Month: October 2021

  • Spanx + more news

    Spanx

    Spanx commits to all-female board after Blackstone investment — QuartzMore than  a quarter of board seats in the Russell 3000 Index belonged to women during the last quarter, compared to 15.1% just five years ago, according the corporate leadership research firm Equilar. Still, just 84 of these boards had achieved gender parity, meaning that they were represented by 50% women. And companies still struggle to achieve adequate racial and LGBTQ representation on their boards as well. Justine Smyth, chair of the New Zealand telecommunications company Spark, has suggested that while the first “diverse” appointees on company boards may feel like tokenism, those members can help advocate for change once they are given decision-making power – Spanx is an American underwear company that does foundation garments to make the wearer appear thinner. Spanx innovated around testing with real people, having multiple sizes and packaging colours that increased brand salience. The back story of Spanx is similar to the ‘founder in a garage’ story that was the starting point of many Silicon Valley firms. Spanx is a private company. It is interesting that Spanx are taking private equity money from Blackstone rather than going public. Will we get to a situation in the future where all-women boards like Spanx come under the kind of pressure that all-men boards come under now? If we got to that stage, then we’d have equality. I think that will be a while.

    Business

    Effects of China’s regulatory onslaught felt in Hong Kong as large IPOs fall by the wayside | SCMP – the Hong Kong government is involuting towards the mainland so this is to be expected

    With seaports jammed, cargoes are taking to the skies | Financial Times – the rise in air freight prices is fascinating

    Oil refinery woes raise concern in Westminster over financial backers | The Guardian – sounds like a later era Le Carré novel

    China

    Piraeus port deal intensifies Greek unease over China links | Financial Times

    Consumer behaviour

    British leavers and remainers as polarised as ever, survey finds | Brexit | The Guardian

    Economics

    China’s central bank says spillover from Evergrande crisis ‘controllable’ | Financial Times

    Chinese developer Sinic defaults as Evergrande deadline looms | Financial Times

    ‘We’ve woken up’: attitudes change as Saudi Arabia kick-starts job market | Financial Times

    America’s political and business elites no longer agree on China | Financial Times – more like Jack Welch created shareholder value mindset has severed the link between Wall Street and the public good and this is the most obvious fissure

    America, China, and the Tragedy of Great-Power Politics | Foreign Affairs

    U.S., trading partners urge China to liberalise further | Reuters – interesting WTO developments

    Ethics

    Microsoft Executives Told Bill Gates to Stop Emailing a Female Staffer Years Ago – WSJ – interesting that we haven’t seen this kind of expose about Larry Ellison or Steve Jobs. Secondly, there is the timing with Mr Gates’ divorce. Finally, all of the money and hard work to reinvent Mr Gates as a philanthropist looks as if its becoming undone. While Mr Gates

    The soft bigotry of America’s cultural left | Financial Timesimposing 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

    EVs Are the Future, but Are They Really All That Eco-Friendly? – Robb Report

    Finance

    Goldman Sachs granted full ownership of China securities venture | Financial Times

    Reforms in Hong Kong Encourage Homecoming of Offshore Funds | Winston & Strawn LLPIn 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 – I suspect that this is designed to do a few things over time.

    • Allows Chinese citizens on the mainland access to more ways to do investments, whilst still being in full view of the Chinese government.
    • It allows the Chinese government to expand ‘capture’ of western financial institutions
    • It will allow China to put pressure on VIEs ran out of the likes of the British Virgin Island and similar territories out of scrutiny

    FMCG

    Procter & Gamble increases marketing spend by 30% | Advertising | Campaign Asia

    Unilever warns of even higher inflation next year | RTÉ News

    Hong Kong

    How Hong Kong’s Elite Turned on Democracy – The Atlanticthere is something performative about the face and patriotism on display that I suspect may be driven less by a drive to get on and more by the fear of what might happen to them or their loved ones if they didn’t

    Sleepy Hong Kong residents get 5-hour “Sleeping Bus Tour” | The Standard

    Innovation

    EETimes – Samsung Foundry Promises Gate All-Around in ’22 – Interesting new transistor type

    Synopsys, Dassault Systèmes team for lighting digital twin | EE News Europe – automotive focus

    ARM launches virtual modelling toolchain to boost AIoT development | EE News Europe – AIoT – AI in the internet of things

    Luxury

    Prada’s back-to-back game-changing campaigns: What drives a luxury brand from cat-walk to wet market? – reminds me of a project that Motorola was thinking of doing back in early 2005 linking London and Chicago

    Marketing

    Purpose could be ‘the death of brands’, warns Byron Sharp

    Media

    Mediatel: Mediatel News: John Lewis goes woke and the paradox of ESG – fraught creative

    Apple’s privacy changes create windfall for its own advertising business | Financial Times – “Apple was unable to validate for us that Apple’s solutions are compliant with Apple’s policy,” he said. “Despite multiple requests and trying to get them to confirm that their products are compliant with their own solutions, we were unable to get there.” Apple said its privacy features were designed to protect users. “The technologies are part of one comprehensive system designed to help developers implement safe advertising practices and protect users — not to advantage Apple.” – this has my spidey sense tingling right now

    What blockbuster? China spurns Hollywood’s advances | Financial Times – “If I was an investor, I would be very concerned about a strategy at this point that depended on access to the Chinese market and the good graces of Chinese film regulators,” said Aynne Kokas, the author of Hollywood Made in China and a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. “To make very expensive films in anticipation of being able to deliver them to the Chinese market and then not being certain that’s possible is actually a much more financially irresponsible strategy from my perspective.”

    Why your ad next to trendy pimple-popping, mukbang, and ASMR videos missed the target | Marketing | Campaign Asia – great research, context is everything

    Online

    China Said to Weigh Opening Tencent, ByteDance to Search – Bloomberg – this could be good for Baidu if it can show superior search

    Facebook confronts growth problems as number of young users in US declines | Financial Times – this isn’t news at all

    Retailing

    Alibaba Faces New Threat: an Evolving Chinese Shopper – WSJ – consumers have started to embrace new ways of shopping that favor browsing and interaction over targeted product searches. That trend has left Alibaba playing catch-up in some areas, and competitors have used the shift to gain a foothold in the world’s largest online retail market. Alibaba remains the leading platform in online shopping, but its share of China’s retail e-commerce market has fallen to a projected 51% in 2021 from 78% in 2015, according to research firm eMarketer. Interesting that WeChat, BilliBilli, Pinduoduo and Douyin are claiming part of the e-commerce pie. What this article doesn’t cover is the relative importance by comparison of O2O (offline to online) (paywall)

    Inside the John Lewis nightmare | Financial Times

    Security

    At least 13 phone firms hit by suspected Chinese hackers since 2019, say experts | Hacking | The Guardian

    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 they don’t care

    Telecoms

    Half of Americans Might Switch to Starlink Once Widespread Service Rolls Out / Digital Information World

    Web of no web

    Insight SiP announces funding for IoT security program | EE News – securing RF modules in IoT devices

    Wireless

    Apple is Still the Most Profitable Smartphone Company in the World / Digital Information World

  • South Korea + more things

    South Korea soft power

    This presentation on South Korea was done before Squid Game took off on Netflix. South Korea can enhance and leverage its soft power in fields such as K-pop, soap operas, movies, video games, contemporary art, sports, education, business, and technology. Geography dealt Korea a poor hand as it historically has been invaded by China and by Japan. South Korea now has the economic and cultural resources to produce significant soft power, allowing it to design a foreign policy that will give it a larger role in global governance. South Korea today has an unparalleled opportunity to expand its international influence in ways that would have been unimaginable just a generation ago. Scholars, journalists, authors, industry leaders and other leading experts join us for sessions to raise the level of understanding of South Korea’s soft power and analyze the role of soft power in the context of U.S.- ROK alliance while offering suggestions for how Korean soft power can be used to broaden and strengthen the alliance.

    Rush Doshi

    Rush Doshi, former director of the Brookings China Strategy Initiative and a former fellow in Brookings Foreign Policy, and Michael O’Hanlon, director of research in Brookings Foreign Policy, followed by a panel discussion with experts who focused on analysis concerning the U.S.-China relationship and China’s grand strategy. This was to mark the launch of Doshi’s book The Long Game.

    Dasani UK case study

    One of the first posts I wrote on this blog was about Dasani which was in reaction to one of the stories that run about the brand in the media. Dasani is a bottled water brand owned by Coca-Cola; it is similar to Watson’s Water in Hong Kong and Singapore. It is processed and purified, rather than being a natural spring water. Tom Scott does a complete run down of the history of Dasani in the UK.

    Shanghai Animated Film Studio

    Shanghai Animated Film Studio has made films from world war two to the present day. The golden age for the studio was between the 1950s when they experimented with films using Chinese art techniques to the cultural revolution. Havoc in Heaven draws on Peking Opera.

  • Ransomware & more news

    Ransomware

    North America Is Biggest Ransomware Target, Chainalysis Says – Bloomberg – This quote in the article about ransomware stood out to me: “The number of bad actors responsible for these widespread attacks is surprisingly small,” the report said. By taking action against the biggest players in groups such as infrastructure providers and money launderers, it said, “law enforcement can have an outsized impact and disrupt the operations of multiple strains.” – If ransomware was treated as war by other means that it actually is, rather than thinking of it as a law enforcement problem, things might get better. It would require the west to target ransomware payment rat runs and take out its key ransomeware players through covert means

    Design

    Carhartt WIP FW:21 Flower & Season | carhartt-wip.com – such a good photography project

    Economics

    Evergrande: China faces ‘challenging trade-offs’ in addressing developer’s debt crisis, IMF says | South China Morning Post

    Ethics

    We need to get news off Facebook, and we need to talk about mental health – Baekdal Plus – Thomas Baekdal is a Danish media analyst who has been an expert commentator on online media for over a decade. His newsletter and analysis carry a lot of weight in the European media industry

    Finance

    Henry Kravis and George Roberts step down as KKR chiefs | Financial Times – Kravis and Roberts had a storied career in finance including the RJR Nabisco corporate battle captured in Barbarians At The Gate.

    Elite Capture of Foreign Aid Evidence from Offshore Bank Accounts Jørgen Juel Andersen Niels Johannesen Bob Rijkersdisbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centers known for bank secrecy and private wealth man- agement, but not in other financial centers. The estimates are not confounded by contemporaneous shocks such as civil conflicts, natural disasters, and financial crises, and are robust to instrumenting with predetermined aid commitments. The implied leakage rate is around 7.5 percent at the sample mean and tends to increase with the ratio of aid to GDP. The findings are consistent with aid capture in the most aid-dependent countries.

    Hong Kong

    Almost half of Hong Kong’s BN(O) migrants are still unemployed, struggle with language and workplace culture differences | South China Morning Post – this rings true to me, although I would argue that the language issues are confidence, NOT ability. All of this will change for the better in a couple of years. Whats interesting is their high level of realism and determination to leave anyway. We’re now starting to see healthcare workers as well, who should fare better

    Chinese Billionaire Jack Ma ‘in Hong Kong’ After Media Investment Ban — Radio Free Asia – South China Morning Post to become state media

    Ideas

    Among the Taliban: a soldier-turned-writer’s journey through Afghanistan | Financial TimesI’ve benefited from the west. I had to fight, though; it has not been easy, but I hate being a victim. People kicked my head in. I kicked theirs in back. Things improved after I left my hometown of little opportunity in 1997. The Pakistani boys left back there are told to pull their socks up, get called Pakis, are accused of turning England into an Islamic state, forced into marriages, have fingers pointed at them by politicians when it’s convenient, and today they’re being told to change from being undereducated town-dwellers to remote coders for international tech companies. Yeah, right. A plane ticket to a war zone is much easier – great essay in the Financial Times

    The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning – Palladium 

    Luxury

    Should Brands Even Be Speaking About Social Causes? | Highsnobbriety 

    Media

    New Bond Can’t Take On Beijing’s Supervillains | Foreign Policy – how Hollywood underwent capture by China and now can’t break free without giving up access to the China market

    Chinese Billionaire Jack Ma ‘in Hong Kong’ After Media Investment Ban — Radio Free Asia – South China Morning Post to become state media? Which makes me wonder about what will happen to Stand News, Hong Kong Free Press and HK01?

    Security

    U.S. to tell critical rail, air companies to report hacks, name cyber chiefs | Reuters – good that they are doing it, but should have been done over a decade ago. I would be surprised if the offensive tools aren’t already implanted ready to go off

    Company That Routes Billions of Text Messages Quietly Says It Was Hacked | Motherboard

    WeChat’s Privacy Breach Exposed Online – Brumpost – not terribly surprising

    Taiwan

    The Harvard Crimson – Harvard summer school moves from China to Taiwan – wider issues of cultural decoupling driven by Chinese conduct

    Beijing accuses Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen of demanding equal ‘state-to-state’ treatment | South China Morning PostBeijing says her comments that Taiwan should not be ‘subordinate’ to the mainland had revived the doctrine first adopted by Taipei in 1999. Tsai is reported to have played a prominent role in formulating the theory, which Beijing says cannot exist alongside the one-China principle

    Vietnam

    Vietnam’s factories lurch into crisis from worker exodus with holiday shopping on the line | South China Morning Postthousands of workers – originally from the poorer parts of the country – who are leaving for their hometowns, an exodus that has left business owners in a state of panic over labour losses. Of the 3.5 million migrant workers employed in Ho Chi Minh City and its neighbouring provinces, 2.1 million want to return home, according to state media reports – explains Nike’s problems indicates that its systemic rather than brand or sector based in nature

    Web of no web

    China tests unmanned warships at secret base | The Times – to be expected

  • 8964 museum + more news

    8964 museum

    六四記憶‧人權博物館 8964 Museum – 8964 Museum is a site ran from outside Hong Kong that acts a memorial for events running up to the June 4th 1989 protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The 8964 museum site was originally built predominantly for a local Chinese audience in Hong Kong. The reason why its 8964 is because Chinese language is quite logical about structure. You go big to small, hence June 4th, 1989 is 4/6/89 in the UK and 8964 in Chinese. The 8964 Museum is a really nice piece of web design. The 8964 Museum goes back and shows the history of China from the founding of the People’ Republic through the 1989 student and worker’s protests and beyond. The 8964 museum is now blocked in Hong Kong.

    Beauty

    Unilever invites startups to partner through Positive Beauty Growth Platform | Unilever global company website – interesting Unilever Foundry concept aligned around ‘positive beauty’

    Business

    China’s Supreme People’s Court has Ruled against Apple, allowing a lawsuit to Proceed on Antitrust Grounds – Patently Applethe decision by China’s top court to allow the lawsuit to be considered by the Shanghai court could signal more trouble ahead for Apple in China, which now accounts for a fifth of its iPhone sales. Wang Qiongfei, Jin’s attorney, told the South China Morning Post in a telephone interview that a hearing is expected to take place in Shanghai next January. You Yunting, a senior partner at Shanghai Debund Law Firm, said that the top court’s ruling could have a far-reaching impact. “I think this case has established a new principle namely that antitrust cases are also rights infringement cases and thus can be adjudicated by local courts.”

    China Wields New Legal Weapon to Fight Claims of Intellectual Property Theft – WSJChinese courts granted so-called anti-suit injunctions blocking foreign companies from taking legal action anywhere in the world to protect their trade secrets…At Xiaomi’s request, a Chinese court in Wuhan issued an injunction barring InterDigital from pursuing its case against Xiaomi—in China or anywhere else. If InterDigital persisted, the Chinese court said, it would face fines equivalent to roughly $1 million a week.To trade lawyers and others who have tangled with Chinese companies over intellectual property, the InterDigital case is the latest sign of how China disregards the patents, copyrights and trade secrets of foreign companies

    Revealed: Bribery in advertising pitches is pervasive in APAC | Campaign Asia – I wonder if this is skewed to certain markets?

    China to block ‘core’ industrial, telecoms data from leaving the country | South China Morning Post – interesting, this could decouple everything from supply chains to billing systems and also make stocks even more opaque

    Global supply chains at risk of collapse, warn business leaders | Financial Times – the disparity between UK and US trucking problems is striking

    China

    Why China Is Alienating the World | Foreign Affairseven more striking than the backlash against China has been the country’s inability to recalibrate. Beijing’s response to the rapid deterioration in ties with Canberra was to confront Australia with a list of demands that it said were prerequisites for improving relations. China’s leaders have also repeatedly stressed that any improvement in relations with the United States must begin with concessions from Washington and issued Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman a similar list of demands when she visited Tianjin in July. Officials in Washington have begun to see Beijing’s inability to shift course as an advantage in the emerging competition between the two countries – less an inability than no desire, this is more about culture. I was reminded of Huawei’s ‘shut up‘ incident a number of years ago

    Goldman Sachs was poised to triumph in China. What happened? | Financial Times 

    Consumer behaviour

    Conscientious Korean consumers demand the full package | Campaign Asia“Now more than ever, consumers are evaluating brands across multiple dimensions of functionality, personal relevance and collective contribution,” Mali Wuestenhagen, senior media director at Essence Korea, told Campaign Asia-Pacific. “The term ‘meaningful brands’ is gaining increasing importance. Consumers are looking for unique brand experiences, and not just product and service excellence. To connect with consumers on a deeper emotional level, brands’ values need to resonate strongly with consumers. Brand authenticity and brand responsibility are equally important factors in driving positive consumer sentiment.”COVID affected brand relevance

    Project MUSE – Perceptual Divided Leviathan and the Modes of Political Participation in Chinacitizens’ varying degrees of participation across a range of political activities. It considers the perceived Chinese divided leviathan as a crucial cognitive shortcut for ordinary citizens to assess the uncertain activism environment, estimate the relative costs and benefits of different political activities, and strategize their participation portfolios. Using nationally representative survey data, the article exploits latent class analysis to uncover four distinct mass participatory modes—outsiders, conventionals, agitators, and activists—and examines the impact of perceptual government trustworthiness and integrity on modal transition. The empirical results reveal that citizens’ perceptions of a division between the central and local government affect their choice of participatory activities but not their overall participation levels: people who perceive a greater integrity division tend to engage the state in an agitative and contentious mode, and are less likely to do so in an institutionalized, conventional mode

    Gender and Sexuality – CHINESE RELIGIOUS LIFE – really interesting article for anyone looking at China consumer behaviour in terms of foundations

    Did Communism Smash the Patriarchy?In China, the government has maintained a monopoly of violence, rule of law and public trust. Men needn’t present as thuggish. But progress towards gender equality is still held back through the suppression of civil society. Taiwan and South Korea demonstrate what women can achieve when economic development is combined with democratisation and feminist activism. As Taiwanese women amassed wealth, status, and networks, they organised politically. Feminist lobbying secured gender quotas. Twice-elected Tsai Ing-wen now presides over a legislature that is 42% female. With strong female representation, the Government of Taiwan has strongly entrenched protections for women’s rights, criminalising sexual harassment. In South Korea independent civil society and religious groups were never fully suppressed under the military dictatorship. Anti-government coalitions of workers, students, priests, intellectuals, and farmers gained strength over the 1970s and 80s. South Koreans have now consolidated democratisation, on par with the UK!!  South Korea’s strong civil society laid the foundations for today’s feminist activism. 340 women’s organisations, labour unions and NGOs launched ‘Citizens’ Action with MeToo & campaigned ‘With You’. Recognising their collective strength and successes, women increasingly agitate for accountability. In 2018, 20,000 women marched against spy-cams (up-skirt and hidden cameras in loos) and revenge porn (which is then circulated online). This led to more government attention, a ministerial committee, and more police investigations. China lags behind, with the weakest protections against gender based violence. – things will get worse when the government has to come up with inventive ways to make the 3 child policy work

    Design

    BA06 – G-Class Governmental Business – I could totally see this screwing with the Ineos Grenadier

    Open Architecture: The husband-and-wife design duo redefining China’s cultural landscape – CNN Style – Beijing-based practice Open Architecture, are responsible for some of the last decade’s most thought-provoking Chinese arts destinations. Best known for transforming a series of aviation fuel tanks into a popular riverside gallery in Shanghai, the pair’s understated theaters and performance spaces offer a welcome dose of subtlety in a country with skylines all too often blighted by bold statements. “It’s about making a dialogue between us, as humanity, and nature,” Li said in a video interview.

    Economics

    Harper’s Magazine – Unmade in America — Open Markets Institute – America’s manufacturers spent those same happy years shifting many basic operations right off their factory floors. And by this I don’t mean simply offshore but right out of the company, along with the responsibility to make sure their world-spanning assembly lines always run right. Like Enron, our manufacturers did so largely to pump up the value of their stocks. And, like Enron, they will probably get to watch one day as their empty edifices collapse. Unlike Enron, however, this crash may bring down a lot more with it than one or a few companies. The global assembly lines that manufacturers such as Dell, Ford, Motorola, and Intel have so expertly engineered these last few years—in which, say, a single semiconductor might be cut from a wafer in Taiwan, assembled in the Philippines, tested in China, fit into a subcomponent in Malaysia, plugged into a component in Brazil, and loaded with a program designed in India—are just as audaciously complicated as any of Enron’s financial schemes. Yet because manufactured goods are so much less fungible than money, these systems are vastly more vulnerable to the mysterious mutterings of God or the deliberate hand of man and state – this was written back in 2002

    Hidden Performance: Salary History Bans and Gender Pay Gap by Jesse Davis, Paige Ouimet, Xinxin Wang :: SSRNAs of 2019, salary history bans have been enacted by 17 states and Puerto Rico with the stated purpose of reducing the gender pay gap. We argue that salary history bans may negatively affect wages as employers lose an informative signal of worker productivity. We empirically evaluate these laws using a large panel dataset of disaggregated wages covering all public sector employees in 36 states and find, on average, salary history bans lead to a 3% decrease in new hire wages. We find no decrease in the gender pay gap in the full sample and a modest 1.5% increase in the relative wages of women, as compared to men, among new hires most likely to have experienced gender discrimination historically.

    Ethics

    Apple’s fortress of secrecy is crumbling from the inside – The Verge – on Apple’s culture – executives make decisions about how the company will function, and employees either fall in line or leave. What choice do they have? Apple is currently worth $2 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the world, as well as one of the most powerful. Over the past few months, however, that culture has started to erode. As workers across the tech industry advocate for more power, Apple’s top-down management seems more out of touch than ever before. Now, a growing number of employees are organizing internally for change and speaking out about working conditions on Twitter.  “There’s a shift in the balance of power going on here,” says Jason Snell, the former editor of Macworld, who’s been covering Apple since the 1990s. “Not everyone is afraid that their boss at Apple is going to fire them. They’re saying, ‘I’m going to say some bad things about Apple, and if you move against me, it’s going to look bad for you.’”

    Murky waters: What next for the AUKUS nations and their allies? — 9DASHLINE – The development of global financial architecture in recent decades has transformed the transnational arena such that the old rules don’t necessarily apply. As the AUKUS announcement was being made, Russia’s political opposition was being undermined by groups including Google and Apple, who removed tactical voting apps for the country’s election. As attention in the US turns to the implications of growing Chinese power, the Chinese Embassy there can depend on Squire Patton Boggs, a lobbying firm in its pay. Included on the firm’s roster is the retired speaker of the House and one of the best-connected politicians in the US, John Boehner. Chinese leaders themselves are supported by a cast of western enablers who help secure their substantial fortunes offshore, most frequently in the British Virgin Islands

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong schools lose 81 Primary One classes as wave of emigration saps student population | South China Morning Post 

    Hong Kong faces worst quarter for stock listings since pandemic | Financial Times – interesting that financial institutions bet that HK would be the new favoured market for IPOs hasn’t paid off

    How to

    Kibbles & Bytes #1171:The Plug Is Mightier Than the Puck: Wireless Charging Is Wildly Inefficient, Need to Share Files Securely? Try Password-Protected ZIP Archives – great points on wireless charging versus plug-in charging

    Ideas

    Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley – start a project NOW to write the plan for the next GOP candidate – by Dominic Cummings – this looks like Domnic Cummings is writing himself a job description and hopes that someone will employ him to do it.

    Innovation

    Dry Ice Detailing Cleans Car Back to Factory Condition Without Water | Business Insider – this was a very specialist thing used on classic and supercars, interesting to see it be mainstreamed

    Luxury

    LinkedIn Global Head of Luxury: “Audiences Are Looking For More Storytelling From Brands.” – ‘In the five years since Tatiana Dupond joined LinkedIn, the social media platform has become a key destination for luxury brands to communicate their messaging to its highly engaged audience. She speaks to Luxury Society about how brands can further the experience for their followers through richer storytelling and more meaningful content.’

    The Deep-Dive: The Luxury Market Is Rebounding. Will It Last? | Luxury Society – Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Cartier and Hermès, to name but a few, have all seen a rise in brand desirability, according to data compiled by DLG, which found that Google searches for the brands have grown by 15 percent, 11 percent, 39 percent and 21 percent respectively, from January 2021 to June 2021, compared to a year earlier.

    TELFAR.TV – rather than write my take here’s Matt Muir’s: – this is an interesting bit of marketing from them, which is in part MEDIA EMPIRE stuff and in part a smart way of stopping bots from snapping up new stock for the resale market. Telfar TV is an online stream of…stuff, the gimmick being that it’s like public access cable insofar as anyone can submit video to be featured on the platform. Among the UGC stuff (I have only seen a couple of things and they are…I mean, look, let’s just say there was a STRONG AESTHETIC and if I were more inclined to look at video art then maybe I would have appreciated it more) will be scattered occasional QR codes which act as gateways to buy limited merch drops, in smart, bot-proof style. This is a super-interesting idea, which will almost certainly die a death based on a lack of people submitting content – I would add that they could also raid the internet archive for filler video content….

    Media

    New Bond Can’t Take On Beijing’s Supervillains | Foreign Policy 

    Adam Curtis: Social media is a scam | IdlerI’ve always thought John Le Carré did spies a great service because he made it seem as if there were endless depths of mystery and darkness when in fact, if you’ve ever researched the spies, they are (a) boring and (b) useless. I mean really, really useless. I researched MI5 once and they hardly ever manage to capture any traitors… it’s usually someone else who points them in the right direction. And in a way I think that’s true of this. The tech companies are powerful in the sense that they’ve got hold of the internet, which people like me think could be a really powerful thing for changing the world and disseminating new ideas, and they’ve got it in this rigid headlock. To do that, they’ve conned everyone into thinking that their advertising is worth it. And in the process, they’re destroying journalism – I would disagree with some of Curtis’ assertions but this feels right in terms of how they’re seen in terms of policy wonks now

    Facebook Views Preteens as ‘Untapped’ Wealth, Documents Show | Gizmodo – actually says valuable audience. Interesting that they were focusing on playdates as a possible media moment

    Retailing

    Shein exemplifies a new style of Chinese multinational | The EconomistXu Yangtian had none of their tailoring experience when he founded Shein (pronounced she-in) in 2008. Instead, the creator of the fashion world’s latest sensation was a specialist in search-engine optimisation. This expertise helped Mr Xu gain an understanding of how to draw shoppers’ attention in the digital world. And he has understood this very well indeed, bringing to an audience of rapt Western fashionistas a Chinese style of “social commerce”, which combines social media with online shopping. Add in a revolutionary approach to manufacturing and the results have been spectacular. In 2019 Shein’s gross merchandise volume (GMV), e-commerce groups’ preferred measure of total sales on their platforms, was $2.3bn, estimates to Zheshang Securities, a Chinese broker. This year it is forecast to surpass $20bn. By 2022 analysts expect Shein’s GMV to overtake Zara’s revenues. In May Shein was the most downloaded shopping app in America, overtaking Amazon

    Security

    C.I.A. Admits to Losing Informants – The New York Times – blames over optimism about their own abilities, under-estimating opponent intelligence services and over-optimism. What’s in the back of my mind is how much their electronic networks are compromised and how many are now double agents

    US has already lost AI fight to China, says ex-Pentagon software chief | Financial Times – blamed the reluctance of Google to work with the US defence department on AI, and extensive debates over AI ethics for slowing the US down. By contrast, he said Chinese companies are obliged to work with Beijing, and were making “massive investment” into AI without regard to ethics. Chaillan said he plans to testify to Congress about the Chinese cyber threat to US supremacy, including in classified briefings, over the coming weeks. He acknowledged the US still outspends China by three times on defence, but said the extra cash was immaterial because US procurement costs were so high and spent in the wrong areas, while bureaucracy and overregulation stood in the way of much-needed change at the Pentagon

    The entirety of Twitch has reportedly been leaked | VGC 

    GCHQ chief: Facebook is a worry but China is the real internet danger 

    The west sees China as a ‘threat’, not as a real place, with real people | The Guardian – Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both real places with real people

    Technology

    Study: Despite uptick in telehealth use, patient satisfaction sags – News – MM+M – Medical Marketing and Media – Learning more about unsatisfied patients can help healthcare marketers tailor efforts to reach them more effectively. To that end, the survey found that the industry provided uneven care to patients, with those deemed higher-risk – ones who self-reported their health as fair or poor – having lower satisfaction with telehealth offerings than people who self-reported their health as excellent.In addition, patients in better health were more likely to better understand information conveyed during telehealth visits and characterize these visits as more personalized.“The onus is on the telehealth industry to understand the analytics behind who these members are, and what sort of level of services they need that can be tailored to their healthcare conditions,” Beem said. – I wonder how this compares to in-person visits?

    The Impending Chinese NAND Apocalypse – YMTC 128 Layer NAND Is The First Semiconductor Where China Is Technologically Competitive – by Dylan Patel – SemiAnalysis 

    Wireless

    iPhone 13 Customers Sold On Longer Battery Life | Investor’s Business Daily – “Desire for a better battery life is the most popular reason for upgrading,” Daryanani said. “5G was not a popular reason for upgrading this year likely because 5G excitement in the U.S. remains well below the levels in China.” and working from home with your handset on wifi won’t help that sentiment

  • Frances Haugen

    Why Frances Haugen?

    Frances Haugen went from an unknown to prominence in the space of a week. Ms Haugen is the whistle blower who collaborated with the Wall Street Journal on a series of stories about Facebook.[1] Her identity became public when she appeared on US programme 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes included allegations of promoting human trafficking and domestic servitude.[2]

    One interesting aspect of what Frances Haugen said on the show was that Facebook tackles as little as 3 – 5 percent of online hate and misinformation content, despite being the best in the world at it.

    Frances Haugen then appeared before a US senate committee[3] and testified about the effects of Facebook. Finally she complained to the SEC claiming that Facebook has misled shareholders with regards the social network’s appeal with young people.

    When is data science a house of cards? Replicating data science conclusions. June Andrews (Pinterest), Frances Haugen (Pinterest)

    Are social networks bad for people?

    Facebook’s research indicated that 40 young women who had self esteem / mental health issues were negatively impacted by use of Instagram. There is a good deal of evidence within the Facebook document trove and elsewhere that social media can have a negative impact on mental health.

    There is also research that establishes a link between social media and both conspiracy theories and political polarisation[4] in Frances Haugen’s horde of Facebook’s internal documents. None of this is surprising and has been confirmed by third party sources over the years. So yes social networks can be bad for people.

    This also isn’t the first time that social networks like Facebook have been linked to political polarisation.

    But….

    But so have other mass media. For instance:

    The early years of state television in Italy, which began transmission in 1954, have usually been viewed as crucial to the spread of mass culture through Italian society. In addition, these developments have essentially been seen in negative terms by historians and sociologists.

    Television and the City: the Impact of Television in Milan, 1954–1960[5]

    Back in 1997, research had looked at the negative effects of fashion magazines on female self image in college age students. Fashion magazines were seen to have a negative effect.[6]

    Back in 1990, there was already academic coverage of how talk radio was driving political polarisation with a genre of service called confrontalk. Factors driving this included satellite networks driving national syndication in the US and free phone numbers that the audience could dial into.[7] By the mid-1990s nationally syndicated US talk show host Rush Limbaugh was named as a driver of political polarisation.[8]

    Political polarisation in the US has been discussed since at least the 1950s. By comparison bipartisanship is actually the odd event spanning from the 1950s through to the early 1990s; so polarisation is more likely to be closer to the norm in US politics.

    While Facebook was used in Myanmar to organise and galvanise action against the Rohinga minority. It was hasn’t been the only media used this way. The Indonesian mass killings of 1965 – 1966 were galvanised with the use of propaganda pamphlets as well as organising and training local militias.

    In a similar way to how Ugandan dictator Idi Amin used broadcast media,[9] support amongst Hutu people for the Rwandan genocide was galvanised by two national radio stations. The state owned Radio Rwanda and commercial station Radio Télévision des Milles Collines (RTLM).[10]

    I think there is a bigger question to be asked about is Facebook and other social media platforms somehow worse than other media? And if so, why is that? What can be done to resolve it?

    Has Facebook misled shareholders with regards the social network’s appeal with young people as Frances Haugen alleged?

    I don’t know if Facebook had explicitly made misleading statements, but the media has certainly covered Facebook’s declining appeal to young people. By 2018,[11] there was third party research to indicate that teens were abandoning Facebook for other platforms like Instagram (owned by Facebook) and Snapchat.

    I would be surprised if investors hadn’t discovered it in their due diligence. The negative network effects for young people were entire predictable in terms of their nature, if not their timing. There are bigger questions to be asked about the business model of digital advertising, Scott Galloway put together some of the salient points in terms of its relative inefficiency.[12]

    Facebook’s response

    I had a de ja vu moment when I heard about Facebook’s rebuttal of Frances Haugen. It reminded me of Microsoft’s responses during the buffeting it received in the late 1990s and early 2000s. If you want a definition of awkward watch Bill Gates video testimony for the antitrust hearings. This is just a small bit of the footage.

    Yes before Bill Gates was a cross between Mr Rogers and the Oprah book club; he ran a company that dominated media and technology. Microsoft shut down innovation. If you were in an area that Microsoft might have an interest, you couldn’t get VC funding. Yahoo! always called themselves in a media company to try and stay out of Microsoft’s hit list.

    It was a habit that was hard to shake. I flew over to San Francisco on the eve of a Martin Luther King bank holiday for a pitch (i think it was for BusinessObjects, but can’t be certain) at the agency I worked for. By the time that I landed and got in the office b AT&T Park, the pitch was off. The reason was the Microsoft was our client. Every pitch we did was run past them. I was told that we couldn’t do the pitch as it was an area that Microsoft might want to be in, in the future.

    The weak sniping responses of Facebook[13] reminded me so much of Microsoft’s responses to the antitrust issues and open source software. The bigger issue for Facebook is it that it can’t easily debunk its own research that Frances Haugen leaked outside the organisation as part of her work with the Wall Street Journal, report to the SEC and in front of the senate committee.

    What does this all mean for Facebook?

    There is a sense in the media that this scandal is different for Facebook and we are likely to see some sort of change. It is highly unlikely that the business will be broken up a la Standard Oil or the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think that we’ll see Facebook having to do the kind of video that Microsoft did over its antitrust settlement in 2001.

    https://youtu.be/z5_fBqZrwA0

    America’s regulators have a history of being very light touch in nature, especially around issues that are tangental to free speech. Secondly, while there is a bipartisan agreement to take action against Facebook; there is a US partisan split on what to take action over and how that action should take place.

    Broadly speaking the Democrats believe that Facebook is an engine of hate and harm. The Republicans feel that Facebook unfairly censors their opinions in favour of the Democrats.

    Facebook may see regulation instead in markets like the European Union, Japan and Korea.

    I think the singular worst thing that came out of this for Facebook is that they are bad at technology. They have demonstrated an ability in machine learning that is far behind peer organisations in China for instance. Facebook just isn’t that innovative.

    How will Facebook change?

    It is hard to say how Facebook itself will change as an organisation. Early indications are that ‘move fast and break things’ might be moving out of the company lexicon as it looks to review the reputational risks of new products.[14]

    What’s less clear is whether this is a temporary or permanent behaviour change.

    Facebook will also find it harder to recruit western employees in technical and product roles. But that was to be expected anyway as the company matured; there have been red flags about Facebook’s culture for over a decade and there is diminishing opportunities for riches joining a mature media technology company. Alphabet is in a similar position.

    Like trendy bars or night clubs, with online properties the heat eventually moves on, it is a miracle that the likes of Alibaba, Baidu, Google and Yahoo! have lasted for so long.

    Online services have their time and then lose their heat.

    More information

    [1] Glazer, E., Hagey, K., Horwitz, J., Purnell, N., Schechner, S., Scheck, J., Seetharaman, D., J. Stamm, J.S., Wells, G. and West, J. (September 13, 2021 – October 3, 2021) The Facebook Files. United States: The Wall Street Journal

    [2] Zubrow, K., Gavrilovic, M. and Ortiz, A.(October 3, 2021) Whistleblower’s SEC complaint: Facebook knew platform was used to “promote human trafficking and domestic servitude”. United States: CBS News (60 Minutes Overtime)

    [3] Haugen, F. (October 4, 2021) Written statement of Frances Haugen. United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation Sub-Committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security

    [4] Zubrow, K. (October 4, 2021) Facebook whistleblower says company incentivizes “angry, polarizing, divisive content”. United States: CBS News (60 Minutes Overtime)

    [5] Foot, J. (November 1, 1999) Television and the City: the Impact of Television in Milan. United Kingdom: Contemporary European History volume 8, issue 3 published by Cambridge University Press

    [6] Turner, S.L., Hamilton, H., Jacobs, M., Angood, L.M. and Dwyer, D.H. (Fall 1997) The influence of fashion magazines on the body image satisfaction of college women: an exploratory analysis. United States: Adolescents; Roslyn Heights Volume 32, Issue 127

    [7] Munson, W.E. (1990)Talking about talk: The talkshow, audience participation and the postmodern. United States: New York University

    [8] Barber, B.R. (winter 1996) An American Civic Forum: Civil Society Between Market Individuals and the Political Community. United Kingdom: Social Philosophy and Policy volume 13, issue 1 by Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation

    [9] Burke, J. (October 7, 2019) Idi Amin’s mastery of media revealed in newly published photos. United Kingdom: The Guardian

    [10] Rwanda radio transcripts. Canada: Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University

    [11] Anderson, M. and Jiang, J.J. (May 31, 2018) Teens, Social Media and Technology 2018. United States: Pew Research Center

    [12] Galloway, S. (October 8, 2021) Carcinogens. United States: No Mercy / No Malice

    [13] Lapatto, E. (October 5, 2021) Facebook runs the coward’s playbook to smear the whistleblower. United States: The Verge

    [14] Glazer, E. and Seetharaman, D. (October 6, 2021) Facebook Slows New Products for ‘Reputational Reviews’. United States: Wall Street Journal