What constitutes a gadget? The dictionary definition would be a small mechanical or electronic device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.
When I started writing this blog the gadget section focused on personal digital assistants such as the Palm PDA and Sony’s Clie devices. Or the Anoto digital pen that allowed you to record digitally what had been written on a specially marked out paper page, giving the best of both experiences.
Some of the ideas I shared weren’t so small like a Panasonic sleeping room for sleep starved, but well heeled Japanese.
When cutting edge technology failed me, I periodically went back to older technology such as the Nokia 8850 cellphone or my love of the Nokia E90 Communicator.
I also started looking back to discontinued products like the Sony Walkman WM-D6C Pro, one of the best cassette decks ever made of any size. I knew people who used it in their hi-fi systems as well as for portable audio.
Some of the technology that I looked at were products that marked a particular point in my life such as my college days with the Apple StyleWriter II. While my college peers were worried about getting on laser printers to submit assignments, I had a stack of cartridges cotton buds and isopropyl alcohol to deal with any non catastrophic printer issues and so could print during the evening in the comfort of my lodgings.
Alongside the demise in prominence of the gadget, there has been a rise in the trend of everyday carry or EDC.
David Hoffman spent decades making corporate films and documentaries, he has self-made films and footage such as this clip on Giorgio Moroder. If you’re younger than 30, Giorgio Moroder is the old guy who collaborated with Daft Punk on their album Random Access Memories. The story of Giorgio Moroder is larger and more complex than this.
Start to Musicland
At the time of writing 83 year old Moroder has spent over six decades in the music industry. Giorgio Moroder came from an artistic family in a small corner of what is now Italy, that spoke German and Italian. His brother Ulrich is a famous painter.
https://flic.kr/p/x62Qk
From the age of 18, Moroder worked as a musician and songwriter. He eventually got into sound engineering. He founded the Musicland Studios in Munich, which was a popular recording venue with even large artists like the Rolling Stones.
Songwriting
While Giorgio Moroder is most famous as an electronic music producer, he couldn’t have succeeded without songwriting. Before his success in electronic disco and after it, he was a successful songwriter. Through the 1960s and 1970s, artists often covered songs in different languages. In addition Moroder’s birthplace helped him to be multi-lingual. The royalties from these songs helped him build the production side of his business.
Moroder claimed that the song he was most proud of writing was Berlin’s Take My Breath Away– made famous by the original Top Gun movie.
Electronic production to disco
Musicland gave Moroder a base in the 1970s to start producing music. Here is where he started to record disco projects.
Munich Machine
One of the projects was Munich Machine – a mix of electronic music with session musicians and singers. Like a lot of European disco at the time it draws from latin music elements and even classical music, with a mix of original songs, interpolations of classics and high tempo cover versions of older pop. The original Munich Machine album art featured ‘Gundam’ type robots that sent my young imagination into overdrive. I saw them in the clouds on long journeys or in car parts my Dad had around the place. Munich machine went on to make three albums.
Munich Machine influenced a lot of hi-energy recordings, as well as British gay club culture like Almighty Records.
Productions done for artists that they worked closely with like Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and Midnight Express movie soundtrack contribution The Chase were much more driven by synthesisers – rather than ‘traditional’ instruments supported by synthesisers. As disco record production budgets shrank away from the Salsoul orchestra-driven productions, electronics made dance music more financially viable and Moroder showed the way.
Recursion to Daft Punk
And in a further link back to disco Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter had a father who was a peer of Giorgio Moroder. Daniel Bangalter better known as Daniel Vangarde was a disco era writer producer who was behind Ottowan’s D.I.S.C.O. and The Cuban Brother’s Cuba with a more conventional disco sound. You can see Bangalter senior’s influence in the way Daft Punk wrote and produced music.
The David Hoffman clip era
The David Hoffman clip of Giorgio Moroder, shows his electronic studio set up I guess around the time of Giorgio Moroder’s E=MC2 album. In the same way that Bob Dylan’s 1965 move to incorporate electric instruments and rock sound into his previous accoustic folk sound shook things up, E=MC2 could also be considered to a similarly iconic moment.
Moroder and his studio partners created a pre-programmed, using only electronic sounds for the instruments. It was also described as first electronic live-to-digital album.
A quick aside on digital recordings
Japanese broadcaster NHK had a stereo digital recorder working in its research lab in 1969, Dr. Takeaki Anazawa of Denon and others had been doing digital recordings from 1971, these were live one-take recordings mostly of jazz and classical music music performances. Denon digital recorders went on record more jazz, classical and traditional Japanese music over the next couple of years. But it was only Sony’s PCM-1600 in 1978 that made digital recording viable for commercial recording studios.
Ry Cooder is the first popular music artist to make an album Bop Til You Drop as a digital recording using a custom-built 32 track digital tape machine by 3M.
It was in March of 1979 that Philips demonstrates its first compact disc player, a prototype called the Philips Pinkeltje. The first commercial production of compact discs was made in August 1982 and the first commercial compact disc players are launched on October 1, 1982 by Sony and Philips.
Recording E=MC2
Moroder uses US start-up Soundstream’s digital recorder, that makes use of computer tapes as its recording medium, which gives an indication of how forward looking Giorgio Moroder was at the time. (Soundstream goes out of business in 1983).
Moroder’s album was probably being recorded and produced by the time Sony launched their PCM-1600. E=MC2 was released at the end of August 1979.
Giorgio Moroder combined digital recordings with electronic instruments. On the album there are credits for ‘programming’ and computerised digital editing. This was a decade before DigiDesign (now AVID) launches its Sound Tools (which evolved into Pro Tools) software for computer-based audio recording, editing and mastering.
This was a few years before Ikutaro Kakehashi of Roland proposed developing a standard way of communicating control instructions to instruments to Oberheim Electronics founder Tom Oberheim. This was seen as the starting point to come up with interoperable instrument instructions.
At the time when Moroder made E=MC2. Some instruments from the same company could control each other, but couldn’t control ones from other companies. It would be four years later before the first MIDI instruments would be launched for sale.
In addition, other instruments had no method of electronic control at all, which is why you see electronically actuated motors pushing instrument keys in the footage below.
Now all of this could have been done in software like Apple’s Garageband, but not in 1979. In fact, it would be 25 years before Apple launches Garageband.
Shusei Nagaoka
As another aside the original album artwork with Giogio Moroder wearing an electronic t-shirt was done by Japanese artist Shusei Nagaoka, famous for The Electric Light Orchestra’s (ELO) Out of The Blue cover art with its space opera visuals. The image that Hoffman uses below is from the remastered re-released version of E=MC2 without Nagaoka-san’s iconic artwork.
Starmer’s Britain – Portland – Kier Starmer is considered to be the most likely prime minister after Rishi Sunak. In some respects this feels like 1996, all over again. The then Conservative government back then was buffeted by scandals such as the Arms to Iraq affair report, the BSE crisis and the slow drip of sleaze.
Depending when in 2024 the general election happens, we will have had 14 years of Conservative rule and the government has been dogged by scandal.
https://flic.kr/p/2iLykJ8
Rewind to 1996
Unlike Kier Starmer era Labour, back in 1996, Labour looked like a political party chock full of ideas. Will Hutton’s The State We’re In focused minds on what a future Labour government would look like and long term thinking. Tony Blair and the policy wonks around him seeded the media and academia around them with their new ideas. Blair even used a computer system to analyse Conservative parliamentary statements and gain the upper hand in prime minister’s question time.
Back to the present
Kier Starmer and the modern day Labour Party isn’t the Labour of 1996. There isn’t the buzz of modernity about them. There is no vision thing at the moment. They are defined by not being the tories. Public Affairs specialists Portland have tried their hand at kremlinology to paint a picture of what a Kier Starmer-led government is likely to look like, should it get into power.
A number of people who contributed were veterans of the Blair – Brown administration. They recognise that Kier Starmer and colleagues are likely to inherit a country with problems across the economy, public services and infrastructure. The Kier Starmer administration is unlikely to share the globalist viewpoint of Tony Blair, partly due to decoupling and partly due to Brexit.
All of which makes the Kier Starmer five missions for a Better Britain look like a pipe dream without several back-to-back terms in government.
Secure the highest sustained growth in the G7 – with good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country making everyone, not just a few, better off.
Make Britain a clean energy superpower – to create jobs, cut bills and boost energy security with zero carbon electricity by 2030, accelerating to net zero.
Build an NHS fit for the future – that is there when people need it; with fewer lives lost to the biggest killers; in a fairer Britain, where everyone lives well for longer.
Make Britain’s streets safe – by halving serious violent crime and raise confidence in the police and criminal justice system to its highest levels, within a decade.
Break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage – for every child, by reforming the childcare and education systems, raising standards everywhere, and preparing young people for work and life.
Kier Starmer needs his own version of The State We’re In as just under 70 percent of the British public surveyed are neutral to being in disagreement about whether they understand the current Labour vision for Britain.
Can Chinese Payment Apps Gain Traction Globally? | ChinaFile – Chinese fintech companies and their super-apps will still revolutionize global finance. In this excerpt from his book The Cashless Revolution: China’s Reinvention of Money and the End of America’s Domination of Finance and Technology, Chorzempa explains why Chinese fintech has thus far struggled to gain a foothold in the international market, but will likely inspire other companies to replicate the fintech super-app model in their home countries
People too tired to lead healthier lifestyles, UK survey finds | Health | The Guardian – A survey has found that tiredness is why 35% of people don’t make the changes to their diet and physical activity levels that would help them close the gap between good intentions and concrete action. The results, from a YouGov poll of 2,086 UK adults for the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF), illustrate the barriers many people face in their desire to adopt and stick to healthy habits. When asked what was stopping them from eating more healthily and exercising more often, 29% of men and 40% of women cited “feeling too tired”
The Lost Planet of Hong Kong | Newsroom – This just in from Hong Kong. Its chief executive has corrected the language of a journalist for asking a question at a press conference about the pro-democracy protests of 2019: “First of all, it is not [called] the 2019 protests. It is the black violence.” And: a 23-year-old has been charged under the Beijing-imposed national security laws for allegedly “intimidating the public in order to pursue political agenda”. He was attempting to stage a protest, otherwise known as a black violence. Also: a satirical cartoonist has been sacked after a government official complained about a drawing that mocked local elections, and his books were removed from libraries. When approached by the last signs of independent journalistic life in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Free Press, the Leisure and Cultural Services Department commented, “Books that are suspected to potentially violate national security law will be immediately removed for review.”
Young women in South Korea are live-streaming their suicide attempts | The Economist – the South Korean government announced its fifth “Master Plan for Prevention of Suicide”. Mental-health check-ups will now be available every two years, rather than every decade. Beyond that, the plan proposes different approaches for the young and old respectively. (Over-70s have the highest suicide rates in Korea.) For women in their 20s and 30s who live alone, South Korea will make available more counselling and therapy
The Rise of Generative AI Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT — Information is Beautiful and How Kevin Kelly is using AI in his creative process | Dropbox Blog and Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? | The New Yorker – as A.I. becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey? The question is worth considering across different meanings of the term “A.I.” If you think of A.I. as a broad set of technologies being marketed to companies to help them cut their costs, the question becomes: how do we keep those technologies from working as “capital’s willing executioners”? Alternatively, if you imagine A.I. as a semi-autonomous software program that solves problems that humans ask it to solve, the question is then: how do we prevent that software from assisting corporations in ways that make people’s lives worse? Suppose you’ve built a semi-autonomous A.I. that’s entirely obedient to humans—one that repeatedly checks to make sure it hasn’t misinterpreted the instructions it has received. This is the dream of many A.I. researchers. Yet such software could easily still cause as much harm as McKinsey has
What actually represents good taste and good style was discussed in this old show from the 1970s, which makes an interesting perspective to reflect on.
Space Battleship Yamato goes back to one of the most creative periods in Japanese animation or anime as its known. It develops a complex plot and covers themes such as honour, sacrifice, death and loss.
The show was originally made in three TV series and four movies from 1973 through to 1983. An additional five episodes were made from 2004 – 2007. There was a 2009 animated film reboot and a live action film the following year. It was then remade as two 26-episode TV series between 2014 and 2017 with the remakes of the original movies from 2021 onwards.
In addition, there were manga adaptions of the Yamato universe published in 1974 and 2000.
Star Blazers or Space Battleship Yamato also indicates the curious relationship that Japan has with its imperial legacy.
https://flic.kr/p/3t8JGw
The Yamato was named after a Japanese province that’s the current Nara prefecture. The original Yamato and its sister ship the Musashi were the heaviest battleships ever built with the largest guns.
What these Japanese battleships lacked in numbers compared to the American navy, they made up for in firepower. Unfortunately for the Imperial Japanese Navy, the very nature of warfare at sea was changing with the rise of the aircraft carrier. The Yamato was sunk in the East China Sea along with five other warships as it sought to engage and slow down the US invasion fleet attacking Okinawa. The Musashi had been sunk the previous year off the coast of the Philippines.
In the story, earth is threatened by an alien race who irradiated the earth’s surface, requiring the survivors to live underground. A spaceship is needed to get help to undo the damage. There are clear analogues of the Cold War and the atomic bomb experience of Japan in the plot line, along with the popularity of disaster movies.
In order to make the spaceship christened Argo, the ship is built around the sunken wreck of the Yamato, joining the Japanese imperial past and pacifist present together.
Satellite and open source intelligence
Satellite technology improvements allowing more sensing capability to be fitted in a much smaller package is changing what can be done and reducing costs. The analogy of mainframe to personal computer movement with a 1000 fold increase in technological change is very interesting.
Progressive distortion
YouTuber Curious Droid asked the question Why is Older NASA Launch Film Footage Still the Best? The use of engineering cinematic film created some of the most iconic footage of the space race. It turns out that its a fascinating edge case of how film handles over exposure better than digital cameras reminded me of how analogue tape handles over peak levels compared to digital recording in a similarly progressive way. It seems film mirrors the progressive distortion of analogue audio recordings.
Sengoku burai (戦国無頼) aka Sword for Hire
The 1950s saw the resurgence of a confident and creative Japanese film industry. Sword for Hire is a classic example of a chambara film. The ronin character in chambara films is a prototype for the stranger that comes into town in western films.
Elliott Management wrote this opinion piece on Apple and China: Apple is a Chinese company | Financial Times – interesting assessment of risk exposure with a focus on the Apple share price.
The Apple and China relationship started before China joined the WTO. Taiwanese contract manufacturers had built huge industrial sites in Shenzhen, China and later in other parts of China. The best known of which was the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen. Back in 2010, I was driven around the perimeter of the site, which went on for miles.
The only site that I had seen which would be comparable would be the Mercedes-Benz manufacturing site in Sindelfingen which is part of the Stuttgart metropolitan area. I spent part of my childhood and early adult life living next to a General Motors car plant, a shipyard and a couple of oil refineries, so I am used to scale of industry.
As Apple came back from a near demise in the mid-1990s, it needed manufacturing scale so the combination of Apple and China happened due to that. Over time the Apple and China relationship drove manufacturing expertise and new ways of doing business, such as using CNC machines at scale. Prior to Apple and China, smartphones were plastic mainly due to product engineering influenced by Nokia’s work on its feature phones.
Over time, the Apple and China relationship evolved. Chinese developers make up about half of the programmers making iPad and iPhone applications. Chinese component manufacturers replaced US, Korean, Japanese and European suppliers. Apple and China has become tightly entwined as Chinese manufacturers look to dethrone Apple at the same time.
Apple and China national security focus
China’s state and national security focus has spilled into the economic and social aspects of policy which has a high probability of reaching the Apple and China relationship. Apple already compromises on its privacy tenet in the way it handles China’s data. It actively supported China versus Hong Kong protestors – doing everything it could to disrupt the protestors self-organising tools.
China has shown that its ever expanding security considerations trump business so Apple and China may come to a rapid and disruptive break. Apple is trying to de-risk production outside China but it might be too little, too late. Apple and China are due for a relationship reset.
China’s assessments of Soviet Union’s collapse is very interesting as they offer a playbook of Xi Jinping thought
China’s ‘men in black’ step up scrutiny of foreign corporate sleuths | Financial Times – “It’s hard to attract capital if you can’t get a report from a global due diligence firm,” said one international services executive. That could run counter to the government’s efforts to revive animal spirits in China’s economy, consultants and investors said. “Maybe this is the intention,” said the head of one consultancy in Beijing, “to choke off investment and get the state to step back in, to stop the ability of investors to place bets.”
Xi Jinping Can’t Handle an Aging China | Foreign Affairs – less convinced this assertion is true, when we look at natalistic policies in authoritarian regimes such as what happened in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu with Decree 770 which was one of the strictest anti-abortion law at the time, or Nazi Germany’s breeding programmes
US Companies in China Grow More Pessimistic of Ties: AmCham Survey – Bloomberg – Some 87% of respondents to a flash survey taken last week said they were at least slightly pessimistic about US-China ties, according to the survey published Wednesday by the American Chamber of Commerce in China. That was 14 percentage points higher than the chamber’s previous poll. “Bilateral relations between the United States and China have substantially deteriorated,” said Lester Ross, chair of AmCham China’s Policy Committee. “It’s hard to see at this point when they will begin to improve — and this, of course, affects the ability of business to operate across borders.”
China Ratchets Up Pressure on Foreign Companies – WSJ – Business executives who have consulted with Chinese authorities say a central tenet of the effort is the desire to more tightly control the narrative about China’s governance and development, and limit the information collected by foreign companies such as auditors, management consultants and law firms that could influence how the outside world views China… Some foreign business executives say they worry the rewriting of the espionage law means that many topics, ranging from the status of Taiwan to China’s human rights record to technology such as semiconductors, are now becoming off limits in discussions with their Chinese counterparts. The recent trouble for foreign companies in China is drawing criticism in Washington. Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin who chairs a congressional committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said in a statement Thursday, “Our business leaders need to take off their golden blindfolds and recognize that the recent police raids of American companies Bain and Mintz are not one-offs, but part of a long, proud tradition of exploitation.”.. The push is driven by a deepening conviction within China’s leadership that foreign capital, while important to China’s economic rise, isn’t to be fully trusted – if I was a brand planner in China or Hong Kong I would be very wary at the moment as this will spill over into agency life (paywall)
Longitudinal consumer behaviour change around increased empathy in western markets
A lot of this focus on the expertise in the ‘aspiration economy’ sounds like brands back in the early 1990s again. The kind of expertise exemplified by Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity or the characters Randall Graves and Dante Hicks in Kevin Smith’s movie Clerks.
The new industrial policy, explained – by Noah Smith – the speed and disruptiveness of China’s entry into the global trading system destroyed the career trajectories of large numbers of American workers and hurt the economies of whole regions. Second, U.S. complacency about the trajectory of Chinese politics, combined with a massive campaign of technological espionage, hastened and encouraged the rise of a new, hostile superpower. By the mid-2010s, only economists thought that free trade was still an unquestioned good, and the country wasn’t listening to economists the way it used to
Too Big to Challenge? | danah boyd | apophenia – the tech industry represents 9% of the U.S. GDP and only five Big Tech companies account for 25% of the S&P 500. Prior to Covid, most of the growth in stock market came from Big Tech. Now, as the U.S. economy is all sorts of wacky, Big Tech is what is keeping the stock market’s chin above water. In the process, Big Tech is accounting for more and more of the stock market – edited for brevity
The gender pay gap is not a myth, it’s math – it’s mostly not a discrimination story, it’s a parenting story. But more flexible employment is likely to be more of a discrimination story
Microsoft-branded mice and keyboards are going away after 40 years – this reminds me of when a new exec joined Bill Gates era Microsoft in the late 1980s/1990s. The company had unintentionally had in warehouses 3 years sales worth of Microsoft mice ready to sell. Their hardware with the exception of an ergonomic keyboard haven’t been great products that were superior to other technology companies
Interesting that even state broadcaster Deutsche Welle is complaining about the poor quality of modern German cars. Back in the early 1970s BMWs had a reputation as being clever fragile rust buckets, but the decline of Mercedes is far more dramatic in terms of quality. The decline seems to be in lock step with the globalisation of these companies and an increased focus on shareholder value.
Compare and contrast with older Mercedes cars across the Middle East and Africa.
Project MUSE – China’s Hong Kong Affairs Bureaucracy: Factional Politics and Policy Consistency – “From the perspective of factional politics, this article sheds light on the functions and operations of the Central Liaison Office and the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office (the “two Hong Kong offices”) throughout the history of the Communist Party of China (CPC), focusing on the 2013–22 period. The authors posit that the stronger the factional relationship between the top leader responsible for Hong Kong affairs and the heads of the two Hong Kong offices, the greater the policy consistency between the two offices and the central authorities on Hong Kong issues. This article uses text mining techniques to measure the degree of policy consistency between Chinese President Xi Jinping and the two Hong Kong offices from 2013 to 2022. In 2020, Xi appointed his protégés as directors of the two Hong Kong offices, thus regaining absolute control over Hong Kong affairs. Xi may further tighten his hold on Hong Kong in the future, thereby undermining the region’s autonomous status.” – Interesting aside: The Party and State Institutional Reform Plan (党和国家机构改革方案) unveiled in March established the Hong Kong and Macao Work Office of the Central Committee (中央港澳工作办公室) on the basis of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council. The latter has essentially become a Party body instead of a state body, and the arrangement is now “one organisation, two nameplates” (ie., two identities). – expect even further ratcheting of authoritarian measures in all aspects of Hong Kong life and economy
Culture and technology adoption’s effect on Japanese information design online. It reminds me of the early web portal designs were more like print newspapers.
Interesting that the Korean government is allowing these strikes to go ahead given the central role of Samsung in the country.
Luxury
Alibaba, Partners Fight Fraud and Root Out Counterfeits – Over 730,000 IP rights were under Alibaba protection by the end of 2022. 98% of IP takedown requests by rights holders were handled within 24 hours for the third consecutive year – I wonder what Amazon numbers look like for this?
I didn’t realise that Taiwan’s semiconductor expertise went back this far. DigiTimes has unprecedented access to the elder statesmen and experts on the early Taiwanese semiconductor industry
McDonalds CSR activities came up a few times over the past day or so I thought I would visit it. CSR stands for corporate and social responsibility. A few American PR executives that I have come across used not to like the S in the middle, which sounded like socialism. The idea was doing good to enhance brand reputation – generally it was a strategic function.
https://flic.kr/p/7wWbqf
ESG operates at a higher level. CSR predates ESG as an idea. McDonalds CSR is interesting because of the tactical way it seems to be employed around what a couple of rules that I have noticed.
Children are always a good universal focus of McDonalds CSR, which is the reason why Ronald McDonald House is a common theme throughout the worldwide operations of McDonalds
McDonalds CSR is on the side of authority, hence its support for the Metropolitan Police when dealing with XR protests and Korean national service draftees. There is a risk that this could make its conduct in authoritarian countries more problematic
To be a poem. – from the Web Curios newsletter ‘is a digital poem by Alicia Guo – it’s infinite and self-generating, and I don’t quite know how it works or where it’s pulling the words from, but each time it’s different and each time it’s fragmented and magical and silly and poignant and confusing and beautiful and I would like this to be read forever by a choir of machine voices until the heat death of the universe please thankyou.‘
