Spanish life is not always likeable but it is
compellingly loveable.
-
Christopher
Howse: A
Pilgrim in Spain.
Cataluña
- Catalan MPs will vote on Tuesday on whether to re-elect Sr Puigdemont as their president. Madrid has been pulling out the stops to prevent this but suffered a major setback when Spain’s State Council rejected its plan to dispute Sr P's s candidacy at the Constitutional Court. Undaunted, Madrid has now taken this step and we await the next move in this farce. Unless this was it: Last night Spain’s Constitutional Court ruled that Sr P could be sworn in only if he was physically present and that he would require a judge’s permission to attend. Said the Speaker of the Catalan Parliament: It seems comical but in the end it’s very grave. Amen to that.
Spain
- As tourists turn away from the USA – one wonders why – Spain's numbers continue to soar, and the country has now replaced the USA as number 2 in the global rankings, after France.
- I think I might have mentioned this bizarre saga before.
The EU
- New EU Mifid II rules - intended to make the real cost of investment funds more transparent - have resulted in an unclear system, with costs that cannot be compared and more confusion for investors. Well, what do you expect when a committee of 28/27 takes decisions on very complex issues?
The USA
- President Trump’s ambition to expand the American economy at a pace not seen since the years of George W Bush suffered a setback yesterday when an official estimate showed that growth was slower than expected at the end of 2017. Annual growth was 2.3% last year, below Mr Trump’s goal of at least 3%. I guess we can now expect Fart to give us a totally different take for 2017 plus unbounded optimism for 2018. Reality rarely fazes him. If ever.
- Is this why there's so much unhappiness in the USA? And possibly elsewhere, especially in the Anglosphere.
The UK
- The head of politics at Surrey University, Italian Roberta Guerrina, claims that Brexit is the greatest modern-day threat to gender equality and women’s reproductive rights. I hadn't realised it was that bad.
China
- Years ago, I heard a BBC podcast on towns in China which had been created purely to produce genuine copies of Old Masters. One of these - Dafen Oil Painting Village - has now decided there's more to be made from China's burgeoning middle classes via original works.
- Talking of Chinese progress . . . Tech giants of the East, not the US, are now the world rulers-in-waiting. Until recently, I was among those who assumed that the world would be divided up in the following way: the titans of Silicon Valley — Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google — would take everywhere except China, which would be dominated by Chinese rivals Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT). But what if it is BAT that takes everywhere except America? Well, we'll soon know, as this is what is happening, possibly assisted by Fart's intention to make America great again by concentrating on the home market. See the full Sunday Times article below.
The Spanish Language
- I came across the word cagadito yesterday and assumed it meant 'little shit'. But, no. It does come from cagar (to defecate) but means 'very similar to'. Or 'lookalike', perhaps. However, the related noun cagado means: coward/fearful/gutless. Researching this on the site of the Royal Academy gave me the chance to see all the (malsonantes) expressions in everyday Spanish involving said cagar. En diez, en la leche, en el mar, etc., etc. Not to mention: Que te cagas. 'Very good/excellent', says the RAE. As in Un coche que te cagas. A car which makes you shit yourself. See what the South Americans mean about rude Spanish discourse?
Nutters Corner
- The American guy who didn't actually get off the ground in his homemade rocket last year, says he'll try again on February 3. Well, maybe
Social Media
- America’s tech giants were subjected to a severe bashing over the course of the week, the latest barrage of criticism that has seen them become public enemy number one, the pariahs of the corporate world. Facebook and Google insist they are listening and ready to co-operate but beyond the sound bites there is little evidence of willingness to address the criticism, even less a sense that they know how to fight back. Calls for regulation are now coming from every angle. It is only a matter of time before an era of impunity for tech’s big guns comes to an end. Join the revolution!
Galicia
- As I've said, it's very unlikely the man accused of murdering a local woman (El Chicle) could ever get a fair trial in front of a jury. The local media, at least, is dogged in recording every 'related' event. Including the phone calls and visits to him of his wife and daughter. All rather nauseating, in truth. But not exclusive to Spain, of course.
Pontevedra
- The city had more than 117k visitors last year. Oddly, the final quarter was the one most up on the previous year. The very good weather that might well be sign of AGW?
Finally
- My blatant attempt to get more readers on Google plus has had immediate impact. Having fallen to 57 from a peak of 58 readers, it's now reached 56, Bkoody good job I'm not making money from this blog.
Today's Cartoon
Jack of all online
trade trumps Davos Donald: Niall Ferguson
Tech giants of the
East, not the US, are now the world rulers-in-waiting
The most interesting
man at Davos was not He Who Must Not Be Named. (In the style of the
Harry Potter books, I’m going to omit the name of the Dark Lord,
otherwise known as the president of the United States. To be frank,
I’m bored with him.) No, the most interesting man at this year’s
World Economic Forum was a rather scrawny 53-year-old former English
teacher from Hangzhou in eastern China whose business is poised to
take over the world economy.
Jack Ma is the founder
and chairman of Alibaba, the ecommerce company that you probably
think of as the Chinese equivalent of Amazon. You’re wrong. I’ll
get to why you’re wrong in a minute. But first: Jack.
Silicon Valley has its
fair share of egotists, but none can match Ma. If you didn’t
catch it, watch his immensely self-indulgent yet captivating martial
arts movie, which was one of the pop-cultural highlights of last
year. Titled Gong Shou Dao (The Art of Attack and Defence), the
22-minute film features t’ai chi enthusiast Ma battling a
succession of martial arts masters including former wushu champions
Jet Li and Donnie Yen and retired sumo champion Asashoryu.
This is what being
worth $43bn (£30bn) makes possible: you can hire the best cinema
choreographers in the business — such as Yuen Woo-ping, who
co-ordinated the fight scenes in The Matrix and Kill Bill films —
and get them to make your home movie. It’s wildly over the top, of
course, but can you imagine even Elon Musk having the chutzpah to do
that?
Two weeks ago I visited
Hangzhou and took a trip to the sprawling campus that is Alibaba’s
headquarters. In the heart of it, surrounded by brand-new office
blocks, is an incongruous black-roofed compound built in the ancient
Chinese style. “That’s Jack’s office,” I was told.
As a boy growing up in
the impoverished, chaotic China of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Yun
(to give him his Chinese name) studied English, cycling miles from
his home to meet the few English-speakers at the international hotel
in Hangzhou, offering them free guided tours to build up his language
skills. Yet that did not make him especially employable in the China
of the 1980s. He was rejected by the police. He was even rejected by
KFC. He applied to Harvard — 10 times. More rejections. He was
reduced to lecturing in English at a local college.
In early 1995, Ma took
a trip to America and had his first encounter with the internet.
Unlike Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon to sell books online, Ma from
the outset envisioned an online marketplace for everything. He ran
the name Alibaba past a San Francisco waitress. “What do you know
about Alibaba?” he asked her, to which she replied: “Open
sesame.” (Presumably if she’d said “Forty thieves” it would
have been back to the drawing board.)
So what else makes
Alibaba different from Amazon? Two things. First, Ma moved faster
than his American counterpart, Bezos, to diversify his business. In
particular, Alibaba pioneered electronic payments, establishing
Alipay to allow online purchases with no transaction fees.
Today few things
impress the western visitor to China more than the ubiquity of
electronic payments. Everyone pays for everything with smartphones.
Although Tencent’s WeChat messaging app now offers a rival service,
it was Alipay that blazed the trail, not only with online payments
but also with money-market funds (Yu’e Bao) and a growing range of
online financial services, now spun off as Ant Financial. One day
I’ll fully understand why America fell behind in financial
technology. Maybe it was regulation. But whatever made Alipay
ubiquitous in China in a way that PayPal isn’t in America, Ma was
surely a part of it.
As an investment,
Alibaba has been a dream. If you bought stock in its 2014 New York
initial public offering, you’ve tripled your money. True, the past
year was a great one to own Amazon.com: the stock rose 67%. But
Alibaba’s share price doubled.
The second thing that
sets Alibaba apart from Amazon is the sheer scale and speed of growth
of the Chinese ecommerce market. Notice, too, that Bezos —
especially since he acquired The Washington Post — is at daggers
drawn with Him Who Must Not Be Named. Ma, on the other hand, couldn’t
be on better terms with Xi Jinping.
“The political and
legal system of the future is inseparable from the internet,
inseparable from big data,” he told a Communist Party commission
last year. Technology, he went on, would soon make it possible to
pre-empt criminal acts. “Bad guys won’t even be able to walk into
the square.” Put differently: if the Chinese government wants data
from Alibaba, Jack’s not about to say no.
All this matters a
great deal because one of the implications of You Know Who’s
“America first” policy is that the rest of the world is up for
grabs. In his (by his own standards) bland speech at Davos, the Dark
Lord repeated his sales pitch to global businesses to invest in the
United States. His administration’s slashing of the US corporate
tax rate and sweeping deregulation mean that many probably will.
However, if multinationals such as Apple are going to move production
back to America, what does that imply for the rest of the world?
Ma has an answer to
that question. “Ecommerce is not for big companies or developed
countries,” he said. “It’s for developing countries, young
people and small businesses. We should not let world global trade be
controlled by 60,000 big companies. We should make technologies and
policies to encourage 6m, 16m or 60m businesses . . . Alibaba will
make it happen.”
That’s smart. Every
emerging market in the world lags behind China when it comes to
ecommerce, from the nuts and bolts logistics of delivering packages
to the high-end application of artificial intelligence to consumer
credit. Ma’s new mission is to roll out the Chinese model not in
America or Europe but everywhere else.
“Five years ago,”
he said at Davos, “Alibaba sent 80,000 packages to Russia and
Russia’s postal system crashed.Today 1m packages go from China to
Russia per day.” A similar process of expansion has taken Alibaba
to India and southeast Asia.
Until recently, I was
among those who assumed that the world would be divided up in the
following way: the titans of Silicon Valley — Facebook, Amazon,
Netflix and Google — would take everywhere except China, which
would be dominated by Chinese rivals Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent
(BAT). But what if it is BAT that takes everywhere except America?
The chatter at Davos
was that He Who Must Not Be Named had been put in his place by some
harsh words from the billionaire investor George Soros. But for me it
was Ma who offered the better riposte to “America first”. In
Verdi’s opera Attila, the Roman general Ezio says to Attila: “You
can have the universe, but leave Italy for me!” Perhaps
unwittingly, You Know Who just made a similar offer to Ma. “You
make America great again,” replies Jack, “but leave the universe
to me.”
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