… there is was a message that one is all caught up in Instagram? Can not remember that I ever saw it.
Category: technology
China is testing a digital currency. In the US credit cards are big. They let you pay without physical money and they give people a line of credit. Charging them 15% interest rates. Yes, this is an actual business model. The other form a revenue is a 3% cut the card company gets from the transaction. There is a convoluted network of institutions involved in a credit card purchase. Enter ‘credit card payment flow diagram’ in image search and you will see. It is not that complicated. But it is also not that easy that you just use ‘visa’ or ‘master card’. Tandem Computers ran for a long time these transactions. So payments are being processed by computers. But they behave as if you still use Knuckle buster to initiate a paper trail.
The system kinda works. It is inherently unsafe and slow. Lots of people are involved. Their jobs are of the kind of a switch board operator in the early days of the telephone: A tech system that requires glue by people since it has not full matured. Those are always horrible jobs. Just ask an assembly line worker.
Since everybody carries a connected computer around you can replace physical money with digital one. You “just” need a system to do so securely and reliable. Technically entirely possible. And China is heading that way.
I bought a geiger counter board the other day. Arrived in less than a week in Europe. It was packaged really well. Documentation? A WeChat QR code. So I might as well get an account with them.
Alipay – not digital money but a replacement for credit cards – gets accepted in more and more places outside of China.
Much like we have Paypal accounts and credit cards we will have Digital Renminbi accounts. First to just get better service, a better price on a little trinket. But since it will work and will be easier than other things we will use it more and more. Out of the sudden the world will use 3 currencies, not 2. Right now people use their local currency, and they use US dollars. If they know or not. The US dollar is being used to buy lots of stuff. Like Oil etc. It is the currency that steps in when local currencies have flaws. Digital Renminbi will be a 3rd currency. Driven by ease of use and Security. Many people don’t like the dominance of Amazon. But they end up using them anyway since the experience is just better than those with other services. Same with Google. People don’t like China and how it ignores our beloved Democracy. But when you need a geiger counter board you get it from China. A working digital currency can be so much cheaper than other means of transactions. I pay 3% for credit cards and 1.3% for international wires. I’d rather keep that money. I would gladly use Chinese Money if my loss would be 0.5%. Technically charges as low as 0.01% are possible. The amount of data you need to transfer is really really tiny. Think oil tankers full of condensed water mist. One of these drops that are so so small that they can float is your transaction. The oil tanker is the Internet pipelines that people have to watch 4K TV. The software you only need to create once. Cost is in the backbone systems. Here we think water mist drops and Water bottles. A little bit of work, but not much.
Other countries will not be able to get a digital currency going. Facebook tried with Libra, and failed.
This might happen by 2030.
Two events obliterated urban landscapes around the globe this week. Ammonium nitrate not stored properly will become a bomb. It happened many times before. 75 years ago a single bomb devastated a Japanese town.
Not violent, and so far unnoticed by press and pundits is another change: Trump directing his “lets break things to get reactions” spiel on WeChat. (And tiktok). Outside of China WeChat is not widely understood. I have never seen or used it. Neither have I handled Fertilizer components or enriched uranium. WeChat is how people do everything in China. Banning WeChat for a Chinese person is like banning the Internet for you. Why would that change the urban landscape? Much of the building boom in DTLA is fueled by Chinese investments. Chinese money erected lots of glas towers, hoping to sell at least parts of them to Chinese citizens. An A380 can get you from the Middle Kingdom to Hollywood in great comfort and less than a day. Sunshine, stars, America. That is was something to go for. But without WeChat it suddenly is no longer interesting: What good is it, if you see Jonny Depp driving by (you never do, but it sells real estate) and you can not send your friends pictures. What good is it, if the sun is always shining, but non of your family members can reach you.
For reasons that don’t matter, I care for a specific building in Downtown LA. So I check occasionally how many listings there are in Zillow:
- May 15 – 11 listings
- May 29 – 14 listings
- Jun 12 – 14 listings
- July 11 – 20 listings
- Aug 8 – 24 listings
This doubling in inventory has nothing to do with the impact of 45 attempting to mess with Chinese online entities. It would take months to show up in these numbers.
Prices didn’t change much. They seem to slowly decline. But no real big changes. Yet. Since money and its value is questionable right now and going forward they might never really go down. I think that – depending on what individual situations will be going forward – there will be spikes and good deals to be had. There is certainly pressure building from the circumstances.
Banning an App seems like nothing, but it is something. People exist through their screens. It is reality for them. That is stupid. But something being stupid never has stopped people from following it, as long as it tickles enough of their fancies they will continue to go where it feels good …
is Wirecards motto. Those jokers ran a company, and a scheme where they pretended that billions of Euros would be generated by some daughter company in Dubai. That money then was supposedly in the Philippines. Funny that that that division in the middle east was the only part of Wirecard that made all that money. And it was growing. So the Wirecard stock price when up and up. The FT had some articles about stuff being sketchy. I think, no interest to peek behind their paywall. They seem to play the role of Harry Markopolos in this re enactment of the Madoff story: A crisis puts pressure on a Ponzi Scheme until it collapses. Crazy that it is only always one of these that gets exposed.
Not so great is the role of EY KPMG PWC and and Deloitte. Wirecard was running this scheme since 2015. And only in 2020 did KPMG notice. Beyond Responsibility would be a better subtitle for this.
As time takes its toll what might have been a stream ones turns into a trickle. Such of which we could just witness. 43 presidential minutes condensed into the above. What nonsense. This is all that POTUS did during that time. Watching TV, clicking on nonsense links and tweeting out random crap that adds nothing to the world. Even his ardent followers can only react with ‘yeah, he is right’ to such nonsense. There is nothing there. Really isn’t. As he would say it: “Sad!”.
As if there would be no epidemic. As if there would be not seismic shifts in the global power landscape. As if there would not be a climate crisis.
It seems that the general public has discovered code and how people call things in there. Now we no longer can create master and slave processes, and have to call them director and performer instead.
Reflecting on how culture is using words is a worthwhile process.
This however is BS. A process is master, another is a slave. That analogy from ancient history makes perfect sense and the concept clear. If I find somewhere a reference to a performer I am not looking right away for a director. And what about ‘agent’, is that one related?
This change is well intended, but will backfire: If somebody uses classical nomenclature in code, does that now signal secret admiration for white supremacy?
Also: mainstream culture please stay out of our code. Your very absence is the reason why that darn stuff eventually works in the very end. Meetings have never solved anything …
Next stop: stop calling physical connectors male and female.
Dezeen presents an interesting look at what kind of visuals people want to see right now.
Creative? Maybe, but creepy too. While it appears superfically to be in a in a similar vein to Joseph Kosinski’s early work, to me it clearly is far less substantial or decidedly motivated. After 12 years the aesthetics of a spot for a defunct car company still is relevant. Most of what Dezeen shows on that page will only be of historic interest in 2032. If that …
The effective reproduction rate Rt of the epidemic is a topic that gets different attention in different countries. In Germany the media focuses highly on it. Up to the point that a daily change from 1.07 to 1.1 was ‘news’. Well technical that kind of change is noise, but if people click on it.
Sadly in the US it is not a topic for many people. There is a really wonderful site that visualizes the effective reproduction Number called rt.live. Mike Krieger built it, and does a marvelous job in communicating this crucial information. Like everybody I really enjoyed the books by Edward Tufte. The concept that the communication of information can be wonderful if done right is very intriguing. I have trouble finding another example where this has been executed as wonderfully as in the site created by Mr Krieger. The number is of crucially importance. I will ramble more about their meaning later, but even in this light I was struck by how well rt.live has been done. America is both: A place where people can start Instagram and then go on to make things like this, and it is an ignorant s*hole country that walks open eyed into the abyss.
Which brings me what I actually wanted to point out: The US might be in much deeper trouble then ‘it’ might think. Of course there is no longer a coherent national mind, like there was, when for instance the decision got made that ‘we go to the moon’. That is one of the problems the country faces. People love that they are American. But sadly there is no national positive plan to deal with anything. Not even a huge f*ing problem like Covid-19.
It has been in the US and in the news cycle since March. The George Floyd protests were already the next topic. The media likes to go through new topics every so often. Which is fine if you roll from shark attacks to celebrity divorces. If there is an actual reality shaping dynamic event at foot the fickle media attention can become a problem. Covid-19 is old news. And it simply does not care that it no longer had the publics attention. It is different from presidential candidates in that respect.
The real problem that the US ignores is one of math: With an Rt above one infections will rise. Exponentially. There are more infected people than there were during this pandemic. Demographics might have shifted. Many people who had the disease a couple of months ago would have not gotten tested, now they do. But still: There are more infected people than they have been. And they will infect more people. Until there is ‘herd immunity’ at an estimated 60% infection rate. There are officially 3 million cases. Less than 1% of the population. Of course there are more infected people. But not 40x or anything that one could hope that soon herd immunity could bring the numbers back down.
Change in behavior can also bring numbers down. If a significant part of the population participates. Sadly 5% of the population starting to walk around in full body PPE will have zero impact. It is the number of people that don’t pay attention at all that can drive an epidemic.
Lastly a vaccine and also clinical progress can lessen the impact of the epidemic. Clinical progress gets made. Day by day. Doctors are smart, they figure new things out. Little by little. Much does not make it into the media. Lots of little effects eventually add, without it been written about. We see this now. Downside is that this is not a panacea. Even if there would be a perfect vaccine next week, application of it will take a month – or probably more. If only half of people have it, be it because they don’t want it, or the infra structure to apply it is not capable enough, then its impact is not the binary switch off to the state of 2019 that people tend to envision – hope for.
Infections will grow and grow. The national regime makes an attempt to stretch things out to bring the prize home in November. It stopped giving daily briefings. It will try all sorts of PR maneuvers to distract the American mind from the looming doom. Tragically it will make matters worse by doing so. If the American president would have operated like that of any of the western European countries (aside from maybe Sweden and the UK) his reelection would have been a slam dunk. He blew that one. He always blows things, and then survived them. Naturally for him to think that it will be no different this time. But Covid-19 is not a weak foe like the Democratic Party.
Once infections grow there will be new problems: A second country wide shut down, now needed, while in hindsight it wasn’t the right thing to do in March, will be much harder on the financial system. The feds expanded their balance sheet from 4 to 7 trillion in a matter of weeks to dampen the effect. The big question is: At which level does the dollar loose its global role. Is that at the 10 or at the 100 trillion mark. The GDP of the entire planet is estimated to be at 140 trillion.
The Stock market or its comically skewed measure of the DJIA are pointing upward. Did so in the last months. It might continue its ignorance of the facts even through the next level of human and economic devastation that looms in the months ahead. Or the leather bubble might finally rapture. The bear might not have been dead as it has appeared. It maybe was just hibernating real fucking hard in the last months. It is impossible to know if this aspect will add to the epidemic impact. If people think their retirement is in tatters this would change their outlook on everything.
Healthcare capacity was big topic in March. It strangely no longer is. Last time the collision got avoided. But this time I don’t see how things should be magically different. Those 50,000 daily new positive tests will eventually condensate in the need for hospital resources. Which are still limited. Once number encroach on that border stuff gets generally much worse: Overworked staff can not take care of themselves, gets itself infected. Covid becomes nosocomial again. Which is pushing hard on lethality rates. We have been there before. In Wuhan, in northern Italy, in Spain.
The big question mark is how society as a whole will react to this. George Floyd protests were bigger than anything of their nature before. People in general are not in a good, sane, balanced state. The impact of tech / internet based world consumption has vastly intensified in the last months. And it was not on a healthy level before. We have no idea what that means for a society.
Lastly and globally the sharks are circling: Both Russia and China have a significant interest in a diminished role of the US. Russia so that it can continue its path of increasing its regional power position. The Krim is theirs already. One of the few map changes in this century so far. It would like to operate as the major European power.
China is on a more ambitious path: Hong Kong and then Taiwan is in its sights. That does not stop it from rubbing shoulders with India. It also wants to be a in position to be the dominant force in the inevitable massive changes on the Korean peninsula.
Western Europe and the highly developed asian countries all existed very well in a world that got stabilized by American power, influence and values. In the end of 2020 this situation could be a significantly different one. It is clear that China will come out as the winner here. The question is just by how much.
The Iranian city of Natanz is in the news again. The original stuxnet is still a marvel of technology and creativity. That a Siemens controller was the victim back than does not surprise at all.
Sky News actually wonders if there is a larger pattern of things blowing up in Iran during recent weeks.
Under Mac OS X 10.12.1 aka macOS Sierra attempting to put files into the trash results in an error message:
The operation can't be completed because one or more required items can't be found. (Error code -43)
Currently a solution can not be googled that well: As general as the error message sounds there is a large heap of well meaning system care advice.
In my situation the problem seems to have been caused by no cleanly un-mounting CF cards and/or external hard drives.
A reboot makes the issue go away. Nothing more and nothing less required.