Looking back to when I started this blog, it would have been reasonable to expect an inevitable march of retailing from offline to online. Amazon was on a tear and search advertising volumes were increasing year on year. By the time I was at Yahoo! search advertising (focused on online retailing) counted for about half of all revenue for the company.
At that time Yahoo! had a Spotify-like subscription streaming music service that was viewed as a threat to Apple’s iTunes download only offering. When I worked there Yahoo Music was the number one online music site in terms of audience reach and total time spent by consumers on the site. Also display advertising was much bigger for brands than it is today and Yahoo! was guaranteed a good share of the online marketing spend from any movie launch at the time.
The reality of online retailing, was slower than our expectations. While COVID drove an increase in online retailing there has also been corresponding innovations in retailing as well.
Amongst the pioneers in this change have been luxury brands like Burberry and Nike, who brought digital into their stores to provide a superior customer experience.
Adidas brought manufacturing into its stores with its speedfactory experiment, allowing for fast time to market and customisation.
Supreme changed the cadence of retailing with the Thursday morning ‘drop’ which saw queues outside stores. Every Thursday became a launch day as far as their customers where concerned. The queue has moved from Apple’s annual cadence, to every week.
RUSI put together a great presentation on the nature of illicit finance from the perspective of terrorism and terrorist states including Russia and the People’s Republic of China. The foundations of illicit finance seems to be the offshore financial structures that were build up by the United Kingdom in the post-war period to capture the EuroDollar market.
In some ways this lecture on Illicit finance felt very familiar. It is exactly the same structures that John Le Carre outlined in his post-cold war novel Single and Single. The nature of illicit finance was also covered in Michael Oswald’s documentary The Spider’s Web – Britain’s Second Empire. This linkage was not lost on the audience attending the talk.
The concerns about illicit finance now are because these structures are being used to attack democracies at their core and buy influence for hostile states such as Russia and China. It is like the west is slowly awakening from a slumber as its enemies try to slit their throat.
Riding the slow train in China | The Economist – As Mr Xi enters his second decade as supreme leader, his sternly paternalist version of Communist Party rule seeks to draw ever more legitimacy from the provision of customer-friendly public services, supplied via modern infrastructure. In the case of China’s railways, at least, that promise of order and efficiency has been kept.
Wintershall’s empty bank accounts expose plight of western companies still in Russia | Financial Times – “We helped create a very powerful and dangerous Russia without being cognisant of the risk,” he said, while acknowledging that the country had done its best to remedy this in the past 12 months. And he said BASF risked repeating its Russian mistake in China. “What I’m really surprised about, and almost upsets me, is that while this is all happening . . . BASF decides to invest €10bn in China,” he said, referring to a planned chemicals complex that will be the company’s largest ever foreign investment. “That’s the most upsetting part,” he said. “That we don’t learn from it.” – this quote from Thomas Schweppe of 7Square nails the problem neatly
Finance
Thousands of offshore companies with UK property still not stating real owners | Tax havens | The Guardian – wealthy businessmen, Gulf royalty and states such as China have legally bought up billions of pounds of mostly London property, often via jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and the Channel Islands. Stephen Abbott Pugh, head of technology for Open Ownership, a non-governmental organisation focused on beneficial ownership transparency, said the fact that so many of the offshore companies are declared as owned by other companies or trusts means “the public still aren’t able to easily discover the people behind those companies in many cases”. “With access to many European beneficial ownership registers being shut off following a 2022 court ruling, the Register of Overseas Entities shows how useful public data is for tracking how offshore money is used to buy assets,”
Health
The 1964 House Report on how smoking affected the health of Americans went around the world. Sales dropped 30 percent in a week, and then picked up back to normal after existing smokers addiction kicked in.
How Microsoft’s Stumbles Led to Its OpenAI Alliance — The Information – For more than a decade, Microsoft Research, the company’s in-house research group, has touted artificial intelligence breakthroughs such as translating speech to text and software that could understand human language or recognize objects in images. But the company’s effort to commercialize its AI research moved at more of a crawl – this was at the centre of Microsoft’s innovation narrative for the best part of two decades. It’s embarrassing
Inside the secret Facebook groups where women review men | Dazed – then there’s the whole other side of ‘Are We Dating The Same Guy’, which is a lot more ethically ambiguous. Is it ever OK to publicly share someone’s photos and private conversations without their consent? Or in other words, to ‘doxx’? There’s a clear power differential, but if genders were reversed and guys were exposing females to strangers on the internet, it’s unlikely we’d see the group in such a positive light. “If a boy posted me and people were writing ‘red flag’ in the comments, I would genuinely be quite hurt,” says Tara, 20. She notes how, sometimes, users make particularly unfair remarks: for example, they’ll lambast a date for having “shit chat”, or “[talking] like a 60-year-old dad”.
Getting Personal With State Propaganda – China Media Project – Nanchang Aviation University (南昌航空大学), located in China’s southern Jiangxi province, announced that it had launched the “Jiangxi International Communication Research Center” (江西国际传播研究中心) in cooperation with the China Media Group, the state media conglomerate formed in 2018 directly under the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department. According to coverage by China Education Daily, a newspaper directly under the Ministry of Education, the new center is an experiment in combining central CCP media and universities (央媒+高校) to carry out international communication by using the “overseas student resources” (留学生资源) of the university.
I subscribe to all kinds of weird and wonderful newsletters to get content for these posts, the idea of a Ukraine beta test was inspired by this post on SOFREP: Combat Sandbox: Ukraine’s ‘MacGyver Army’Tests Western Weaponry | SOFREP. SOFREP is written a self-described team of a team of former military, intelligence and special operations professionals. While some of their stories are repeats of tabloid fantasies: UK Apache helicopter gunships for Ukraine, they also provide some smart editorial thinking.
Western military ideas were designed to run against Russian and Chinese campaigns. The Ukraine beta test seems to have failed for Russia’s hybrid warfare concept, when it was executed on a large scale basis. Russia were trying to execute on an idea first outlined by an American theorist Frank Hoffman in his work Conflict in the 21st century: the rise of hybrid wars for a think tank. The Russians themselves call it ‘non-linear warfare‘. After careful preparation, Russia used non-linear warfare to capture Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014. On the surface of it, a successful Ukraine beta test for Russia. Yet 7 years later on a larger scale approach Russia failed and is having to go back to older ways of doing things.
Part of the Ukraine beta test works because of the Ukrainians and everything that they have on the line. Part of it was down to better tactics by Ukraine compared to Russia and at least some of which was down to the use of western weapons systems used in an innovative way.
There has since been a Ukraine beta test of western military ideas:
Delta is a system for collecting, processing and displaying information about enemy forces, coordinating defense forces, and providing situational awareness according to NATO standards, developed by the Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, founded in 2021 at the base of the A2724 military unit, which, in turn, was created in 2015 from the volunteer group Aerorozvidka.
Delta is used for planning operations and combat missions, coordination with other units, secure exchange of information on the location of enemy forces, etc. In particular, Delta has integrated chatbots developed by the Ministry of Digital Affairs – “eVorog” and the Security Service of Ukraine – “STOP Russian War”.
The system is equipped with modern means of monitoring suspicious activity. From 2021, allied cyber units are constantly scanning the system for vulnerabilities, intrusion attempts, data leaks, and more.
According to the developers, Delta provides a comprehensive understanding of the battle space in real time, integrates information about the enemy from various sensors and sources, including – intelligence, on a digital map, does not require additional settings, and can work on any device – laptop, tablet or even on a mobile phone. Roughly speaking, Delta is such a modern real-time command map and troop control center
It has taken years for western powers to build comparable systems. Delta is powered by a mix of human intelligence, Ukrainian open source intelligence and also includes NATO electronic intelligence and satellite imagery. Integration of NATO for Delta is a Ukraine beta test in itself. NATO will learn from the successes and challenges of Delta. At a tactical level the idea of a Ukraine beta test shows how well weapons systems work under real-world ‘near peer’ war conditions, giving them valuable understanding of what systems are most effective against Russian systems.
The Ukraine beta test shows where the gaps are in NATO systems. For instance the Gepard tank is a short range anti-aircraft system phased out by Germany a decade ago, that has shown the value of similar gun based systems against drones and low flying aircraft as a cost effective method to engage.
All of which makes me wonder why the arms industry aren’t taking the obvious step and ‘donating’ trial systems to the Ukrainian military for a Ukraine beta test to show their mettle and value to western clients? The closest that we’ve seen to this is the GLSDB. The GLSDB is an existing Boeing bomb mated to recycled rocket motors. But the arms industry could do so much more as part of a Ukraine beta test.
China
The politics of China’s Belt and Road workers in Africa – Asia Times – strong empirical evidence that democracies host significantly fewer Chinese workers than autocracies, all other things being equal. The results hold up using a variety of different statistical modeling techniques. In Ghana, a vibrant democracy, we found that both the country’s main political parties faced pressure to ensure that Chinese-built projects delivered local jobs. For example, in the construction of the Bui Dam, the agreement between Sinohydro, the Chinese state-owned behemoth contracted to complete the project, and the Ghanaian government stipulated that a certain proportion of the workforce would be local. In Algeria, on the other hand, Chinese labor has been used to quickly complete projects seen as politically expedient. Algeria is a “hybrid” regime that was ruled by a single man, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, from 1999 to 2019. Even when domestic discontent over Chinese workers prompted measures to limit their presence, the measures were not implemented. Our findings have several important implications. First, host country agency is important. Host governments have the ability to ensure Chinese companies hire locally. Second, projects that hire locally may bring more long-term economic benefits to host countries. This can happen both directly through the jobs that they create, and via knowledge and technology transfers into the wider economy. Our analysis, therefore, suggests that the wider developmental benefits of Chinese-built infrastructure may actually be stronger in democracies than in autocracies
China is flashing red on the skewed consensus indicator | Financial Times – The only strong standout finding is on China, around which a strength of current optimism has no offset. Morgan Stanley didn’t think to even offer one. It’s a Goldilocks scenario with no bears – this doesn’t make sense. Wall Street seems to have an irrational belief in China as a market. For example: China moves to take ‘golden shares’ in Alibaba and Tencent units | Financial Times – expect this is to be about more than censorship. More like military – civil fusion – also likely to have big implications for media engagement on social platforms
Ryanair unsure if softening in UK demand here to stay – “There’s no doubt that the UK economy by any stretch of the imagination, in terms of going into recession or whatever, is different than the other European economies,” – interesting that they are concerned about travel overall rather than thinking about a pivot to them from BA etc
Is this the end of the bachelor pad? – The Face – the bachelor pad has been gobbled up by the economy. Nearly a third of 20 – 34-year-olds in the UK are living at home with their parents. I did feel a bit triggered by the author’s dismissal of stainless steel as a material and good quality furniture like an Eames lounge chair as being emblematic of toxic masculinity. But the economic points are very valid
Mainland rush to return to Hong Kong, Macau post zero-Covid nears 1 million | South China Morning Post – travel demand has been growing since China relaxed its border restrictions in December, with around 998,000 mainland residents applying for travel documents to Hong Kong or Macau, and 353,000 people applying for a new passport – expect Hong Kong fatalities to surge. Hong Kong has an even older population than mainland China. There is a corresponding low vaccination rate amongst them, partly down to vaccine distrust due to often Chinese orchestrated misinformation
Wokeness as prairie fire – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – Anyway, with all that said, the point of this post is that wokeness’ role in American society is evolving as we move into the early 2020s. In particular, I see three simultaneous trends:
An increasing anti-woke pushback from conservatives
Increasing entrenchment of woke ideas and practices within liberal institutions
A general exhaustion with wokeness among thought leaders and young people
Who Are You Calling a Great Power? – Lawfare – trying to define great power status is difficult in ways that are evident from the mismatched assortment of candidates that emerge in the recent literature. Power varies across issues and domains in ways that are glossed over when international politics is reduced to great power competition. It can be a convenient shorthand, but policymakers should not lose track of the nuances: Who counts as a great power may vary from issue to issue
Saudi Aramco bets on being the last oil major standing | Financial Times – What is often forgotten is how oil is also needed as a feedstock for materials. You want electric batteries they need a plastic based insulator and cables need plastic insulation. Mercedes et al tried soy plastic based cable insulation in the late 1990s and the wiring looms of these cars have had to be remade. All of which will be needed if you want a LiON or hydrogen economy. Then there are seals, bushings, coatings, medicines etc all of which rely on hydrocarbon feedstocks. Oil isn’t just about carbon emissions. Aramco is being prescient about this, Companies like Shell etc are increasingly looking at plastics manufacturing for exactly the same reasons
Lidl, Zara’s owner, H&M and Next ‘paid Bangladesh suppliers less than production cost’ | Retail industry | The Guardian – Lidl, Zara’s owner Inditex, H&M and Next have been accused of paying garment suppliers in Bangladesh during the pandemic less than the cost of production, leaving factories struggling to pay the country’s legal minimum wage. In a survey of 1,000 factories in the country producing clothes for UK retailers, 19% of Lidl’s suppliers made the claim, as did 11% of Inditex’s, 9% of H&M’s and 8% of Next’s. A majority of suppliers of those four brands, and also of Tesco and Aldi, told researchers that almost two years after Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic they were still being paid at the same rate – despite soaring raw material and production costs in the interim
EU draws up plans to stockpile scarce medicines | Financial Times – “a systemic challenge with numerous vulnerabilities”, including overreliance on a few countries for certain products, and the way drugs are regulated and bought. The EU’s Health Emergency and Response Authority (Hera), established in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, could organise joint procurements for several countries to improve supply. Health commissioner Stella Kyriakides outlined the plan in a reply to Greek health minister Thanos Plevris, who had demanded action in a letter to her last week. “There is a shortage in certain branded drugs containing paracetamol, antibiotics and inhalers . . . particularly for children,” Plevris said at a news conference last week where he announced a series of measures that would tackle the shortages. – because China
UK supermarket uses facial recognition tech to track shoppers – Coda Story – In July, civil liberties group Big Brother Watch filed a complaint to the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office against Southern Co-op and Facewatch — the company providing the surveillance system. Joshua Shadbolt, a duty manager at the Copnor Road supermarket, told me that high levels of theft have forced him and his colleagues to hide, for instance, all the cleaning products behind the till. Without the technology, he fears customers would be given free range to steal. Since Covid restrictions were lifted in the U.K. in early 2021 following a third national lockdown, shoplifting has been on the rise. This is likely to have been compounded by a cost-of-living crisis. Still, even if theft has not reached pre-pandemic levels, for Shadbolt, the biometric camera has been an effective and necessary tool in tackling crime. For Big Brother Watch, the camera is a breach of data rights and individual privacy. Every time a customer walks into a shop or business that uses Facewatch’s system, a biometric profile is created. If staff have reasonable grounds to suspect a customer of committing a crime, whether it’s shoplifting or disorderly conduct, they can add the customer to a Facewatch list of “subjects of interest.” Facewatch’s policy notice says that the police also have the power to upload images and data to Facewatch’s system. Anyone uploading the data, which includes a picture of the suspected person’s face, their name and a short summary of what happened, must confirm that they either witnessed the incident or have CCTV footage of it. But the policy does not indicate what the bar for “reasonably suspecting” someone is.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
As cybercrime has become more common there has been a move towards the incidents becoming uninsurable hacks in nature. 2022 looks like a watershed moment in the move to uninsurable hacks.
Lloyd’s of London defends cyber insurance exclusion for state-backed attacks | Financial Times – Lloyds of London were looking at state backed exclusions. The parallel between a state backed cyber attack and and an act of war have clear parallels from an insurance point of view. An act of war would be exempt from most insurance policy cover. A state backed cyber attack then becomes an uninsurable attack. However, while a business could expect government retribution and likely support in an act of war, the uninsurable hack exists in a grey zone just below the threshold of government response.
The closest thing that has happened was criminal charges filed against Park Jin Hyok for the Wannacry ransomware that affected the NHS, Bangladesh Central Bank theft and the Sony Pictures hack. Russia has attempted attacks against at an oil refinery in at least one NATO country likely due to the material support that Ukraine has been receiving. NATO isn’t in a state of war with Russia and there are likely to be few repercussions and deterrents. Chinese backed hackers dismantled Nortel and helped drive the business into bankruptcy. These would all be uninsurable hacks as the risk is unmanageable in nature.
North Korea presents a particular type of risk for uninsurable hacks, using cyber crime to finance its sanction hit economy.
Companies like NSO and service companies based in India have democratised sophisticated intrusions for legal firms and business purposes. Widening the risk even further and creating a shadow economy of such scale that it creates uninsurable hacks by his own nature. Some of these law firms may even work with insurance companies in other areas; indicating the kind of perverse business incentives that drive these uninsurable hacks.
The final aspect ushering in uninsurable hacks is one of scale. Due to the economics of digital business – criminal or otherwise; they scale in a non-linear fashion. Insurance insiders see these as uninsurable attacks as they are ‘civilisation level’ attacks. Uninsurable hacks also come from an inability of the insurance industry to absorb pay-outs on a massive scale. But what can be done about uninsurable hacks since Pandora’s box has been opened?
Business
This story how Balkan organised crime groups completely compromised MSC is stunning for its audacity and impact.
Mao and markets – great talk on the permeable membrane between communist thought and capitalism.
China Makes Moves in Middle East After Biden’s Frosty Reception – An eagerness to offer “Chinese wisdom” to the Middle East’s problems is symbolic of Xi’s decade in power, during which time he has thrown off the humble shackles of his predecessors to raise his country’s stature on the international stage. Welcome or not, his offer signals to China’s domestic audience Beijing’s growing influence abroad and its capacity to advise others on successful governance. However, China’s exact role in realizing its peacekeeping recipe remains unclear. A frequent critic of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere, Beijing knows all too well the political, economic and military costs of becoming involved. Its willingness to do so is also a matter of constant debate. “China is cautiously increasing its presence in the Middle East, driven more by Middle Eastern states than its own ambitions,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “China sees the Middle East as volatile and an area still dominated by the United States. They are cautious about getting sucked into the region’s conflicts.”
Mr Tape used custom modified reel-to-reel tape recorders. The reason why he can handle the reels is that its actually the tape capstans rather than the reels that are powered on a tape machine. So very different to how a cassette tape recorder works.
Henry Cavill on his love for Warhammer 40K. He is seriously invested in the universe.
Making Products in America Means Stuff Will Be More Expensive | Business Insider – cost is less clear when one takes into account carbon tax. It is also worthwhile thinking about how this could drive an improvement in product quality as well as production moves away from China. Improved quality could help reduce consumption and improve environmental impact
Ethics
The Camp Fix: Infrastructural Power and the “Re-education Labour Regime” in Turkic Muslim Industrial Parks in North-west China | The China Quarterly | Cambridge Core – Drawing on worker interviews, government documents, industry materials and images this article shows that for-profit public-private industrial parks have been built as part of a “camp fix” mechanism centred on detaining and “re-educating” Uyghurs and Kazakhs at the periphery of the nation. It argues that these industrial parks concentrate forms of repressive assistance and “dormitory labour regimes” that operate at other frontiers of Chinese state power and point these strategies of disempowerment towards a seemingly permanent, ethno-racialized underclass, producing a “re-education labour regime.” It further argues that the material infrastructures of these surveiled and policed spaces themselves are productive in enforcing the goals of the “camp fix”: the creation of high-quality, underpaid, docile and non-religious Muslim workers who are controlled through the built environment – this is the environment that large corporates have used in their supply chain. Companies such as VW Group and Anta (aka Salomon, Arc’teryx etc)
Finance
Scott Galloway breaks down a number of financial stories from 2022.
Visual Framing: The Use of COVID-19 in the Mobilization of Hong Kong Protest | The China Quarterly | Cambridge Core – messages and images posted on Lennon Walls between January and April 2020 have used COVID-19 to extend public expression of sentiment on the debates around the Hong Kong government and to further mobilize a sense of Hong Kong identity against China. The findings contribute to the understandings of how the cultural politics surrounding the pandemic became a collective action frame in the mobilization of a localized Hong Kong political identity against the Hong Kong and Chinese governments – this linking of COVID-19 to political discourse makes public health communications much more complex
Hong Kong property: developers mourn demise of ‘coffin homes’ boom | Financial Times – Analysts, including Goldman Sachs, expect Hong Kong home prices to drop by 30 per cent by the end of next year. Shares of CK Asset and Henderson Land have fallen about a tenth in the past six months. The latter trades at 10 times forward earnings, which is more than 40 per cent lower than even 2014 levels — during the last property market decline — reflecting the dire outlook. – add into this also the amount of Hong Kongers leaving the city as well
In Indonesia, ‘all-gendered’ priests are fighting to keep their traditions alive | South China Morning Post – With fewer than 40 Bissu remaining in areas across South Sulawesi, a community which once held divine status is now fighting against extinction. Many Bissu were accused of violating Islamic principles and faced persecution, but some are trying to preserve their heritage by performing cultural, shaman-like roles – the implicit influence of gulf Arab style muslim beliefs is not only about extremism but presenting a dead orthodoxy that will make Indonesia as unattractive as Malaysia has become
Read Zuckerberg’s 2019 Deposition on Facebook User Data | Business Insider – A 2017 report in The New York Times had said Cambridge Analytica previously claimed it could use data to glean voters’ inclinations. Zuckerberg appeared to address those types of news reports in his testimony to SEC regulators, saying it piqued his interest about how the company might have been using Facebook at the time. “I kind of remember having this reaction to this, which is, if they are using our systems for advertising, then I’m curious to understand if they’re actually doing anything novel that matches the rhetoric that they have, or if they’re just kind of puffing up rhetoric around what would be a relatively standard use of our ad systems,” he told the SEC in 2019, according to the newly released testimony. – to be fair Zuckerberg’s reaction reminds me of a lot of discussions that I was having with peers about Cambridge Analytica at the time
How SpaceX’s Starlink terminals first arrived in Ukraine | Quartz – Weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, the US began scrambling to find satellite communications equipment that could keep the Ukrainian government connected to the rest of the world, new documents reveal. Those efforts resulted in thousands of satellite-antenna terminals that connect to SpaceX’s Starlink broadband internet network being sent to Ukraine. They have proven vital to Ukraine’s war effort, but became a source of controversy for both SpaceX and the US over the service’s cost, and who is paying for it. Government contractor DAI began searching for the right equipment as early as Feb. 11, according to documents Quartz obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, shocking many, but not the US government, which sounded the alarm ahead of the invasion
TikTok admits tracking FT journalist in leaks investigation | Financial Times – ByteDance, the Chinese owner of viral social media platform TikTok, has admitted it inappropriately obtained the data of users, including a Financial Times journalist, in order to analyse their location as part of an internal leaks investigation. Over the summer, four employees on the ByteDance internal audit team looked into the sharing of internal information to journalists. Two members of staff in the US and two in China gained access to the IP addresses and other personal data of FT journalist Cristina Criddle, to work out if she was in the proximity of any ByteDance employees
Software
How Amazon Uses AI To Automate Work In Its Corporate Headquarters – I was struck by how deeply artificial intelligence was already ingrained in their cultures. With in-house AI research labs that rank among the globe’s best, the tech giants were automating wide swaths of their operations and changing the nature of work within their companies. This commitment to AI in the workplace is newly relevant as powerful tools like Dall-E, ChatGPT, and their ilk make their way into the public’s hands. As access to this powerful technology spreads, nearly all companies will soon have tools like those I saw inside Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. So work inside our companies will change as well
Asianometry does a run down of Sun Microsystems history. A few things. When I started working agency side, this was what our client websites were hosted on. Sun had a partnership with Netscape to have a great software stack. Oracle’s hardware business is the old Sun Microsystems business. Cisco routers and other manufacturers as well were basically a Sun motherboard and a raft of ethernet ports together with a look-up database that handled the routing.
Vietnam loses 25 ancient books related to culture and sovereign territory — Radio Free Asia – one of which is “relevant to Vietnam’s sovereign territory,” according to the deputy head of the literature department, Nguyen Xuan Dien. Posting on his Facebook page on Tuesday, a day after the institute’s annual meeting, Dien said the books were “extremely important for national culture.”The institute said Wednesday the books were among 35,000 volumes it had cataloged and preserved at the request of the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences When it inspected the inventory in April 2020, for the first time in over 10 years, it discovered that 29 books were missing. Four of the books were later found on the wrong shelves. Among the books still unaccounted for are four written by scientist Le Quy Don and two books which record the precise geography, boundaries and borders related to Vietnam’s sovereign territory, according to Dien. Those two volumes could help substantiate Vietnam’s territorial claims in the South China Sea – I would guess that these books have been incinerated in China, as it helps China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and debilitates Vietnam’s rival claims
