Olympics, World Cup & F1's Last Hope - Authoritarianism

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/30/2014 02:00:00 AM
You'd be a fool to bet against Almaty hosting the 2022 Winter Games. Talk about the relationship between sports and authoritarianism. Let me put it this way: the only countries now willing to host expensive marquee global sporting events--the Olympics, the World Cup and Formula One are authoritarian regimes. The proximate reason for this is that the cost of hosting these events keeps rising and rising. As they do, citizens in democracies are less and less willing to shoulder the costs. On this point, Yahoo! Fourth Place Medal has an interesting feature on how no democracies want to host the 2022 Winter Games: Residents...
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Spies Like Us: USA, PRC and, er...'IBM'

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,, at 5/29/2014 01:00:00 AM
The silly season is upon us once more in the spying biz as the US and China make tit-for-tat accusations about each others' covert activities. The US started the ball rolling with this nonsense by "indicting" five Chinese military men it believes are spying on American companies. At this point we learn of many things important already. First, it is obvious that the US government cares more about its corporations than us Internet users when it distinguishes purported corporate espionage (not OK) from NSA spying (perfectly OK). In America, I guess corporations have more rights than people do as the anti-globalization types...
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As Asia Goes to Heck, Remember Factory Asia

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,,,,, at 5/28/2014 02:00:00 AM
The system of production spread throughout East/Southeast Asia has been dubbed "Factory Asia" as we make goods for the rest of the world. In doing so, we (or is it MNCs more accurately speaking?) take advantage of our comparative advantages in splitting production activities country by country. At its apex is Japan which makes leading-edge componentry, closely followed by manufacturing-oriented Asian tigers Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan that are very nearly at the cutting edge technology-wise. Next up are China, Malaysia and Thailand--sites that combine technical expertise with lower labor costs, followed by locations...
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What Comes After Failed Global War on Drugs?

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/27/2014 02:00:00 AM
 "Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade...[c]learly, what we have been doing has not worked and it is unfair for our incapacity...to be creating a situation" - Hillary Clinton. Americans have obviously inflicted hardships on the rest of the world with next to no concern about others' well-being. Militarization in the "War on Terror," for instance, has polarized many and radicalized more than a few who would otherwise remain neutral as the United States takes a heavy-handed approach by playing the role of Globocop. Another somewhat lesser-known but equally unsuccessful Yanqui effort has been the...
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Is 'Responsible Mining' an Oxymoron?

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/26/2014 02:00:00 AM
Like other extractive industries, mining elicits much hand-wringing among leftists about labor exploitation, environmental degradation, and the decimation of indigenous cultures in mining communities. As a more practical sort, I appreciate how mining makes modern life possible, from the computers leftists design their accusatory banners with to the cell phones they use to organize the overthrow of bourgeois capitalist scum with. In urbanized societies, there is a squeamishness about where our food comes from (slaughtering animals) and where the raw materials that make modern life possible come from (mining) since we are...
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Why Putin Has Got the Moves Obama Lacks

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/25/2014 12:30:00 AM
But would you buy a used car from this guy? I watched the entire Putin interview yesterday on CNBC from his World Economic Forum wannabe, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. This time, the British host Geoff Cutmore did not toss softballs at Putin but asked quite pointed questions about the effects of sanctions on Russia, Russian relations with Ukraine, Putin's seeming hankering for the return of the USSR, and his overall worldview. Dare I say it but Putin was in his element: smiling, smirking and sulking where appropriate as he delivered an astonishing range of one-liners, polemics and put-downs. Definitely,...
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Workplace Realism: The Myth of Flattened Hierarchy

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in at 5/23/2014 02:00:00 AM
Actually, we're not quite there yet. The management literature is littered with references to new forms of organizational structures alike matrixes, networks and so on that are coming to replace bureaucratic hierarchies. This phenomenon is linked to modern, politically correct notions of diversity, equity and fairness. Surely, we can't have [white, male] bosses lording it over others in an enlightened age, can we? Having been conditioned to think organizations are evolving in this, well, collegial direction at university, young entrants to the workforce are often surprised that most instead resemble your grandfather's corporate...
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The Amoeba Boys: Philippine DDoS Attacks on China

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,, at 5/22/2014 02:00:00 AM
Filipino "hackers" are the Amoeba Boys of cyberspace.  Well this is embarrassing: Having played up the Philippines' emergence as a technology hub in Southeast Asia to rival India, the sheer lameness of its sympathizers' Internet attacks on China is appalling. If you are going to cause mayhem online, then you have to at least target frequently-visited websites. I have long been fascinated with D-I-Y reprisals among netizens through distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on websites, especially those hosted by the offending government. In 2007 I wrote about Russians mounting DDoS attacks against Estonia after...
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China Has Exhausted Its Goodwill in SE Asia

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,,, at 5/21/2014 02:00:00 AM
Call it "Escape From the Killing Fields 2": China sending ships to repatriate its workers from Vietnam as anti-PRC riots there resulting in the deaths of four of its nationals heralds a turning point not only in PRC-Vietnam relations but broader PRC-ASEAN relations. Make no mistake: it's getting really ugly in Vietnam for Chinese nationals and their businesses. In PR terms, what's odd is China's ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Having done the hard work establishing economic links with Southeast Asia--witness the landmark China-ASEAN FTA or even the forthcoming Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank--the...
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US Firing Squads From Mars, EU Pharma From Venus

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,, at 5/20/2014 02:00:00 AM
Having (ab)used the hackneyed Americans from Mars, Europeans from Venus trope already, I suppose giving it another go isn't bad. As I usually start my day, I perused the Yahoo! news items presented to me on the homepage, including an AP article about how the state of Utah may be bringing back the firing squad to execute death row inmates. The proximate cause of this seeming return to barbarity is especially interesting: For many, many years now, European countries have been trying to persuade the United States to stop the cruel and inhumane practice of handing down death sentences. As it turns out, though, many of the chemicals...
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Japanese Depopulation & Few Foreign Workers

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/19/2014 02:00:00 AM
For all its current woes, there is no doubt that the United States remains an attractive destination for skilled migrant workers. Despite its current bedraggled state, there is no doubt that American is still the place to be in any number of areas: creative industries, finance, technology....the list is lengthy. In comparison, there isn't even a single "must join" industry prominent mostly in Japan that compels expatriates to go there. Besides difficulties learning the language--Japanese is an order of a magnitude more difficult to learn than English--their society is also more difficult into. All the while, deflation and...
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How Big is "Too Big to Fail," Exactly?

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/18/2014 12:30:00 AM
Like any other international organization, the IMF portrays itself as a technocratic institution instead of a political one. In other words, they would like others to see themselves as economic experts offering solutions instead of as pawns in someone else's political machinations. There is, however, a fairly large literature on how the IMF lending is steered by American interests--see Thomas Oatley, Strom Thacker and James Vreeland among others. Apropos for the season, we got another reminder of IMF politicization as Managing Director Christine Lagarde bailed out on being the commencement speaker at Smith College after...
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Chinese Themselves on the PRC: 'Why China Works'

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/16/2014 02:00:00 AM
Replicating Pearl River Deltas all over the nation? Many Westerners have tried capturing China's secrets of success from the outside looking in. Joshua Cooper Ramo famously coined the "Beijing Consensus" to denote China's state-directed counterpart to the American prescription for economic success which is a fairly straightforward application of the neoliberal ideal of unshackling markets to do their magic. Aside from not reflecting what's really happening in China--does anyone consider China  a model of sustainability and equality--the Beijing Consensus has become shorthand for what China merely does as opposed to...
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