China’s ‘Lipstick Brother’ Livestream Has Record $2 Billion Day – BNN Bloomberg – Beauty livestreamer Li Jiaqi aka Lipstick Brother sold $1.9 billion worth of products in one twelve hour show on Taobao. That’s slightly less than the total sales from all four Selfridges stores during 2019. Lipstick Brother is one of a number of live-streaming sales stars like Mr Bags aka Tao Liang. There are clear parallels between Lipstick Brother and informercial stars on US shopping TV. The reason why live-streaming commerce happened was because of the historic iron grip that the Chinese government has held on TV station. This drove audiences online because the content was that bad and there wasn’t a QVC analogue for the likes of Lipstick Brother to appear on. The key difference is in the breadth of products that Lipstick Brother and his peers sell, Lipstick Brother and Mr Bags work with topline luxury brands in their respective categories rather than mid-market brands. It is interesting that Lipstick Brother has managed to survive the communist party’s purge from public life of sissy men across off-line and online media.
China cuts finance pledge to Africa amid growing debt concerns | Financial Times – Chidi Odinkalu, senior manager for Africa at the Open Society Foundations, said the reduced financial pledge showed that Beijing no longer had to try so hard in Africa. “China’s strategic objective was to get a foot in the door. Now that it’s in the door, it can choose to dictate the terms,” he said. He criticised some African governments for relying too heavily on loans from Beijing. “The volume of credit that some of them have binged on makes them dependent beyond any sensible notion of sovereignty,” he said.
South Korean presidential hopeful plays down reunification with north | Financial Times – South Korean ruling party’s candidate for president has downplayed the prospect of the future reunification of the Korean peninsula, as the country’s voters tire of decades of fruitless diplomacy with the North. Lee Jae-myung of the progressive Democratic party, whose manifesto includes a commitment to “seek unification through peaceful measures”, told reporters on Thursday that competition between the two Koreas in terms of ideology and efforts to prove the superiority of each system “has no meaning” and did not offer the prospect of “real gains any more” – potentially a big move from the Moon regime position, also probably linked to a more hawkish position on China
Macau casinos gamble on relations with Beijing | Financial Times – casinos increase the shareholdings held by Macau permanent residents. A speedy public consultation has ended and business is waiting for the final law to be put to the legislature, a process that is also expected to determine how many of the casinos have their licences renewed, and for how long. The situation is particularly troubling for the three Macau casino groups that are largely US-owned: Las Vegas Sands, founded by the late Sheldon Adelson, MGM and Wynn operate nine resorts in Macau, and their local subsidiaries are listed in Hong Kong. Local operators Galaxy Entertainment, the late Stanley Ho’s SJM Holdings and Melco, which is dual-listed in the US and Hong Kong, also hold concessions – guessing that this adds pressure on gaming operators to try and put pressure on the US government rather like Wall Street does for China
TVs TV was nighttime TV programming on Japanese TV. Like in the west, some of the most innovative cutting edge visual graphics and cult programming was broadcast on these night time slots from the 1980s through to the late 1990s. TVs TV blends video graphics with b-roll video and specially commissioned footage. You can find more Japan related content here.
Indigo Gaming
YouTube channel Indigo Gaming have managed to successfully complete their three part documentary series on cyberpunk culture.
Part one covered the origins of cyberpunk in the 1980s including Neuromancer, Blade Runner, RoboCop, Akira and Shadowrun.
Part two covers the late 1980s and early 1990s including Ghost in the Shell, Shadowrun, Total Recall and the Blade Runner Game.
Part three went into the 1990s with The Matrix, System Shock, Snow Crash, Hackers, VR & Simulation Theory.
Its an epic bit of documentary making covering books, comics movies and games with a cyberpunk theme. It is well worth sitting down and watching all three episodes to date.
Finally, it is worthwhile comparing it with the Cyberpunk documentary by Marianne Trench interviewing hackers and authors back in 1990.
Outdoor gear design
While football casuals and mountain girls made outdoor wear fashionable before Virgil Abloh and Palace made Arc’teryx trendy – Dana Gleason goes back to the origin of outdoor gear. The modern industry came out of the end of the second world war. He was in the industry back when it was run by hippie mountain climbers. He saw the industry tap into globalisation with production offshored to Taiwan in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
He also explains how a massive brand consolidation happened. The story involves Taiwanese generals, federal crimes and his own approach to design. Gleason now designs Mystery Ranch, which sells packs to trendsetters in Japan and around the world. I’ve had one of his Mystery Ranch packs for the past 12 years and its as good as when I got it.
TV glyphs of the USSR
Someone had found a demo reel of CGI for broadcast IDs made towards the end of the Soviet Union. It is impressive for its creativity.
Adult entertainment economics
The music industry was disrupted by the move to digital downloads and streaming online. With artists seeing severe revenue decline. The same seems to be the case in the adult entertainment industry with the rise of tube sites and the move away from physical media. Performers had an 85 percent reduction in their rate of pay.
Saab 900
A couple of films caught my eye celebrating the Saab 900. There is now enough distance between Saab’s collapse under GM to view the Saab 900 as the innovative car that it was.
The Saab 900 changed ergonomics, safety, driving performance and design in a way that is probably comparable to Tesla today in terms of its influence. It was the template for what Audi is today.
Big Car do a really good history of the Saab 900 that has a more serious tone to it.
The Incal
The Incal is the latest comic that is being adapted for streaming services. It is an epic work as a comic, here’s a 20 minute explanation of it. You may not have read the comics, but will have likely seen films that have been heavily influenced by it.
Luxury Stores Across the US Hit By Mass Heists in the Same Week – Robb Report – this sounds like a classic example of steaming. Steaming is a British phrase describing the phenomenon of shoplifting, when a large group of (usually youths) enter a store en masse and engage in shoplifting. Steaming puts a strain on shop security, it often causes panic in the store and creates so many suspects for the police to chase down. For the shoplifters steaming reduces the individual risk of getting caught. In large department stores, steaming becomes easier because of the number of exits. There are usually enough people involved to push past hastily set up security checkpoints during steaming. Young people are particularly attracted to steaming for a couple of reasons:
Low risk, high reward
Low impact of criminal penalties for many depending on their age
Peer pressure from other older members organising the steaming group
When I was in secondary school, we had a trip to Paris. A good number of peers one day engaged in steaming. They managed to make off to a large amount of Lacoste and Sergio Tachini sports clothing which was popular in Merseyside at the time. Steaming was also a central part of football casual culture. Much of the sportswear back in the 1980s were fenced goods. Criminal gangs followed European football games and practiced steaming in the lead up to a match at major department stores across France, Spain and Italy. The items were then sold on to groups of football fans back home through informal networks. What surprised me about this group doing the steaming was the nature of their crime. They were steaming boutiques, which have less entrances and exits than department stores. Boutiques often have queues of people to get in and security on the doors that would be bad for practicing steaming.
So what went wrong with store security to prevent steaming? Has steaming been facilitated by a cut back in security for cost cutting purposes? If so, will insurance companies honour losses incurred through these steaming attacks?
Beauty
Prestige beauty: Inside Unilever’s growth engine | Vogue Business – Dana Kreutzer, project lead for beauty and personal care at US research firm Kline, says the acquisition “demonstrates the company’s focus on expanding its portfolio to include more digitally-led brands and clinical-grade skin care, which is a fast-moving segment in the skincare space”.
Opinion | We Spent a Year Investigating What the Chinese Army Is Buying. Here’s What We Learned. – POLITICO – the Chinese military is “intelligentizing” warfare by purchasing AI systems for all manner of applications, including autonomous vehicles, intelligence analysis, decision support, electronic warfare and cyber operations. At the same time, we found reason to be skeptical of the most ominous predictions about China’s efforts to fully automate warfare through “doomsday”-like weapons. Perhaps most importantly for U.S. policymakers, our investigation into the PLA’s buying habits shows how Chinese progress in military AI is being driven, in part, by access to American technology and capital. Our report highlights the critical role U.S. companies play in supplying China with data, software and funding. This points to serious shortcomings in the U.S. export control system, which wasn’t built to screen the high volume of technology transfer and capital flows into China, and which struggles to distinguish between military and civilian purchasers. Even as the United States attempts to decouple supply chains from China when it comes to American goods, it also needs to consider new strategies to prevent American know-how from inadvertently powering China’s technological advancements
In the Russian Arctic, China treads on thinning ice | China Dialogues – In order to reach its goal of becoming a ‘polar great power’ China will need to lessen its dependence on Russian support and expand its economic and political ties with other Arctic states. This may present Arctic states with an opportunity to set limits on China’s regional influence, but the benefits of any such limitation must be measured against the importance of giving China a stake in the fight against climate change. In the traditionally calm waters of the Arctic, China’s ‘Arctic Policy White Paper’ made much of a splash when it was first released in 2018. The paper showed, as was argued at the time by politicians and pundits, that Beijing would seek to establish itself as a new Arctic power, and in the process deprive the eight Arctic states of their control over the region’s abundant natural resources
Solomon Islands PM Manasseh Sogavare faces calls to resign over China diplomatic ties | South China Morning Post – The protest began peacefully, but schools and businesses were shut by the afternoon as crowds tried to enter parliament demanding PM Manasseh Sogavare step down. Protesters were angry about lack of promised development and the Solomons government’s 2019 decision to cut ties with Taiwan and establish a formal relationship with China – the big question is what will China do to keep Sogavare or his party in power and maintain the status quo?
Secret Chinese Port Project in Persian Gulf Rattles U.S. Relations With U.A.E. – WSJ – U.S. intelligence agencies learned this spring that China was secretly building what they suspected was a military facility at a port in the United Arab Emirates, one of the U.S.’s closest Mideast allies, according to people familiar with the matter
Is the China-Europe Express becoming a political weapon in the hands of China? | RailFreight.com – China launched the Belt and Road initiative with the purpose to enhance Eurasian transport links. It includes Chinese cities, transit countries through Asia and European destinations. Understandably, such a vast investment from the Chinese side, including involvement in other countries’ economies, could constitute a political and economic hazard. Maja Bakran Marcich, the Deputy Director-General for Mobility and Transport at the European Commission, had warned some months ago that good synergies between Europe and China should be characterised by mutual respect and control over the power relations.
It seems that when Marcich was saying that, she had a similar situation in mind. The New Silk Road is a crucial and fast-developing part of the global supply chain, putting rail freight at the forefront of transportation. However, it looks like it has the possibility of becoming a dangerous card on the table of diplomatic and political games. Should China have the liberty of just cancelling Eurasian train services in the name of political disputes? And shouldn’t the New Silk Road focus only on transportation purposes?
Chinese doctors query Beijing’s Covid contact tracing policy | Financial Times – the way that the Chinese government is going about it fits in with the concept of struggle in Stalinist thought. That the struggle is not only done but seen to be done. The doctors challenge therefore represents a much more profound dissonant voice against the CPC than the content in the article suggests. For this reason alone, they’ll likely spend some time down at the local public security office sitting in a tiger chair and agreeing to sign a document apologising. They will also have earned a huge black mark on their credit score at the very least.
Kevin Rudd: “China views the UK as weaker after Brexit” – New Statesman – three core ideological undercurrents that form Beijing’s economic and foreign policy. First, China’s domineering relationship with its neighbours is shaped by its perception that it sits atop a regional hierarchy rooted in its imperial past. Second, the Chinese Communist Party’s Marxist-Leninism results in the dual conclusions that China’s time has come and the struggle between reactionary and progressive forces places China in opposition to the United States. The third undercurrent is national reunification with Taiwan – what Rudd describes as the central organising principle of China’s plans for East Asia first and then globally. Hence China’s work in the Antarctic and inserting itself as an Artic power without any semblance of claims.
China Is Jihadis’ New Target – In early October, an Islamic State-Khorasan bomber killed nearly 50 people at a mosque in Kunduz, Afghanistan. That the militant group claimed responsibility for the attack wasn’t surprising, but, in a worrying new twist for Beijing, it also decided to link the massacre to China: The group said that the bomber was Uyghur and that the attack was aimed at punishing the Taliban for their close cooperation with China despite its actions against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. China was long seen as a secondary target by international terrorist organizations. Groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State were so focused on targeting the United States, the West more generally, or their local adversaries that they rarely raised their weapons toward China, even though they may have wanted to due to, for example, China’s mistreatment of Uyghur Muslims. But in Kunduz, this narrative was brought brutally to a close. China can now consider itself a clear target. – probably more worrying for China is the risk that this kind of action will pose to them in other geographies like the Middle East and Africa and along the parts of the belt and road that go through restive muslim majority regions of the former Soviet Union
Why Is Gen Z Acting Like Boomers Right Now? – Gen Z’s frantic, chain email-flavored TikToks prove naivety and gullibility is ageless. Not surprising given the younger cohorts in the resistor segment of COVID regulation compliance that research by Kings College London found last year.
Chinese parents find new ways to give their children an edge | Financial Times – parents have been seeking new ways to give their children an edge in the cut-throat university entrance examinations. Instead of signing up for foreign language classes, barred by the regulations, parents instead opt for non-core curriculum subjects like art, which are taught in English, says Ekaterina Kologrivaya, co-founder of Edtech Expand, a Beijing-based consulting start-up. Many of the large tutoring companies have closed their physical classrooms, transferring online to save costs. But Beijing barred local firms from hiring tutors located overseas, driving up demand for the depleted number of foreign teachers in China, unable to get into the country due to strict border controls. This has pushed up the prices of classes taught by foreigners, including debate classes, another crafty way for students to master prized English skills while abiding by the new rules
Is China’s catch-up growth over? – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – But all things come to an end. Every other spurt of rapid development has eventually slowed to the stately pace of a mature economy. There are basically two reasons this happens. First, as you build more physical capital — more buildings, roads, railways, machine tools, vehicles — the added output of each new piece of capital goes down, while the upkeep costs just keep rising. This is the basis of the famous Solow growth model, and we’ve seen this happen again and again to fast-developing countries. The second reason rapid growth peters out is that it’s easier to copy existing technologies from other countries than to invent new ones yourself. The real question is when this slowdown happens. Japan’s history provides an interesting example here. Here’s a graph of Japan’s income per capita (at purchasing power parity) as a fraction of America’s: You can see that Japan’s catch-up (at least, post-WW2) really happened in two phases. There was rapid catch-up until the early 1970s, then a few years where catch-up paused, then a resumption of catch-up at a slower pace for about 15 more years. After the bursting of the country’s famous land bubble, its economy actually lost ground to the U.S. (rapid population aging was also a big part of this), and settled in at around 75% of U.S. levels (fairly standard for a medium-sized developed country). Economists have found that this pattern is very typical. In a pair of famous papers in 2012 and 2013, Barry Eichengreen, Donghyun Park and Kwanho Shin found that fast-growing countries tend to slow down when they reach a certain income level – peak China
Finance
The ‘Tesla-financial complex’: how carmaker gained influence over the markets | Financial Times – the real importance and wider footprint of what might be called the “Tesla-financial complex” far outstrips the company’s market capitalisation. This is thanks to a vast, tangled web of dependent investment vehicles, corporate emulators and an enormous associated derivatives market of unparalleled breadth, depth and hyperactivity. Combined, these factors mean Tesla’s influence over the ebb and flow of the stock market is far greater than even its size would imply. It may even be historically unrivalled in its wider impact, some analysts say – is there a market squeeze opportunity? The parallels with Porsche in this regard are striking
Close Reading of the QAnon Shaman’s Conspiracy Manifesto ‹ Literary Hub – the legitimate skepticism inspired by historical events like the assassination of JFK (and the Warren report’s open-and-shut verdict on it) has mutated into a toxic skepticism that is not only hostile to government institutions but has turned on gatekeepers like the press, scientists, and medical authorities, provoking an epistemological duel to the death over facts and alt-facts, truth and truthiness. The effect of these attacks and counterattacks is “mutually assured disqualification,” Bratich argued, in a 2017 lecture, punning on the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. And the effect of that is what could be called epistemological vertigo—the pervasive sense of not knowing how to sort fact from falsehood; of being unmoored from the truth. It’s what makes so many grab onto the reassuringly black-and-white theology of conspiracism. And it is a theology, Manichean in its cosmic struggle between good and evil, apocalyptic in its conviction that we’re living in the end times. “There is a war on humanity, there is a war on religion, there is a war on human assembly,” said Naomi Wolf, on Fox News Primetime. “Big Tech wants to drive everyone indoors and dissolve the bonds between people.” – interesting, though the writer shows their own belief in conspiracy theories
Carbon Counter/EVs: cleaner electricity makes a big difference to emissions | Financial Times – In the UK, US and Germany such vehicles offer large emission reductions of 76 per cent, 60 per cent and 49 per cent respectively when run on the typical mix of power sources in mains electricity. Germany’s poor performance reflects its exposure to dirty lignite and coal as fuels. Hydroelectric-dependent countries such as Norway do strikingly better. However, a much smaller reduction in emissions occurs in China, at less than a fifth. China has the biggest market for plug-in cars. Fully electric vehicles accounted for 9 per cent of its entire market in the first half of this year, more than double the figure for 2019. Every year it adds more solar power capacity than any other nation. But as of November 2020, two-thirds of China’s electricity came from coal-fired generation, says the IEA. China’s huge appetite for coal means it plans to add almost a fifth to its coal-powered generation capacity of more than 1,000GW.
Disney CEO: We’re Ready for a Metaverse Future – The Hollywood Reporter – “Our efforts to date are merely a prologue to a time when we’ll be able to connect the physical and digital worlds even more closely, allowing for storytelling without boundaries in our own Disney metaverse, and we look forward to creating unparalleled opportunities for consumers to experience everything Disney has to offer across our products and platforms, wherever the consumer may be.”
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.
Vivienne Tam hosted a video fashion show for her clothes in Hong Kong. The key difference between this and other shows is that the Vivienne Tam show took place in the iconic Ngong Ping cable car across Lantau island.
Vivienne Tam has a range had the usual mix of western cut and Chinese design motifs.
Buzz Lightyear origin story
The original film Toy Story had the reality of Buzz Lightyear being a toy versus his own beliefs of him being a space hero coming into sharp contrast.
Move forwards 26 years and the character gets an origins story, making his fictional story more real. Disney continues to raid its catalogue. The story has references to both the Star Wars and Marvel universes as well as Pixar’s usual humour and easter eggs. A lot of this is down to the fact that the geeks conquered and creatively own Hollywood now. In fact the film is as much about this subtext, where reality and fantasy have been subverted as it is about Toy Story.
Chris Evans (who played Captain America) has replaced comedian Tim Allen as the voice of Buzz Lightyear, which gives an idea of the change in tone.
Jho Low
Vice Media interview the Wall Street Journal journalists who wrote some of the major stories breaking 1MDB and the financier who managed it Jho Low. In a weirdly parallel aspect to the story Low used 1MDB money to help finance The Wolf of Wall Street movie. Low is reputed to be hiding out in China’s greater bay area, moving between Shenzhen, Macau and Hong Kong. If this is true, then he is likely to be under the protection of powerful officials in China.
Low’s back story in Penang is fascinating and proves that it is easier to pull a large con than a small one.
Cyberpunk design cues
Casio’s new premium G-Shock GMW-B5000TVA-1 Titanium “Virtual Warriors” has definite cyberpunk design vibes. Even though it is a premium watch, it is also at odds with Casio’s more connected G-Shock models.