities for growing market share via innovation, with a view to eventual revenue growth.
How Chinese Companies Are Reinventing Management – If a team splits up and some members form a new team, the leader of the new team must pay a fee to the original team for its previous training of the acquired staff. Moreover, the company’s financial system automatically transfers 10% of an acquired staffer’s bonus to the original team leader every month for one year. This system encourages each team to reorganize and generate new autonomous teams
Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder — The Information – Toyota doesn’t seem to need Alexa anymore. The automaker has dropped support for an app that allowed users to operate Alexa in their cars via smartphones in 2023 editions of several of its most popular models, including the RAV4, Prius and Corolla. And according to a person close to the automaker, Toyota plans to phase out Alexa integration from the rest of its lineup in the coming years. The automaker is now focused on improving an in-house voice assistant it launched last year and is considering integrating ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI, into it
Style
The influence of cyberpunk on tech wear and functional fashion. William Gibson’s Zero History talks explicitly about the function and tech wear nature of military clothing. They are a central part of the plot line.
Technology
Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder — The Information – Toyota doesn’t seem to need Alexa anymore. The automaker has dropped support for an app that allowed users to operate Alexa in their cars via smartphones in 2023 editions of several of its most popular models, including the RAV4, Prius and Corolla. And according to a person close to the automaker, Toyota plans to phase out Alexa integration from the rest of its lineup in the coming years. The automaker is now focused on improving an in-house voice assistant it launched last year and is considering integrating ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI, into it
Taiwan
I am currently reading Chris Miller’s book Chip War. This is a great talk by Chris about many of the areas covered in the book
I was started down the train of thought to think about the idea of a cyborg based on a discussion with my colleague Colleen with regards to the changes we had been seeing in consumer behaviour. With that in mind I thought I would reflect on what my understanding of what cyborgs are.
‘Moo-mail’ Yahoo! cow parade cow. The web appliance / cow cyborg hybrid used to stand in the lobby of building D, next to the Yahoo! branded merchandise store on the Yahoo! campus back when I worked there. It was originally created in 2000 as a buzz marketing gimmick to promote Yahoo! Mail – the company’s email product to New Yorkers. More here.
Cyborg in culture
I can just about remember playing with friends bionic man toys and primary school and remember the opening credits of The Six Million Dollar Man. The show ran from 1973 to 1978 and had a corresponding spin-off show called The Bionic Woman.
According to the show a cyborg was:
CY’BORG
A HUMAN BEING WHOSE ORIGINAL HUMAN PARTS HAVE HAD TO BE REPLACED TO ONE EXTENT OR ANOTHER BY MACHINES THAT PERFORM THE SAME FUNCTIONS.
According to the definition, at the time of writing my Dad is a cyborg, having had a pacemaker fitted a year or two ago. So would the character Batou be in Ghost In The Shell.
The cyborg was a feature of cyberpunk culture. The key difference was that people chose to have augmentation, not just as a repair but as a form of enhancement.
Optional enhancement
Johnny Mnemonic had a storage brain interface fitted that allowed him to be a giant walking thumb drive as a profession.
Fellow William Gibson creation Molly Millions has retractable razor sharp blades in her fingers and an augmented metabolic system. She has permanently fitted mirrored lens over her eyes that enhance her vision.
Captain Cyborg
Real life did a rather poor version of this cyberpunk fantasy with academic Kevin Warwick spoofed by IT paper The Register using the moniker Captain Cyborg for him. He did foolish things like implant himself with an RFID chip usually used for pet identification. And yes of course Warwick did a TED talk. I can’t tell whether the audience is laughing with him; or at him.
So what has an office conversation got to do with a cyborg?
Digital drugs
Which brings me to how an office conversation spurred me to reflect on how a conversation on compulsive behaviour got me to start thinking about cyborgs. Culture did envisage some form of device addiction. The premise of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash revolves around a file that crashes a person’s computer and leaves a hacker called Raven with real-world brain damage in the process.
Long live the new flesh
Ten years earlier Videodrome featured a TV executive called Max Renn investigating a satellite TV show called Videodrome. It is described a socio-political battleground in which a war is being fought to control the minds of the North American population. Built into it is a signal that produces a malignant brain tumour. Renn’s reality dissolves over the rest of the film as he finds out more and then kills himself.
There is a clear analogy with the heroin and crack cocaine epidemics that ravaged the cities of the western world through 1980s and 1990s as drugs of desperation in the face of globalisation. Science fiction is as much about the past and the present rather than the future. Heroin and crack both cost large amounts of money, so children tended to be secondary and tertiary victims rather than addicts in their own right. It would also be problematic for the authors to contemplate gratuitous harm to children in their works back then, let alone now in more anxious times.
In both Snow Crash and Videodrome users suffer damage from technology that they are unwilling to put aside.
Back to now
Addiction is ‘real’
My colleague put forward the following points:
Screens now dominate our lives, and their presence is only getting stronger and more powerful
(Some) adults can control to a certain extent how often and when they use screens. But there is a commonplace screen addiction.
Smartphone addiction and drug addiction share some similarities including a neglected personal life, a pre-occupation with the subject of the addiction, social media as a mood modifier or for escapism. The implication is that smartphones are an unwilling appendage which add capabilities (some of which are of a questionable value) and can’t be put down. All of which reminded me of my childhood (and adult relationship with music). But it is why I started to thinking about the nature of a cyborg
Smartphone addiction
Smartphone addiction goes by many names including screen addiction, online or internet addiction. Japan identified the phenomenon of hikikomori. The term was coined by social scientist Tomaki Saito in a 1998 book. While the term itself meant socially withdrawn, it hinged around the person staying home and playing video games or living a virtual life.
By 2015, academic research indicated that somewhere between 1.9 – 2.5 percent of Hong Kongers aged from 12 to 29 might fall into the hikikomori category, compared to the 1.5 percent of Japanese believed to in the category.
Meanwhile in the early 2000s BlackBerry email devices were nicknamed Crackberry, often by users who admitted overusing them in anti-social contexts. There was a corresponding term ‘BlackBerry orphans‘ for children who were ignored by parents wrapped up in their BlackBerry writing and reading emails instead of engaging at home.
China was the first country to push for action to clamp down on children’s online time, in particular the use of online games. As far back as autumn 2005, China’s General Administration of Press and Publication had started trialling a fatigue system to limit screen time.
By 2007, the local government of Shanghai had a camp set up to help cure teens of internet addiction working with a pilot bunch of inmate aged between 14 and 22. And just a year later the FT was documenting how the Chinese government was struggling to combat the addiction throughout the country. This addiction implies a cyborg-like relationship with their internet access device.
In 2017, the substitute phone is launched as a kind of fidget tool. This provides the tactile experience of swiping and button pressing, but without any of the compelling addictive software.
By 2018, smartphone manufacturers were worried about smartphone addiction and came up with different ways to try and give their customers better information and control over their smartphone usage.
What about the children?
My colleague asked the following question: given the impact on adults, who haven’t grown up with screens, what does this all mean for children?
Remember the BlackBerry orphans earlier? My colleague proposed that now children are being taught once they are born that screens and smartphones are at the centre of life, rather than people. Parents use their smartphone as a substitute to toys, parent-child playtime or conversation or even reading to the child.
This is claimed to manifest in impacted social and emotional development. Expert opinion is that children below 2 years old shouldn’t have any ‘technology in their life‘.
There is a belief amongst experts that screen time can result in permanent damage to developing child’s brains impacting concentration, social kills and vocabulary. Some even believe that there might be a link between ADHD and TikTok.
But the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), the UK’s professional body most concerned with a child’s health, doesn’t publish any recommendations. There isn’t any research to indicate the ‘safe’ level and arguably commissioning this research would likely pose ethical questions.
By the time children enter secondary education, they are likely to own a smartphone of some sort. They maybe exhibiting a number of physiological effects:
‘Text neck’
Premature eye ageing
Sleepless nights
Admittedly, as a child I was told that reading after lights out and listening to the radio or watching TV in the dark would result in ‘going blind’ or a lack of much needed sleep.
Like television before it, online screen time adversely affects academic performance. My own exam grades were empirical evidence of this. China, South Korea and Taiwan both have different ways of limiting screen time. China has enabled technology with online games platforms. Taiwan has held the parents directly responsible and even fines them.
Questions
All of this prompted a number of questions with me:
Is it the device or is it the media?
Is it different to other waves of technology?
Moral panics – or what can we learn from the past & our cyborg future
Media
Rock music – academic research indicated that listening to rock music was linked to an increase of reckless behaviour including drug use, unprotected sex, casual sex, drunk driving, speeding and vandalism
Violent content – while violent content was considered to trigger a response in children, the overall risk associated with it was difficult to prove conclusively despite decades of research. Studies as far back as the mid 1990s indicated that there a lot of other factors to consider in addition to the exposure including mental health and cognitive ability.
Sexual content – the US Center for Media Literacy pulled together views on sexual violence in content. There wasn’t a lot of clarity in the plurality of views beyond the challenge of defining content to be of an overly sexual nature. What views were expressed were not backed by scientific research
Video gaming – because of the strategies used by players in video games. Academic research in 2015 indicated that video games might have a negative impact on brain development over time.
Devices
Personal stereos – the use of a Sony Walkman and later on the iPod was considered to a negative effect on hearing. They were also considered to have a social effect, depending who you ask it considered to be empowering or dislocating from society with increased narcissism. The positive autonomy based interpretation was called the ‘Walkman effect‘. The implication from this research is that not giving a child a smartphone at a certain point could have a detrimental effect on them – at some point the child has to become a smartphone | human cyborg.
Televisions – when I was a child I was constantly told to not sit too close to the television and that doing so would cause me to go blind. According to Scientific American, it isn’t the distance from the television that affects the child, but a long enough amount can cause eye strain.
The implication in past concerns about media and devices is that its the content that tends to do the damage rather than the device. This tends to indicate where action should be taken on ‘screen addiction’. As for our great cyborg future – it can’t be stopped.
YouTuber aini does good videos that analyse sociological and cultural subjects, so a video on East Asian beauty standards was inevitable. East Asian beauty standards are even more important now due to the cultural impact that they have:
Korean and Japanese beauty products that have become popular from BB cream to SK-II
Filter / camera effects mobile apps – you can see their influence looking at how Cardi B does her make-up
Soft power assets: Hallyu and anime popularity – it affects the aesthetics of this content
China
Huawei building automotive ecosystem without making its own cars – Huawei will not build cars on its own, but will continue to strengthen its automotive ecosystem alliance and platform, integrating R&D efforts of related carmakers to provide diverse resources of smart systems, software, chips and other aspects – interesting profile by Taiwanese technology news outlet DigiTimes
Interesting that proposes that cyberpunk owes as much to Japanese psyche during late bubble Japanese miracle culture as opposed to the writings of American authors Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. It reflects angst, consumerism and accelerated technology.
Cybersecurity Label for U.S. Coming as Early as April – EE Times – 600-plus companies that have joined the ioXt Alliance to help it build confidence in Internet of Things products will be among the first to experience the national cybersecurity label NIST is developing for consumer Internet of Things (IoT) products and consumer software products—as soon as April
Why The Chinese Balloon Was a Necessary Wake-Up Call – Recent events have shown that terrorism is not the only threat to the U.S. homeland. Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine shattered not only the 75-year peace in Europe but also Americans’ sense of security, particularly when the Kremlin has threatened nuclear escalation. Relations with Beijing have also deteriorated to a 40-year low, punctuated by the threat of Chinese aggression against Taiwan and other regional allies and covert activities within the United States
Visvim’s Toshiyuki Ueno in this film made in partnership with Porsche Japan, as we learn about the fundamental philosophy of ‘monozukuri’, or craftsmanship, behind the storied Japanese brand, as well as Ueno-san’s joy of ownership with long-lasting products.
Ueno’s joy of ownership comes from products that are potential candidates of what I called on this blog ‘heirloom design‘. Something that might develop a patina, but manages to last a lifetime. EDC or everyday carry is a category of products designed around the joy of ownership. Products over engineered and made of easy to service parts, yet are used everyday.
One can see this joy of ownership ethos in Visvim’s own products such as their iconic daypack. These look superficially like the classic Jansport design, but are over built in order ensure the bag outlasts the owner.
The joy of ownership is at odds with many aspects of our modern world. People no longer have digital or music collections. Instead relying on play lists on streaming services to give them the right muzak for whatever they are doing at the time. Online business Rent The Runway does away with the joy of ownership and curation of your look, you no longer need a wardrobe beyond the basics. Luxury brands are now talking about a circular economy play where consumers are encouraged to only enjoy the joy of ownership for a short while and they might then be resold. At the other end, fast fashion from Shein and H&M.
The much prescribed ethos of fast failure, agile methodologies and Facebook’s ‘move fast and break things’ are a world away from the philosophy behind the joy of ownership. This is the reason why Bang & Olufsen is a shadow of its former self, yet a vintage BeoSystem still provides the joy of ownership. More related content to the joy of ownership can be found here.
Xi Jinping shows his strength by muscling women away from power – Nikkei Asia – China’s path toward becoming a modern socialist country, as officials describe their aim, has historically been framed as incorporating gender egalitarianism. “Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole,” Mao Zedong wrote in 1955. By this measure, one would expect the Chinese Communist Party to at least signal that it cares about women’s representation in 2022. But last month’s 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party broke tradition by elevating 24 men and no women to the party’s Politburo, omitting its usual token female for the first time in 25 years. Women took just 11 of 205 seats on the new party Central Committee. Loyalty and utility to the top leader, above qualifications or affirmative action-style standards, are now the major determinants of officials’ prospects for promotion. Party leader Xi Jinping no longer feels any obligation to gesture toward gender equality – what this misses out on is that Mao Zedong’s public and private conduct were in sharp contrast. Mao was an avowed paedophile.
TikTok ‘ghost mall’ indicator of problems with Malaysia’s failed Silicon Valley | South China Morning Post – “It’s the only Malay-Muslim concept mall in Malaysia,” Abdul said, adding that he feels attached to the mall as “there is a brotherhood here.”While the mall didn’t have many customers, I was struck by the lively camaraderie among the staffers working there. Outside the mall, I found a singer performing for a small crowd. A couple meters away stood a unit where a popular Thai restaurant once operated. While it’s listed as operating on Google Reviews, one of Fadzil’s staff told me it has “closed down for good.” The restaurant appeared to once have good reviews online, with diners describing the food as “affordable” and “delicious.” The lot was padlocked and the tinted glass walls obscured what was inside, but my fat zoom lens captured an eerie image of the restaurant’s interior. Kitchen tools were piled in a corner and dozens of bottles of beverages stood packaged together, unused. It looked like a scene that had been quickly and hastily abandoned. – retail is tough at the best of times, but there is also a constant tale in Malaysia of expensive white elephants and failed economic policies once it had been decolonised
Ethics
Filmmaker Andrew Callaghan Says Cable News “Ramped People up” for Jan. 6 – I think that January 6th is much more of a riot than it is an insurrection. And I think that the mainstream media is endlessly focusing on it because it’s, it’s very good eye candy. It makes great news. It makes all conservatives look like absolute morons, and it’s good for selling ads. So it was a terrible thing, but there’s reasons they’re dragging it out, and they’ll continue to drag it out until the next major conservative fuck up like that. I don’t feel, necessarily, that the frontline brainwashed Capitol riot soldier is to blame for what happened. I think it’s the people who push them into action, particularly on the fringe as well. I think mainstream media and social media play a role in ramping up division, but I think it’s people like Alex [Jones] and Enrique [Tarrio] who really are primarily just merchandise salesmen. We have a serious problem with media echo chambers and informational literacy in this country. We have to take it upon ourselves to be more educated and think on a different level. So what’s in it for influencers like them? The “MAGA-sphere” allows for a ridiculous array of hustles and grifts. There’s Forgiato Blow, who built a rap career around the MAGA train. Enrique Tarrio runs the largest right-wing t-shirt shop on the Internet. Alex Jones makes millions of dollars selling brain pills, basically. There’s so many ways to make money in the MAGA world. It’s really appealing for someone trying to get their start as an entrepreneur or a politically active person – probably one of the smarter views that I have read on January 6.
Siegfried Muller’s interview shows the complexity in modern German history. Muller was plied with alcohol and interviewed by East German interviewers who then put together this film (presumably with editing). For Muller, the threat of communism was real. You can read more on Muller here.
The War in Ukraine Highlights European Rifts – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – Despite the destruction Russia is wreaking on Ukraine, both Chancellor Olaf Scholz and sections of his Social Democratic Party and business lobbies hanker after the status quo ante. Herein lies the second rift. It is linked to EU member states’ varied historical experiences and the resulting threat perceptions. The EU as a peace project was finessed over the years without a voice from the Eastern or Central Europeans. They had to endure living under the dictatorship of the Soviet Union. Today, Western Europe, particularly France and Germany, considers a future European security architecture involving Russia in some form. For the East Europeans, security is about defending themselves against Russia. That is why the latter want Ukraine to win and Russia to be defeated. For them, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens Europe’s stability and security—a threat that would be compounded if Russia were to win
Health
Race is on to develop new generation of weight-loss drugs | Financial Times – this looks like a Viagra like gold rush, on the plus side there is a lot of scientific progress being made. The biggest barriers are socio-cultural in nature. Disclosure, I worked on the global launch of Wegovy – the current category leading treatment
Hong Kong committee can bar foreign lawyers from national security cases: Beijing — Radio Free Asia – “Now the national security committee gets to decide what is and isn’t a matter of national security in all cases, not just national security cases, but in any other court cases and also in all matters of government policy, without being subject to judicial review,” he said. “They could claim that pandemic prevention was a matter of national security, or education,” Yam said. “It’s not just about the judicial system.” “It affects legislation and anything that takes place throughout the entire government system.” – Australian lawyer Kevin Yam points out the weakness that anyone using Hong Kong as a legal jurisdiction in contracts should be concerned about. Is the counter-party connected to the government, in a strategically important sector, government owned or supported by government loans? Do they employ mainland employees who might be affected by the contract. All of this could fall within the national security law. Another take by Hong Kong based legal scholar and former judge Henry Litton: HKU Legal Scholarship Blog: Henry Litton: Red Alert: Hong Kong Judicial Independence Under Existential Threat (Comment on the Admission of Owen KC). Samuel Bickett’s take on things here: Beijing’s New Year’s surprise: awarding itself broad new powers over Hong Kong and NPC Observer: Explainer: NPCSC’s Interpretation of Hong Kong National Security Law over Jimmy Lai’s Foreign Defense Counsel – Beyond the confines of Lai’s case and the specific issue it raised, the [NatSec] Committee’s seemingly broad and unreviewable power to “make [enforceable] judgments and decisions” on whether an issue of national security is involved, regardless of setting, could be cause for concern. It awaits to be seen whether and to what extent it would invoke this newly declared authority to deal with other situations in the future.
Three ways Big Tech got it wrong | Financial Times – Most of Big Tech got rich on software, which is easily updatable and basically free to distribute at scale. Such online innovation rightly places a huge premium on “failing fast”: getting a product out quickly, building a following and fixing the bugs later. The same is simply not true for a car, a medicine or even a new flavour of packaged meat. They have to work correctly and meet regulatory standards right off the bat. Production facilities and distribution networks cannot be conjured out of thin air, or easily amended after the fact. In the physical realm, an innovator can see its lead evaporate in the face of competition from rivals with experience in production and distribution. Tesla is discovering this the hard way. Tesla’s share of the US electric vehicle market has dropped below 65 per cent from 79 per cent five years ago. S&P Global Mobility predicts it will fall below 20 per cent by 2025 as other makers bring out electric trucks and cheaper models faster than Tesla can build new factories
A few things on this. I believe that hydrogen will play a far bigger role in the energy mix for transport. These cars are Toyota Mirai vehicles. Secondly, look at how easy it is for the workers to get the fit and finish right on the cars, which says a lot about the precision of their component manufacturers to get to Toyota’s legendary reliable, rattle-free vehicles.
William Davies · The Seductions of Declinism: Stagnation Nation · LRB 4 August 2022 – The claim that everything has been getting worse for decades is a gift to Thatcherites and Brexiters, who promise a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of the nation, and would like to banish those who talk down Britain’s prospects. Edgerton went to considerable lengths in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A 20th-Century History to dispute the claim that the interwar and postwar British economy was a failure, or that it needed ‘reviving’ in the way Thatcher promised. For Edgerton (and the Resolution Foundation appears to agree), Britain’s current economic malaise began under Thatcher, when rent-seeking via the housing market, privatisation and financial ‘innovation’ became the basis of Britain’s economic growth. But even Edgerton would agree that we are now in a very bad way. The poor quality of the Tory leadership candidates and the unseriousness of the debate between them creates the impression of a country that can now only speak to itself in slogans, oaths and insults, and has no capacity to describe or explain its problems. Away from the theatre of the leadership contest, the signs are that Britain’s elites now intend to stake everything on another financial free-for-all. Inexplicably, the Bank of England recently abolished the regulations that impose affordability criteria on the sale of mortgages, meaning that lenders no longer need to check whether borrowers have the capacity to repay if interest rates rise further. A new Financial Services Bill, supported by Sunak and the current chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, will challenge the power of the Bank of England to regulate financial services, with the aim of releasing the City of London to engage in greater risk-taking. The Brexiters’ ideology, according to which Britain remains restricted by its conformity to EU rules, may have one more hurrah, if it can liberate speculators for another few years before the Ponzi schemes finally collapse
Fake ‘Rothschild’ Was Chased by Russian Organized Crime When She Took Pictures With Trump at Mar-a-Lago – OCCRP – the self-confessed grifter was a Ukrainian immigrant tangled up with Russian organized crime, a joint investigation by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and OCCRP has found. OCCRP and the Post-Gazette revealed in August how Yashchyshyn gained access to Mar-a-Lago without any background checks, making at least four trips to the estate in two days. The investigation and an FBI action that same month to retrieve documents from Mar-a-Lago renewed questions about security at the private club that has hosted powerful U.S. and world leaders. Those questions will only grow with the new revelations that the fake Rothschild was being chased by a serious organized crime figure as she mingled with prominent club guests and the ex-president himself.
Singapore redevelopment of its harbour in the early 1980s is fascinating. The area is now a mix of bars, cafes and restaurants. Among the buildings lost was a cinema built and owned by The Shaw Organisation – who were responsible for the post-war boom in kung fu martial arts films and even helped finance Blade Runner. The Shaws came out of a merchant background and were big in pre-war Shanghai as one of the big three film studios. They diversified into amusement parks over a decade before Disney did; though the Shaws were not as single-minded in their focus on ‘family-friendly’ experiences as their US counterpart.
The limits of growth in Singapore, some of these factors feel very Brexity, partly due to neo-liberalism
