Calling the Chinese bluff

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Lovely column by Joe Nocera about Jim Chanos, the guy who spotted the unsustainability of the Chinese real-estate bubble before most people — and acted on his insight.

Perhaps you remember Jim Chanos. The founder of Kynikos Associates, a $3 billion hedge fund that specializes in short-selling, Chanos was the first person to figure out, some 15 years ago, that Enron was a house of cards.

He shorted Enron stock — meaning that he would profit if the stock fell, rather than rose — and shared his suspicions with others, including my friend Bethany McLean, who wrote a story for Fortune that marked the beginning of the end for Enron. That call not only made Chanos a small fortune; it also made him famous.

Chanos and his crew at Kynikos don’t make big “macro” bets on economies; their style is more “micro”: looking at the fundamentals of individual companies or sectors. And so it was with China. “I’ll never forget the day in 2009 when my real estate guy was giving me a presentation and he said that China had 5.6 billion square meters of real estate under development, half residential and half commercial,” Chanos told me the other day.

“I said, ‘You must mean 5.6 billion square feet.’ ”

The man replied that he hadn’t misspoken; it really was 5.6 billion square meters, which amounted to over 60 billion square feet.

For Chanos, that is when the light bulb went on. The fast-growing Chinese economy was being sustained not just by its export prowess, but by a property bubble propelled by mountains of debt, and encouraged by the government as part of an infrastructure spending strategy designed to keep the economy humming. (According to the McKinsey Global Institute, China’s debt load today is an unfathomable $28 trillion.)

The 2015 Bad Taste Award

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There are reports (the reliability of which is currently unknown) that two individuals whose identities have been disclosed in the Ashley Madison hack have committed suicide.

But in this crisis, ingenious entrepreneurs have spotted an opportunity. For example, this:

At least one company is using the whole unfortunate situation as a PR opportunity. Travel group CheapAir.com is offering $50 vouchers for anyone who sends the company a message from an email address that was disclosed on the leaked user list. “If your relationship is in ruins and you’re thinking about heading out of town, we have a solution for you,” the company wrote. “You may have made some mistakes, but a vacation may be just what you both need right now.”

This wins the Memex 1.1 Bad Taste Award for 2015. As the Obama election team used to say, never waste a good crisis.

The ad-blocking paradox

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This morning’s Observer column:

Mail Online is one of the world’s most popular news websites and it’s free: no paywall. But my browser has a plug-in program called Ghostery, which will scan any web page you visit and tell you how many “third-party trackers” it has found on it. These are small pieces of code that advertisers and ad-brokers place on pages or in cookies in order to monitor what you’re doing on the web and where you’ve been before hitting the current page.

When I looked at the Mail Online report, Ghostery found 31 such trackers. Some of them came from familiar names (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, Doubleclick). But others were placed by outfits I have never heard of, for example, Bidswitch, Brightcove, Crimtan, Sonobi, Taboola. These are companies that act as high-speed intermediaries between your browser and firms wanting to place ads on the web page you’re viewing. And theirs is the industry that pays the bills (and sometimes makes a profit) for the publisher whose “free” content you are perusing.

But we humans are cussed creatures. It turns out that we loathe and detest online ads and will do almost anything to avoid them…

Read on

Unnatural beauty

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Cockington_Court_edited

The genius of Capability Brown and the other great English landscape artists was to make the artificial seem utterly and timelessly natural — as here at Cockington Court in Devon. Their only modern counterparts are golf architects: think of the way Augusta National looks now, compared to what the terrain was like when Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie first got to grips with it.

Labour: the hard facts

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Good column by Eunice Goes on The Conversation:

So far, no one has shown that they understood the causes of Labour’s defeat in 2015 and the problems social democracies have had all over the world following the global financial crisis. Instead, they have preferred to talk about micro policy ideas, such as free childcare and sex education policies. None seem to fit into a larger narrative.

The truth of the matter is that the Labour Party is stuck in a very deep hole. Research from the Fabian Society shows that in order to secure a majority in 2020, Labour needs to gain at least 106 seats in very different parts of the country. Considering the forthcoming constituency boundary changes and the advent of truly multi-party politics, that task seems like mission impossible.

In order to win, Labour needs to find an electoral formula that attracts Tory voters in the south of England and UKIP voters in the Midlands and north-east of England. In Scotland it needs to attract SNP voters and the south-west and English urban centres cities it needs to pull in Liberal Democrat and Green voters. None of the current contenders to the leadership of the Labour Party has so far shown that they are able to pull off this very difficult electoral trick.

That’s true. The bigger question, though, is whether the Labour party could ever pull off this trick without being rebuilt from the ground up.

iWatching

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iWatch

I bought an Apple watch a few weeks ago. “It’ll take a while to get used to it”, a friend said to me, and he was right. My expectations were low, based on previous experiences with so-called smartwatches, which were generally flaky. But because I have a policy of not writing about stuff that I don’t actually own, I bought the cheapest, and, as I thought, the least ostentatious, version of the Apple device.

And…?

Well, it grows on one. The battery life is better than I expected (and it charges quickly). The interface works. Most importantly, the linking with the iPhone is really seamless. What infuriated me about, say, the Pebble watch, was the flakiness of the ‘notifications’ system. It turns out that the main reason I want a smartwatch is so that it stops me having to take my phone out of my pocket all the time. The Pebble failed miserably in that regard, whereas the iWatch is excellent for that. When a message comes in, all it takes is a glance to identify the sender — and therefore to know whether it needs attention or not.

Apart from Quentin’s commentary, the most insightful comments on the watch that I’ve come across are by Ben Evans. For example:

Reading the Watch’s launch reviews, I sometimes got the sense that the tech press was writing about it as though the luxury goods industry didn’t exist and that the luxury press was writing as though technology didn’t exist: no-one spends money on things because they’re just nice and no-one buys things that don’t last forever. The gold version brought this out best – a tech product that’s $10,000 but has the same spec as the $350 one – heresy! And a gold watch that probably doesn’t last a lifetime – again, heresy! But all rules can be broken with the right product – that’s how progress happens. Meanwhile, the irony is that it’s not actually the gold that’s the luxury but the software – that tap on the wrist telling you to turn left. In a sense, the gold case is an accessory to the software in the same way that the strap is an accessory to the watch.

Spot on. Smartwatches are unlikely ever to be ‘must-have’ devices. They are luxuries.

The lessons of (computer) error

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This morning’s Observer column:

A few years ago, I received a speeding ticket from the Metropolitan police claiming that a speed-camera in London had photographed my car – citing the correct registration number of the vehicle – doing 43mph in a 30mph zone. Most people would, I guess, be distressed by receiving such a communication. Your columnist, however, was perversely delighted – because it offered him the opportunity of not only irritating the cops but also of making an important point about the dangers of being overly dependent on technology.

The reason for my glee was that the car had definitely not been at the location specified on the speeding ticket at the time and I could prove that using the same technology that the Met had used in order to frame me. My family and I had been out of the UK in the week in question and the car was parked at Stansted airport, where its arrival and departure at the mid-stay car park were logged by the automated numberplate recognition technology that the airport authorities had recently installed.

Accordingly, I wrote to the commissioner of the Metropolitan police enclosing a copy of the speeding ticket and saying that I would be very interested to see what evidence he had in support of it, adding that I intended to contest it on the grounds that I could prove my car had been nowhere near the location at the time. But my hopes for a bloody good row were dashed within a fortnight: a computer-generated notice arrived, informing me that the speeding ticket had been cancelled. No explanation; no apology; nothing…

Read on.