Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

 

  • Group B + more things

    Group B rallying

    Group B rallying was the stuff of my childhood. Its history was complex. In the 1970s the motorsport governing body FIA was in dispute with formula one team owners. As a result the FIA reformed one of its own committees related to formula one called CSI, in 1978, into the autonomous Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile (FISA). This came under Jean-Marie Balestre. He was a former journalist and president of the go-karting association.

    Reorganisation

    Just a few years later, FISA re-organised racing and rallying standards. It replaced groups for unmodified and modified production cars. That was largely a like for like swap. Secondly it combined grand touring (sports cars) with a race circuit only production-derived special builds class into Group B.

    Group B allowed really small production runs of really fast cars with only a superficial relationship (if any) to cars that could be sold in a showroom. Regulations had a generous minimum kerb weight and allowed rear wheel drive or four-wheel drive. Audi had just launched its Audi Ur Quattro which showed the potential of four-wheel drive in a normal car package. There was no restrictions on turbo-charged engines ‘boost pressure’ – allowing for small engines in a light car package with immense power.

    1984

    1984 was a crucial year for Group B, when the format would form its ultimate shape.

    Audi Sport Quattro S1

    For the first few years Audi’s production derived Ur Quattro had won loose surface events and a rear-wheel drive Lancia 037 doing better on tarmac roads. Other manufacturers were bringing cars into the championship as well including Toyota, Porsche and Opel. Peugeot brought the first car that fully took advantage of the regulations. A two seater, four wheel drive, mid-engined car in a space frame. A slew of similar competitors followed the year after, including the Ford RS200. This was the stuff my dreams were made of. My exercise books covered in sketches – side profile designs of vehicles that would be optimised for Group B regulations.

    The end

    1986 saw a series of fatal accidents that would result in Group B being shut down for safety and PR reasons. This created the illusion of a safer sport, but the reality was that the body count peaked some three years later in 1989, due to the way rallies were organised back then and how South Europeans conducted themselves as spectators – playing chicken in the road, dropping rocks on the road to hinder non local drivers and trying to touch cars as they went by.

    This is where Richard Madden (of Game of Thrones) short film comes in capturing the difficulties of a driver managing a Group B car and dealing with trauma.

    China

    A reporter exposes China’s influence in Canada – Asia Times and Huang Jing on China’s relations with the world – contrast with FT op-ed Xi Jinping’s plan to reset China’s economy and win back friends | Financial Times 

    US-China tech war: Shenzhen set to become international sourcing hub for semiconductors, electronics with new trading exchange | South China Morning Post – probably beneficial for Russia to get around sanctions as well. Larger perspective on Chinese business pressures: Global Chinese firms try ‘decoupling’ from China as US business climate turns hostile | South China Morning Post – Public relations specialists note a growing trend of Chinese companies trying to localise their image and operations to remain competitive in the US. Between perceived security threats and an emphasis on new supply chain alternatives, US policies have left Chinese firms scrambling for cover. This is a world away from the ‘China going global‘ narrative that my former colleague Matt Stafford alongside Chris Reitermann used to talk about just over a decade ago.

    Tesla cuts prices in China for second time in three months to reduce inventory – PingWest – Mercedes and Volkswagen have also been struggling with Chinese electric vehicle sales as well

    Why Isis offshoot is still a threat for China’s businesspeople in Afghanistan | South China Morning Post 

    Japanese electronics giant Sony banned from posting on Chinese microblogging site Weibo for ‘violating laws’ | South China Morning Post 

    Consumer behaviour

    Who are the rioters who stormed Brazil’s government offices? | Financial Times – many pro-Bolsonaro truckers blocked highways across the country, choking supply chains and at one point forcing the closure of Brazil’s main international airport. These hardline backers are nationalist, socially conservative and often evangelical Christians. They accuse Lula and his Workers’ party of being corrupt and against family values, claiming the left intends to implant socialism in Brazil. 

    How to fix people’s perception that climate news is not useful? – high degree of climate change fatigue

    Economics

    What the UK’s financial district is saying to each other about Brexit

    The End of China’s Magical Credit Machine | Rhodium Group 

    China’s industrial policy has mostly been a flop | Noahpinion  – this assumes that China shared the same priorities as Korea and Japan did in their economic rise. See also Beijing blocks listings of ‘red light’ companies to steer funding to strategic sectors | Financial Times – “The Chinese government doesn’t want a market-based stock market,” said Larry Hu, an economist at Macquarie Group in Hong Kong. “It wants one that helps the authority carry out industry policy.” The CSRC did not immediately respond to a request for comment

    The Poland/Malaysia model – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – Malaysia hasn’t been that successful and has had a lot of crony capitalism

    The Nokia Risk | Phenomenal World – Denmark, Israel, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and Taiwan a handful of firms account for a hugely disproportionate share of both profits and R&D spending. The firms which dominate these seven economies have all been extraordinarily successful in the knowledge economy of the past three decades: Samsung Electronics in Korea, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. in Taiwan, Novo Nordisk (pharmaceuticals) in Denmark, and Roche and Novartis (pharmaceuticals) in Switzerland

    Energy

    Market Cap 100: China-based car OEMs proceed on bumpy 2022 – electric cars are a key part of this

    UK still ducking the issue on gas storage | Financial Times – energy is still not being treated by the UK as a strategic consideration

    Finance

    Jack Ma cedes control of Ant Group | Financial Times 

    Gadgets

    Number of Chinese companies at CES event less than half of pre-pandemic level – PingWest 

    Fascinating tech found on Wagner mercenaries: Russia’s unusual laser devices fall into Ukrainian hands | Defence Blog 

    Health

    Transcript – The Myths About Fat People 

    90% of people in China province infected with Covid, says local health official | China | The Guardian 

    Hong Kong

    Is Hong Kong’s ‘2-dish-rice’ phenomenon a dark sign that the city is returning to widespread poverty? | South China Morning Post  – Hong Kong is in recession, this apparently harks back to the 1950s

    Dim Future for Hong Kong’s Rural Industries – Varsity – the government tends to avoid underutilised plots controlled by village gentries and land banks of property developers when it tries to resume lands for urban development. – Hong Kong oligarchs still have some pull for the time being

    Why Beijing Wants Jimmy Lai Locked Up – The Atlantic – Beijing has weaponized the courts against its longtime adversaries—just as Chinese state media continues to promote Lai as the poster boy of everything nefarious in Hong Kong. For both purposes, Lai has a sufficiently high profile and is convincingly rich enough to have fomented a subversive uprising; and, amid the nationalist atmosphere that prevails in Beijing, Lai also had highly suspect foreign connections that reached close to the center of power in Washington, particularly during the Trump administration. By turning to its old playbook of assigning blame to a hostile force at home backed by support from abroad, the Chinese Communist Party is falling into a trap of its own creation. Given the sentences that Lai is likely to receive for his alleged crimes, Lai could very well be imprisoned for the rest of his life. In looking for a scapegoat, Beijing may find it has created a martyr.

    Indonesia

    The Liem family and The Salim Group and how crony capitalism busted Indonesia in 1997/8

    Innovation

    How Silicon Valley was build on the back of defence research

    Spotlight CES: Spectricity unveils first multispectral image sensor for smartphones – Tech.eu 

    IBM Loses Top US Patent Spot After Decades as Leader – Bloomberg 

    Japan

    Panasonic to Boost China Investment Significantly, Bucking Decoupling Trend – Bloomberg 

    Luxury

    The Anti-Apple Watches: Silicon Valley’s Other Status Timepieces Are Beautifully Analog — The Information – and that’s because the Apple Watch isn’t a watch, its something else

    What China’s reopening means for luxury | Vogue Business 

    Marketing

    Best of Jeremy Bullmore – Bullmore had been a major force at JWT

    Materials

    This strange metal alloy is the toughest material on Earth | BGR

    Interesting commentary on materials development and the role that the Apollo space programme played to create a chemical and materials science golden age that had applications in other areas.

    A secret self-healing material makes Roman buildings ultra-durable | Interesting Engineering 

    Online

    Whatever happened to Google Search? | Financial Times – echoes some of the thinking I shared here. Worthwhile reading in conjunction with TikTok’s Secret Sauce | Knight First Amendment Institute 

    Retailing

    LVMH-owned DFS eyes travel retail’s post-lockdown future | Vogue Business 

    Security

    Tory MP leads warnings over UK security after Chinese spyware ‘found in Government car’ – “If these SIM cards have been duplicitously installed, then this is CCP espionage. If the SIM cards are operationally standard, then it is a failure of security not to have removed them to protect the data of our Government and sensitive Government sites.” – I wouldn’t be surprise if it was the latter rather than the former

    The Long War in Ukraine | Foreign Affairs – Western strategists have sought to preempt a military standoff in two ways. Some, such as the leaders of several Baltic countries, have called for arming Kyiv with more of the heavy weapons it would need to expel Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory; others, including Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, have suggested that Ukraine’s political leaders should consider a negotiated solution that falls short of complete victory but would at least end the fighting

    Style

    Lacoste moves to collective model as Louise Trotter exits | Vogue Business – The British designer joined Lacoste from Joseph, and previously worked at premium high street brands Whistles and Jigsaw. At Lacoste, she applied her creative vision to both Lacoste’s fashion shows and general collections, bringing “real consistency” across its designs, according to the brand. “She has also accompanied the shift initiated by Lacoste towards womenswear, imagining a new wardrobe combining comfort and style,” the statement reads. Lacoste’s last fashion show was in October 2021 for Spring/Summer 2022, for which Trotter drew inspiration from her passion for cycling. Sales reached €2.5 billion in 2022, according to the brand.

    Taiwan

    Taiwan plans domestic satellite champion to resist any China attack | Financial Times – “Our primary concern . . . is facilitating the societal resilience, to make sure for example that journalists can send videos to . . . international viewers even during a large-scale disaster,” Tang said, adding that the system would also support “telephoning and videoconferencing — think [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelenskyy’s daily addresses.” Starlink, the mobile internet satellite constellation operated by Musk’s SpaceX, has helped Kyiv maintain communications with its forces despite Russian attacks

    Technology

    I wrote a story for a friend – by Julian Gough – I wrote the End Poem for Minecraft, the most popular video game of all time. I never signed a contract giving Mojang the rights to the End Poem, and so Microsoft (who bought Minecraft from Mojang) also don’t own it. I do. Rather than sue the company or fight with my old friend, who founded the company and has since gone off in the deep end, I am dedicating the poem to the public domain. You’ll find it at the bottom of this post, along with a Creative Commons Public Domain dedication.

    Taiwan to join WTO chip dispute consultation to understand possible impacts | DigiTimes 

  • Joy of ownership + more things

    Joy of ownership

    Visvim’s Toshiyuki Ueno in this film made in partnership with Porsche Japan, as we learn about the fundamental philosophy of ‘monozukuri’, or craftsmanship, behind the storied Japanese brand, as well as Ueno-san’s joy of ownership with long-lasting products.

    Ueno’s joy of ownership comes from products that are potential candidates of what I called on this blog ‘heirloom design‘. Something that might develop a patina, but manages to last a lifetime. EDC or everyday carry is a category of products designed around the joy of ownership. Products over engineered and made of easy to service parts, yet are used everyday.

    One can see this joy of ownership ethos in Visvim’s own products such as their iconic daypack. These look superficially like the classic Jansport design, but are over built in order ensure the bag outlasts the owner.

    The joy of ownership is at odds with many aspects of our modern world. People no longer have digital or music collections. Instead relying on play lists on streaming services to give them the right muzak for whatever they are doing at the time. Online business Rent The Runway does away with the joy of ownership and curation of your look, you no longer need a wardrobe beyond the basics. Luxury brands are now talking about a circular economy play where consumers are encouraged to only enjoy the joy of ownership for a short while and they might then be resold. At the other end, fast fashion from Shein and H&M.

    The much prescribed ethos of fast failure, agile methodologies and Facebook’s ‘move fast and break things’ are a world away from the philosophy behind the joy of ownership. This is the reason why Bang & Olufsen is a shadow of its former self, yet a vintage BeoSystem still provides the joy of ownership. More related content to the joy of ownership can be found here.

    China

    China scraps inbound quarantine rules in decisive break with zero-Covid regime | Financial Times and Coronavirus: could US restrictions on travellers from China raise tensions further? | South China Morning Post 

    Where is China’s Intelligentsia during the Covid Emergency? — re-reading Xu Zhiyong’s Letter to Xi Jinping – China Heritage 

    Financial trends: risky model will spawn new China crises | Financial Times 

    Xi Jinping shows his strength by muscling women away from power – Nikkei Asia – China’s path toward becoming a modern socialist country, as officials describe their aim, has historically been framed as incorporating gender egalitarianism. “Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole,” Mao Zedong wrote in 1955. By this measure, one would expect the Chinese Communist Party to at least signal that it cares about women’s representation in 2022. But last month’s 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party broke tradition by elevating 24 men and no women to the party’s Politburo, omitting its usual token female for the first time in 25 years. Women took just 11 of 205 seats on the new party Central Committee. Loyalty and utility to the top leader, above qualifications or affirmative action-style standards, are now the major determinants of officials’ prospects for promotion. Party leader Xi Jinping no longer feels any obligation to gesture toward gender equality – what this misses out on is that Mao Zedong’s public and private conduct were in sharp contrast. Mao was an avowed paedophile.

    Zhou Enlai’s posthumous triumph – Pearls and Irritations 

    China Evergrande crisis: world’s most indebted developer misses overhaul proposal deadline amid creditor talks 

    Economics

    Semiconductor Outlook 2023: Green Shoots – which has implications for only a short global recession as the semiconductor sector is the canary in the coal mine. This news from Infineon lends credence to the view point: Infineon ready to spend ‘billions’ on acquisitions, says CEO .| EE Times 

    TikTok ‘ghost mall’ indicator of problems with Malaysia’s failed Silicon Valley | South China Morning Post – “It’s the only Malay-Muslim concept mall in Malaysia,” Abdul said, adding that he feels attached to the mall as “there is a brotherhood here.”While the mall didn’t have many customers, I was struck by the lively camaraderie among the staffers working there. Outside the mall, I found a singer performing for a small crowd. A couple meters away stood a unit where a popular Thai restaurant once operated. While it’s listed as operating on Google Reviews, one of Fadzil’s staff told me it has “closed down for good.” The restaurant appeared to once have good reviews online, with diners describing the food as “affordable” and “delicious.” The lot was padlocked and the tinted glass walls obscured what was inside, but my fat zoom lens captured an eerie image of the restaurant’s interior. Kitchen tools were piled in a corner and dozens of bottles of beverages stood packaged together, unused. It looked like a scene that had been quickly and hastily abandoned. – retail is tough at the best of times, but there is also a constant tale in Malaysia of expensive white elephants and failed economic policies once it had been decolonised

    Ethics

    Filmmaker Andrew Callaghan Says Cable News “Ramped People up” for Jan. 6 – I think that January 6th is much more of a riot than it is an insurrection. And I think that the mainstream media is endlessly focusing on it because it’s, it’s very good eye candy. It makes great news. It makes all conservatives look like absolute morons, and it’s good for selling ads. So it was a terrible thing, but there’s reasons they’re dragging it out, and they’ll continue to drag it out until the next major conservative fuck up like that. I don’t feel, necessarily, that the frontline brainwashed Capitol riot soldier is to blame for what happened. I think it’s the people who push them into action, particularly on the fringe as well. I think mainstream media and social media play a role in ramping up division, but I think it’s people like Alex [Jones] and Enrique [Tarrio] who really are primarily just merchandise salesmen. We have a serious problem with media echo chambers and informational literacy in this country. We have to take it upon ourselves to be more educated and think on a different level. So what’s in it for influencers like them? The “MAGA-sphere” allows for a ridiculous array of hustles and grifts. There’s Forgiato Blow, who built a rap career around the MAGA train. Enrique Tarrio runs the largest right-wing t-shirt shop on the Internet. Alex Jones makes millions of dollars selling brain pills, basically. There’s so many ways to make money in the MAGA world. It’s really appealing for someone trying to get their start as an entrepreneur or a politically active person – probably one of the smarter views that I have read on January 6.

    Machine learning and ethics: The AI “Revolution in Military Affairs”: What Would it Really Look Like? – Lawfare and Pulse joins the Mozilla family to help develop a new approach to machine learning 

    Finance

    DOJ divided over charging Binance for alleged crypto crimes, report says | Ars Technica – Binance has already been censured in Singapore

    Germany

    Siegfried Muller’s interview shows the complexity in modern German history. Muller was plied with alcohol and interviewed by East German interviewers who then put together this film (presumably with editing). For Muller, the threat of communism was real. You can read more on Muller here.

    The War in Ukraine Highlights European Rifts – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – Despite the destruction Russia is wreaking on Ukraine, both Chancellor Olaf Scholz and sections of his Social Democratic Party and business lobbies hanker after the status quo ante. Herein lies the second rift. It is linked to EU member states’ varied historical experiences and the resulting threat perceptions. The EU as a peace project was finessed over the years without a voice from the Eastern or Central Europeans. They had to endure living under the dictatorship of the Soviet Union. Today, Western Europe, particularly France and Germany, considers a future European security architecture involving Russia in some form. For the East Europeans, security is about defending themselves against Russia. That is why the latter want Ukraine to win and Russia to be defeated. For them, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens Europe’s stability and security—a threat that would be compounded if Russia were to win

    Health

    Race is on to develop new generation of weight-loss drugs | Financial Times – this looks like a Viagra like gold rush, on the plus side there is a lot of scientific progress being made. The biggest barriers are socio-cultural in nature. Disclosure, I worked on the global launch of Wegovy – the current category leading treatment

    The start-ups seeking a cure for old age | Financial Times 

    Cyberattack Shuts Down French Hospital 

    Palo Alto Networks Announces Medical IoT Security to Protect Connected Devices Critical to Patient Care 

    Hong Kong

    China Lets Hong Kong Leader Override Courts Over Jimmy Lai Lawyer – WSJ – what’s interesting is that the Hong Kong government had attempted to kick this over to Beijng after the courts ruled against them. National People’s Congress Standing Committee did not ban foreign lawyers as widely expected. Standing committee clarified two clauses of law after city’s top court upheld earlier ruling that allowed jailed tycoon Jimmy Lai to hire British barrister for his pending trial, National security law: Hong Kong to pass legislative amendment ‘in months’ to ban British lawyer from Jimmy Lai trial, after Beijing ruling | South China Morning Post – Committee for Safeguarding National Security, chaired by city leader, expected to call meeting and lay down framework for amendment. Country’s top legislative body had on Friday clarified two clauses of the Beijing-decreed legislation, stating the matter required chief executive’s input

    Hong Kong committee can bar foreign lawyers from national security cases: Beijing — Radio Free Asia – “Now the national security committee gets to decide what is and isn’t a matter of national security in all cases, not just national security cases, but in any other court cases and also in all matters of government policy, without being subject to judicial review,” he said. “They could claim that pandemic prevention was a matter of national security, or education,” Yam said. “It’s not just about the judicial system.” “It affects legislation and anything that takes place throughout the entire government system.” – Australian lawyer Kevin Yam points out the weakness that anyone using Hong Kong as a legal jurisdiction in contracts should be concerned about. Is the counter-party connected to the government, in a strategically important sector, government owned or supported by government loans? Do they employ mainland employees who might be affected by the contract. All of this could fall within the national security law. Another take by Hong Kong based legal scholar and former judge Henry Litton: HKU Legal Scholarship Blog: Henry Litton: Red Alert: Hong Kong Judicial Independence Under Existential Threat (Comment on the Admission of Owen KC). Samuel Bickett’s take on things here: Beijing’s New Year’s surprise: awarding itself broad new powers over Hong Kong and NPC Observer: Explainer: NPCSC’s Interpretation of Hong Kong National Security Law over Jimmy Lai’s Foreign Defense Counsel – Beyond the confines of Lai’s case and the specific issue it raised, the [NatSec] Committee’s seemingly broad and unreviewable power to “make [enforceable] judgments and decisions” on whether an issue of national security is involved, regardless of setting, could be cause for concern. It awaits to be seen whether and to what extent it would invoke this newly declared authority to deal with other situations in the future.

    Free Hong Kong’s Fiercest Defender by Chris Patten – Project Syndicate – Chris Patten on Jimmy Lai

    The Wolves and Sheep case HKU Legal Scholarship Blog: Johannes Chan: The Village of the Sheep Case (HKSAR v Lai Man-ling) which is just embarrassing for Hong Kong HKU Legal Scholarship Blog: Henry Litton on The Case of the Wolf and the Sheep in Hong Kong (Pearls and Irritations) and The case of the wolf and the sheep in Hong Kong – Pearls and Irritations 

    Ideas

    Steve Barrett summaries behavioural change hacks.

    Innovation

    Three ways Big Tech got it wrong | Financial Times – Most of Big Tech got rich on software, which is easily updatable and basically free to distribute at scale. Such online innovation rightly places a huge premium on “failing fast”: getting a product out quickly, building a following and fixing the bugs later. The same is simply not true for a car, a medicine or even a new flavour of packaged meat. They have to work correctly and meet regulatory standards right off the bat. Production facilities and distribution networks cannot be conjured out of thin air, or easily amended after the fact. In the physical realm, an innovator can see its lead evaporate in the face of competition from rivals with experience in production and distribution. Tesla is discovering this the hard way. Tesla’s share of the US electric vehicle market has dropped below 65 per cent from 79 per cent five years ago. S&P Global Mobility predicts it will fall below 20 per cent by 2025 as other makers bring out electric trucks and cheaper models faster than Tesla can build new factories

    India’s start-up dream sours for fired tech workers | Financial Times – a good deal of the blame can be laid at the feet of the team that Nikesh Arora built and led at Softbank, alongside the wider macro-economic factors currently happening

    Applied Materials expands in Singapore, US | EE Times 

    What Happened To Amazon’s Employees After AI Automated Their Work 

    Huawei patents EUV lithography tools used to make <10nm chips | TechSpot – patents are one thing, getting it to work is something else entirely

    Ireland

    Over a million passports issued in 2022 | RTÉ News 

    Japan

    A few things on this. I believe that hydrogen will play a far bigger role in the energy mix for transport. These cars are Toyota Mirai vehicles. Secondly, look at how easy it is for the workers to get the fit and finish right on the cars, which says a lot about the precision of their component manufacturers to get to Toyota’s legendary reliable, rattle-free vehicles.

    https://youtu.be/FpmaNakvQRM

    Korea

    KOSPI Ends Year with Lackluster Performance – The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition) – to be fair this has been the same around the world

    North Korean hackers once again exploit Internet Explorer’s leftover bits | Ars Technica – again a good deal of this is down to Korea’s historical reliance on Windows

    London

    William Davies · The Seductions of Declinism: Stagnation Nation · LRB 4 August 2022 – The claim that everything has been getting worse for decades is a gift to Thatcherites and Brexiters, who promise a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of the nation, and would like to banish those who talk down Britain’s prospects. Edgerton went to considerable lengths in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A 20th-Century History to dispute the claim that the interwar and postwar British economy was a failure, or that it needed ‘reviving’ in the way Thatcher promised. For Edgerton (and the Resolution Foundation appears to agree), Britain’s current economic malaise began under Thatcher, when rent-seeking via the housing market, privatisation and financial ‘innovation’ became the basis of Britain’s economic growth. But even Edgerton would agree that we are now in a very bad way. The poor quality of the Tory leadership candidates and the unseriousness of the debate between them creates the impression of a country that can now only speak to itself in slogans, oaths and insults, and has no capacity to describe or explain its problems. Away from the theatre of the leadership contest, the signs are that Britain’s elites now intend to stake everything on another financial free-for-all. Inexplicably, the Bank of England recently abolished the regulations that impose affordability criteria on the sale of mortgages, meaning that lenders no longer need to check whether borrowers have the capacity to repay if interest rates rise further. A new Financial Services Bill, supported by Sunak and the current chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, will challenge the power of the Bank of England to regulate financial services, with the aim of releasing the City of London to engage in greater risk-taking. The Brexiters’ ideology, according to which Britain remains restricted by its conformity to EU rules, may have one more hurrah, if it can liberate speculators for another few years before the Ponzi schemes finally collapse

    USA vs. England: Which one is more deranged? | Slate.com – guess that free trade deal won’t be a high priority….

    Extinction Rebellion abandons disruptive climate protests in UK | Financial Times – not terribly surprising, they managed to alienate rather than get allies

    Materials

    EU looks at ban on non-rechargeable batteries | EE Times 

    Trashed lithium-ion batteries caused three garbage truck fires in California | Ars Technica – recycling these batteries is going to be very dangerous

    How Li Ka-shing backed start-up Notpla plans to replace plastic with a sustainable seaweed alternative 

    Media

    Turning tables: the UK’s new vinyl manufacturer riding the music revival | The Guardian – the collecting bug underpinning vinyl records is another part of the joy of ownership for many people. A more ethereal version of the joy of ownership comes from the secondary markets in sports and streetwear.

    Hollywood talent agencies seek new deals tied to Netflix advertising model | Financial Times – its basically the TV model from the 1970s all over again

    Philippines

    Philippines’ new SIM card law could be abused by corrupt officials, critics say | South China Morning Post 

    Retailing

    Flink hits €400mn in sales as German grocery app seeks to narrow losses | Financial Times 

    Security

    PLA Blows Hot and Cold over U.S. Air Force’s Multirole Heavy Aircraft – Jamestown 

    Spying on Chinese Living Abroad: A Visit To the City Responsible for China’s Police Stations in Europe – DER SPIEGEL 

    Fake ‘Rothschild’ Was Chased by Russian Organized Crime When She Took Pictures With Trump at Mar-a-Lago – OCCRP – the self-confessed grifter was a Ukrainian immigrant tangled up with Russian organized crime, a joint investigation by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and OCCRP has found. OCCRP and the Post-Gazette revealed in August how Yashchyshyn gained access to Mar-a-Lago without any background checks, making at least four trips to the estate in two days. The investigation and an FBI action that same month to retrieve documents from Mar-a-Lago renewed questions about security at the private club that has hosted powerful U.S. and world leaders. Those questions will only grow with the new revelations that the fake Rothschild was being chased by a serious organized crime figure as she mingled with prominent club guests and the ex-president himself.

    Keeping your information secure on the road

    DHS secretary says US faces ‘a new kind of warfare’ | Cyberscoop 

    Effective, fast, and unrecoverable: Wiper malware is popping up everywhere | Ars Technica 

    Never-before-seen malware is nuking data in Russia’s courts and mayors’ offices | Ars Technica – this looks like it might be designed to affect Russia’s ability to draft population and might have been done by Russians inside, or outside the country

    Rackspace Incident Highlights How Disruptive Attacks on Cloud Providers Can Be 

    SiriusXM, MyHyundai Car Apps Showcase Next-Gen Car Hacking 

    Singapore

    Singapore redevelopment of its harbour in the early 1980s is fascinating. The area is now a mix of bars, cafes and restaurants. Among the buildings lost was a cinema built and owned by The Shaw Organisation – who were responsible for the post-war boom in kung fu martial arts films and even helped finance Blade Runner. The Shaws came out of a merchant background and were big in pre-war Shanghai as one of the big three film studios. They diversified into amusement parks over a decade before Disney did; though the Shaws were not as single-minded in their focus on ‘family-friendly’ experiences as their US counterpart.

    The limits of growth in Singapore, some of these factors feel very Brexity, partly due to neo-liberalism

    Taiwan

    An International Lifeline: Taiwan’s Parliamentary Outreach – Jamestown 

    Taiwan counts on military conscription reform to deter China invasion | Financial Times – in the 1960s Singapore worked with Israel to come up with a defence strategy. This exercise offers a lot of lessons for Taiwan today, along with the agile national guard forces of Ukraine

    Technology

    Server supply chain migrating to North America and Southeast Asia, according to DIGITIMES Research 

    Telecoms

    After bankruptcy and war, OneWeb turns to a competitor for help | Ars Technica – a batch of 40 satellites is due to launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A in Florida. SpaceX, of course, is a competitor in satellite broadband Internet

    Interesting documentary on the AT&T Long Lines project. The closest AT&T has now is its disaster recovery and First Net services.

    Bell Labs did an explanatory film on the AT&T Long Lines microwave network

    Web of no web

    VR Shipments Declined by 12% in 2022, Casting Doubts on the Future of the Metaverse / Digital Information World and When it comes to the Metaverse, Brits don’t care about virtual environments – City Monitor 

    Gorillaz turn the world into a stage with augmented reality | Google Blog – a classic example of what William Gibson would call locative art

  • Valley of Genius by Adam Fisher

    Valley of Genius by Adam Fisher promises to be ‘the uncensored history of Silicon Valley’ based on stories that founders and programmers told to each other. All of which begs the question how much is myth making and how much is true?

    Valley of Genius
    Valley of Genius front cover

    Getting to the truth

    Having worked for Silicon Valley clients and in-house at Yahoo!; I recognise that the truth doesn’t get out there and the myth making is largely self-serving. There is also a big question about how far the collective memory actually goes back.

    Yahoo! star

    Secondly, the story of Silicon Valley has already been told a number of times, how will Valley of Genius compare to Dealers of Lightning, The Valley of Heart’s Delight, Where Wizards Stay Up Late or Accidental Empires in terms of telling the story of Silicon Valley?

    Finally, there is the challenge of how big tech companies have got so good at controlling their story in the wider world. Whether it was keeping close tabs on journalists like Fred Vogelstein found out while working at Wired magazine, through Frank X Shaw’s reputation for robust rebuttal, funded their own media outlets like Pando Daily and eventually disintermediated the media altogether.

    Adam Fisher

    Adam Fisher grew up in the Bay Area and became a journalist and later editor at Wired. He left there and freelanced for a number of publications, branching out from technology writing to other areas like travel and tourism.

    Style

    The most noticeable thing about Valley of Genius when you get into it is that there is no prose. It is all dialogue. Fisher has cut together segments of interviews to tell a story. Sometimes it feels like people around a table, other times it feels more disjointed.

    The book is described as an oral history and Fisher in his interviews describes the process as being like putting together documentary interviews.

    Fisher went out and interviewed many of the great and the good of Silicon Valley to get this material, however given some of the soundbites were things I had heard before such as Steve Jobs talking about a computer as a ‘bicycle of the mind’; I was not sure if these people like to self reference or if Fisher has interspersed his interviews with archival material. Right at the end of the book, Fisher comes a list of people by chapter and where he had to source secondhand quotes from.

    I’ve read a number of books on Silicon Valley over the years, so had a frame of reference and I had context, so I found Valley of Genius enjoyable to read. But for someone who is coming to the subject with just a cursory knowledge of Silicon Valley, there is benefits to having a guide. Reading the quotes without understanding the context, or having been to Silicon Valley still leaves you outside.

    I honestly don’t know if Fisher would have been a good guide, so him removing his voice from the book maybe less of a loss than we might think. But a new reader to the subject matter would benefit from a guide like Michael S. Malone or the insider snark of Robert X. Cringely (aka Mark Stephens). Fisher’s book Valley of Genius is a book for insiders and future academics who might be looking at the history of Silicon Valley in the future. According to Fisher, he managed to secure the last interview that Bob Taylor ever gave. Bob Taylor played key roles in moving Silicon Valley forward while in managerial positions at NASA, ARPA and XEROX PARC. In those interview quotes are more granular aspects of things, like Nolan Bushnell having a champagne party on the grass outside the offices of a recently bankrupt competitor, or that the video card to power the monitor used in Doug Engelbart measured about 3 foot by 4 foot in size.

    It’s also a very one dimensional view of Silicon Valley. It largely misses out hardware and hard innovation; which is problematic for a technology hub that is competing against China and India for that matter. There is no 3Com, Cisco or Juniper Networks. The hardware story is very much lacking, there is no Intel, AMD or Nvidia, Sun Microsystems or SGI. It is largely a consumer technology vision that writes out businesses like Oracle and Salesforce together with the characters that lead them.

    Plot line

    Valley of Genius ignores a good deal of early Silicon Valley, such as the the pre-war nature of Stanford, Varian, Bill Hewlett and David Packard’s garage start-up, Shockley Labs, the treacherous eight, defence contracting and the missile age.

    Mother of all demos

    Instead Valley of Genius history starts at 1968, when Dough Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute provides the Mother of all Demos to a mix of academics, government people from the likes of the department of defense and technologists.

    Engelbart talks about his developments in 1986

    He the talked about his career on the Google campus in 2007.

    Atari

    The story moves on to Atari and Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell was responsible for popularising computer games and arcade consoles. Bushnell was a bridge between the counter culture and Silicon Valley hustle. A few chapters later Valley of Genius also covers the acquisition and eventual (first) failure of Atari.

    Here’s Bushnell being interviewed for the 50th anniversary of Atari by IGN.

    Bushnell did a Google Talk a number of years ago as well.

    Xerox PARC

    PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) was a west coast R&D facility put together by Xerox to understand what the future of work would look like. They had already realised that it would be computerised. From PARC came modern computers, local area networks, file servers, laser printers and productivity software.

    Apple

    In separate chapters Valley of Genius covers Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s commercialisation of phone hacking tools, and the evolution of the Apple computer line up from the Apple II to the Macintosh.

    Retailer High Technology did the first adverts featuring the Apple II computer

    Which was a far more budget affair than Apple’s own launch of the Machintosh.

    The book goes on to cover the return of CEO Steve Jobs and the rejuvenation of Apple as a business including the iPod, iPhone and iPad through to the death of Jobs.

    The hacker ethic, or hacker culture

    The hacker ethic or culture, a digital equivalent of the person who tinkers away with things in a shed or garage has their own section. The section is atemporal in nature, which I can understand to a certain extent. Steve Wozniak came out of hacker culture, as have many software developers over time.

    Fisher focuses on what hacker culture is, rather than what it means (both good and bad). I would recommend Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution as a companion to this chapter in Valley of Genius. The copy I read years ago was published by Penguin, but O’Reilly have re-published it as the book this is part of myth-making and cultural norming in software development teams.

    The WeLL

    The WeLL was the proto-online community that is still going and features first generation digerati such as journalist Wendy Grossman, the founders of Wired magazine and cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling.

    Stewart Brand talked about the founding of The WeLL during a Google hosted talk

    The WeLL never scaled in the same way that we think about social networks now but it has quality discussions and is much kinder than Twitter or Reddit.

    VPL

    VPL was a failed start-up in the mid-1990s that set much of the expectations and tempo on VR to this day. You will most likely know it from the VR suit featured in The Lawnmower Man movie. I covered it in more depth in my metaverse discussion paper.

    General Magic

    Take a series of burnt out Apple employees and have them invent a predecessor of the net appliance or smartphone. That was General Magic and it was a glorious failure. Sarah Kerruish’s documentary on General Magic tells the story much better.

    Wired magazine

    Wired magazine gets its own chapter. it represented a way of melding culture and technology. I had read Wired before I had used the web, but it gave me a good idea of what to expect. But I don’t know if it is more important than ZDnet or other technology publishing houses. Valley of Genius goes on to celebrate Wired’s online endeavours including HotWired, Suck – a sarcastic version of Wired and Webmonkey – which taught a lot of people web development skills and probably doesn’t get the love it deserves in Valley of Genius. Mondo 2000, a rival to Wired in terms of setting the cultural zeitgeist for technologists also gets a chapter.

    Pixar

    Pixar as a Silicon Valley story is an accident due to two things

    • George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic being based in North California rather than in Los Angeles
    • Steve Jobs looking for a project post-Apple

    But it didn’t necessarily move Silicon Valley forward.

    Netscape

    The jump to Netscape as the first commercial browser makes sense. AOL, AT&T True Experience, CompuServe and Prodigy services were all driven by businesses outside the traditional Silicon Valley space.

    Bob Cringely, from what I guess was PBS’ Triumph of The Nerds

    At the time Netscape seemed as much about the crazy public valuation of the business which was emblematic of the dot com boom, as it was about the software that would kick off the open web. These kind of valuations re-emerged with businesses like Uber and WeWork.

    eBay

    eBay was the standout e-commerce play for Silicon Valley. Amazon was a Seattle company and so was an outsider in a similar way that Microsoft always had been. eBay was also founded by an ex-General Magic employee and so was part of Silicon Valley’s version of ‘Rock family trees‘. We see this even now with the ‘PayPal mafia’.

    Google

    Google changed the web experience that Silicon Valley had pioneered via Yahoo! and Excite. Brin and Page became a key point of focus in Valley of Genius. However, this ignores the complexity both around search and the development of foundational web technologies that other companies produced. If you are interested about the nature and history of Google, Steven Levy’s In The Plex is probably a better option to read.

    Google’s move to pay per click advertising gets its own chapter that greatly reduces the complexity of the real story.

    Napster

    Napster was the poster child of market value destruction and disruption that predated Uber and its ilk.

    Dot bomb

    The dot com boom can be charted from the last quarter of 1995 and reached its nadir in the last quarter of 2002.

    Eric Steiner tells his tale as the CEO of Inktomi through the dot com boom and bust

    Valley of Genius covers it in terms of its sociological impact on the Bay Area, as much as its economic impact. The reality is more complex, even the dot.com label attached to it is a misnomer. It encompassed telecoms, networking hardware, datacenters and more in terms of its impact rather than just e-businesses.

    Facebook

    While Facebook was an east coast invention, the movement of the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg west saw a cultural change in Silicon Valley that took it down a much darker patch. By comparison Twitter in its start-up phase looked more like Atari in terms of its counterculture influence.

    Future gazing

    At the end of the book there is a section on future gazing, which became what made Silicon Valley great. The business model was prioritised over innovation. Veteran journalist John Markoff even talked about how Salesforce had moved to a ‘vertical campus’ model with Salesforce tower. Which is how every other business in places like Singapore, Hong Kong and even Wall Street work anyway.

    There was a singular lack of reflection on challenges ahead or areas of introspection by the people telling these stories. If anything, that was what concerned me the most about the book. Innovation is at a technological, scientific and socio-cultural cross-roads and the inhabitants of the Valley of Genius apparently doesn’t have a clue. More on the book here. You can find more of my book reviews here.

    Extra content – Valley of Genius promotional tour interviews

    Panel hosted by Adam Fisher to promote the Valley of Genius book

    Leo LePort interviews Fisher on Valley of Genius at the time of its launch.

  • KanDenko + more stuff

    KanDenko

    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.

  • ChatGPT + more things

    ChatGPT

    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.

    ChatGPT
    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?

    China

    Volkswagen’s Skoda considers withdrawing from China – media report | Reuters – Czech carmaker Skoda Auto, part of Volkswagen, is considering withdrawing from China and will make a final decision next year. The re-orientation towards India is interesting

    How China aims to avoid the curse of increased longevity & ill health – Financial Times – Partner Content by Ping An Insurance – Ping An Insurance has a health management model or concierge service as they like to position it

    Learning from the Soviet Collapse – by Jordan Schneider – China’s Marxist Leninist version of Andy Grove’s book Only The Paranoid Survive – all of which implies at weakness at the heart of the CCP; its own members…

    Defending democracy in an era of state threats – GOV.UK 

    Consumer behaviour

    Gen Z: progressive, illiberal or both? 

    Culture

    Why we’re doing this – Flickr Foundation – interesting on the future of Flickr Commons and good to see George Oates involved

    Economics

    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

    Globalization is Dead and No One is Listening – by Kevin Xu 

    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.

    Finance

    Microsoft to take 4% stake in London Stock Exchange Group | Financial Times – interesting series of cloud computing deals happening that include an equity purchase

    Health

    How docs deal with tricky situations with patients or billing | Fierce Healthcare

    Gary Jones of MediMusic says his ‘greatest ambition’ is to see music prescribed on the NHS | BW Magazine 

    Hong Kong

    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

    Hong Kong security chief accuses Google of ‘double standards’ for refusing to correct national anthem search results | South China Morning Post – Hong Kong upset that Google knows the national anthem of Hong Kong is ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ – I wonder how they will use the National Security Law in this fight?

    Ideas

    Techno-optimism for 2023 – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion 

    The great disruption has only just begun | Financial Times 

    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

    Innovation

    Tracking How the Event Camera Is Evolving – EE Times 

    IBM Reveals Its 433 Qubit Quantum Computer – EE Times 

    Innovative ASIC CPU Drives Record-Setting Server Performance – EE Times 

    The global microchip race: Europe’s bid to catch up | Financial Times 

    Robots set their sights on a new job: sewing blue jeans | Reuters – the economics of automation are very interesting. In markets with poor productivity i.e. the UK , people are replacing automation in warehouses and the car wash

    IBM partners with Japan’s Rapidus to make advanced chips as US recruits allies to its cause in China tech war | South China Morning Post – 2nm node process

    Canon prepares to ramp nano-imprint lithography | EE Times 

    Tracking How the Event Camera Is Evolving – EE Times 

    Ireland

    Do you recognise these iconic Irish Christmas ads? or the effect of nostalgia on Irish consumers perceptions of advertising campaigns

    Japan

    Japan scraps pacifist postwar defence strategy to counter China threat | Financial Times – this is much needed, but will be huge in terms of Japanese politics and how the country sees itself

    Legal

    China preps $143 billion chip support, goes to WTO | EE Times 

    Luxury

    5 Facts About Chanel Métiers d’Art Show in Dakar | Hypebae – apparently Chanel managed to amass an armada of Toyota Land Cruisers to put all this on.

    Luxury Watch Thefts of Rolex, Patek and Other Models Are on the Rise – Robb Report – which is why you have some UK watch collectors on YouTube talk about the ‘London watch check’ and rather than showing their timepiece have a bare wrist instead

    Luxury Daily: One-second wonder: Mr. Bags x Qeelin sells out immediately – I will never get how the HSN / QVC type format works so well in Chinese luxury sector

    You’ll own nothing (besides luxury goods) and be happy | Financial Times 

    Online

    Is Snapchat+ still being subscribed by users? / Digital Information World 

    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.

    Taiwan considers extending TikTok ban to private sector — Radio Free Asia 

    U.S. lawmakers unveil bipartisan bid to ban China’s TikTok | Reuters – first Taiwan, now the US…

    The METAmorphosis of behavioural economics and fast data. | Human Digital 

    Security

    Recruited for Navy SEALs, many sailors wind up scraping paint | The Japan Times – is this generation snow flake, or is there something broken on SEAL unit culture? What’s not talked about in the article is unit fit and mental resilience

    Ex-U.S. pilot held in Australia faces U.S. charges over export of defence services to China | Reuters 

    Dutch chip equipment maker ASML’s CEO questions U.S. export rules on China -newspaper | Reuters 

    Fall of the house of Sergei Leontiev | Financial Times 

    This won’t help consumers trust in politicians, but the strong legal reaction might

    Web of no web

    ChinAI #206: China’s Virtual Reality Push Gets Real