Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) caused by others, by restraining the freedom of others to act. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be of persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems or any other entity or phenomenon vulnerable to unwanted change. Security mostly refers to protection from hostile forces, but it has a wide range of other senses: for example, as the absence of harm (e.g. freedom from want); as the presence of an essential good (e.g. food security); as resilience against potential damage or harm (e.g. secure foundations); as secrecy (e.g. a secure telephone line); as containment (e.g. a secure room or cell); and as a state of mind (e.g. emotional security).
Back when I started writing this blog, hacking was something that was done against ‘the man’, usually as a political statement. Now breaches are part of organised crime’s day to day operations. The Chinese government so thoroughly hacked Nortel that all its intellectual property was stolen along with commercial secrets like bids and client lists. The result was the firm went bankrupt. Russian ransomware shuts down hospitals across Ireland. North Korean government sanctioned hackers robbed 50 million dollars from the central bank of Bangladesh and laundered it in association with Chinese organised crime.
Now it has spilled into the real world with Chinese covert actions, Russian contractors in the developing world and hybrid warfare being waged across central Europe and the middle east.
Riding The Wave Into China’s Latest Hype — Land Surfing | Jing Daily – land surfing is what a lot of people would know as a long board in skating. I first came across them 20 years ago, when I used to know a dreadlocked German photographer who got around London on one. South Korean app developer Ko Hyojoo, brought style and strong Instagram game to long boarding. From her style cutting and spinning on her board, I can see where land surfing came from. She has collaborated with a lot of fashion brands, getting an international profile with her land surfing.
Films like this one from Vogue in 2016 blew long boarding / land surfing up across Asia. I have former colleagues from Hong Kong who took up land surfing in the winter as they missed the feeling of water-skiing which they did some summer weekends.
It was only a matter of time before China’s Taobao culture picked up on the idea of land surfing.
The Professional Try-Hard Is Dead, But You Still Need to Return to the Office | Vanity Fair – It’s Malcolm Gladwell waxing emotional about how much he loves return-to-office and pleading, “Don’t you want to feel part of something?” as if the man has never heard of, like, recreational softball. It’s Mark Zuckerberg reportedly getting mad about an employee asking if Meta Days (extra vacation days introduced during the pandemic) are still on this year because, shouldn’t the pleasure of working for Meta be enough? It’s any number of investor-type herbs who’ve been warning about how quiet quitting will cause you to lose out on x dollar amount of earnings later in life
Pro-China media slam ‘minority’ of Hong Kong mourners in wake of Queen’s death — Radio Free Asia – Hong Kong historian Hans Yeung, who now lives in the U.K., said Hong Kongers’ nostalgia for colonial times was a complex emotion. “The reason we are seeing these mourning activities is that the current way of governing is different from the way it was in Hong Kong more than 20 years ago, and the emotions that result from that difference between the old and the new,” Yeung told RFA. “It’s not necessarily the idea that we miss colonial times because things were so good back then, but because the current government is so poor,” he said. Yeung said some mourners were too young to remember an era in which the Queen’s portrait was in every classroom, and TV stations shut down every night with “God Save the Queen.” He said younger people likely have read about Hong Kong before the 1997 handover to Chinese rule, and drawn their own conclusions
Ideas
Simple models predict behavior at least as well as behavioral scientists – we analyzed data from five studies in which 640 professional behavioral scientists predicted the results of one or more behavioral science experiments. We compared the behavioral scientists’ predictions to random chance, linear models, and simple heuristics like “be- havioral interventions have no effect” and “all published psychology research is false.” We find that behavioral scientists are consistently no better than – and often worse than – these simple heuristics and models. Behavioral scientists’ predictions are not only noisy but also biased. They systematically overestimate how well behavioral sci- ence “works”: overestimating the effectiveness of behavioral interventions, the impact of psychological phenomena like time discounting
How China Has Added to Its Influence Over the iPhone – The New York Times – More than ever, Apple’s Chinese employees and suppliers contributed complex work and sophisticated components for the 15th year of its marquee device, including aspects of manufacturing design, speakers and batteries, according to four people familiar with the new operations and analysts. As a result, the iPhone has gone from being a product that is designed in California and made in China to one that is a creation of both countries. The critical work provided by China reflects the country’s advancements over the past decade and a new level of involvement for Chinese engineers in the development of iPhones. After the country lured companies to its factories with legions of low-priced workers and unrivaled production capacity, its engineers and suppliers have moved up the supply chain to claim a bigger slice of the money that U.S. companies spend to create high-tech gadgets. The increased responsibilities that China has assumed for the iPhone could challenge Apple’s efforts to decrease its dependency on the country, a goal that has taken on increased urgency amid rising geopolitical tensions over Taiwan and simmering concerns in Washington about China’s ascent as a technology competitor.
Chinese mercenaries have been around longer than the belt and road. You can come across Chinese mercenaries protecting in the border areas of China such as the warlord regions of Myanmar. But now Chinese mercenaries are increasingly linked with the Belt and Road Initiative. China claims that it isn’t building an empire in Africa, across the former Soviet Union and Sri Lanka. Yet all of the private security companies that Chinese mercenaries work for are state owned. The Chinese mercenaries come out of the PLA, the PLAN marines and the PAP. That doesn’t mean that they are well trained or even well disciplined and they exist in a Chinese legal vacuum.
There is more connecting China to its empire with these Chinese mercenaries than there was for the army fighting under Clive of India for the East India Company a few centuries before. Task and Purpose goes into the subject of Chinese mercenaries in more depth.
Inside Missfresh’s hunt for investor cash ahead of collapse | Financial Times – probably one of the best comments on this article – Missfresh is only one of a number of Chinese domestic startups that sought US investors, as their own domestic private investors were unwilling to invest. For a Chinese investor, they always consider when and if the CCP may want a piece of the business, or worse take action against the promoters and management. for non performance. The lighter loss being financial and. the greater loss, life.
China’s Growth Sacrifice by Stephen S. Roach – Project Syndicate – Japanization of an increasingly debt-intensive, bubble-supported Chinese economy. An overly leveraged Chinese property sector fits this script, as does the debt-fueled expansion of state-owned enterprises since the 2008-09 global financial crisis. For China, this became the case for deleveraging, well worth the short-term price to avoid the longer-term stagnation of Japan-like lost decades. Finally, a major reversal in the ideological underpinnings of governance is also at play. As the revolutionary founder of a new Chinese state, Mao emphasized ideology over development. For Deng and his successors, it was the opposite: De-emphasis of ideology was viewed as necessary to boost economic growth through market-based “reform and opening up.” Then came Xi. Initially, there was hope that his so-called “Third Plenum Reforms” of 2013 would usher in a new era of strong economic performance. But the new ideological campaigns carried out under the general rubric of Xi Jinping Thought, including a regulatory clampdown on once-dynamic Internet platform companies and associated restrictions on online gaming, music, and private tutoring, as well as a zero-COVID policy that has led to never-ending lockdowns, have all but dashed those hopes – China was on a rocket ship that it couldn’t control, it is now trying wrestle back control at the expense of growth
Eurostar to axe direct trains from London to Disneyland Paris over Brexit | Eurostar | The Guardian – “We have taken the decision not to run the direct Disney service … in summer 2023,” it said. “While we continue to recover financially from the pandemic and monitor developments in the proposed EU entry-exit system, we need to focus on our core routes to ensure we can continue to provide the high level of service and experience that our customers rightly expect.” – not enough demand from the UK and too much hassle to run
In Myanmar, Vietnamese firms learn the political risks of backing the junta — Radio Free Asia – interesting that Burmese consumers are boycotting military-owned businesses including MyTel – a mobile carrier that VietTel has a major stake in. Also: Vietnamese firms have begun investing abroad, and, in particular, have sought a place in the 5G marketplace, especially in markets where there is residual fear of China’s communications giant Huawei. – Also: Vietnamese conglomerate THADICO, which has invested in Myanmar Plaza, the largest modern mall and office space in Yangon, ran afoul of the local population when the plaza’s security attacked civil disobedience protesters in November 2021. This led to a sustained boycott that hit the plaza’s 200 retail units hard, compelling the firm to publicly apologize
In Deep Geek through his Middle Earth playlist goes in depth into the world that JRR Tolkien built around The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings. Christopher Tolkien added to the world through his work compiling and editing his father’s manuscripts. Keeping track of it all is a huge undertaking and Tolkien fans often disagree over nuances. Hence, the Middle Earth playlist acts as a sort of audio CliffsNotes analogue to all things Tolkien-related.
Ahascragh races
The Ahascragh of my memories is a one-road town with a petrol station slash local garage and tractor repair workshop, pub and one or two general stores. It was the local market town closest to the farm where my Dad grew up in Galway. By comparison it barely merits the name of town compared to the local urban centre Ballinasloe. This TV news section is from 1977. This seems to be encouraging child jockeys and raising money for the local GAA club.
Big Trouble In Little China
Big Trouble In Little China has a number of problematic aspects to it, but is saved by its efforts to honour the Chinese and Hong Kong cinema that went on before. It’s one of my guilty pleasures as I am a big John Carpenter fan.
Cadbury Lunch bars
Cadbury South Africa promoted their Lunch Bar using a character called Tumi who is the ultimate side hustler.
According to Dan Parmenter who was the creative director on the project
So, we created the story of Tumi, a streetwise hustler who has a couple of different vocations and even owns his own small business. His streetwise nature means that even though he’s managed to snag a part as an extra in a war film, he’s still not shy of a bit of his own shameless self-promotion.
Using StableDiffusion algorithm to create a video that explore our past, present and future. It has a charm to it that reminds me of old stop motion animation.
Alan Dulles
Alan Dulles talks about the role of intelligence and regime change in foreign states in this old film. It is interesting that the film starts off with a modern Soviet tank that the CIA managed to acquire through theft. Dulles was the head of the CIA during the early cold war. He was responsible for coups in Iran and Guatemala. His career finished with the Bay of Pigs.
I worked peripherally on And1 early on in my career, but it didn’t catch fire in Europe than it did in the US. I hadn’t known the full extent of the buzz marketing campaign that backed up the brand in the US. Here’s the early versions of their ‘mix tapes’, which did for street football what skate videos did for skateboarding in the 1980s. They blew up street basketball in the US, in a similar way to the X Games blowing up extreme sports. ESPN got on board with a sports related reality TV show with players competing for an And1 team contract.
But all the buzz marketing didn’t get the cut through that Wieden + Kennedy’s Freestyle TV advert did, effectively depositioning And1 from its street ball territory. Then there was a tie-up show on MTV2 that was similar to the And1 | ESPN show of the previous year. The lesson I took away from And1 was that product and reach both matter. Nike could buy reach and And1 didn’t have any product of note after the Tai Chi.
Opinion: Intel’s ‘smart capital’ is a warning from the past | eeNews Europe – the author considers the rise of private equity to fund new silicon fabs as a warning of peak semiconductors. Similar things happened in the 1980s and 1990s when large businesses like Coca-Cola helped fund manufacturing facilities. The key difference this time is how globalisation has been thrown into reverse by ‘Made in China 2025’ and hostile moves against Taiwan
Loss of Chinese tourists forces Europe’s luxury retailers to rethink | Financial Times – A recent surge in Middle Eastern tourists, as well as US visitors buoyed by the strong dollar, has helped fill stores. Eduardo Santander, CEO of the European Travel Commission, said the lack of Chinese tourists left the many luxury retailers that relied heavily on them with “a huge feeling of loss”, but had spurred “a huge effort to diversify”. Retailers have personalised their services. During Europe’s Covid lockdowns, shop assistants contacted customers via WhatsApp with tailor-made recommendations. Berg sees a “possible return to the old idea of service and store management from the 1990s, the little black book with all the customers’ addresses and preferences in it”. “You have to do much more to attract local customers,” Berg said. “They can come back, they have more time to spend, versus an international customer that was determined and straightforward.” – A few thoughts on this: The article asserts that Chinese tourists are straightforward and not picky. I think Chinese tourists are very picky by comparison, although the diagou’s supplying lower tier cities or buying to order might appear to be ‘luxury hoovers’. Secondly, luxury brands have treated non-Chinese customers abysmally (in particular the watch makers like Rolex and their retail partners like the Watches of Switzerland group) and they deserve all the problems that they get. Only focusing on the Chinese market has allowed the Chinese customers to blow up the secondary market. A straw poll of people that I know who have a Rolex from the past 10 years or so:
All of them had to buy their watch on the secondary market
About 80 percent of them had original warranty cards with Chinese family names, which is far higher than the 30 to 40 percent share that Chinese consumers make of the global luxury market
Finally, I don’t see the market coming back in the same way given Xi Jingping’s focus on common prosperity which will make luxury consumption increasingly problematic.
This New Study Reveals How Brand Loyalty is On the Decline / Digital Information World – I see this as more indicative of economic recession rather than any major change. Gallup showed that traits such as preference for green products decline in a recessionary environment, it would make sense if brand loyalty took a similar battering in favour of private label brands and substitute products
Over the weekend, Darya Dugina was blown up in a car bomb under the Toyota Landcruiser, her newsworthiness was down to her being the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin. News stories covering the bomb blast described Aleksandr Dugin as a political commentator close to the Putin regime. But that descriptor doesn’t really tell you that much.
Aleksandr Dugin is a political philosopher, published author and commentator. But most importantly he is the founder of the Eurasian Movement. This movement supports neo-Eurasianism. This means opposing and rolling back the Atlanticism of western nations and having Russia to rebuild its influence through annexations and alliances, underpinned by an ultranationalist and neo-fascist ideological logical world view that considers America and liberal values the scapegoat for every ill.
https://flic.kr/p/2nFvPwm
Dugin’s written work
Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russiapublished in 1997, outlined in how Aleksandr Dugin saw the future of Russia. it would form an alliance with Iran in the middle east. Reassert control over former Soviet republics, dismantling some completely like Ukraine and Georgia.
Dugin on re-engineering the world’s borders
It would look to address what it perceived as a threat from China, encouraging China to look south to its neighbours on the South China Sea rather than north to the former Qing empire lands now full of natural resources. This would allow China to solve the Straits of Malacca problem in its favour. The constraint to its move west would be India inside the Eurasian empire.
Aleksandr Dugin wanted the UK was to be isolated, as he viewed it as an aircraft carrier of the US, (echoes of Orwell’s 1984 in that viewpoint). Europe is to remade an anti-Atlanticist Franco-German bloc, that would affect a ‘Finlandisation of Europe’. Countries like Poland, would become a vassal like state of Russia. Orthodox countries would look towards Russia as the home of their mother church and cultural lodestone. Finland would be absorbed into Russia. Eventually, due to an over-reliance on Russian commodities, Aleksandr Dugin hoped to engineer an economic shock. Germany’s dependancy on Russian gas and oil would ultimately allow Russia to pick up the pieces in Europe and create an empire stretching from Dublin to Vladivostok
Aleksandr Dugin maybe at a distance from the Putin administration, but his political ideas have influenced Vladimir Putin, Russian foreign policy and military thinking.
Uneasy Euroasian detente
One can only see Russia’s relationship with China as reminiscent of the von Ribbentrop – Stalin detente of the interwar years, based purely on timing and mutual convenience.
Demographics
Aleksandr Dugin’s ideas are challenged by demographics. In the Middle East, Iran and Shai Muslim community are outnumbered by their Sunni counterparts. Russia’s own population growth is in terminal decline and not a match for China should it decide to go north. Which probably explains why Dugin tries to shoehorn India into part of the Eurasian empire.
The current war in Ukraine is as much a product of Aleksandr Dugin as it is of Vladimir Putin. President Putin is merely implementing Dugin’s vision slavishly. It is also interesting that the attempt on the life of Aleksandr Dugin seems to have given new ideological impetus to the invasion of Ukraine in Russia.
Is Dugin’s Eurasian ideological purity a threat to the Putin administration?
Marx and Lenin were dead by the time that Mao came along, so the Chinese communist party was never threatened by the legitimacy of their thought leaders with a higher authority ideologically pure voice. If they were alive today, it would be impossible for Xi Jingping to accuse Marx or Lenin of being guilty of hstorical nihilism. But Aleksandr Dugin exists outside of the Putin administration, he could be a natural rallying point of Putin’s support basis as the philosophical centre. He could be even considered a rival leader to Putin, drawing support from believers across the military intelligence and political classes. Making Aleksandr Dugin into a martyr just at the point when Russia has been suffering setbacks has some obvious benefits for the Putin administration and arguably less benefits for the Ukrainian government.
From Drugs to Corruption: The Growing Presence of Chinese Organized Crime in Latin America – In 2021, China’s policy banks — the China Development Bank (CDB) and Export-Import Bank (Exim) — made no loans to Latin America for the second consecutive year. Beijing is now essentially focused on financing Chinese companies to operate in the region. This shift in strategy and the resulting proliferation of Chinese companies in Latin America will increase the circulation of people and money that are no longer under the direct control of local governments. Based on current trends, Chinese criminal organizations will likely thrive in this new economic environment. Extortion, money laundering through front firms, and smuggling are already increasing, posing a severe threat to the population’s safety in the region. Worthwhile reading in conjunction with: Will Kenya’s next president follow through on China contract promises? | South China Morning Post – William Ruto campaigned on threats to deport illegal workers and make big contracts with Chinese companies public. But politics and the reality of government are two different things, observers say
Interesting dive into what’s causing the ‘great resignation’ and what it will mean for productivity
Culture
Guy Ritchie talks about Snatch – as a film, its interesting, but I won’t bother buying my own copy of Blu-Ray. A few things of note:
The direct influence of Sam Peckinpah’s western films on Snatch was not a connection that I saw coming at all
Ritchie talks about directing a Jason Statham film remotely via iPad, rather than being on set. I presume that this was done during COVID but still very interesting
His use of amateurs as actors because they were the right kind of characters
The folkloric nature of pub stories. The bit that chimed with me is how I knew of similar characters growing up at a similar time to Ritchie and some of them I knew personally. As I moved in more middle class circles my exposure to that world declined
Design
Big Car have a great documentary on the development of the Renault Scénic including an interview with Renault’s head of design at the time Patrick le Quément.
Economics
Why Mexico is missing its chance to profit from US-China decoupling | Financial Times – While foreign companies have borne the brunt of López Obrador’s attacks, the handful of big Mexican businesses that control large parts of the economy have been less affected. When the president wanted to tackle inflation, his government invited Mexican business leaders for private conversations to agree an informal pact limiting price rises on basic groceries. “It wasn’t a big sacrifice,” noted the owner of one large Mexican group. Mexico’s oligarchs have reinforced the impression of a cosy relationship with the president by making supportive statements in public and confining any criticism to conversations behind closed doors. “All the Mexican business leaders complain about Amlo,” says the chief executive of one big foreign company. “But when they meet him, they all appear afterwards in public saying how wonderful he is . . It’s a circle of collusion.”
I hadn’t realised that 8-track cartridges were used as a karaoke medium in Japan. I thought that they had gone from vinyl to cassette and then on to laser disc. Vinyl based karaoke is what gave use the Technics SL-1200 series of turntables, which is why the speed control on the right hand side of the deck was called a ‘pitch fader’.
The reason why these karaoke featured have a common design with the US 8-track cartridge players is likely down to the relatively high tooling costs to create the plastic mouldings. You can see the ’round polished marks in the recessed section where the inputs and outputs are that show a tools has been amended and quickly cleaned up.
Samuel Bickett had some really good insight into why Joshua Wong and several other people pled guilty to charges under the national security law : The Hong Kong 47 Committed No Crime…So Why Are So Many of Them Pleading Guilty? – Bickett points out that their actions were legal under the Basic Law article 52, but the National Security Law seems to supersede and reinterpret the basic law to anything the authorities want it to be.
The Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region must resign under any of the following circumstances: When he or she loses the ability to discharge his or her duties as a result of serious illness or other reasons; When, after the Legislative Council is dissolved because he or she twice refuses to sign a bill passed by it, the new Legislative Council again passes by a two-thirds majority of all the members the original bill in dispute, but he or she still refuses to sign it; and When, after the Legislative Council is dissolved because it refuses to pass a budget or any other important bill, the new Legislative Council still refuses to pass the original bill in dispute.
At the moment, this will be of most interest to more political types. Now if you apply that interpretation to short sellers like Muddy Waters Research, punchy buy-side equity analysts or a brief that an advertising planner like me might write where a client is competing against a connected Hong Kong or Chinese company – then legal, reputable and ethical commercial activities can result in national security charges at the whim of the Hong Kong government. This is something that many multinational companies seem to be sleep walking into. Work for a multinational like a VPN provider? That looks like colluding with a foreign power, subversion or even terrorism under the National Security Law.
The use of the term “national security” is particularly objectionable because the concept has frequently been used in China to criminalise the peaceful exercise of the rights of expression and to persecute those with legitimate demands like democracy and human rights. Its inclusion raises fears of extension of such Mainland Chinese practices to Hong Kong especially in the light of Article 23 of the Basic Law.
Hong Kong already had substantive security laws in place since British rule. Notably the 1971 Criminal Ordinance which remains on the books.
Then there is the way that the judiciary in Hong Kong has been shaped by the National Security Law. No defendant has won any points with regards the law and judicial decisions have allowed the law to be used in a retrospective manner in concert with older colonial era laws.
A film produced by a German film crew in 1966 to try and bring to life Japanese life for a European audience. I am sure that some of the manufacturing scenes are b-roll footage, but it is fascinating nonetheless. There is a style to the car and light truck designs which is a lovely aesthetic.
Vintage Studio 1 tracks mixed by Japanese sound system veterans Mighty Crown
1/ Chinese consumers overstretched themselves on luxury goods
2/ China is going through straitened financial times, 6 percent GDP growth feels like zero growth in developed markets. I have heard growth being described as being closer to 3 percent. Government control and intervention means that you won’t see the kind of collapse you saw in the west during 2008 and 2009 and internal security would stomp all over any ‘Occupy Wall Street’ analogue. Security forces are already suppressing depositors who have lost their savings in regional banks. There are also a lot of investors in property businesses: China Evergrande Shares Are Worthless, Top Fund Manager Says
Russia Holding Its Arms Expo With Weapons That May Be A ‘Hard Sell’ Now. | SOFREP – it is interesting that the Russians took steps to make sure the captured American gear on display was spotlessly clean, right down to the tyre paint. Who is to say that some of the gear came in by being bought or traded with the Taliban rather than from the Ukraine battlefield? I wouldn’t be surprised if Russia did a ‘homage’ to the M777. Russia has a wealth of experience in titanium fabrication from submarine hulls to aircraft, so the M777 carriage shouldn’t be that hard. The challenge would be the digital tools used to facilitate a higher degree of accuracy.
ViewSonic lays out plans for education metaverse – ViewSonic, which marks its 35th year of establishment in 2022, has been actively promoting digital transformation in recent years, shifting from a hardware company to a solutions company. Looking towards the future, company chairman James Chu has laid out the key development strategy of “ecosystem as a service,” announcing the Universe education metaverse software. Chu pointed out that ViewSonic has transformed in response to the rapidly changing environment. The company will focus on assisting the digital transformation of the education market. In the third quarter of 2021, ViewSonic’s electronic whiteboard was already no.1 in global market share, Chu said. Its Universe education metaverse software aims to level up the traditional 2D digital education into a 3D interactive virtual education platform. The goal is to solve the lack of interactivity and participation and make online education feel as if it is in-person. The proposed “ecosystem as a service” is about the integration of hardware, software and service, it said. Regarding software and hardware, ViewSonic will integrate its ViewBoard, a smart interactive electronic whiteboard, with myViewBoard, a digital teaching platform, to provide a complete education technology solution.