Finance is a really odd section for me to have. I don’t come from a finance background, I have no interest in fin-tech. Yet it makes its appearance here on this blog.
When thinking about this category, I decided to reflect on why its here. It’s usually where curated content sits, rather than my own ideas.
The reality of life in the west is that everything has become financialised. As I write this as people think about web 3.0, they are thinking about payment systems first and working about utility later. This implies that the open web we know won’t be part of the metaverse in terms of ideas or ethos.
Instead of economic growth consumer spending depends on different ways of creating credit. Its no accident that delayed payments finance company Klarna is the biggest thing in European e-commerce at the time of writing this page.
Back when I started writing we were heading into the financial crisis of 2008, the knock on effects of that could still be felt a dozen years later and was a contributing factor to Brexit and Trump victories. The ‘occupy’ movement was catalysed by the financial crisis and then turned into something else. For instance it became a pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
We had the implosion of financial brands like Lehman Brothers and the Royal Bank of Scotland. This created a lack of trust in business, the media and the government. We are still seeing that play out today, from cryptocurrency to conspiracy theories and a lack of trust by the public in experts.
KanDenko is a Japanese construction company that specialises in infrastructure. This advert communicates effectively what they do in a creative manner. KanDenko must have spent a good deal of money to have this film produced. But it is well worth it.
Vintage Singapore
Footage of Singapore‘s North Boat Quay circa 1983. This area has now been redeveloped with the shop houses refurbished and now holding cafés, restaurants and bars. What this video shows is traditional Chinese life that would have been similar to the mainland prior to Mao’s ‘new China’ which culminated in the cultural revolution.
Thankfully overseas Chinese and Taiwan had preserved the culture and beliefs.
Stussy x Nike
Nike and Stüssy have collaborated on bringing an old Nike model back to life.
New Order’s Blue Monday on 1930s instruments
The BBC made a video of Orchestra Obsolete using early electronic instruments (including a Thermin) alongside traditional instruments to reproduce New Order’s Blue Monday
Distorted Kowloon City
When I first saw this footage of Distorted Kowloon City, I was reminded of the locative art discussed in William Gibson’s novel Spook Country. I read this shortly after being switched on to where 2.0 services while working at Yahoo! on search and Flickr offerings. Yahoo! bought Whereonearth, to better understand what ‘local’ meant with its InternetLocality product set. At the time Whereonearth worked with Three on local mobile services and was a data provider to the likes of insurance companies and credit reference agencies. Yahoo! engineers like Dan Catt and Paul Hammond worked on projects like ZoneTag and including location data in the EXIF metadata of photography; something we just accept as normal on smartphones now.
Distorted Kowloon City is a piece of immersive digital abstract art. Or according to The Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC)
Kowloon City is full of collective memories of Hong Kong people. Spanning the old town with restaurants and specialty shops, Checkered Hill (also known as Radar Hill), tree-lined parks, the historical remains of the Kowloon Walled City and the former Kai Tak Airport, Kowloon City is as diverse as Hong Kong.
To re-interpret how we perceive, how we feel and how we see Kowloon City, moon.moon weaved the sensory data elements of the real world into an 360-degree audio-visual experience with the aid of original music and technologies (e.g. Point Cloud Processing and drone photography), allowing the public to re-discover Kowloon City from abstract art perspective.
Design Inspire | HKTDC
From this explanation, its a mix of history, Hong Kong culture and geography blended into the art work.
The work was done by local digital artist Moon Hung.
Fractured markets
The effect of low interest rates in the aftermath of 2008 on financial investors was to encourage increased risk taking and one of the first casualties of interest rate increases were UK pensions under management. The FT goes into more depth in a video documentary.
The buzz in part of our office about Midjourney has subsided to be replaced by buzz about ChatGPT, rather than Christmas. ChatGPT is is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text. ChatGPT was considered to be a superior example of a chatbot down to the power of machine learning used in creating the content.
I was curious about how good ChatGPT actually was given the following commentary from The Verge:
The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce
Vincent, J. (2 December, 2022) AI-generated answers temporarily banned on coding Q&A site Stack Overflow | The Verge
The Verge article was interesting. Most of the places where chatbots might be needed: providing customer services, regulated industries like finance would suffer from confident, but incorrect answers being provided to customers.
Secondly, media outlets decided that ChatGPT was a potential Google challenger, with outlets like CNBC comparing the two and equity analysts at Morgan Stanley feeling the need to come out and say that ChatGPT was not likely to replace Google.
Sample of conversation
Google’s innovators dilemma
What became quickly apparent Google’s narrative about being an innovator full stop, has been threatened by ChatGPT. Google as an incumbent is now stymied by Clayton Christiansen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. Google is no longer cool, its conversation related products are seen to be behind the curve and the company is seen as being too big to out-innovate itself easily.
So what’s ChatGPT like to use?
I have shared a picture of some of the better responses I had from the service. I started off with a certain amount of ambition. I asked it about who it felt might win the current war in Ukraine. I found that the training set of data used to power it was finished in 2021. This was obviously done to filter out the worst of the internet from the content, getting around rather than solving problems that previous chatbots have suffered from like Microsoft’s Tay project.
Eventually I managed to get on to safer ground for ChatGPT. It answered questions about what an AI winter was, whether fuzzy logic is a form of artificial intelligence (it is), whether Baye’s Theorem was a form of AI (it isn’t per se, but it is employed to solve some AI problems there similar to the kind of uncertainty challenges fuzzy logic solves.
ChatGPT said that AI (like Bayes Theorem) could be used to provide a solution to buffer bloat – which massively increases the latency on data networks.
I found out quantum computers could make an optimised AI more power efficient and the business expert systems popularised in large companies during the 1980s and 1990s were analogous to modern day AI systems.
It reminded me a lot of content I had read on Summly, the mobile news app that mashed up an AI service API with news sources to summarise articles. This start-up was bought by Yahoo! a decade ago.
In this respect, I do wonder whether ChatGPT is truly the quantum leap forward that many seem to think, or is it merely a reminder of how well understood technology can be applied in different ways?
Can India build a military strong enough to deter China? | Financial Times – I think that this is down to the lead China has in manufacturing capability and innovation as much as anything else. There is a substantial risk that India could lose many of its northern provinces in theory. In theory being the operative phrase here. Ukraine has show what’s possible with people fighting for their homes. It makes more sense for India to think about assymmetric and grey zone tactics at scale to bleed China’s financial and human lifeblood. From hacking well in advance of a conflict, to militias trained and equipped for guerrilla actions allowing for attack in depth once China crosses the threshold.
China boosts military aid to Africa as concerns over Russia grow – Nikkei Asia – China has kept its forces from direct engagement in crises in Africa as part of its noninterference policy, it has also taken an increasingly high profile in United Nations peacekeeping missions. It has sent more than 1,000 troops, police and specialists to oil-rich South Sudan, for example. “When Chinese interests were threatened by insurgencies in Nigeria, China issued a statement, as it still lacks the military commitment. This can, however, change in the future,” Ali said. Experts say China is more focused on economic and national security interests than on peacebuilding. Beijing prefers strategies centered on development that help to alleviate poverty and provide stable governance, but do not necessarily advance protection of individual rights and free markets. But this growth-first attitude may be counterproductive over the long term. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, China has a very close relationship with the government, but attacks in the resource-rich east of the country by a number of rebel groups pose threats to its mining interests. “Insurgencies happen as the product of social exclusion,” Nte said. “There must be a stable political climate to address economic degradation caused by the wrong policies.”
UK economy rebounds by more than expected in October | Financial Times – the second largest contributor to growth in October was performance of the health sector in administration of vaccine boosters and flu shots, the biggest sector was construction. But construction has started to slow since then with sites halting work in November
How Putin’s technocrats saved the economy to fight a war they opposed | Financial Times – tough moral questions to be asked. However, Central Bank governor Nabiullina’s moral calculus reminds me a good deal of convicted German war criminal Albert Speer, in particular the “Speer Myth”: the perception of him as an apolitical technocrat responsible for revolutionising the German war machine. The close alliance with Iran should allow both countries to pool expertise in sanctions busting.
Meanwhile air travel is going great guns according to airlines like Lufthansa who are bringing back their Airbus A380 jumbo jet airliners.
Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai’s sentence casts chill over relaunch, analysts say — Radio Free Asia – “If you can’t say anything anyway, then you might as well locate [your office] in mainland China,” Chow said. “Using Hong Kong as a jumping-off point to the mainland is a waste of money, because rents are much more expensive than in mainland China.” – there is also the tax aspect (expats pay much more tax in Mainland China) and a transferrable currency, but otherwise the point is pretty valid
A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any of Us Survive It? – In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated. Monahan, who is 35, breaks down the three vibe shifts he has survived and observed: Hipster/Indie Music (ca. 2003–9), or peak Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, high-waisted Cheap Mondays, Williamsburg, bespoke-cocktail bars; Post-Internet/Techno Revival (ca. 2010–16), or the Blood Orange era, normcore, dressing like The Matrix, Kinfolk the club, not Kinfolk the magazine; and Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016–20), or Drake at his Drakest, the Nike SNKRS app, sneaker flipping, virtue signaling, Donald Trump, protests not brunch
Amazon’s heroic phase is over | Amazon Chronicles – My first theory is that capitalism doesn’t stop evolving. The evolution of the microprocessor, digital computing, the internet, the personal computer, the World Wide Web, and the tech giants that have emerged in their wake are all transforming capitalism as we experience it and the culture produced by it in ways we don’t even fully understand. These are the biggest companies in the world and the ones with the greatest impact on how we think, work, shop, and communicate. You can’t understand capitalism in the twenty-first century without understanding how technology is changing it. I think this theory is pretty uncontroversial. It’s certainly not new. My second theory is that the arc of capitalism traced by Marx and Lukács and others writing in their tradition can also be retraced on a smaller scale. Like those early modern bourgeoisie, big tech has moved from its initial chaotic and subterranean strivings, to a heroic universalist phase where it championed political and economic liberation. Now these companies are consolidating their dominance by reducing or eliminating their workforce, shifting away from consumer goods, and brokering compromises with state power.
The heat from radioactive processes within the planet’s interior causes the plates to move, sometimes toward and sometimes away from each other. This movement is called plate motion, or tectonic shift
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declaration of a zeitenwende or epochal tectonic shift following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Part of this tectonic shift is Germany’s desire to become a security guarantor in Europe. A lot of coverage has focused on how far away Germany is from this aspiration in terms of military preparedness and over-reliance on the very countries likely to threaten European security.
In an opinion piece Chancellor Scholz asked a rhetorical question
How can we, as Europeans and as the European Union, remain independent actors in an increasingly multipolar world?
Scholz implies that the tectonic shift also adversely affects the United States efforts to jumpstart green industries and contain a globally more aggressive China. One could argue that Scholz’s approach is business as usual. For decades, large German enterprises have encouraged the government to work with authoritarian regimes, creating a Germany highly dependent on bad actors.
Indonesia set to penalise sex outside marriage in overhaul of criminal code | Reuters – the new code could be passed by as early as next week. The code, if passed, would apply to Indonesian citizens and foreigners alike, with business groups expressing concern about what damage the rules might have on Indonesia’s image as a holiday and investment destination. – the question is if this is going to take Indonesia on a similar path of economic stagnation as Malaysia has taken?
Twitter’s decline continues. I noticed this morning that Twitter allowed me to post the exact same Twitter post twice. That isn’t something that was possible previously and I could see how it could be used for nefarious reasons.
My twitter account this afternoon when I checked it
Shein Confusion: The Fast-Fashion Giant’s New Resale Site Doesn’t Make Buying Easy — The Information – Annie tries out Shein Exchange, the e-commerce brand’s foray into the bustling resale market. On its face, the platform seems like a good idea, given the ongoing controversies over Shein’s cheap, disposable, landfill-clogging apparel. But there is something distinctly off about the brand’s effort to sell used clothes
Amazon’s new AI tool may take over work from employees facing layoffs and buyouts – Vox – the tech giant has been working for at least the last year to hand over some of its recruiters’ tasks to an AI technology that aims to predict which job applicants across certain corporate and warehouse jobs will be successful in a given role and fast-track them to an interview — without a human recruiter’s involvement. The technology works in part by finding similarities between the resumes of current, well-performing Amazon employees and those of job applicants applying for similar jobs
The US Army’s Land Warrior programme was in development for some 33 years. The idea behind it is that better informed soldiers who are connected to support assets can do more with less and survive.
Chris Capelluto put together a good accessible history of the programme.
Burning chrome
About a decade after the rise of cyberpunk developed as a literature genre, the defence thinkers realised the potential of modern technologies that would have sounded similar to Case’s cyber deck in Neuromancer.
Head up displays, small but connected and powerful networked computers and connected weapon sights of the Land Warrior programme have taken over three decades to fulfil the original vision. Technology takes time, while Land Warrior has taken three plus decades; artificial intelligence is taking a lot longer again.
Human factors
Even now the Land Warrior programme isn’t completely sorted. The Microsoft Halolens AR displays are said to cause debilitating nausea, headaches and eye strain. More than 80% of those who experienced discomfort suffered symptoms within three hours of using the Land Warrior AR headset.
The wearable computer of the Land Warrior programme is an Android powered Smartphone sized device, but would be using very different networks. The network is both the strength and the point of weakness in the Land Warrior programme.
How the networked structures of Land Warrior will fully affect military culture and power structures will be interesting. All of it will be creating tensions in the millennia of ‘hard-wiring’ humans have had since before the dawn of civilisation as we know it and the impact will be much deeper than just the physical tiredness from head up display googles.
Just think about the benefits and ills of social media, or how the world has shrunk through video calls. In my parent’s lifetime, people leaving their homes in Ireland to emigrate to the US or Australia used to have a wake at their leaving. In some respects that departure was a form of death. That is very different to the relationship that I have with family and friends around the world now. Changes coming through from Land Warrior might be equally deep over time.
A lament for the age of apathy | Financial Times – Turnout in the US election of 1996 fell below 50 per cent. In Britain five years later, it was the lowest since the Great war. Most pop culture either side of the millennium wasn’t even allusively or allegorically political. You can read Jane Austen — goes the old line — without knowing that Napoleon was cutting through Europe. You can watch Friends without knowing that America has a government. The peak of the apolitical age was Big Brother, which, in sealing contestants from the news, didn’t disrupt their lives much. – I think a large amount of society still live in that bubble
I was watching this video and I could it imagine something similar being done to describe the luck of many market towns in the west of Ireland with the identikit feel
The video below is a good run down on the short term aspects of the current state of the UK economy. However UK productivity has been going wrong for decades. Several reasons:
The UK relies on services rather than manufacturing – While the UK was in the EU, those factories that remained imported more productive workers from the east. With Brexit the manufacturing and warehouses went east instead along with income tax revenues
The UK has a serious skills gap, there isn’t the prevalence of night colleges any more
The UK has been declining in automation. The classic example is trying to find an automatic car wash. During the 1970s and 1980s these were all over the UK. Now you get a bunch of people with buckets. UK warehouses are much less automated than most other places. This is partly down to several decades of short termism that Will Hutton wrote about back in The State We’re In circa 1995
Brexit has permanently re-eingineered supply chains around the UK
Too much UK investment has gone into real estate, you only have to see all the developments in London and Manchester
Universities are now developed for the benefit of foriegn students rather than domestic talent growth, innovation. And the universities are over leveraged in property development and are likely to go under if there is a reduction in foreign students or a rise in interest rates
Epson to End All Laser Printer Sales by 2026 – ExtremeTech – quietly chosen to stop selling laser printer hardware by 2026. The company will instead focus on its more environmentally-friendly inkjet printers, according to a statement obtained by The Register. Although the company stopped selling laser printers in the United States a while back, it had maintained the line in other markets, including Europe and Asia. Consumers will no longer be able to purchase new Epson laser printers as of 2026, but Epson has promised to continue supporting existing customers via supplies and spare parts. Epson itself claims its inkjets are up to 85 percent more energy efficient than its laser units and produce 85 percent less carbon dioxide. Interesting move, western companies would be virtue signalling the hell out of this.
Really impressive piece of technology and engineering by Sony. But I can’t work out why it was done. By this time Citizen, Casio and Sony were already making LCD televisions. Back in the day Sony used to some products, just because the engineers could. I also love how this looks like a miniature version of a Sony 14″ portable TV circa 1984, even down to the homage to the Trinitron branding.
There seems to be a lack of appreciation for economic trajectory that Hong Kong is on; inextricably linked in China
They don’t seem to understand the political trajectory Hong Kong is on
They aren’t the kind of talent that Hong Kong needs to plug losses in healthcare, education, social services and the creative industries
More developed countries aren’t likely to want ‘stepping stone’ Chinese people from Hong Kong. Their choices might be as limited as are on the mainland
This will only accelerate simmering nativist hostility and more Hong Kongers may leave via BNO visas etc.
If Hong Kong has been in a recession, what must the real state of the China economy be? Are they way worse than PMI and official numbers seem to suggest?
Finally, China has disliked Hong Kong being a vehicle for capital flight. With a greying workforce and declining birth rate will they dislike the talent flight of middle class Chinese through ‘stepping stone’ Hong Kong?
Ideas
Interesting viewpoint on Russia from author Ian Garner. You can find out more about his book here.
China’s puffer jacket obsession: Its not just Moncler and Canada Goose, homegrown brands are taking off | Campaign Asia – Domestic Chinese and international puffer jacket brands are battling for market share in the mainland. We take a look at which names are emerging victorious. China’s puffer jacket obsession: Its not just Moncler and Canada Goose, homegrown brands are taking offWhen temperatures in China started to cool down in early October, one of the biggest fashion trends to return was the puffer jacket. Alongside higher-priced brands like Canada Goose — which saw 20 percent higher sales compared to the previous year — homegrown puffer jacket labels such as Bosideng, Xue Zhong Fei, and Yaya all reported that their gross merchandise value (GMV) growth rate on Tmall exceeded 100 percent. Meanwhile, European brand Moncler sold out of its classic Maya coat on the first day of its debut on Tmall Luxury Pavilion in October.
Media
Why Hong Kong’s outdoor advertising is underperforming | Media | Campaign Asia – Based on a recent study by Hong Kong Baptist University, OOH ads are failing to capture people as they severely lack creativity. Dang, I feel bad for you son, that’s burn to the Hong Kong agency scene right there. Seriously though I would be curious about the methodology
The $300 Million Sneaker King Comes Undone – WSJ – In May, Mr. Malekzadeh’s fiancée—also the company’s finance chief—pushed for both of them to come clean, according to people familiar with the situation. Federal prosecutors a few months later charged the couple with bank fraud and Mr. Malekzadeh with wire fraud and money laundering. Customers claim they paid millions of dollars for shoes that never arrived. A court-appointed receiver is sorting out the remaining inventory of the entrepreneur’s company, Zadeh Kicks. Early last year, Mr. Malekzadeh collected orders for about 600,000 pairs of Air Jordan 11 Cool Grey sneakers months before they hit stores, netting over $70 million, according to prosecutors. He priced the sneakers between $115 and $200 a pair, cheaper than their expected retail price of around $225
OOPS is Meta’s online operations support system. OOPS provides access to user accounts like a sys admin on a company IT network. If you’re a Meta employee, friends or family you can get hold of a concierge service to solve account related problems. It isn’t available to outsiders.
It seems that OOPS has been used to reassign or disable accounts for profit and access wasn’t as controlled as it should be.
The Meta OOPS scandal made me wonder if OnlyFans performer Kitty Lixo had actually been gaslit about her account by Meta employees, rather than being helped out in return for sex. Lixo has gone from having an Instagram account with 199,000 followers to two smaller accounts with under 20,000 followers combined at the time of writing.
“We met up and I f**ked a couple of them and I was able to get my account back two-three times,” Kitty Lixo said, recommending others with locked accounts to continue reaching out to the platform for eventual ban reversal.
OnlyFans Star Says She Slept With Meta Employees to Get Instagram Unbanned by Nick Mordowanec (May 20, 2022) Newsweek
Subscription Pricing Coming to Features Your Car Already Has – a $25-per-month charge for advanced cruise control or $10 to access heated seats? What if those charges continued long after your car was paid off? …As vehicles become increasingly connected to the internet, car companies aim to rake in billions by having customers pay monthly or annual subscriptions to access certain features. Not content with the relatively low-margin business of building and selling cars, automakers are eager to pull down Silicon Valley-style profits. For automakers, the advantage of this model is clear. …Not only do they get a stream of recurring revenue for years after an initial purchase, they can hope to maintain a longer-term relationship with the customer and build brand loyalty, said Kristin Kolodge, vice president and head of auto benchmarking and mobility development at J.D. Power. – I suspect that this will only work if every car was on a lease agreement and if that’s the case then there are lots of negative impact from old cars that need to be written off that outweigh this business model. Secondly, there is an expectation that all of the vehicle will conform to Moore’s Law.
What about the layoffs at Meta and Twitter? Elon is crazy! WTF??? | I, Cringely – I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977 — 45 years ago. I was 24 years old and had accepted a Stanford fellowship paying $2,575 for the academic year. My on-campus apartment rent was $175 per month and a year later I’d buy my first Palo Alto house for $57,000 (sold 21 years later for $990,000). It was an exciting time to be living and working in Silicon Valley. And it still is. We’re right now in a period of economic confusion and reflection when many of the loudest voices have little to no sense of history. Well my old brain is crammed with history and I’m here to tell you that the current situation — despite the news coverage — is no big deal. This, too, shall pass – vintage Bob Cringely
Kiwix on the App Store – this is available on Mac and iOS app stories. It allows you to view an offline version of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg and Khan Academy modules. Ideal for when you’re unplugged.
