After yesterday’s surprise announcement that a “slightly slimmed down” Google would become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the new Alphabet, which would also own the newly spun out Calico, Fiber, Nest, Google Ventures, Google Capital, and Google X, Google’s focus is tighter than ever, and just in time: the long awaited shift in advertising from legacy media, most notably TV, seems to have finally begun in earnest, and Google (along with Facebook) is primed to be a chief beneficiary. As I noted, I find this very exciting.
Month: August 2015
So why should people outside of China even care about WeChat? The first and most obvious reason is that it points to where Facebook and other messaging apps could head. Second, WeChat indicates where the future of mobile commerce may lie. Third, WeChat shows what it’s like to be both a platform and a mobile portal (what Yahoo could have been). Ultimately, however, WeChat should matter to all of us because it shows what’s possible when an entire country — which currently has a smartphone penetration of 62% (that’s 33% of its population) — “leapfrogs” over the PC era directly to mobile. WeChat was not a product that started as a website and then was adapted for mobile, it was (to paraphrase a certain movie) born into it, molded by it.
Envy Good
No one would deny that feeling envy is unpleasant, or that feeling envious sometimes leads us down a path we wish we hadn’t taken. Envy is frequently corrosive and destructive. And yet, the right kind of envy can serve an important personal and social function. It spurs competition and improvement. The title of a recent paper from the University of California, Santa Barbara, nicely captures the effect. It’s called “Inspired by Hope, Motivated by Envy.”
India Foxconn
Chinese mega-manufacturers set up factories in India
Foxconn is opening a $5b facility in Maharashtra; Huawei just got a green-light for a networking gear factory; Xiaomi already runs a phone assembly plant in Andhra Pradesh. There are enormous economic, political and military resentments between China and India — the world’s 2 most populous nations. India accuses China of secretly financing the Naxol “Maoist” guerrillas and the 2 countries have long-simmering border-disputes. More interesting is what this says about relative wages, labor availability and demographics in China and India. China’s manufacturing center have thrived on a seemingly bottomless pool of cheap workers, mostly women from the provinces, who travelled to the Pearl River Delta to work in the factories that supply the world with its manufactured goods.
Golf course recycling
Aesthetically pleasing. There are lots of useless lawns that could be similarly transformed.
Sinaloa tunnels
We should hire sinaloa to finish the NYC subway tunnels. They’d be able to get it done decades faster.
Sinaloa specializes instead in infrastructural marvels that federal agents call supertunnels. Agents estimate that a single supertunnel takes several months and more than $1M to build. Many include elevators, electric lights, ventilation ducts, and cleverly disguised entry and exit shafts.
Click wisely
i wouldn’t know of course, but this could be true.
Trolling confederates
It turns out that people on Confederate Facebook are not very good at the internet. Our friend Lowen dialed Chris to investigate. He claimed to be a guy named Roger who’d heard Chris was a Northerner who’d joined the group to troll. Understandably, Chris was upset about this, and claimed to have never left the state of Texas. “Roger” told Chris he’d heard that he had the state flag of “Maine or New York” on his truck, that he worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, and that he’d voted for Obama “both times from a polling station in Brooklyn, New York.” Chris was very upset that people were spreading these vicious rumors about him, and told “Roger” that his “friends in high places” would slap the trolls with prison time for their actions.
Once I was in charge of the group I decided to take it in a new direction. The Confederate flag, I felt, had become a toxic brand. And all this South-rising-again business was a sure loser with swing voters. A top-down rebranding was in order. After rigorous focus-group testing, I decided to align the group with LGBT rights, Michelle Obama, Judaism, miscegenation, and the victorious Juche ideology. And that is how “confederate pride, heritage not hate” became “LGBT Southerners for Michelle Obama and Judaism.”
trolling for a good cause, the best kind of trolling.
internet hypochondria
A new domain of life?
their work expanded the number of known types — or phyla — of bacteria by nearly 50%, a dramatic change that indicates just how many forms of life on earth have escaped our notice so far.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 