Paris Marx makes a very good case about Elon Musk wanting to relive the good olâ days when he was doing start-ups at the beginning of the millennium. Itâs why things at Twitter are as bad as they are: Muskâs nostalgia. Itâs well worth a read if youâre interested in whatâs going on at OnlyKlans, as Marx probably nails it far better than a lot of other commentators.
There were aspects of the good old days I liked, too. Better CPM rates for online ads. Way more creativity in web design, as well as experimentation. The fact I could balance doing brand consulting, typeface design, and publishing. That helped my creativity flow. But these are rose-coloured glasses; thereâs plenty about my current life that is far better than those hairy start-up days.
If thereâs one thing Iâve learned in half a century on earth is that you canât re-create the past. And even if you could, it wouldnât be as good as how you remembered it.
Iâm often nostalgic for those early days in Hong Kong and that mega-fantastic day of the Tung Wan Hospital fair in 1975 (or was it â76?), where I got to go in the bucket of a Simon Snorkel fire engine. Wonderful day. But at the time I couldnât drive (I was three), so you canât have it all.
And millennium me running Lucire might have been having fun in terms of breaking new ground, but Iâd much rather be where I am now having talked to Rachel Hunter and putting her on the home page (and in two print editions). Our stories are also heaps better than what they were in the late 1990s.
Just enjoy the moment and make the most of where you are at. Iâve projects I want to return to, too, but if I do, I wonât be assuming the year is 2000 and working in an area I donât know that much about, while annoying all the people around me.
Among the topics he covers, as detailed in the summary in Linkedinâs The Next Big Idea:
âą AI is the first technology that can take power away from us
âą if we are not careful, AI and bioengineering will be used to create the worst totalitarian regimes in history
âą Be skeptical of technological determinism
We should be wary nowânot after these technologies have been fully realized.
This should be no surprise to anyone who reads this blog; indeed, this should be no surprise to anyone who has had their eyes open and breathes. This opaque black box is full of abuse, funds disinformation, endangers democracy, and exposes personal data to dodgy parties. As I outlined earlier, someone in the legal profession with cojones and a ton of funding and time could demonstrate that Googleâs entire business should be subject to a massive negligence lawsuit. The authors of the article present more evidence that Google is being up to no good.
An excerpt, without revealing too much:
Last year, a marketer working for a Fortune 500 company launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign âŠ
Over the next few months, Google placed more than 1.3 trillion of the companyâs ads on over 150,000 different websites and apps. The biggest recipient of ads â more than 49 million â was a website called PapayAds. The company was registered in Bulgaria less than two years ago and lists one employee, CEO Andrea De Donatis, on LinkedIn âŠ
It seems impossible that 49 million ads were legitimately placed and viewed on PapayAdsâ site over the span of several months ⊠âI donât have an explanation for this,â he said, adding that he does not recall receiving payment for such a large volume of ads.
I doubt this is isolated, and the story elaborates on how the scheme worked. And when Google realized its ads were winding up on inappropriate websites, the action it took was to keep doing it.
On a more positive note, I found out about Radio.garden in December on Mastodon (thank goodness for all the posts there these days, a far cry from when I joined in 2017) and have since been tuning in to RTHK Radio 1 in Hong Kong. I had no idea they even gave NZ dollarâUS dollar exchange rates as part of their business news! The interface is wonderful: just rotate the planet and place the city of your choice within the circular pointer. It works equally well on a cellphone, though only in portrait mode there. Youâd be amazed at what you can find, and I even listened to one of the pop stations in Jeddah.
My usual suspects are âfavouritedâ: KCSM in San Mateo, Sveriges Radio P1, and RNZ National here. I might add Rix FM from Stockholm but I seem to have grown up a little since the days when its music was targeted to me.
Itâs now been added to our company link list. Sadly, a few dead ones have had to be culled today. But I must say Radio.garden has been one of the best finds of 2022. Almost makes you want to surf to random sites again like we did in the 1990s.
I wrote the below in Lucireâeven though plenty of publications have covered our monarch’s passing, it still felt right to acknowledge it. After all, she had appeared in Lucire a few times.
With the passing of HM Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday UK time, it would be remiss of this magazine to not mark this world event.
During the 25 years of Lucire, the Queen has featured several times, mostly from events that she attended. We werenât around when she was newly crowned in her coronation gown by Norman Hartnell, and wearing the latest British fashions in her youth, a glamorous symbol of a new Elizabethan era that lifted the United Kingdomâs mood after World War II and continued rationing. But it is easy to imagine the coronation in 1953 being a dazzling, colourful event, and indeed it was covered in the likes of British Vogue at the time.
Her era has seen unprecedented change. As the longest-serving monarch in British history, she presided over an era which saw television become mainstream (a technology that she embraced with her Christmas message), many former colonies gain their independence, the dawn of the World Wide Web, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and both her countryâs entry into and exit from what is now the European Union.
Much has already been said about HM the Queenâs sense of duty, and how she still read her red boxâs worth of papers as head of state right to the end. On Tuesday she asked Liz Truss as the new prime ministerâthe Queenâs 15th, having begun with Sir Winston Churchill when she ascended to the throneâto form a government.
Here in Lucire the late Queen has attended events we happened to cover, beginning in 2008, with her last appearance at the Cartier Queenâs Cup in 2017.
I only caught a glimpse of her during a state visit to New Zealand in 2002 during her golden jubilee. It was her last visit to Aotearoa.
The visit was very subdued and HM the Queen and HRH the Duke of Edinburgh were whisked from the airport round the back roads of Rongotai, past the main street by Lucireâs then-HQ. I managed to photograph them as they drove by.
A neighbourhood shop had a staff member who was a diehard monarchist. I mentioned I had a photo of the royal couple and later gifted her my print. I still have the negative somewhere.
At the time, my sense was that our Labour government had republican leanings and downplayed the royal visit, hence ferrying them in the viceregal Daimler past industrial areas; it was a far cry from an earlier visit I witnessed in 1981 when as a school pupil, my schoolmates and I lined the drive at Government House to welcome her.
As someone who chose to retain my British nationality (I dutifully renew my passport every 10 years), as well as adopting my New Zealand one in 1980, I admit to having a tremendous amount of respect for HM Queen Elizabeth II and her unwavering sense of duty. Some of us born in Hong Kong in the 1970s, whose parents had memories of less pleasant times behind the Bamboo Curtain, appreciated the freedoms, although they stopped short of democracy, that we enjoyed in a Crown colony. Up to a point: my father said he could have worked harder to lose his Chinese accent after fleeing Taishan for Hong Kong after the communist revolution of 1949, but he chose not to as he didnât want to be seen as sycophantic to the colonial power.
It was thanks to the Commonwealth that my Hong Kong-born, but China-raised, mother was able to obtain her nursing qualification from the General Nursing Council for England and Wales. When we emigrated to New Zealand, that made her transition into her job that much easier, as it was considered a notch above the rest. (Having said that, the Hospital Board put her on a lower pay grade than what she deserved, leading my parents to fight for it, with the help of Sir Francis Kitts, a family friend and the former mayor of Wellington. We won.)
My fatherâs preferred form of governance was social democracy, but he appreciated a constitutional monarchy; and my own studies at law school concluded that while an imperfect system, it was one which I, too, valued. The prospect of one of our own being president, at least to the law student me in 1992, seemed unfathomable and potentially divisive.
The success of the system does depend on our faith and trust in the monarch. HM Queen Elizabeth II gave us that sense, as one who placed duty first. As this nation enters into a period of official mourning, we also wonder what her successor, HM King Charles III, will bring to the table, with his interests in the environment and a UK government that he might not see eye to eye with.
Whatever the future, we pay tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II and mark the close of this second Elizabethan age.
I canât yet reveal why, but Iâve come across the work of Hong Kong-trained and based designer Caroline Li, and itâs really good. Sheâs done a lot of book covers, and I know first-hand how hard it is to have a small canvas to work from. Maybe Iâm just used to magazines. Check out her work here.
After nearly two months, Lucireâs Twitter account has been restored.
Earlier in the week, they had requestedâagainâthat I upload my ID to prove that I was who I said I was, despite this having been done countless times already in the past two months.
Today, I received another âit appears that this issue may have been resolved.â I had my doubts and was about to send them a reply giving them a piece of my mind, but I checked, and sure enough, Lucireâs account was back.
I donât know if my letter to Twitter New Zealand Ltd.âs directors, via their lawyers, did the trick, or whether my private information finally reached someone literate with reasonable intelligence.
I gave the lawyers till today (the 17th) to respond, though the timing of the resolution could be a coincidence.
It showed just how terrible Twitterâs systems have been and how right I was to call the entire process farcical. To think that Facebook did better when Lucireâs Instagram was deactivated, and we were only out for a week. And I have had plenty to say about Facebook over the years, as you all know.
Itâs a shame that we never got to play with Zoho Socialâs premium version trial with all our social media accounts intact. I just hope that now that weâve reactivated all our gadgets (IFTTT, Dlvr.it, etc.), that they work as they once did. (As they certainly didnât when we used our temporary @luciremagazine account on Twitter.)
When I was waiting for my new phone to arrive, I didn’t know what all the DHL status updates meant. I looked online to see if I could get a clue as to how long each stage took, especially the “last mile” delivery. There were very few screenshots or public traces. Here’s the trace from my package in case it helps someone else the same boat. (Vivaldi put the DHL website header near the bottom when I made the screenshot.)
I was thinking earlier tonight how cars were the one thing that helped me navigate Aotearoa when I got here with my parents. I might not have understood the culture immediately, and very little outside the faces of my family was familiar to me. But I saw Toyota Corollas (the E20s) and Honda Civics outside. And BMC ADO16s. These at least were an external source of familiarity, since they were commonplace in Hong Kong. A neighbour had a four-door Civic back in Homantin, the first car whose steering wheel I ever sat behind as a child.
The cars here in New Zealand were much older generally, since there was more of a DIY fix-it culture, and Hong Kong prospered later, resulting in a newer fleet. Those early days were like a history lesson on what had gone before in the 1950s and 1960s, filling in the gaps. But my eyes still went to those newer 1970s shapes. Curves? Who wants curves when you can have boxy shapes and those groovy vinyl roofs?!
I didnât say I had taste at age four.
What a real honour to promote my reo! Thank you, Dr Grace Gassin and Te Papa for spearheading the Chinese Languages in Aotearoa project and for this incredible third instalment, where I get to speak and promote Cantonese!
Obviously I couldnât say anything earlier, especially during Chinese Language Week, but I am extremely grateful the very distinct Chinese languages are being given their due with this project!
My participation began with Grace and I having a kĆrero last year, and how Chinese Language Week was not inclusive. The organizers of that make the mistake of equating Chinese with Mandarin, and claim that Cantonese and other tongues are dialects, which is largely like saying Gaelic is a dialect of English.
Do read more at the Te Papa blog as Grace goes into far more depth, and brings everything into the context of the history of Aotearoa.
When I was a kid and wanted to hit back at someone for being mean to me, my parents would often say that successful people, true leaders, would be 性æč, which is roughly akin to saying that one should rise above it. I would say that goes with nations as well: you can tell when a country is in a good state by the way its citizenry behaves, and online behaviour is probably a proxy for that.
As many of you know, my literacy in my mother tongue is just above the level it was at when I left Hong Kong, that is to say, itâs marginally better than a kindergartenerâs. And where I come from, that means age 3, which is already in the big leagues considering I started at 2Âœ, having passed the entrance exam, and had homework from then on. What I can write is in colloquial Cantonese, devoid of any formal structure that someone with a proper education in the old country would know. If youâre Cantonese, youâll be able to read what I write, but if your only idea of Chinese is Mandarin, youâll have little clue. (Bang goes the official argument in Beijing that Cantonese is a âdialectâ. It canât be a dialect if a speaker of one finds the other unintelligible.)
With Meizu having essentially shut its international forum, I decided to head to the Chinese one to post about my experience with its Music app, and was met by a majority of friendly, helpful people, and some who even went the extra mile of replying to my English-language query in English.
But there were enough dickheads answering to make you think that mainland China isnât a clear global leader, regardless of all the social engineering and online credit scores.
When I used Facebook, I had ventured on to a few groups where people simply posted in their own language, and those of us who wished to reply but didnât understand it would either use the siteâs built-in translator, or, before that was available, Google Translate. I still am admin on a group where people do post in their own language without much issue. Thereâs no insistence on âSpeak English, I canât understand you,â or whatever whine I hear from some intolerant people, such as the ones sampled below.
That makes you despair for some folks and one conclusion I can draw is that members of a country who demand such a monoculture must not see their country as a leader. Nor do they have much pride in it. For great nations, in my book, embrace, or believe they embrace (even if they fall short in practice) all tongues and creeds, all races and abilities. They revel in their richness.
Of the negative souls on the forum, there was the crap youâd expect. âWrite in Chinese,â âWhy is a Cantonese person writing in English?â âThink about where you are,â and âI donât understand youâ (to a comment I wrote in Cantoneseâagain supporting the argument that it isnât a dialect, but its own distinct tongue).
Granted, these are a small minority, but itâs strange that this is a forum where people tend to help one another. And it tells me that whether youâre American or Chinese, thereâs nothing in the behaviour of ordinary folks that tells me that any one place is more likely to be a centre for 21st-century leadership than another.
Iâve had far worse responses to Tweets, by a much greater proportion of people (the UK still stands out as the worst when I responded to a Tweet about George Floyd), but itâs the context. Twitter is, as Stephen Fry once put it, analogous to a bathing pool into which too many people have urinated, but a help forum?
Itâs the globally unaware, those who engage in casual xenophobia, who are intolerant of other languages, who are the little people of our times, having missed out on an education or life experience that showed them otherwise. They reside in the old country as much as in so many other places. The leading nation of the 21st century does not look like itâs one of the obvious choices. Future historians, watch this space.
Itâs hard not to be in a bubble sometimes, especially when that bubble is safe in the southern hemisphere and away from wars and COVID-19.
With TVNZ having a New York bureau, we of course hear about how poorly the US is doing with COVID-19, and we also hear from the London bureau, where the numbers arenât as staggering, so they donât always make the six oâclock programme. Aljazeera English mentioned South Koreaâs third wave, looking worse than the second, and I knew Hong Kongâs numbers were on the up.
However, right though the month of November, I didnât calculate positivity rates at all, even though I had been doing them most months, sometimes multiple times a month. These were going on to my NewTumbl blog, which Iâve decided not to update for the time being, for reasons already outlined.
Doing them again since late October gave me quite a surprise. I knew Europe was having a rough time with it, but there was quite a change in the numbers. In fact, it wasnât long ago that these rates were trending downwards for the majority of countries that I had been tracking; that is no longer the case. Itâs rising almost everywhere apart from India, the KSA (which has sensibly and surely got its first wave downâIâve seen days of under 200 infections), Singapore, Australia, and, of course, here in New Zealand.
For the first time since Iâve been doing these calculations, we are at the bottom of the table, a fact that Iâm relieved about, but it does make me worried about the rest of the world. I have a lot of family in the US and Hong Kong.
The data come from Worldometers and they tend to source from official parties. I believe I loaded the page around 2200 GMT.
Brazil 25·77% â
France 10·86% â
Sweden 8·07% â
Italy 7·50% â
USA 7·33% â
Spain 7·12% â
India 6·57% â
Germany 4·11% â
UK 3·79% â
KSA 3·62% â
Russia 3·12% â
Singapore 1·25% â
South Korea 1·19% â
Taiwan 0·64% â
Australia 0·27% â
Hong Kong 0·159% â
New Zealand 0·158% â
Brazil 24·63% â
France 7·651% â
India 7·645% â
Spain 7·16% â
USA 6·67% â
Sweden 5·33% â
KSA 4·50% â
Italy 3·59% â
UK 2·80% â
Russia 2·64% â
Germany 2·15% â
Singapore 1·66% â
South Korea 1·02% â
Taiwan 0·55% â
Australia 0·32% â
New Zealand 0·18% â
Hong Kong 0·15% â
which were measured against a bunch from September 2.
For your listening pleasure, here’s tonight’s podcast, with a bit behind the scenes on my first appearance on RNZ’s The Panel as a panellist, and ‘I’ve Been Thinking’ delivered at a more appropriate pace, without me staring at the clock rushing to finish it before the pips for the 4 p.m. news.
