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September 6, 2019 · 12:09

Focal points

I am in a slightly darker stage, I got there myself and I will get myself from it as well. The first issue is the United Nations,

The Yemeni Jam

I never considered that I would one day be ashamed of the existence of the United Nations. The article (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/05/australia-may-be-complicit-in-war-crimes-if-it-supports-saudi-led-coalition-in-yemen-un) gives us: “a Saudi-led coalition that has starved civilians, bombed hospitals and blocked humanitarian aid as tactics of war, may be complicit in war crimes“, I will not go any deeper into it, as I reported on this in my article: ‘Unemployed or UN employed?‘, (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2019/09/04/unemployed-or-un-employed/), so doing that again is just doubling up (there is more in the article as well). The media has not released that report yet and I will dig into that one deep the moment I can. Part of this problem was given to the people by the Human Rights Watch in an article giving us: “The May 2019 report of an independent investigation by a Guatemalan diplomat, Gert Rosenthal, raised serious concerns about the UN’s handling of the human rights crisis in Myanmar. The secretary-general should promptly carry out reforms to prevent what the report called the recurrence of the “systematic” failures and “obvious dysfunctional performance” and to ensure individual accountability for those failures“, the problem is larger, even as the articles are all about showing just how exposed the allies of Saudi Arabia are, the word ‘Iran’ is only seen twice in the entire article. There are a multitude of acts that Iran is involved in and they do not reach the media to the largest extent, the unmentioned actions by Hezbollah in Yemen are cause for further worry in all this. Even as we get ‘The UN leadership has taken an important step to learn from its failures in Myanmar‘, we see only a part; the failure of the UN is seen all over the Middle East. Yemen, Syria, Jordan are only three of the places where UN actions fall short, or better stated they fall far too short.

Let’s also see the larger issue, the UN needs more resources and it needs the ability to act, both are presently in short supply. It is important to see that the entire matter is larger than presented, there are more issues. This does not absolve the connected parties, but the accusations become one-sided. There was enough doubt on some of the accusations against Saudi Arabia, but not all accusations are without merit, they need to be looked into, yet in that same setting there is an abundance of issues on the opposing sides to the Saudi coalition, less than 10 hours ago houthi forces fired a ballistic missile into Saudi Arabia, it never got that far and crashed in the al-Safraa region, as well as in Saada (both Yemeni), yet that is a part that does not make the news, in addition, the established fact that houthi forces have no options to create the ballistic missiles imply that Iran is still delivering them and a lot of that had not been mentioned by the media, and as such I want to get my fingers on that UN Report (especially after seeing that essay from Agnès Callamard).

The Conveyance of GGGGG

We see that the US s still playing its trade war game and it found a new tool. That tool is named Poland. Now, let’s be fair, any nation can use whomever or whatever they desire, need or demand to get their business done and there is nothing out there that Huawei is the only player, because they are not.

So why did I call them a tool?

That part is seen in a news article that gives us: “It was signed by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who’s visiting Warsaw for a ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of World War II, and Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. “We believe that all countries must ensure that only trusted and reliable suppliers participate in our networks to protect them from unauthorized access or interference,” according to the declaration, which doesn’t single out China or any companies“, you do not send the Vice President to Poland to implement a 5G solution, you do not send that man to introduce new technology; this was done. The article is all about implied and accusation towards Huawei on “prevent the Chinese Communist Party from using subsidiaries like Huawei to gather intelligence“, which still has not been proven after a few years and the one issue from 2011 was settled and adjusted for. In addition to all this, Mike Pence comes across as an absolute hypocrite when we see “using subsidiaries like Huawei to gather intelligence“, whilst places like Facebook have been spreading data like a prostitute with an STD to anyone willing to listen and store data (Cambridge Analytics anyone?)

The issue becomes even more hilarious when we consider the source FierceWireless. There we get ““Polish counterintelligence have detected certain actions, which might have been an espionage nature”“, a quote given by Poland’s president Andrej Duda, Apart from Polish counterintelligence being too stupid, I meant untrained to shut down the FSB/entrepreneur silver acquirers in Gdynia being one example and those individuals have been active since before 2002. I am basically stating the speculative situation where Polish intelligence could not find a clue unless it was spoon-fed and is it my speculative view that Mike Pence fed the Polish president some CIA reports of a highly dubious nature. so whilst we see the operative ‘which might have been‘, there is a 87.332% likelihood (roughly) that Polish Intelligence can too often not differentiate between FSB, Chinese MSS, Polish Students and Russian Entrepreneurs (Russian Mafia is such an overused term). I have to admit that I have not bothered to look into Polish abilities after 2003, yet in those days SIGINT in Warsaw really did not add up to anywhere near the needed level they needed to be.

The problem for the US is not that they have 5G equipment; the issue is that it is too inferior at present. It is the price of iterative technology versus innovative technology (a fact I highlighted on numerous occasions) and Huawei has been the innovator for several years now. In this setting we see the accusations of US being nothing but a bully going up against a tech giant that has at present shipped over 200,000 base stations and the delay that some governments are creating (because they know not what they do) will hinder them as per 2021 a lot more than they realise. There is now an additional shift happening. There are early indicators that the Huawei offices in Saudi Arabia have been part of a larger group that are making progress on getting Pakistan on 5G using Huawei, even as the sources are unconfirmed (read: not super reliable), the stage that India now has it that the 3 year delay because of the Huawei issues would give them additional set-backs as well. Not to mention that certain new 5G IP that is openly for sale will also foster additional speed for Huawei in other ways. Huawei now has the created stage to directly instigate advancements to a global community of over 400 million small businesses whilst these players all get to have a larger stage on their own creation of awareness, visibility and marketing. That power directly to the business will leapfrog business in places like India faster and faster (the largest beneficiary when they get it), when that door opens places like IBM and Google will see a loss of revenue growth and a dip in their data soon thereafter, with the Princeton Digital Group (PDG) now in the stage of building their data centres in China and Singapore, more options will open up outside of the US, more important the connections that the joint venture has created with 21Vianet will change a lot more heads in the coming year. I doubt that the centre will be ready before the end of 2020, but there are larger clusters now being made ready outside of the US and Huawei will benefit a lot more than anyone else at present. In addition to that the Colocation Saudi Arabia Data Centres (19) as well as the Google Data Centre (upcoming) changes the cloud even further, with the US losing the monopoly it once had we see a shift and the consideration that data becomes a currency. That seems outlandish, but it is not, it is merely the next step and 5G is essential to that part of the racetrack, a racetrack that the US tried to grease, making it a slippery place to be and the consumer market is waking up to that danger. These elements are visible out there via a whole range of openly visible sources and published agreements.

In the end the conveyance of 5G is starting to get an additional pool of players that are openly out there growing business ventures and those ventures are not in the US. That what the US feared the most is now slowly becoming reality.

The larger concern is not merely these focal points, it is how they take resources away from places where focus needs to be, the actual and proven transgressions by Iran, even as it is removing more and more limits on their nuclear programme, we see Forbes giving us the part that matters to the US, or better to US corporations. the headline ‘War With Iran Would Be Disastrous And Enormously Costly‘ is true on both sides and even as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton are all for military actions (to some degree), we need to see two parts. The first is that corporations want a peaceful settlement and the media is not mentioning large issues with Iran on several levels, the second is that with a debt of well over $22 trillion ($22,500,000,000,000,000) there is no money for a costly war. The US is playing the paper tiger and the slowdown that they are creating in the US-China trade war is having a much larger issue, so the US is depending on tools to do the work for them and even as Poland is on their side, Greece is ready to embrace Huawei with 5G because of the economic momentum they gain. These are merely two of a much larger pool of issues, basically the US needs to fight a war on two fronts (China and Iran) whilst they are out of money, options and technology, a setting that seemingly implies a war but without soldiers and without weapons. It is funny, but this reminds me of a Star Trek episode from 1967 called A Taste of Armageddon.

There the two players have decided on a virtual war to keep their cultural heritage safe. The problem is that both need to agree on the rules, so we see in the translated reality a UN SC versus UNIFIL setting. The United States Security Council intervenes when two parties agree (MFO), the United Nations intervene when two parties disagree (UNIFIL). I personally was in the first force in 1982 (Sinai). In this game we see the US trying to play a virtual game, whilst the evidence is not there, so they rely on tools. In addition this virtual game is not played because China and Iran both disagree on matters and the US cannot afford to send troops and wage a super expensive war.

All elements come to blow in the two given focal points, so until the other players are willing to deal with Iran, there will be no action leaving the pressure on Saudi Arabia, the UAE with Yemen in the middle. Until the US gives actual and factual evidence the 5G stage is moving towards China (Huawei) more and more and all those who support the US will see a slowdown on their future economies and it making more governments reconsidering the Huawei solution. It is optionally seen as a war on two fronts (US vs Iran and China) as well as two dimensions (economy and technology) whilst at present it is almost a given that the US will lose both of them.

The second part was given by the South China Morning Post in July when they reported ‘Nearly 60 per cent of Huawei’s 50 5G contracts are from Europe‘, 28 out of 50 chose Huawei. All in all there is a tactical problem in the US and it is getting worse, the moment that they act against Iran too late is the day that whomever is in the Oval office will have to publicly admit that they would decide to signing an economic trade agreement with Iran. I wonder how Israel and Saudi Arabia will react that day, because it will redefine a lot of global lines that day.

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Tagged as 21Vianet, Andrej Duda, Cambridge Analytics, China, Colocation Saudi Arabia Data Centres, Facebook, FierceWireless, FSB, google, Greece, Huawei, IBM, India, Iran, Israel, John Bolton, Mateusz Morawiecki, MFO, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, MSS, National Security Advisor, Pakistan, Poland, Polish counterintelligence, Princeton Digital Group, Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State, SIGINT, South China Morning Post, UAE, UN SC, Uniffil, United Nations, United States Security Council, US, Yemen

September 2, 2019 · 11:23

Funny Money, Amusing Thickheads

There are two issues and they do not link, but they are supportive of one another. I made notice of this situation 5 months ago in my article (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2019/04/27/then-the-hard/) called ‘Then the hard‘, in the article I give “Now we get to the part where the €2.5 trillion mark matters, as the ECB is trying to find new ways to convince others that the continued provision of stimulus to the economy matters“, as I see it the stimulus protects banks, makes them more powerful, it allows for political stupidity, yet the economy has not been saved (not in the two attempts), it has not been jump started, and it has not been a positive impact for its citizens, merely the industrial executives and the rich CEO’s (OK, that was a more biased view from yours truly, the writer).

As Bloomberg gave us on Saturday (at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-31/more-ecb-officials-pile-into-stimulus-debate-as-economy-wilts) ‘More ECB Officials Pile Into Stimulus Debate as Economy Wilts‘, and when we see: “the ECB should keep all options on the table to reinvigorate inflation and growth, including a relaunch of quantitative easing“, it is at that point that the EU citizens are getting screwed (again), more debt (again) and no resolution because the ECB is about the gravy train and not about resolutions. Yes that same article gives opposing voices, yet I would not be surprised that (by a narrow margin) the stimulus people win. This is why Brexit was so important!

In the end the retirees get hammered for those debts, the ECB officials have too fat wallets to care. At this point the debts have surpassed €3,000,000,000,000 and it seems that the end is nowhere near, yet the stage of bankruptcy is there. Even at 0.1% (no debt interest is ever that low) implies that the interest is €3 billion a year. A payment that is way beyond the budgets of any of the EU nations, payment due every year whilst the bulk of them have overextended themselves with budgets that should have been shrunk by well over 5%, so pretty much all the EU nations are running an economic deficit whilst the Mario Draghi Posse is handing out more money, printed money, for a lack of a better term funny money.

What the ECB is not telling anyone that most stimulus options fall flat when the UK officially leaves the EU that is the despair there. Their options melt away when the UK is out and that is why everyone is suddenly in a panic, that is why we get these moronic acts and even UK Labour is all about remain now. And with that part we move to the second part of this.

Now we get to the Chief of Grief, the Duke of Fluke, the one and only real loser in history (as I personally see it) Jeremy Corbyn. When we see headlines like ‘No-deal Brexit: Jeremy Corbyn vows to ‘pull Britain back from the brink’‘, or ‘Final sovereignty on Brexit must rest with the people‘ we see the idiot he is. There was a referendum, there was a voice and Brexit won, the issues with the ECB shows us that we are a lot better outside then inside that mess. There is no brink of Brexit, there is an economic mess and we will enter a stage of recession, anyone telling you that it can be presented is lying to you, or they are wielding massive amounts of money, amounts that no one has. This has been shown by people more intelligent than me and by people with actual economic degrees; they all are on the ‘remain’ fence, merely because it butters their bread. It gets worse when we see that the Hysterical Remain groups that have become violent, abusive and out of control, more important, to a larger degree the media isn’t even covering it. How is that for balanced information?

I have heard one or two actual ‘remainers’ who made a really good case, yet in the end, they have no control over the ECB and the ECB is in Europe at present the great evil. What they claim is good for Europe is to a much larger extent merely good for big business. When we look at those companies leaving the UK, these are all companies hiding behind taxation options, or facilitating to really large players and to some degree that is fine, but the ECB forgot that the well over 150 million small business owners see nothing of any of that and more important, they will see the impact of the 3 trillion euro of debt that the ECB created, things are that much out of whack and I do not get why people accept the presented BS that people like Jeremy Corbyn have been presenting to the masses. I am aware and I also believe that Brexit had its own waves of BS presenters. I made up my own mind and for the most I was leaning towards Remain, Mark Carney (the Marky Mark of the British bank) and especially his speech to the House of Lords was the setting of that stage. Yet he too had one flaw (if you want to call it that), there was no controlling the ECB and they are out again making some lame excuse on the essential economic need for more stimulus, whilst we already know now that it will not save the economy and they are willing to wager another trillion euro and spend it up front.

These people are not held accountable in any way and I say: ‘Enough is enough!‘ The UK is better off by itself steering the economic waters as it had done for centuries. Oh, I almost forgot the second part on sovereignty, sovereignty does not rest with the people, it rests in Buckingham Palace with HRH Queen Elisabeth II. There was a referendum and the Brexit group with a little over 51% won. And to those people still in doubt, you only have yourself to blame with the mess you are creating. There were 46 million votes, representing a 72% group, so 28% did not even bother to vote! Those 13 million votes were invalid straight of the bat, with only 25,000 invalid or blank votes we see no real impact, it they were all remain voted it would not have mattered. When you consider all this and you see the hooligan masses being remain people, we see two parts, the first is that they are moronic (worthy of UK Labour), yet the larger issue is that a lot are in anger because they are not getting properly informed. Stories like: ‘UK government officials told the food industry that supplies of liquid egg could run out in a no-deal Brexit‘, yet the operative word is ‘could‘ we just do not know, and not knowing is adamant in a lot of this, yet the people have faced two years of fear mongering, all large consortiums that see a danger to their margins, not the margins of the shop, the margins to executives and their bonuses, and the people are eating the fear hook, line and sinker. There will be actual issues, but the foundation of all this is that this has never happened before and the EU and the ECB did this to themselves. We all forget how this started, this all started when Greece in 2009 had misrepresented itself and we saw issue after issue, debt after debt and the politicians that caused it merely walked away. Then we were told stories on how Greece might be evicted from the EU, the news was all over that yet the truth was that we were misled (or is that made Miss Led?) The Guardian (in 2015) gave us: “As Athens will be unable to satisfy its financial obligations after a default, many hardliners expect Greece to leave the Eurozone, and printing as much neo-drachma as necessary. Some see this as the only solution to the Greek crisis: it would allow Greece to devalue its new currency, supposedly making the country competitive and resulting in economic growth and the ability to repay its debt“, in addition we get: “while only article 50 of the EU treaty regulates how a state can leave the union. And a mechanism for leaving only the Eurozone or for expulsion even has not been provided for at all“, basically the stupidity of the EU was that they stated that every member will always be up front and do what must be done, which was deceptive in its own rights. So a group that is merely inclusive and under stringent rules can they leave, yet in addition other sources gave us that NO MEMBER can be expelled. This is called a Corporatocracy, not a democracy. Corporations decide on what happens and that is what we basically see at present. The problem here is that any Corporatocracy will limit its actions towards enablers and consumers; the rest is pretty much screwed. In a monarchy all citizens matter and the people do not seem to be able to grasp that, the UK (and the Netherlands, as well as Sweden, Belgium and so on are monarchies within a Corporatocracy and that is a very different setting, that stage can only be made profitable where debts are soaring and the banks not the government decide where you can be at, a situation we see all over Europe. this is not new, I did not invent it, other voices going back to 2014 say pretty much the same thing, I merely have a lot more data available at present. The media relies on advertisement money from any Corporatocracy, so you cannot expect them to actually inform you, it is a double edged blade and both sides are pointed at YOUR guts, it is that detrimental a situation.

So as Greece made a few issues clear in the wrong way, people like Nigel Farage went with the notion of ‘Better Out than in‘, I agree with him, yet I remained on the fence for the longest of times. It was the second ECB stimulus who would put us so much deeper in debt that got me across. The first stimulus was fine, it was an option and even as it did not work out, it gave Europe time, yet the second one the best we could hope for was time and that is where the problem started and now as stimulus 3 is on the table the setting is too unacceptable, the UK needs to get out and fast, deal or not.

Let’s not make a fairy tale, this will not be a nice time and things will get worse for a little while, anyone telling you different is lying to you. The issue is that with the ropes cut the EU cannot force debts on the UK to the degree it is doing now, more important the UK gets to make a few other choices and it will down the road (3-4 years) turn the economy in something stronger. It will result in an actual better quality of life over time, but it will not be immediate. This is why the ties and economic options with players like Huawei (5G), nations like Saudi Arabia (all kinds of goods) and a few other players become important (optionally India with generic medication). Anyone with the misguided notion that Human Rights are the optimal route better stay at home. If Human Rights were an actual power there would be no age discrimination, there would be actual better (and more) housing and there would be a better social security. All missing and mostly because in a Corporatocracy, corporations are largely tax exempt, exactly what we see today. In that stage we now see the rumblings, even as players like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and others are all making noises on leaving, they do so at the risk of losing 69 million consumers. Facebook is truly global, so is Google to the largest extent, yet for Apple we get Huawei, ASUS and HP, Amazon leaving would give the people a slimmer HMV and optionally small businesses come back (my preferred solution), and even as corporations are shouting, screaming, streaming and threatening, they all realise that you cannot walk away from 69 million consumers. Not when they need to share the smaller EU pool with 3-4 competitors at every corner. That is the part we all forgot, consumer power is actually power and we listened to the likes of Jeremy Corbyn for far too long. To be honest, I never thought that it would be possible to be more dim than Nick Clegg (LIBDEMS), yet I was wrong, Jeremy Corbyn pulled it off nicely. I am not stating that Boris Johnson is without flaws (his barber being the obvious one). I am stating that the UK has been in a dangerous position for far too long and as long as the ECB does the way it does it, the danger stays, getting away from that danger is an immediate need at present.

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Tagged as Amazon, Apple, Asus, Belgium, bloomberg, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Corporatocracy, democracy, ECB, Eu, Facebook, google, Greece, HMV, House of lords, HP, Huawei, Human rights, Jeremy Corbyn, LibDems, Mario Draghi, Mark Carney, Monarchy, Netherlands, Nick Clegg, Nigel Farage, Remain, Saudi Arabia, stimulus, Sweden, the Guardian, UK, UK Labour

September 1, 2019 · 13:55

Change is coming

Well, actually change is always coming, some in the form we know, some innovative new and sometimes change is of a very different variety. We already knew that the Americans weren’t too bright when it comes to trade wars, and the one that is getting fuelled here is definitely a wrong one. Yet it is not about that trade war and it is not in the billions of impact that the war will have on consumers. There is a second war brewing. One that Europe and America were not ready for, one they did not prepare for. It is a new armistice race, they were not prepared because it is not the high technology they usually deal with, it came from the lower regions. Yet let that not underestimate the stage. Two players in that stage are Fabrique Nationale Herstal, established in 1889. Less than a 60 years later They would produce the FN FAL, a rifle used in over 90 countries, in that same year the final push was made for the FN MAG, use in over 80 countries. These weapons are even today lethal and can go up against the most modern side arms. One factory created two behemoth successes, merely two of dozens of weapons that are regarded as a top quality arms. Yet, it is not about FN Herstal. It is neither about the long term number one Heckler and Koch was founded after WW2 and soon became a success story in several fields surpassing FN Herstal, yet these two are not facing a new competitor. Both FN and HK face a rather troublesome future. You see, they are stopped by all these political Human rights laws and whilst we get the need for Human Rights, the people in there seem to have a view so altruistic that it also kills commerce.

Number three is delighted, SAMI, or in its full name the Saudi Arabian Military Industries, is about to equal and surpass in less than half the time that the previous two required to get established. All the data on patents, technology and deals with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and General Dynamics, as well as partnerships with Thales and CMI Defence opens new doors, doors the other two were barred from. SAMI is now in a position to surpass both and become bigger then the two earlier mentioned combined. In 2017 SAMI got Andreas Schwer (former boss of Rheinmetall AG) and the man has not been sitting still. At the same steps we see Neom growing, we see the mandate of SAMI to create 40,000 jobs by 2030 and it seems that SAMI is ahead of that curve too. With all the issues playing in Asia, Africa and Latin America SAMI has created the stage where they can outbid and surpass all expectations from the buying companies. It goes beyond the assembly of 150 Lockheed Martin Blackhawk helicopters. With the partnership with Navantia less than a year ago, we see the additional growth sectors in Latin America pop up, yes, it is all new, it is all change, but not the change you would hope for. We might see shunning of arms in America, but it remains a large export business, one that is now getting pushed to the side by the Saudi Arabian Military Industry, and it is not stopping. As the links with Navantia matures, we see the option to cater to the needs of coast guards on several national levels and these are not the small players. Some might have noticed the small mention of ‘Offshore Patrol Vessels Market 2024: New Business Opportunities for Manufactures to Upsurge in Coming Years‘, yet Navantia and therefor SAMI are in the thick of that part of the equation, growing faster than anyone took notice of. We might look towards the Dutch Damen, Australian Austal and Turkish Dearsan, yet they all have the same flaw ‘each player can deliver few numbers of OPV‘, Neom city changes that premise as it has a massive chunk of red sea at their disposal, basically SAMI has the option of building space well over 5 times the combined spaces that Damen, Spanish Navantia and Dearsan combined have. It changes the equation a fair bit. It sets a different market premise; it took slow growth of 130 years for FN Herstal to get where they are now. It takes SAMI 12-15 years to get that same stage, more important it seems that tall the contracts and memorandums out there gives SAMI a much larger option to grow and more important a lot more industry to bring home through export, another promise made by Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud delivered in advance of the date he wanted it to be. CEO’s and goal driven executives all set in a stage to exceed expectations. It might be fuelled by oil, but more important it is fuelled to success whilst the EU is making more and more issues on exporting all kinds of goods and the US – China trade wars are not helping. In addition the news quotes like “Europe must develop a much stronger common approach to the new 5G technology to make itself less vulnerable to security risks“, which sounds nice, but I already saw two elements they overlooked and my IP pushed a solution, a solution they are not ready for and seemingly Google is less and less ready for making Huawei the only remaining player and Saudi Arabia has a lovely deal in place. You see, that premise of 5G with ‘to make itself less vulnerable to security risks‘ requires 5G to be firmly in place and whilst we see delay after delay Saudi Arabia keeps pushing communication and other solutions forward implying that they are setting a much larger stage creating new technologies for other regions and in that the other players forgot one interesting side effect. Any stage of armistice and war requires communications to be upgraded and Saudi Arabia can deliver that too. It is there where we see a larger change and a larger group of options for Saudi Arabia. Walid Abukhaled, CEO of global defense and aerospace corporation Northrop Grumman has created a stage that is approaching a global one all from the comfort of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and whilst the rest is bickering over scraps of food form the European table we see an entire industry growing silently day by day to almost exponential proportions. An interesting part that can be verified on several levels and the news and the European media remain oblivious to that part.

The Arab News states that he ‘aims to export weapons‘, I believe that SAMI has progressed a lot further, as I see it they are almost ready to implement defense solutions on a global scale, and this includes defense systems to several nations that Europe refuses to talk to for whatever reason. This goes beyond what we see in the Arab News (at https://www.arabnews.com/node/1547956), it goes beyond ‘electronic warfare and cybersecurity‘; it goes beyond the mere operational stage, beyond the educational and implementation stage. Together with General Authority for Military Industries (GAMI) they have created a new wave on a much larger scale than we have seen before.

Good business is where you find it and it seems that Walid Abukhaled is currently finding it everywhere.

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Tagged as 5G, Andreas Schwer, Arab News, Austal, Boeing, CMI Defence, Cybersecurity, Damen, Dearsan, electronic warfare, Fabrique National Herstal, FN, GAMI, General Dynamics, google, Heckler & Koch, HK, Huawei, Lockheed Martin, Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud, Navantia, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon, Rheinmetall AG, SAMI, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabian Military Industries, Thales, Walid Abukhaled

August 21, 2019 · 13:47

Premise towards boredom

Yesterday’s article in the Guardian by Alex Hern is a bit of a wakeup call. When I re-read the article I start to agree with him more and more. As a gamer, RPG’s have been my life. This started in the old days with the Ultima series by Richard Garriott on CBM-64. The first full game experience was the third installment. On the CBM-64, the quality was a little less then you see now, but the entire experience was amazing. This game made me addicted to RPG’s for life and Ultima 4 made matters worse for me. I was lucky; some RPG’s will never have the amazing depth that the Ultima series offered, not for at least a decade.

Yet Alex asks the important question: ‘are role-playing games getting too predictable?‘ When I sat down I did exactly that, try to avoid predictability. In my version of TESVI I was at all times considering replayability. As such the creation required sidesteps, not to be reflectively repetitive, but to set the stage of 100 missions at least twice over, so you did not play two versions of a mission, but two very different missions. It allowed for the market value of a game to remain high, whilst at the same time give other players something to think about. I had been there. I must have played Oblivion 3-4 times all the way through the end. Yet at heart it remained repetitive, so my design was the thwart that nuisance. Skyrim was a little the same in many ways, and Skyrim even as it outperformed Oblivion by a large amount had a few issues, some slightly terminal, but with a game that large it is almost unavoidable (I did say almost). So if we open The Elder Scrolls to number 6 a lot more was required, and as I set the model in play (not the one Bethesda is releasing) I remained dedicated to what Bethesda will offer, because so far they have not disappointed me (this is NOT about Fallout 76). So as we see the push towards the outer Worlds, we are given: “In this world, where mega corporations are starting to take over alien planets, you can act like a hero, an opportunistic mercenary, or a total idiot. The writing is sharp, snappy and funny, the world exciting and vibrant, and there’s a classic New Vegas interplay between factions of characters, any of whom the player can help or hinder“, I am not questioning, not judging, and not placing a verdict. I await the final result that is open for review and purchase. The writer (at https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/aug/20/from-cyberpunk-2077-to-the-outer-worlds-are-role-playing-games-getting-too-predictable) is giving us a lot more. So when the article ends with: “But their genre needs its Breath of the Wild moment: an outsider to toss out the conventions, and build something beautiful from what is left. Surely choosing between shooting, stealthing or sweet talking can’t be the only options that the next generation of virtual worlds have to offer“, I find myself agreeing with him to the part that games (at times) need more. Yet is that in part the limitation of an RPG? What if we take another look at the Ultima range? Ultima 7, the Black Gate is one of the few games that EVER received a 100% rating from me (on PC). In that time (1992) that game surpassed anything else, and others never came close to what The Black Gate offered. So when we see the part ‘shooting, stealthing or sweet talking‘, we need to consider alternatives. There was the option of getting a job (so not shooting and killing), stealing (stealthily not working), and Retail industry (not sweet talking). In part we saw the retail on Skyrim by selling (just like in Oblivion), in Fable 2 and 3 we see the option of doing jobs and gaining money that way, even buying the place and getting the revenue, so we have seen it (almost) all. Yet what happens, when the world is truly a lot larger? What happens when your impact is seen as one of thousands creating commerce and in that way create price fluctuations? What if the game needs to be set to the larger premise? To get one part right, and through the linked limitations create a new system of balances to get the whole environment correct? Make the game impact seen through the changes that not just you create. As a member of the thieves guild you can never be a companion, or with the fighter guild or the Mages guild. So what happens when we take a much larger bite out of the apple of gaming and actually set the apple to be an actual much larger play of impact? The apple of knowledge (Eden), the golden apple (Olympus) and the apple of immortality (Asgard), set the stage where you can merely choose one of them, creating a tripod where one leg is rigid and the other two vary to create some form of balance.

What if one choice demolishes the others and through that path offer 300% more? There is still the challenge of making all missions decently unique and challenging, and if you realise that the Skyrim guide is over 1100 pages, we are facing a serious clambake, not a mere picnic. It was the largest stage setting, so whatever I considered to be the design of TESVI, needed to be able to surpass that, and I mean by no less than 20%.

Now, this does not mean that boredom will not set in, the biggest issue with any RPG is the danger of grinding, and preventing that is a first. Most games have become decently adept in minimising that risk, yet it is not zero, even my version would not have zero grinding, so the need to remain long term appealing is essential. The game does not stop there. Now that the gamers soon get Google and Apple with streaming gaming, the game changes even more and finding original content in any RPG game is the essential search for every gaming junk (I am proudly part of that family), so basically the ante is upped by a fair bit. It becomes even more impressing as I look to more challenge and the Skyrim guide has 350 quests, which implies that in my book, I will need close to 800 missions to keep head of the curve and in all this, anyone getting the range of 800 quests is less interactive in what we see and the mountain of work we look up to. It also requires very different IP to continue on a higher level of gaming.
The second level of grinding is often the places where things are found. In many situations we needed to get to the same places (shouts) and we needed to find essential hardware, however if the word wall did not contain Kyne’s Peace, but a random shout? In addition, what happens when you influence the entire game by making another choice as to where the Fighters Guild, the Thieves Guild, the Dark Brotherhood and the clan of Minimarco is placed (Necromancers), more important when you shape the game as you play and the impact is seen on a larger scale. A stage where the trade route from Skingrad, via Arenthia, to Riverhold, Orcrest, Rimmen and Bravil takes another step as the Fighters guild is placed in Riverhold and not in Rimmen, these are all choices that shape a world you live in. Consider the real (non-virtual) world if not Brussels, but Paris had become the centre of the EU, it would massively impact Belgium economy negatively and France’s economy positively, the direct aftermath is that living in Paris would be almost impossible, cause and effect in play. That same setting might be applied to gaming. Where the aggregation of the lowest and highest 1,000 gamers sets the parameters of your RPG game. a game not set in stone, but in motion as 2,000 players are not set to the average, but on the outliers of the high and the low players, a game that is shaped by all as the economic footprint changes. Yet to prevent deal seekers, we make time a much more definite in any RPG game.

As the measure evolves over time, other players become part of the low and the lower high end. A game now in flux, no longer rigid and confined. Add to that that they all might have issues on some of the resurrection choices and we get an entirely new path towards gaming. Boredom can only start to set in when the game is fixed, so we start by setting change to the game itself. A second choice is to add a management part, not just overall, but a specific super large quest, where you cannot complete the quest, but you provide the options for the quest. I can no longer sneak in like William Tell grasping apples, now we create a workforce working the field and still we are involved to maximise what is possible. Yes, we need virtual worlds that have more and differences to offer, but the best option is allowing evolution in ways that we cannot set, we might be able to influence them towards 6%, impacting but not overwhelming. That too allows for a game to be enjoyed again and again. That is the kind of RPG all RPG players want and yet up to now, no one delivered that option, it is surprising and perhaps it will be the cornerstone of any RPG, the amount that cannot be predicted, for all those coming from the very bottom of the maze and interesting challenge to face.

For now we await The Outer Worlds and Cyberpunk 2077 to make it into the family of RPG fanatics, yet we too await the next Elder Scrolls, and who know, perhaps my idea makes it into The Elder Scrolls VII, as a gamer I can only hope to be given the chance to change the game for thousands of RPG lovers in a new never seen before direction. Even as I accept that this is almost not possible and I would settle for a ‘novel’ place in new original gaming, we need to see that it all has been done before, well, it almost all has been done before. Yet so far, the idea’s I had have not popped up anywhere, so I am sitting pretty for now.

I actually do not care whether someone else finds them and implements them; it means new and original gaming, the ultimate rush for an RPG gamer, preferably additions done to a game that the gamer loves. So Alex Hern is correct and the first step in avoiding all this is to make sure that we take a non Ubisoft approach to gaming, I have faith that Bethesda can do that, they might have missed the ball with Fallout 76, but still, they took it in a direction that had not been done before. Let’s not forget that before Nintendo gave us the Switch, we were given the WiiU. Everyone gets to have a bad day and when we realise that Bethesda have given us winners from 2002 onwards, over a dozen clear winners in 16 years, the existence of one less popular title (Fallout 76) with so many winners is not an issue at all, in Bethesda we trust, the rest can take a number and await their turn with the global RPG population.

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Tagged as Apple, Bethesda, Brussels, Eu, google, Oblivion, Paris, Richard Garriott, Skyrim, TES, the Elder Scrolls, Ultima 3, Ultima 7, Ultma 4

August 19, 2019 · 11:44

Marketing Deceptive Concepts

We are all in the lane of what is coming; the problem is that what is coming is set on the E40, the longest European highway going from Calais all the way to Kazakhstan (Ridder). So as we depart from Ridder, trying to get to Calais on this AI highway, we need to consider that at present we only got past the first 100 kilometres of a trip that will be 8,000 kilometres long and we are not driving a Aston Martin, not even a Lada, we are traversing this in a 1908 Model T, giving a much clearer indication that this trip will take years (read: a decade at the very least) at best. To be quite honest, as technology goes, we are nowhere near AI, true AI. It will take the largest players (Google & IBM) decades to get to the real AI part, and only when computers become more technically savvy and a lot faster. As such I do not see the reason for people and companies like RACGP to give us: ‘AI is coming to healthcare – and it’s here to help‘, with the quote: “real promise – of artificial intelligence in healthcare“, yet we remain fair. Dr Martin Seneviratne stays faithful when he gives us: “we’re far away from that, to be honest” and he is correct. Yet the stage is there where we see: “In this article we are listing top 15 artificial intelligence apps for android and iOS users“, as well as “an Indian start-up claiming to have built an artificial intelligence-assisted app development platform, is not in fact using AI“. It is all BS (read: Hogwash), there is no such thing as AI, it is theoretical, conceptual at best, the real deal is at least a decade away. It reminds me of some Sales Dumbo I had to deal with on how cloud computing was it bees knees. When I mentioned that there is no thing like a cloud, it is merely someone else’s computer, I was the one who did not comprehend it (in the end I was right, and he (read: it) was not). Yes, I am aware of the ZDNet article (at https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-saying-the-cloud-is-just-someone-elses-computer-because-its-not/). We get it, it is about scalability and the scale of the cloud is huge, but still, it is a server center that is owned by someone else, and the location of that server is equally important in the data laws we see today. Because the moment China launches its own commercial cloud system, the Americans will ‘suddenly’ come with issues like cloud locations and how the Chinese government can look into every cloud account. I was not belittling anything, merely making sure that we keep focus on terms used (and awareness is often larger than anyone considers). It is the monitoring, hacked data and more important lost data. The cloud comes with all kinds of marketing hypes, but informing on the scope and warning of the dangers that poor passwords bring is often not seen.

So when we get to the Verge where we see: “The company was sued earlier this year by its chief business officer, Robert Holdheim, who claims the company is exaggerating its AI abilities to get the funding it needed to actually work on the technology. According to Holdheim, Duggal “was telling investors that Engineer.ai was 80% done with developing a product that, in truth, he had barely even begun to develop“, we see the larger deception and we also see a lack of actions by governments to a much larger degree, apparently white collar deception is OK in their books.

So when we get back to the RACG (at https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/professional/ai-is-coming-to-healthcare-and-it-s-here-to-help) where we see: “‘Documentation is a constant issue, and so is having a computer separating you and the patient,’ Dr Seneviratne said. ‘The dream of this AI revolution is that it helps with the parts of medicine doctors and patients don’t like, creates a safety net for ensuring quality across the board, and gives clinicians more time to be with their patients.’“, my mind goes back 47 months, 12 days and 14.1 hours (roughly) when I designed the concept of what could be the Google Tome (I concluded that the iTome could never become a reality in an technological iterative pushed corporation), a device that would take case of part of it and help the UK NHS to get a handle on their paper mess and red tape. The device would also be a great solution for places like Scandinavia where the rural population is all over the place. There was one tiny setback, it required 5G, it was the only way to get it to work to the degree it did and 5G was nowhere near ready to the stage that places like the NHS, GP’s and clinics could be upgraded. We are still 1-2 years away, but the Google Tome would be a game changer as it worked on a very different IP. Apple would take a decently large hit as I remembered some original parts from before the PowerMac and Apple actually had the inside track, with today’s iPad they could have ruled, but in the last two years they became a mere iterative needy toddler, taking them out of the game. both IBM and Huawei are not ready for this leap giving Google an actual first position with no chance of any number two catching up for close to half a decade. My solution was not AI based, it was based on the realistic foundation of NHS administrations and to see where the obstructions were. Instead of making some political never working one system (UK Parliament spend £11.2 billion learning that it did not work), my path was to upgrade all the elements and give a new definition to speed, not the one that is founded, for downloading, but a new on access protocol that emphasises on security and data safety. In fact, the results would in theory get to the right physician 30%-60% faster. Anyone who waited for results in an NHS location can tell you what a game changer that is.

And none of this touches the 5G IP I created three years later.

But that is not what it is about, it is about the marketing ploys we are confronted with and for the most, the media greedily uses that hyped term to get traction with people, clicks and awareness, the information is less and less a concern to the larger group of media (or so it seems). The one that I got confronted with yesterday is the one that set it off. A friend (Tom Breur) wrote an excellent piece regarding Data Democracy (at https://tombreur.wordpress.com/2019/08/13/what-does-data-democracy-stand-for/). Yet in data, as I personally see it, there is no real democracy, it can be dictatorial, it can be feudal, it can even be tyrannical, but it is never democratic, you do not get a vote in that hierarchy, that is the way with data and it is the researcher who can redefine you through giving you a weight of 1 (or lower) or disregard you as inconsequential as grouping you with other user missing points of non interest. The respondent never had a voice in the matter negating the entire democracy part.

This setting was most likely started by media with their claims of “Big data’s threat to democracy becoming global problem“, and there the delusion started. Big data is never about democracy and democracy is not about data, it is about applied wisdom, they do not correlate and are even less likely one and the same. It becomes even more entertaining when we (at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/labour-will-ban-big-money-buying-democracy) see: “Labour will ban big money from ‘buying up democracy’“, it is entertaining and hilarious as this has been happening well over a century, long before there was a silicon based economy (not talking about boobies here). When we get: “Last November Mr Johnson was flown to New York and was paid £94,507.85 for a two-hour speech at the multibillion-dollar hedge fund company Golden Tree Asset Management“, we can argue that he was merely doing a job he was allowed to do, and that is not impeding democracy, is it? And when we see: “We are funded by workers through their trade unions and small donations, averaging just £22 in the last general election“, how much support did you give the people who voted for UK Labour without a donation? And when we see the Washington Post give us: “Data shows that an overwhelming majority of Africans believe that democracy remains the best form of government“, I might not disagree with that, yet the issue is not agreeing and disagreeing, it is the deceptive model of awareness creation that big business allows for when they buy the identities on Facebook by millions and target them with political advertisement. Even as Senators like Ron Wyden are calling to ban that, he knows he is fighting a lost war. Also, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he is watching proven CIA tactics being deployed via Facebook and he knows how efficient those can be, it is a game only the rich can play. He even hides behind “I’d rather have them do it voluntarily than requiring a law“, because there is no way that they can pass that law in time and even then there will be a dozen loopholes to circumvent the law passed via the first amendment.

It is all due to the marketing we allowed from the very beginning. there was no stop to the media, the hold on awareness versus deceptive is sketchy at best and now that there is a whole slew of iterations coming forward we see more and more deceptive conduct, yet nothing is done, there are attempts, but they are feeble at best. That evidence is seen when we consider Engineer.ai and its founder & CEO, Sachin Dev Duggal. We see the news in the Wall Street Journal as well as the Verge, yet less than 3 days ago that person won the Serial Entrepreneur award, so it seems that the players are all OK with deceptive conduct. Yet I remain optimistic, I merely have to wait to see this blow up in the faces of those sales driven CEO’s and VP’s to see that their failure gave them months of reprieve and every documented event merely sets the stage for my IP in a much more powerful way.

We need to consider that when it comes to creating awareness, the media is still accountable to shareholders, stake holders and advertisers, as such there are a lot of issues in the IT field, personally in light of recent events the do’s and don’ts of Sachin Dev Duggal take the cake. Don’t take my word for it, merely look at the Wall Street Journal (at https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-startup-boom-raises-questions-of-exaggerated-tech-savvy-11565775004) and consider how the award two days later was still handed to Sachin Dev Duggal. Even as the man ‘hides’ behind ‘human-assisted AI‘, and when we look at the quote: “it uses artificial-intelligence technology to largely automate the development of mobile apps, but several current and former employees say the company exaggerates its AI capabilities to attract customers and investors“, we need to ask a whole range of questions, none of those are found anywhere. I am not raining on the man’s parade, but clearly no one else is either. I wonder how many righteous participators at that entrepreneurial award feel left out in the cold, a fair question if I say so.

I merely look at the marketing part of it all, when I look into the direct impact, that some marketing hypes are giving us, I tend to wonder if the need was really awareness, or confusion that was behind the creation of the hype. It is sad but that is more and more often the need to wonder when any form of media gets involved.

It is a sad evolution in the age of information as it has been for some time now.

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Tagged as China, CIA, Data Democracy, Engineer.ai, google, Google Tome, Huawei, iTome, Macintosh, Martin Seneviratne, NHS, RACGP, RISC, Robert Holdheim, Ron Wyden, Sachin Dev Duggal, Senator Ron Wyden, Serial Entrepreneur award, UK, Wall Street Journal, ZDNet

August 16, 2019 · 12:13

The slammer got slammed

There is nothing so rewarding as the moment you realise that you get to slam the door on those slamming the door on you. It is an innate feeling that is in the core of all of us. It is more powerful than getting the drop on your boss or CEO with an overwhelming amount of narcissism and the overbearing feeling towards the need of being some dominant / dominatrix figure (at that point they become merely a figurine).

I made several references over the course of 2018 that this was coming, the stronger one in May 2018 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2018/05/05/milestones/) where I made the reference: “the EU was never about everyone agreeing on everything and the economic setting that requires that to happen at present is also making the dangers of waves that sinks the barge called EU. Now, that seems like an exaggeration, but when you realise that the German anchor is the only one giving stability, you can see the dangers the EU faces and more important, the dangers of no reserves and an utter lack to keep proper budgets in place, a setting now in more danger for the reasons that I gave supported by the economic views of many others. I believe some are downplaying the impact, yet when we realise that EVERY European Union government is downplaying the economic impact (as every nation always wants to look as good as possible, which is a PowerPoint setting of the human ago) we get a much more dangerous setting“. The article ‘Milestones‘ has more, it also has references to the AfD (Alternative for Germany), and even as we see in the Financial Times (at https://www.ft.com/content/d695fff8-b838-11e9-96bd-8e884d3ea203) “It is a happy hunting-ground for the AfD: if polls are accurate, it could emerge as the most popular party in regional elections on September 1, even beating the left-of-centre Social Democrats which have governed this corner of East Germany since reunification in 1990. Two other eastern regions, Saxony and Thuringia, are also choosing new parliaments this autumn and, as in Brandenburg, the AfD is set to make big gains. That is a major problem for the eastern political elite“, I believe that this powerful eastern political elite is part of causing the headline ‘Germany: AfD surge threatened by party disunity‘, they are that scared at present. The gains cannot be stopped not to the degree some elitists are vouching for; the best that they can hope for is derailing them from becoming the majority, which is actually a political war that is allowed. The question becomes will it work?

We are 2-3 weeks away from finding out.

CNN gave us less than 2 days ago: ‘5 of the world’s biggest economies are at risk of recession‘ (at https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/14/economy/recession-risk-economies/index.html), it is a huge part because the impact matters. Under Mario Draghi and his bond buying program, there are no reserves left, so the impact towards recession is about to get real. The shift in quality of life makes the consumer spending tactic an instant non option.

Yet, it all comes down to the Washington Post who (at https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/14/stocks-tank-another-recession-warning-surfaces) gives us: ‘Stocks losses deepen as a key recession warning surfaces‘. It is here that we get: “after a reliable predictor of looming recessions flashed for the first time since the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 800 points, or about 3 percent, and has lost close to 7 percent over the past three weeks. Two of the world’s largest economies, Germany and the United Kingdom, appear to be contracting even as the latter forges ahead with plans to leave the European Union. Growth also has slowed in China, which is in a bitter trade feud with the United States. Meanwhile, Argentina’s stock market fell nearly 50 percent earlier this week after its incumbent president was defeated by a left-wing opponent“. First of all, ‘reliable predictor‘ is not the term I would use, the dangers were clear for well over a year, it was the wrong stage of a trade war, with the Huawei 5G setting that pushed the inevitable date forward by a lot. The entire Huawei stage was a stage of stupidity, and a more dangerous post-recession part than anyone was willing to consider. We might find clarity in the footnote: “But with so many losing confidence in the near-term prospects of the economy and rushing to buy longer-term bonds, the U.S. government now is paying more to attract buyers to its 2-year bond than its 10-year note“, is looking in the wrong direction. It is merely a small symptom at present and direct consequence on risk and not the one that bites. The US is losing its footing on the global mobile market faster and faster. And even as we accept the ‘marketing’ that Huawei gives via Cnet towards 6G, the direct truth is outstanding for a longer time. It links to my own IP that is currently available to Huawei and I want my share of that market, I believe that my part after the fact will be enough to truly make me independent on several fronts. One party found my claim a $ billion market through the investment on $25m post taxation too good to be true, but it is the second wave that takes care of my needs and you gotta give a little to get a little. It is was the ‘denied’ parts of Credit Agricole and the Paris games of 2024 that gave me the final straw I needed to see that I was right all along. In all this verification that I was correct was always the biggest issue for me to deal with, and the recession is making those big business daddies of greed close to desperate, giving me a small push forward. Those people are not willing to walk away from a one billion market at the investment of 2.5%, no bank has ever offered those margins and with the Credit Agricole parts exposed to the smallest extent, I know it will work. It is there that I saw that the IP I designed was never considered by either Google or Huawei, all set to iterative paths to innovation, and the economy shows that nearly all of the other players were looking at the next quarter, whilst the quarter+3 was the game changer. The Olympics gave the option to look at inverted innovation and make it a new innovation, Paris was not the first, but certainly the clearest indicator and whilst we see through Channel News “Huawei Technologies has joined 564 other entities in the Paris Call“, the message is not that there are 565 players, it is that they are all looking in a similar direction whilst the none excavated the gold mine that was right behind them, a first lesson that the classics can inspire towards a new direction. Now that I see their direction I found two other fields that had not been considered to the degree it needed. Saudi Arabia is giving us Neom City, but there is a lack in one direction and now that this can be exploited we see even more options. You only had to be willing to get your hands dirty in the most literal of ways. And all this is pushed even more through the impact of the European economy. A French invention gets a new life after almost 2 centuries and we can see that there is more to be found.

Sergey Brin on Sat. morning

It is what else Harmony OS can do that will push the benefits away from the US and it will hurt Google to the smallest degree (almost inevitable), Google is just too big, but now that the equation changes, it is Google who will be chasing Huawei, so well done Trump dude, you merely made everything worse for America and I will sell to the quickest bidder and the 2.5% approach gives me the edge; the two known entities Ren Zhengfei and Papa Smurf Sergey Brin can make the investment from the small change they have in their pockets and the bait would be just too appealing for them.

Al this was confirmed and accentuated through the US Senate with: “In February, the US Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing titled “Winning the Race to 5G and the Era of Technology Innovation in the United States”, to discuss what policies are required to accelerate the deployment of 5G to keep America “competitive on the international stage”” and whilst we accept the American point of view, they forgot about two elements in the 5G field and the upper echelons of decision makers showed at that point that they were working in a dimmed room without lights, giving additional evidence that they never saw the writing on the wall and now I get to make a new voice and whilst I only am willing to trust Google or Huawei in all this, there can only be one winner and the others are merely a chaser at best, it is the price of iteration over innovation. Even as Microsoft and IBM are in denial of what they are about to lose, they do know and accept their choice. Microsoft is banking on Azure and there the hindrance of Harmony will cause a void, they were ready for Android, yet HarmonyOS is another matter and China is seeing that as another opportunity. It is there where we see the talks of Huawei with the Shanghai Blue Cloud Technology taking an additional turn, and how many players in the Paris games are banking on Azure? How many lose out when they are not ready for the 5G version 2 under HarmonyOS, it will work with Android and Azure, but suddenly we will see some accidental 10% gap (latency) and that is how the game was played and all this before my elements come into play, and they will!

The big business slammers all relying on PowerPoint presentation they are given the elements and when we see the 2023 acceleration and people cannot answer the differences because they never considered looking behind them as well as looking at the corners of their eyes, the blind corners they ignored; now they no longer have one blind spot, they suddenly have three and we get all kinds of concept promises in presentation form, all whilst the data was never that unclear from the very beginning. An issue they claimed that it was being looked at.

So here I am, having to take their shit with the option to sit at the sidelines watching them fight over options because they anticipated without comprehension, sometimes the universe gets to be nice and smile at those having to take their shit. A direct zero day exploit of the applied intent of narcissism on how good a presentation looks, whilst their data never clearly supported it.

My case of exceeding expectations towards customer satisfaction trumped some short sighted ‘Ca$h is king‘ setting, because it works at the grocer, but that part has no bearing when their minimum needs exceed he budget of 80%, it was a simple equation from the very beginning. So when we are now considering the new ‘truth’ where the Washington Post gives us less than an hour ago: ‘Weak global growth likely to mean US slowdown, not recession‘, we merely see wishful thinking in the quote “Yet most analysts expect the U.S. economy to power through the rough patch, at least in the coming months, on the strength of solid consumer spending and a resilient job market. The U.S. stock market plummeted earlier this week when the bond market, spooked by the global turmoil, sent a possible early warning sign of a recession ahead: The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note slipped briefly below 2-year Treasury yields“, the article (at https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/weak-global-growth-likely-to-mean-us-slowdown-not-recession/2019/08/15/1cb8d81a-bfba-11e9-a8b0-7ed8a0d5dc5d_story.html),all whilst we see the clarity of next quarter believes linked to the next Thanksgiving and Christmas, all whilst it is Q2 2020 that makes the tequila slammer which gives the drinker the sledgehammer headache stated it was one that they never saw coming. The entire trade war is taking a new turn and when the people realise on all that the US is missing out on and therefor anyone taking that path will also learn that there is a long term price to pay and it is the markets that Google and Huawei are now staging for that brings the next stage. China has too much to gain, whilst Google will try to retain losses that they will optionally get (reduced growth is clearly a loss). Even as the impact for Google is small, losing one percent is still big news and there one percent adds to a billion plus, whilst their risk to hedge will cost them a mere 1.8% of the optional loss, it is a non-issue.

Guarantee?

There is none, but the option of a new 2% market is worth so much more than that, and it is not open to the iterative industries, innovators only, because it will be about the momentum and there is too much to gain. Consider what the 565 are looking at, whilst I focused on the group that represents up to 445,000,000 SME companies in a new 5G setting. The Olympics are merely the icing on the cake. 2020 Tokyo opens the doors more clearly but the impact is abundantly seen in Qatar 20222 and Paris 2024. And at present I see that they never looked in the places where they could be, merely where they want to be.

In the end it is one of Warren Buffett’s quotes that got me there: “the great moves are usually greeted by yawns“, thanks Warren; you were absolutely right on that part!

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Tagged as 5G, 6G, AfD, Azure, Channel News, CNET, CNN, Crédit Agricole, Financial Times, google, HarmonyOS, Huawei, IBM, Mario Draghi, Microsoft, Paris 2024, Qatar, Qatar 2022, recession, Ren Zhengfei, Sergey Brin, Shanghai Blue Cloud Technology, Tokyo 2020, US, US Senate, Warren Buffett, Washington Post

August 7, 2019 · 10:55

Brotherhood of Heineken

As we stepwise push forward towards 5G, we think that it all stays the same, it will not. A few parts will change forever. Google has an enormous advantage, yet they too are now pushing for different changes, changes that they had not seen coming a mere year ago. In this case there is no direct link to my IP, so I am happy to give you all the inns and outs of that part (pun intended).

To start this we need to consider a few sides, all with their own premise. The first is the focal point:

4G: Wherever I am
5G: Whenever I want it

That first premise is a large one, it is not a simple localisation part, it is all about getting access at a moment’s notice, yet what we need access to changes with the push we face. The initial part is the creation and the impact of awareness. As we re-distinguish ‘awareness’ the metrics on awareness will also change and for the first year (at the very least) market research companies on a global stage will be chasing the facts. They have become so reliant on dash boarding, Tableau, Q-view and Q Research Software will all have to re-engineer aspects of their software as they fall short. Even the larger players like SAS and IBM Statistics will require an overhaul in this market space. They have been ‘hiding’ behind the respondent, responses and their metrics for too long, the entire matter when the respondent becomes the passive part in awareness is new to them, and that is all it is, it will be new to them and the constructs that are behind the active and passive interactions will change the metrics, the view and the way we register things.

Google has the advantage, yet the stage for them will take a few turns too. Their initial revenue stream will change. Consider the amount of data we are passing now, that amount also links to the amount of ads we see. Now consider that everything in 5G is 10 times faster, yet 10 times more ads is not an option, so they now face revenue from 10% of the ads compared to what we see now. In addition to that, as we adjust our focus on the amounts we face implies that more advertisement space is optionally lost to the larger players like Google and this too impacts the stats for all involved. Google will adjust and change, in what way, I cannot tell yet, but the opposition is starting to become clear a in this example we see Heineken, a global established brand who now has the option to take the lead in 5G awareness.

Introducing

Ladies and gentleman, I am hereby introducing to you the Brotherhood of Heineken, in this fraternity / maternity, we invite all the lords and ladies of their household to become awareness creators towards their brand. In the Netherlands thousands are linked through a company like Havenstad and similar operations, this stretches through Europe and all over the place going global. These lords and ladies can earn points in the simplest thing, by setting a stage for Heineken to spread the message, we see that the initial power is with the consumer to support their brand. Awareness and clicks are converted to points and that leads to exclusive offers and rewards. Consider the unique stuff that Heineken has given to its professional public now for all to get, to buy and to earn. Bags, coolers, clothing, accessories. For decades we saw the materials created and most of us were envious of anyone who had that part others did not, now we could all earn it and because Heineken (Coca Cola too) have created such an arsenal, these players could take the lead in pushing their own awareness to new levels.

Now it is easy to say that Google is already doing this and that is partially true, but that equation will change under 5G and these really large brands could pay a fortune to Google or take the lead and create their own powerhouse and in this day and age that powerhouse will become more and more an essential need. Anyone not looking and preparing to this will hand over opinion and choice to Google and watch how that goes, yet consider that some sources gave us a quarter ago: “Google will remain the largest digital ad seller in the world in 2019, accounting for 31.1% of worldwide ad spending, or $103.73 billion“, now consider that they need to grow 20% quarter on quarter and that in two years that metric has changed and as such the ads could cost up to 30% more, now do the math on how YOU will survive in that environment.

Samsung, Proctor & Gamble, Coca Cola, Nike, Heineken, Sony, Microsoft will all face that premise and that is how it all changes. As we see that the metrics will have reduced reliability, the market research players will need time to adjust and in that lull a player like Heineken can create its own future and set its digital future in another direction to exceed their required expectations. This step seems short now, but as the stage alters it becomes an essential stage. Google may remain in denial and oppose that this will never happen, but the data and metrics are already suggesting this path and that is where we are now; the option to be first or pay the invoice, what would you do?

I believe that the visibility starts to get a little focal just before 2020 games, and it is in full view before the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and in full swing by the time the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar starts. These two are close together and the people will pay through the nose for that visibility, especially the European parties in all this. I expect a more evolved 5G advertising stage via apps as well, seeing ads to unlock premium view and data is likely to happen, all this is coming to us and our view of advertisement will alter to a larger extent. We will be told that this will never happen, it is not how they work, yet they are deceiving and lying to us. Consider that change in the last 25 years alone, in 1994 advertisement through printed medium and TV was at an all-time high, they all claimed it remained this way, within 5 years that stage was already changing with online ads to some extent and the slowing of printed medium, in addition the international channels would push into national advertisement. A mere 5 years after that (in 2004) it started to take off in earnest and would increase revenue to over 100% in the 4 years that followed. Between 2005 and 2017 that would push from $6 billion to 26 billion, do you really think that their words holds true? To keep that growth and their need for greed the metrics and approach has to change, there is 0% chance that these players will accept a growth of data based impact of a mere 10% of what is was in 4G, there is too much riding on this.

For the largest players there is an alternative and it will not take long for them to set the stage to this and start finding their own solution to keep awareness as high as possible. If you have to pay through the nose to keep awareness or create the environment to reward achieved awareness, what path would you choose?

Let’s not forget players like Heineken did not get to the top by merely offering a really good product, they offered a lot more, a view, an awareness that all embraced; Sony learned that lesson the hard way by losing with a superior product against the inferior competition (Betamax versus VHS). 5G will set a similar yet new battle ground and for the most the media is seemingly steering clear for now.

That is with the nice exception of Marketing Interactive, who gives us (at https://www.marketing-interactive.com/going-beyond-the-big-idea-creative-leads-on-5gs-impact-on-advertising/) “There is no denying that the rollout of 5G will change storytelling and the consumer journey“, it is a true and utterly correct view. They also give us: “creatives need to evolve from old habits and stop hiding behind “the big idea”. “We, as creatives, need to evolve from old habits, stop hiding behind “The Big Idea” and evolve our creative process and creative structures to be based on this new digital reality, to create content based on this new innovative context“, this is the view from Joao Flores, head of creative, dentsu X Singapore and he is right. We also get “For agencies, the opportunity calls for unorthodox alliances to make sure our creativity is the beating heart of this quiet revolution“, which is true, but it ignores the alternative path where the largest players start getting this path in house and in light of the two revelations, we see that during the last decades players like Heineken had been doing just that and that makes them ready to take on the 5G behemoth and push the others into second place or worse. There is a need to have expertise and many do not have it, but in that Heineken has been different for the longest times. It is most likely due to the unique view that people like Freddie Heineken had on their market and consumers. You merely have to realise that they were the first to embrace ‘Geniet, maar drink met mate‘ (enjoy, temper your drinking) it was a slogan that came into play around 1990, as well as ‘Drink verantwoord. Geniet meer‘ (drink responsibly, enjoy it more). All pushes to set a better stage, it is there that we see that a new push could be produced by players like Heineken.

We see so many more paths opening, but in all this the one overwhelming side is not what paths there are, but the stage of metrics that they all rely on, as such having control on the expenses as well as the foundation to create a reliable stage for their metrics will be a first soon enough. Not merely: ‘Who is your population?‘, it is the stage where the passive and active awareness can be differentiated on, that too will push advertisements and the applied visibility through 5G apps and 5G advertising and how the funds are spent, that will be the question that impacts player like Google Ads on the next 24 months, because if they do not do that, their quarter on quarter growth will suddenly take a very different spin, and they are not the only ones affected.

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Tagged as 4G, 5G, Beijing Winter Olympics, Coca Cola, Europe, FIFA 2022, google, Google Ads, Havenstad, Heineken, IBM Statistics, Joao Flores, Market research, Market segment, Microsoft, Netherlands, Nike, Proctor & Gamble, Q Research Software, Q-view, Qatar, Rotterdam, Samsung, SAS, Sony, Tableau, X Singapore

July 31, 2019 · 12:17

A night with Clio and Alecto

It started 2 days ago, I have been wondering about the news (no actual new news, just the rehash) and what to write about. I heard snippets all over the place on ‘more of the same‘ and ‘lack of originality‘, yet until yesterday (around 03:30) I had no idea what to consider when the article (at https://www.inverse.com/article/58121-google-stadia-launch-games-6-aaa-titles-to-get-in-november) hid behind ‘6 Huge Google Stadia Launch Games That Will Make You Rethink Consoles‘ to invoke interest in the Google Stadia.

It was the sight of 6 titles that had been available for some time that made me wonder if some people at Google had any idea what they are doing, so I decided now to counter it.

When we look at these games, we see a first person need, no one denies this, yet if the power is applied, we can go so much further. For example, we might see the RPG giant System Shock in a new light (it is being remade). We might look at the Citadel (Mass Effect Series) and consider it is too big (or the death star for that matter), but the situation is nice and contained. What if we set up a large space station, fill it with crew, not spawning them at certain stages, but a station with the amount of people that would ordinary fill a space station. Now the Death Star has been rumoured to contain a crew of 265,675, as well as 52,276 gunners, 607,360 troops, 30,984 storm troopers, 42,782 ship support staff, and 180,216 pilots and support crew, so too large. Yet is the idea too far-fetched? What if we scoop back to Citadel Station (System Shock version) and we have to contain a situation with 5300 people? Now the numbers start making sense. The game has difficulty settings impacting available ammunition, health food and so on and in addition, we can set the scenario to Contagion (zombie apocalypse), Competitor (sabotage), Patent run (thief) and Entity removal (assassin), each with their own issues, challenges and options. The ability to blend in, to not be seen, to steal stuff and more important to remain hidden whilst you optionally kill (or incapacitate) a specific target. Yet the station is different, the crew is completely managed by the system and in some cases it has to be done within a time frame (any except the zombie apocalypse). The option to do it alone, do it together and the fact that this location can be reused gives it all a larger replayability value on a long term premise.

To some extent System Shock had many parts, yet the original had floors and the enemy would not pass that boundary. What if that is not a constraint? What happens when a place that big becomes its complete environment? Like the station on IO in the movie Outland (excellent role by Sean Connery). What if we had a station where the ‘AI’ error of waves of people do not panic (like in AC Unity, repeated to some extent in Syndicate), what if a proper hidden body does not set off alarms immediatly, but what if a missed shift does alert security to seek for the person, a station requiring ID badges becomes a new challenge.

How is this original?

Because the template might have been used to give rise to the environment, it can be any space station. Games like Destiny, Doom, are all about trigger point, all about spawn points and all about flag points. Yet what happens when it is already all there, how do we get through the game when we set off alarms, when we alert security by giving rise to an alarm. I think that this is the part that Hitman 2 really got right. Some will raise concern, but a lot of NPC should not notice, and that is at the centre of a much larger interaction. What if we consider that the stages of Hitman 2 are too confined (not for the story they had mind you), what if an entire city is the premise; do you think that every cop known everyone? They react to the badge, the uniform (medic), the identity (clearance) beyond that they often do not. So to set the ‘futuristic’ stage, millions of gaming fans have voiced the desire to actually walk around the Death Star, On Babylon 5, on the Enterprise, on Citadel Station and so on, yet no one pushed to make it happen to the degree possible, even Mass Effect Andromeda dropped to ball to the greatest extent there, an original game that allowed for (non IP secured locations) to be addressed. Locations to be originally designed, all with the option of giving a run, a challenge and optionally a group of friends united to stop an infection ramping through thousands. We now have the technology (we have had it for 5+ years) and yet they all rehash IP that has been done before. We even see YouTube on the 32 games that are coming, yet rehashing is not a solution, yes they do have some new titles, yet all IP that is already out there, or titles that will also come to other formats. It is interesting, yet we have seen since the very first PlayStation and Nintendo 64 that their true growth was through unique IP, I wonder when Google will figure that part out. We accept that sometimes doing something over is easier and I accept that, yet when we see that these designers ignore dozens of great titles that are on My Abandonware and evolve these titles into a new stage and challenge that will captivate its Google Stadia audience is interesting to say the least. Even now some of these original creators are looking at bringing life to what was an excellent game and turn it into a new great game. I wonder why Google might have thought that this was a path that was not googley enough for them to walk on.

Dinner with Clio

There had been noise around Netflix, several sources, including the article (at https://www.barrons.com/articles/netflix-stock-has-new-worries-including-disney-and-the-loss-of-friends-51563582983) give us a view on optional issues. The article gives us: “For its second quarter, Netflix added 2.8 million net new international subscribers and lost 126,000 U.S. users, versus Wall Street expectations for 352,000 domestic additions and 4.8 million international adds“, some might state that Netflix was not on the ball; personally I believe that Wall Street was setting the stage where the insiders could profit from the backlash of “The company’s shares fell 10% on Thursday, a day after the results. They fell another 3% on Friday“, it is a personal believe, but when we see that the difference between company and Wall Street is a difference of 2.2 million subscribers, a difference of almost 50%, it implies that Wall Street remains unfamiliar with realism. In light of the growing group of streaming services (Disney, Stan, and so on) gives additional rise to the delusional view of Wall Street, especially when you consider that Disney has Marvel in its corner. Yet with the spending spree of Netflix that is set to a $15 billion budget is also a concern. Even as Netflix studios are a one-time expense, the growth needs to come from new IP and mastering innovation in stories, it is the one part that Google and Netflix have in common. I can’t comprehend that they are not considering cooperation in that regard. There is overlap, but one that could be overcome, especially if they need to push Google Stadia to a much stronger position with Microsoft and Apple biting at their heels. They have to set a stage where they can overcome that optional weakness.

As such I decided to give a little diner party, Clio and Melpomene were in attendance, Clio came with a plus one. Not only did they confirm my view of Wall Street, they gave me another example, one I did not know, a story that never made it to print ever.

There is no time, there is no date, it was late summer and in the cool breeze of night, 4800 years before Jesus of Nazareth would be born Hades met with Apollo in a temple at Gortyn. There was no reason, or none that anyone remembers. They merely crossed paths to exchange words. It was after the talk when Hades walked towards the waters at Lentas that he sensed something, he sensed the end of a life and anguish, anguish to a degree that was rare and he moved in a blink to that source. He found a young woman; she looked at him, in pain and anticipation, but not in fear. It took Hades back for a second, this young woman showed more strength and dignity than the thousands of soldiers he received from the battlefields. He gave strength to her to heal by smearing the smallest amount of ambrosia over her lips, her wounds dissipated slowly to show true beauty, her name was Anemone, she was no one special, merely the daughter of a fisherman, brutally raped and left for death. Hades picked her up and took her to a shelter. It was during that night he bedded her and she gave herself to Hades. In that shelter she felt truly happy for months, and it was not until the second week of May that she gave birth, it was not something that she would survive, to give birth to the child of an Olympian was taxing enough the power of death that was there was too strong and it claimed her. Yet Hades knew that would happen, this was now all planned. The baby was named Elissa and Hades set forth his first part, he left her in the care of Tisiphone, Megaera and Alecto. The furies would raise her until she was ready. Over the next years 7-10 Elissa grew fast and became stronger and stronger. The realm of the Furies gave her a never ending supply of cannon fodder. Yet the furies were well versed in all matters and she was not merely of steel, Alecto taught her how to be anyone, to take shape, and how to reshape form. Form was a weapon that could attack the senses, the ability to temper anger to any degree and drive her opponents utterly insane. Tisiphone took Elissa under her wing to teach her about the act of murder, to see in other ways, the ability to charm any snake instantly and make it do her bidding. Elissa learned that cutting a small lock of her hair and cast it could turn it into a snake, to merely draw some poison from it, or let the snake scout for her. She could see through its eyes and she could see the heat of people without the use of a snake, in the deepest night she could see all around her and they could never hide their warmth from her. Her reflexes honed to new heights she was able to strike in the blink of an eye, her daggers thin and short would ensure death to all requiring the veil of Hades to fall over their eyes. Finally she ended with Megaera and there thing changed, as she taught Elissa the power of envy, to see the true worth and value Megaera did something Hades never expected. You see there is an unwritten link between the Furies and the Muses, it is that link that Magaera relied on in the past to see what is true from false and there the game changed. The furies always remember the services rendered and it was at that point that Terpsichore taught Elissa the art of dance and with that skill new levels of balance and creativity were taught to Elissa, Erato taught her poetry of the heart, so that she could always see the true love from the false one, feelings from deceit, as well as truth from planned falsehood, finally there was Thalia who taught her comedy, because Magaera had seen how the jester, the funny person was often overlooked by others, by serious people driven to greed, Elissa looked deeper into poetry and learned that comedy is not merely a relaxant, it was also an interesting weapon. As the lessons ended Elissa had levels of balance never seen in any person that was not Olympian, and it was at that point that Alecto fed Elissa her dinner which put her to sleep and started the dream of what her mother faced that fateful night near Lentas and they unleashed Elissa on the world.

What exactly happened that night will never be known, yet the 4 old men that ravaged her mother were found feasting on the flesh of their sons, who had grown up to be as despicable as their fathers were. In the morning the villagers found the four elderly feasting on a broth containing the bodyparts of their sons; skulls, ligaments were visible in the cauldron, the men old, grey and turned utterly insane chanting slowly and fearful “ένα ακόμα δάγκωμα για συγχώρεση“, Elissa had completed her training and was unleashed on the world, the furies regarded her as ready for a plan of their own.

In a blazing sun

It was deep summer; the sun was relentlessly beating the streets and people. A woman was walking the streets of Heraklion; she ignored the weather and casually looked at market stalls. The street was filled with tourists and she got plenty of smiling looks, it bothered her not, over the centuries she had gotten used to it. She had not seen Heraklion for decades, so she took it all in, she was on an errant to take out a murderer, she was still every much the girl the furies trained, slowly walking towards her goal, it was a building on Evaggelistrias and as she observed the building from a distance, looking at where she needed to be, she looked back at watching the poor boy beaten to death only 2 days before, the police had no clue, but she was not the police, she looked at the building and she saw her target, the two man relaxing, smiling, laughing and drinking beer, they felt good about themselves. She waited patiently until 18:30, most people were starting their meal and she slowly and quietly walked into the building. there was no movement, no sense of anyone and she walked up to their front door, she dropped a lock of hair and quietly entered the house and moved swiftly into the house, the two men were in the kitchen fetching beer and slicing meat, she walked past them as their backs were turned so that the balcony was not a place they could flee from she knocked on the wall and as the men walked with surprise into the living room she merely stared them in the eyes, as her eyes turned deep black, they went pale and white, they over overcome by fear so intense that they dropped their beers, and rant out the door only to see the large snake on the steps, they screamed and ran up, they kept running in fear feeling the hunt of danger behind them hissing loudly, they ran onto the roof running past the water tanks until there was no roof left, they never stopped running, not even as they fell to the grass field on Anogion and the last they felt was the anguish and pain of broken bones blood leaving their bodies and the sound of hissing snakes until darkness set it. Elissa picked up the snake and softly placing the snake in her bag, she would release the snake outside the city limits, her work was done.

That was merely the beginning!

It took me 30 minutes to come up with this idea, another 30 minutes to look into ancient Greece (and a few maps) and 30 minutes to write this, so when we see the implied lack of originality, I am not sure what that was coming from. Creativity is all around us, and it only needs to right spark to set the stage to something fresh. I believe it to be just around the corner and Netflix has an advantage, Disney will not consider certain paths, they rely on families and fairy floss sugary sweetness, it is partially the weakness that Achilles showed (see Brad Pitt in Troy). I believe that the people want something darker. It might have started with an unknown British director named Ridley Scott when he made Alien in 1979; it was that feeling that I had when watching that movie and that same feeling I felt came to me again when I saw Brightburn. It might seem a little shallow, it is not overly epic, but that same feeling is what David Yarovesky left in me, he got the jackpot and if Marvel does not see that and use it (for example in Moon Knight), they will miss out soon enough, Netflix has an advantage because of the limitation that Disney keeps and even if they go via Fox, the delays they call for give Netflix an edge, they merely need to find the right spark to entice watchers, Google faces the same setting, imitation might be the path to flattery, but in this game originality and creativity are much more powerful partners, Even now decades later we still listen to Queen, watch Firefly (or Star Trek) and we watch Top Gun, again and again. Originality and creativity did that, not imitation.

So find your muse and get creative

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Tagged as Alecto, Alien, Brad Pitt, Brightburn, Clio, Crete, David Yarovesky, Erato, Firefly, Furies, google, Google Stadia, Gortyn, Greece, Hades, Heraklion, Marvel, Megaera, Moon Knight, My Abandonware, Netflix, Outland, Queen, Ridley Scott, Sean Connery, Star Trek, Thalia, Tisiphone, Top Gun, Troy, Wall Street

July 24, 2019 · 11:08

This stupid Neanderthal

Yes, you read it right, as the worst possible grammar allows for we see the needed expression: ‘Me is havening to be the stupid man today‘ statement. It all started in the middle of the night when the Guardian brought us: ‘Saudi state part-owns Evening Standard and Independent, court told‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jul/23/evening-standard-and-independent-unable-to-rebut-concerns-over-saudi-ownership). It gets to be worse (and the actual trigger) with: “Government lawyer tells court part-sale of news outlets has ‘national security implications’“, the naive Neanderthal in me is wondering what kind of drugs David Scannell is on and if I could get some of those (it never hurts to ask). The media (specifically the newspapers) are about the truth and about giving us actual information. The fact that the government has never ever been able to get a handle on whatever Rupert Murdoch does, in that same air the issues with Paul Dacre (specifically on a missing airplane), makes me wonder how the implied gossip that several newspapers spread are national security.

We could go with the premise that with a part owned Saudi Newspapers, the readers will actually get exposed to the acts or Iran, and the facts that many newspapers decided not to give visibility on that (like the proxy war Iran is waging via Yemen). That is beside the point that David Scannell is claiming national security issues against a Russian citizen, is that not laughable too (a Paul Hogan comedy kind of humour)?

So when we get David Scannell stating: “What is of concern to Her Majesty’s government is that a foreign state could be acquiring a substantial stake in Lebedev Holdings [owner of the Evening Standard] and the Independent simultaneously“, whilst her majesties government is seemingly forgetting that the current owner is Russian (born 8 May 1980, In Moscow Russia). Perhaps David Scannell would prefer to consider journalistic integrity and hold the UK newspapers to a much higher standard? He (his bosses more precisely) could have done that a decade ago by removing 0% VAT rights from these glossy ‘news’ bringers, a solution that would fit the UK citizen and resident to the largest degree, but just like the facilitation to the FAANG group (and their less than 2% tax), big corporations are facilitated to the largest degree and a clever Saudi investor thought that this was a good return for their investment. Then there is the other part.

When we see: “The heavily lossmaking free London newspaper is edited by the former Conservative chancellor, George Osborne“, we could consider that this is about changing the hearts of readers, yet if the government legal team is so worried about ‘poor record on press freedom‘, has that legal team not considered that in the end, when the papers becomes even more loss making that the current owners back out and the government could take over at £0.01 per share? In addition, if there is enough evidence in the statement of: “Both the Independent and Evening Standard insist concerns about editorial independence are unfounded and they are not influenced by financial backers” then what is this actually about? It seems that there is a reduced to zero chance that there are actual national security implications, the fact that national security events were always embargoed and as such these two papers must adhere to this, foreign owned or not and in the end, in addition, the fact that we saw last May the quote “There is nothing new about concern over the impact the company, which controls 70% of the country’s newspaper circulation, might have on democratic debate” (source: the Guardian), that keeping more papers out of the fingers of Murdoch might be a Humanitarian good, is that not important too? In addition, there is a second consideration, if the digital worlds that these two newspapers have, setting a stage that this evolution is passed on to places like the Dallah al Baraka Group, Al Arabiya, Al Saudiya and Al Ekhbariya could set a long term prosperity to both Saudi Arabia as well as their European affiliation. This is a long term slow plan and when we consider that Neom City is still happening, having a city well over 20 times the size of New York, also implies that overall the media will grow as well; digital marketing as well as 5G information streams will evolve, and evolve faster. Part of my IP was designed to do just that, whilst promoting commerce on several levels. We see that the evolution cannot begin in Saudi Arabia, but over time evolving those and new stations will be in the interest of Saudi Arabia who is eager not to lose it all to the UAE (Dubai Media Incorporated) or Qatar (Al Jazeera) changing the game and the way they do business is an essential must in the long term and in the short term evolution is more and more pressing.

Homo sapiens

Evolution has stepped in and as the Homo sapiens we are now, life is not that simple, the interaction of the media is larger and more complex. Yet I still find the approach through David Scannell laughable. We want to muster muzzles and bits to state who is allowed to go where, yet the unbridled freedoms pushes through by places like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google remain unhindered. Even in a stage where these groups pay less than 2% taxation in the end, the monster we know is still less acceptable than any optional new monster we do not know. The policymakers have been unable and unwilling to adjust laws ad legislation for almost two decades, the premise of iteration and Status Quo are found everywhere but were given on how the new owner (partial new owner) is setting the stage of national security. When we look at the fines we see in the direction of Facebook and Equifax are partial evidence that this ship has sailed years ago, the latest data breaches show that there is no stopping the flow of data and whilst we look towards North Korea who does not have the storage abilities, skills and bandwidth to do 10% of the issues that they are accused of, we see that the foundation of the current batch of National Security monitoring teams are seemingly in a stage that they have no clue where to look and what data to sift through (a common shortcoming).

So in all this we have larger issues and whilst we forgot about July 2015 ““source close to the family” (MH370 disaster)” with the additional “what is also important is that we saw an issue in 2014 the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) decided to investigate a case whilst using only 1 of 83 plaintiffs” (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2015/07/31/that-joke-called-the-first-amendment/), it would be my personal recommendation that the government (as well as David Scannell have bigger fish to fry. We could start a new Leveson investigation and force harsher settings, but all kinds of chief editors will burst into tears in the House of Lords and as we know that those gentlemen are really unwilling to slap crying girls around, so we get nowhere ever and the option to remove the 0% VAT from some of these newspapers is not regarded as an option, so we are at a stalemate with no solution. But the call via National Security seemingly remains.

In the complete evolved view we see that there is political power into the ability to reach an entire nation through the newspapers and the media, yet in that light when we accept Gay Alcorn (the Guardian) who gave us: “There is nothing new about attacks on News Corp’s influence on policy and politics in Australia. There is nothing new about claims that Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers are not just right wing, but distort and manufacture news“, does it actually matter whether news is manufactured by NewsCorp (Australia) or the Independent (partial Saudi)? Is pushing this path not a race towards discrimination lacking all diplomacy and subtlety?

I am merely asking, because even as i really do not care who the owners are becoming, and the fact that the previous owner is Russian, is it not just all water under the bridge. To be slightly more precise a bridge called Facebook transporting terabytes of data per minute?

In the end, the legal battle is seemingly set to “The legal challenge was only against the decision to refer the Saudi investment to the Competition Commission on merger grounds“, whether valid or not (that is a legislation issue), the fact that the entire article has only one mention of the word ‘merger‘ in that entire article. Informing the public on the exact nature of the issue on the merger, would that not have been an essential first? If that is the case, how does National Security actually fit would be my question, but we really don’t see a clear answer on that either, do we?

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July 21, 2019 · 14:48

Exploitation by the numbers

Yes, the BBC had the right idea when they gave us: ‘Bianca Devins: The teenager whose murder was exploited for clicks‘ three hours ago (at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49002486). The story is about a girl named Bianca Devins. So when we get: “she wrote on a gaming platform about how excited she was to be travelling the 250 miles from upstate New York to a concert in Queens. But before she could return home on Sunday morning, Bianca was dead” we see a story dipped in sadness. We see the quote: “But in the hours after his arrest, it emerged he had shared graphic photographs of the murder online. In the days since, her story has spread across the world – as have the violent images of her death. Her murder, which played out so publicly, is the latest case to place scrutiny on how social media companies police extreme content” we have seen this before, we wonder how and we wonder if it matters. We sometimes here the term ‘lives matter’ but is that really the case? Even as we accept that this was the lone act of a lone man when we get: “the suspect shared an even more graphic photograph of Bianca’s body on Discord – a popular messaging platform for gamers. This image showed the extent of injuries to Bianca’s throat and made clear her wounds had been fatal“, exploitation for clicks is not new, we have seen it for almost 200 days whilst we got exposed to this level of exploitation through the cadaver of Jamal Khashoggi, even the UN got in on it. All whilst there is no actual evidence, speculation, postulation and exploitation. I will give exemption to the Washington Post and his family, they are the two exemptions. To see just that impact we need to look at the numbers.

Yet the numbers are no longer clear, it seems that Google is actively hiding certain events actions and numbers. When I did a thorough search on December 18^th, I got a result that added up to a lot “we merely get 57,000,000 search results, most of them misinformation, repeated unsubstantiated rumours and debatable facts that are anything but confirmed facts” (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2018/12/18/how-americans-lose-wars/), now that number is a mere 13,600,000. And that is seeking all. The exploiters have removed the pages, so not to impair their click manifesto, not to remain visible with all the click options out there, but they are there and as Google is extremely dependent on these clicks, they will facilitate to the largest degree possible, it merely means that we are not given the actual goods, not even close and the exploitation goes on. It’s nice that Kelly-Leigh Cooper chose a subject no one knows, yet this method of visibility has been used for a much longer time than you think.

The party-lines are all about ‘filtering’, or ‘this is what our customers want’, or my favourite ‘have you checked ALL your settings?’ The issue gets diluted; it gets smeared over issues and optional things that are being worked on. Exploitation for clicks became a reality the moment people were offered to earn money through their webpages, and everyone wanted more and everyone wanted the maximum of what was possible, yet now that need for greed is transformed into need to be illuminated, maximum visibility through minimum effort, and for too long social media pushed for this to maximise their return on investment. Now that the fence is gone, we see that the facilitators no longer have a hold on anything and even as everyone points at 4Chan, social media players like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are all using it to maximise exposure of self. LinkedIn gets a partial pardon as it is limiting itself to business parts for the most and whatever exploitation we see is small and tends to be focussed from merely a few and those are often stopped by LinkedIn to the larger extent, the 2 billion on Facebook are mostly not. There it is often about extreme materials filtered and censored, or largely filtered to whatever censor has its hat primed (a personal observation).

Yet it is not the censoring, it is the focus and exploitation that is a case for worry. For Kelly-Leigh Cooper the focus is what happened to Bianca Devins and it seems an extreme case, yet it is not a new issue. Collective Hub gave rise in 2015 (at https://collectivehub.com/2015/08/21st-century-shaming/) to ‘21ST Century Shaming‘, and there we see: “Cyber-bullying and online shaming seem more commonplace than ever before and Monica highlighted some recent occurrences, like the leaked nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence; the Sony hacking scandal; and the death of Tyler Clemente, who committed suicide after his college roommate secretly filmed him with another man“, it seems that the linked “where the online humiliation of individuals results in more clicks, which means more money for the media outlet” is casually overlooked by everyone. We see how politicians are trying to bash Facebook, yet the headline from the Daily Telegraph: ‘Brit Ayia Napa rape victim tells how she ‘fainted’ after 12 Israelis ‘attacked her one-by-one for an hour’‘ gets 41,900 results in Google, they all need clicks, they all want maximised exposure and the people involved do not care how they get it, it all impacts advertisement and circulation.

When you start to look deeper, exploitation by the numbers seem to have less acceptable methods than we see used by drug dealers on a school yard, we merely have become too complacent to care. It is not until we are hit to a much larger degree that we see actions.

In 2010 Cnet gave us the 5 dangers of Facebook:

Your information is being shared with third parties
Privacy settings revert to a less safe default mode after each redesign
Facebook ads may contain malware
Your real friends unknowingly make you vulnerable
Scammers are creating fake profiles

In all this we have seen the impacts, yet we have ignored a lot of it and it gets to be worse when we see a Telegraph article (at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/05/ex-google-facebook-staff-warn-social-media-dangers/) where we see the following quotes:

“The thoughts of two billion people every day are steered by 50 people in Mountain View,” said Tristan Harris, referring to the Californian headquarters of Google.

“But these companies are also caught in a zero-sum race for our finite attention, which they need to make money.

“Constantly forced to outperform their competitors, they must use increasingly persuasive techniques to keep us glued.

The Truth about Tech campaign was about tackling the “manipulation and exploitation” of some social media companies.

These quotes are often intertwined, attention brings funds, so does manipulation and exploitation, they are linked and shown as issues that are unstoppable, yet the effort to do something about it is lacking, there is circumstantial evidence that goes back to 2010 and so far almost nothing was done, again we see evidence now in the form of the death of a journalist no one cares about (Jamal Khashoggi) and the media themselves all want to ignore it because he was a journalist, yet the speculation (not evidence) that they propagated shows that he was not their concern, propagation and clicks were. The moment you realise that part of the equation is the moment you realise that the system is flawed and broken, and whilst the media is all about showing the flaws, the defects are not tended to, making matters worse for a long time to come.

By the numbers, we are not in a good frame of mind, as I stated before, there were 57,000,000 search results (in less than 60 days) proving me right.

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Tagged as 4chan, BBC, Bianca Devins, CNET, Collective Hub, Facebook, google, Jamal Khashoggi, Kelly-Leigh Cooper, LinkedIn, Telegraph, Tristan Harris, Twitter

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