urban devastation week

economy politics technology

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 …

winning & losing

unkategorisch

T didn’t win in 2016. Hillary lost it. And she was a much better candidate than Joe Biden is right now. T will not win 2020. He can not.

The Democrats however might very well loose this years election.

Again.

Stimmenjagd

unkategorisch

Offensichtlich von 2016. 2020. Aber warum dann immer noch Frau Clinton? Had Putin vergessen für die Photoshop Lizenz zu bezahlen?

unintended Covid art

unkategorisch

This piece of performance art has a whole new dimension in epidemic times.

Shill Philler

unkategorisch

So he “advances to Apple Fellow”. Apple newspeak for loosing your job. I was not a fan of his. Jobs was a BS artist as well, his antenna response ‘you are holding it wrong’ has a clear and distinct part in America’s history of BS. PT Barnum, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump: What you say does not have to be true to be sucessful.

Phil was doing the same thing. SD card slot? Magsafe? Working keyboard? Away with it for the progress of all mankind.

Sure he got rich. But I would not want to switch with him for a single second: Bending the truth for a living must be horrible.

feet to the fire

unkategorisch

Finally what looks to be a real interview. Confronting the man with the facts. Exposing his blatant falsehoods for what they are.

Of course most people will get hung up on the frenetic paper shuffling that comes along with the strange defense attempts.

cloud is hard

unkategorisch

Canon has a cloud service. Today I found out:

Some of the original photo and video data files have been lost. We have confirmed that the still image thumbnails of the affected files have not been affected.

http://image.canon/

Also new to me is that canon is a top level domain.

Just because big vendors don’t loose any data does not mean that this never gonna be the case. Even if people run on good infra strucure there might be issues on levels above it. In both directions:

  • having not enough copies of your data (as in zero, or 1 which will lead to zero)
  • having too many copies of your data (as in security not being the way should be)

1420 tons of potatoes

unkategorisch

According to Audibles Chapter 7 of Gareth Russell’s excellent “The Ship of Dreams” there were 1420 tons the ‘tuberous crop’ on the ship with the well known fate. Funny how nobody during the production realized that this amount would make for a very big pantry, vast appetite and rather long journey …

The Rembrandt that didn’t want to move

unkategorisch

Last week Sotheby’s auctioned a Rembrandt self portrait. It did not go as intended. 1632 there were no batteries, and they would not last that long in the frame. Of his 600 paintings around 40 had the subject of ‘moi’, but as Oliver Barker points out, only 3 of those are in private collections, and therefor – unless weird things happen – the only ones on the market. This particular one shows the painter at the age of 26. 22 years younger than its auctioneer.

However: It did not move.

While it sold after rather tedious 395 sounds, it was only 12.6 million pounds that the auction house could get for it for its client.

EDIT:

I was confused, since the number in the NY Times:


was 14.5 and not the 12.6 documented by YouTube. Of course I suspected that Scott Reyburn would be bad at math. Which shows more about my attitudes towards people who actually can write, than to what is going on, and how that relates to how little I actually know: The number that the auctioneer says is what the seller receives. The buyer however has to pay a premium to the auction house as well. Which at this price explains the added 15%.

»China could have totally stopped it«

unkategorisch

The man presiding over the US of A can be heard saying in Summer 2020. Is it so? In theory yes. Every outbreak, regardless of where, can be easiest mitigated at its source. The size of a well connected immunologically naïve population will impact the speed of distribution of any communicable disease. Not good for the Middle Kingdom. But could have China stopped it? That is very doubtful. In January there was already a vast pool of infected people. China put a lock down on more than 20 million people in January 23rd.

Months later the man in the US will still say, that Covid 19 is just like the flu and will blow over by summer.

While it is not clear what China could have done to eradicate the virus, it is very clear what the US could have done to stop what happens to it now: So far, it has four times the per capita death rate of Germany. While both took an economic hit of similar proportions in Q2.

The President not acting in January and Februar in terms of testing was a deadly mistake. Interpreting the motivations of a crazy person has its logical perils. I think that testing was not high on his priorities for a while since having no cases would make him look good.