Tag Archives: the Guardian

July 8, 2019 · 11:35

The wider field

There is a wider field, the field is ignored by many because it overlaps in several ways and most people (read: media) tend to stare at one element. We can argue whether it is bad or good, but it does mean that the bulk of the information is not there. To get this view we need to look at several sources. First we get the International Business Times, they give us two headlines. The first is ‘Samsung Expecting Profits Slump For Q2‘ as well as ‘Huawei Ban Helps Company Earn More‘, in one way we get an increase of revenue due to the Huawei events in the US, yet there is still a Q2 slump. There are several plays that apply, but it is not about the play as such. The firs realisation is that 5G is currently being ‘advertised as here‘ by several players and at present there is an increased question on which phone is 4G and/or 5G and most people are holding off on phones this year until that field has a better view on what is available. Most people cannot afford to buy a new phone when some new models are $1800, most people cannot afford a step like that and being tied to any provider at present is an increasingly bad step to make. Even as Huawei is 20% cheaper, it remains a lot of money, and the Google (Android) issues are still there, so people are hesitant. I might have committed myself to Huawei, but that is in part because I renewed my phone in the beginning of the year, so it has to last me 2-3 more years (I have principles towards blatantly buying new phones) and I am happy with my phone.

then there is the new stage hat is now evolving when we see CNN Business give us (at https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/04/tech/huawei-us-ban/index.html) ‘US government asks judge to dismiss Huawei lawsuit‘, they are rightfully scared because the claim: “Huawei had filed the lawsuit in March, arguing that a law preventing US federal agencies from buying its products violates the US constitution by singling out an individual or group for punishment without trial” is almost a given, the US government made sure that every media outlet on the planet took great painstaking effort in illuminating that and now it becomes the anchor attached to their legs as they have to swim across the Pacific river (or Atlantic river). If the case goes through and discrimination is proven, the impact will be monumental, especially as no evidence was ever brought forward and if we are a nation of laws, the impact will be large, moreover, at present Huawei is still growing its pool of 5G contracts and should the Case fall on the side of Huawei, the impact on Europe will be much larger, it could signal a much larger run on trying to get a quick deal with Huawei, not because they are nice people (they optionally are), but because Huawei 5G equipment is more advanced and all the telecom players know this. Ericsson and Nokia fear that side, they had a good run due to the escalations, but Huawei is still on par to have well over 50% of 5G by themselves and that is what the US fears, that large a disadvantage because its pool of CEO’s and CTO’s were increasingly stupid, flaccid and complacent in an age where pushing innovation was essential.

The issue is not out of the room yet because there is the larger issue that everyone has not been looking at. There is still the Google issue around Android. Consider that Huawei’s Oak OS is now 60 days away from release, it is the start where people who were initially ‘forced’ to dump Android, they now will be part of the Oak OS group, a data core that involves millions from adding data to the Oak servers and no more to the Google servers. The impact seems small, but it impacts the US to a much larger degree, this stance has given China a much larger boost than ever possible. For the users it will only be a temporary setback, as apps will be supported through Oak/OS, these players will continue, yet the overhaul as people push away from android is much larger than the interaction of IOS versus Android. Consider what you need. The bulk of all android apps we use will almost immediately be available, leaving us with optionally some issues regarding LinkedIn, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Now there is a new stage where Chinese options could be considered and for the most when we can address who we need, we might not care on where we are. The idea that advertisements might initially fall away will be a massive reason to do that. I am certain that there will be a Facebook Oak and LinkedIn Oak, the rest remains open, the usage is huge but that too might be a reason to try something new, people love new things, especially if it comes with cool additions and new we see a different stage, it is not the US that matters, it is whether China has options that appeal to India and Europe, these three represent 3 billion people and there is the data crunch, they will not all go the Chinese solution, but even 10% would be massive, it would be a an intense gut punch to Google, more important over time as word of mouth make more people switch, the damage will increase for Google. Make no mistake, it will merely impact the total, it will not sink Google, it is too large, but in light of their predictions when they have 20% less data points to make predictions with, granularity becomes an issue for the professional side and there too there will be an impact, Chinese app owners will have their own digital advertisement agenda and business dictates that you cannot ignore that population, so budgets will be shortened to cover an audience as large as possible.

All that because of the Huawei ban, which was shown to be short-sighted from the very beginning. Consider that we were given in June: “Huawei can no longer pre-install Facebook apps on its smartphones after Facebook fell into line with a US ban on exporting software“, now consider that suddenly millions are offered a pre-installed WeChat and they are willing to try it, the impact on Facebook will be seen in less than 60 days, the fact that Facebook had been playing games with its mobile users for a much longer time will also entice users to give it a try. Not all will stay, but some will and the dimension of ‘some’ will imply a drop of Facebook of several million user. In addition we see “Chinese users spend an average of over 70 minutes a day within the app. All this makes it one of the most popular choices for businesses looking to get started with social media marketing in China“, yes it was overwhelmingly Chinese, yet in the shift it will now have optional access to a large Indian and European following. In addition the shift we optionally see when we realise: “WeChat allows for one-to-one personalized interaction between brands and users. This allows brands to communicate directly with their followers through the messaging functions on their account. This also allows brands to provide customer service directly through their WeChat account. It’s due to this reason that many companies in China don’t even operate traditional websites instead of focusing their efforts on constantly improving their WeChat official accounts” direct granularity towards the user, not mass marketing, but adjusted marketing for the individual, and then consider players like Tableau, Salesforce (now one and the same), SAP, Sony and Microsoft all wanting to address the person, not the masses, do you think that they will ignore this group of users? These people invest hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a day towards addressing their growing need of users, all revenue that is soon lost to Apple and Google. It goes beyond merely Facebook; Twitter and Snapchat, all have a Chinese version that now has the option to surpass (read: close the gap) towards their competitors. Surpass is perhaps the wrong word, the fact that people will consider the alternative in the immediate is a risk for these players, it sets the dangers of schools of users to switch to another pond, so those fishing for ads, visibility and awareness, they will all have to adjust the way they operate. There now are now only two parts where I have no idea how it will play out. Youku Tudou is the Chinese version of YouTube, but YouTube is so strongly placed that I have no idea how that will go, the same for LinkedIn. these are the two we cannot predict, no one can, but if they remain absent from Oak/OS something will have to budge, the question becomes how much do you need LinkedIn to be on your smartphone when you can just catch up daily at home, or in the office. I personally do not believe that its equivalent Maimai will be embraced as strongly as Maimai would hope, but that is my speculation on the matter.

Only YouTube as it is and remains the behemoth of Google, is too strong an app to ignore, it is too strongly desired, especially on smartphones, some might give Youku Tudou a try, but the library of YouTube increases with 300 hours of material every minute, there is no real competing with that, no matter how you slice that. There is no denial that their Chinese competitor will grow, but there the impact is less than a mosquito bite for YouTube, it is perhaps the one part of Google that no one seemingly can be without.

Is there another side?

Well there is always the option that everything in Google will be accessible on Huawei phones and that is for Google the best solution, but at present that part is just not a given, and when many Huawei smartphones are between 20%-40% cheaper, they will have an advantage and only because of US stupidity that impact is now optionally becoming much larger. And now the shift is changing faster, the Observer gave us on Saturday ‘UK mobile operators ignore security fears over Huawei 5G‘, when we consider the quote “The Observer understands that Huawei is already involved in building 5G networks in six of the seven cities in the UK where Vodafone has gone live. It is also helping build hundreds of 5G sites for EE, and has won 5G contracts to build networks for Three and O2 when they go live“, we see how things are escalating away from the US. the massive part in all this is “a firm line against the company amid claims, strongly denied, that it is controlled by the Chinese government and that its equipment could be used to spy on other countries and companies” all from the point of view that clear evidence was never provided and the commercial corporations need to remain on top or drown and that was the larger flaw the US never seemingly understood (or blatantly ignored). Yet the other side also matter, as the numbers are given: “The consultancy Assembly suggests a partial to full restriction on Huawei could result in an 18-to-24-month delay to the widespread availability of 5G in the UK. The UK would then fail to become a world leader in 5G – a key government target – costing the economy between £4.5bn and £6.8bn” (source: the Guardian). People tend to get nervous at a loss of millions, so the loss of £4,000,000,000 plus is something that can start cardiac arrests all over the telecom boardrooms. More important as Huawei is still ’embraced’ in Germany, the German players will get the upper hand over other European players giving a larger technological shift. The final straw was the consideration of “They have taken note of what happened last December when the O2 4G network went down for 24 hours due to problems with technology provided by the Swedish telecoms firm Ericsson“, a danger as this was 4G technology that should have been clear and non-problematic, now consider that this happened to established technology, so what optional risks are Ericsson users exposed to when in involves 5G, a technology that Nokia and Ericsson is still trying to figure out?

In all this, Huawei has not stopped adding pressure. Now that we see that less than 24 hours ago we were notified that Huawei has completed the contracts with Msheireb Properties. It seems small and insignificant, but it is not. With a smart experience centre in Qatar, it is my expectations that they are ready to approach and upgrade Al Jazeera to 5G, it is speculative but it will be the first time that Al Jazeera surpasses CNN technology (as well a Fox News), It might not matter to most of us, but to people like Nasser Al-Khelaifi (beIN Media Group) it matters a lot, so when we are informed that Al Jazeera getting ready to offer 5G streaming during the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics and Huawei as a Chinese company is mentioned everywhere in Tokyo, you better believe that these two are on top of making this work as fast and as quickly as possible, so when I created my base station IP, I never considered this, but it fits and that is another notch that some miss out on. Half the planet goes nuts for sports on a regular day, how nuts do you think the planet goes when ‘their nation‘ is fighting its fight (against up to 205 other nations) to be the best at the Olympics? When you get to watch that live, streaming it all at 5G, do you really think that people will care who brings it as long as it is true 5G? In several nations the brand jump was huge when 4G became real and some were not up to scrap, I believe that this time around the jump will be close to 300% larger than before, and the Tokyo Olympics will be a clear driver on that part. When 206 nations fight for the laurels (gold medals) every nationally driven sports fan tends to get a little (read: abundantly) nuts, and at present that group of people is well over 3 billion people, all factors some players did not consider when they were playing the short game, Huawei never played the short game, it gives them an advantage in several ways.

That is merely my view on the situation at present.

 

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July 5, 2019 · 10:49

The next economic identity

Today is about an opinion piece by Shoshana Zuboff, Zuboff graces us (at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/02/facebook-google-data-change-our-behaviour-democracy) with: ‘It’s not that we’ve failed to rein in Facebook and Google. We’ve not even tried‘. It’s a good piece, I do not completely agree, but it is a good piece and you should read it. The start is actually full on when we see: “tech giants use our data not only to predict our behaviour but to change it“, it is not actually an attack on democracy, but the applied pressure on our way of thinking, consumer adjusting if you will. Then we get to the part that has an issue, with “In 2011, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned that government overreach would foolishly constrain innovation“, it is not that, it is actually a lot worse than that. It is the stage where big business goes its own way, regardless of what any government dictates and governments are all about facilitating. when we see all governments drop down on so called individuals committing fraud (which is fair enough) staging thousands of man hours finding these dozen or so people, all whilst places like Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook pay a mere 1% of 3 billion plus, do you think that there might be a pattern? A solution offered by me 20 years ago, ignored, shunned and ridiculed could have made things a lot better, but these people ignore it. They did not fail calculus, did they? When you realise these two simple parts, you see that government officials and big business fat cats go like hand in glove, but which of the two is the glove?

Now we get to the good part. We now see: “Facebook giving private information to developers, and more. Each of these was an expression of a larger breakthrough: the invention of what I call surveillance capitalism“, the writer is not wrong, but as I personally see it the writer is incomplete. It is only in part surveillance capitalism, you see capitalism is merely the consumer item; the actual currency in this capitalism is data. Data is everything and Google figured that out from the very very beginning. It took a decade to get where they are now, but that long play changed everything for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, they had been right from the very beginning and it is one of the reasons why I contain my IP for them or Ren Zhengfei, as I personally see it they are the only ones who can take my billion dollar IP (a mere slight exaggeration) and turn it into some serious cash, but I digress.

You see, the realisation that they saw it correctly from the beginning is essential, data is like the application of greed, it value is contained by always getting more. A billionaire becomes stagnant as he/she lives of the interest, stagnancy kills in the end and in data it becomes certain death, so data must always grow, which is exactly why the entire Huawei mess is not a good thing, not for Apple Iovesa and not for Google Androidian.

So far I merely create a side-track and it is all still on the Zuboff train to eternity. It is when we see: “A leaked Facebook document in 2018 describes its machine-learning system that “ingests trillions of data points every day” and produces “more than 6m predictions per second”. Finally, these prediction products are sold to business customers in markets that trade in human futures” this is where we see the first part that should wake us up. It is connected to “our societies successfully confronted destructive forms of capitalism in the past, asserting new laws that tethered capitalism to the real needs of people. Democracy ended the Gilded Age. We have every reason to believe that we can be successful again“, it is a nice premise but it is where the plan falls apart and it all fails. You see the biggest flaw is not them; it is us, the people. We expect all digital media be for free. We want it all and we do not want to pay for it, in addition that this economy implies that we cannot buy too many items before the budget hits our food needs, at that point we see that we are limiting ourselves. There is no free ride, there never was! As people refuse to learn this lesson they are confronted with the notion that they surrender their data as it is currency, it is not taxed and the people are happy, the merely had to hand over their soul if you will be, their personal data to well over a million people with a Faustian agreement and many were happy to do so because they do not comprehend what they signed up for. They are in denial through: “it is supposed to be free, yes?” Nothing is free and nothing is for free. These developers have to pay rent, they want either a gorgeous girlfriend, or they need enough for hookers. It seems plain and bland, but there you have it. Sex sells and sex is never free, not even when they marry the option. It is the simplest of evolutionary points. Be in denial as much as you care to be, but that notion should make it clear that nothing is free. You see, if you bought a program, you get to have rights. They get to be liable and when they consider that 95% of their user base would not be their customer base their income would be exceedingly limited, so as we realise that data is all, data is cash we see the path that is a problem. True democracy is not free either, as such the problem merely becomes bigger. Consider the people using Microsoft Word and those paying for Microsoft Word; we see a difference is a much larger part of several nations. If one does not pay in one way, one pays in another form and data is often that form. So as we get all these Google apps (or Apple apps) to aid us, we are all happy but that reliance on Google/Apple gives them the data they need to make predictive analytics and evolve it at some point into Artificial Intelligence.

At that point the writer becomes absolutely brilliant and gives us: “Data ownership is an individual solution when collective solutions are required. We will never own those 6m predictions produced each second. Surveillance capitalists know this. Clegg knows this. That is why they can tolerate discussions of “data ownership” and publicly invite privacy regulation“, Shoshana Zuboff has figured it out. It is the predictions that move forward and give these firms the additional capital they need, in addition it is almost like answers versus responses. they are two different things, a person can answer you whilst never responding to the question, they can also respond to the question and never give you an answer and whilst you ponder this consider that people are 97% sheep, so the 6 million predictions go a long way. Now consider that 6 million predictions needs a lot of data and when the US trade war comes to blow, Huawei will get a share of users, a large share of users that will then become unavailable to Google when the isolation increases, optionally unavailable to Apple too and so on, a new data currency will be created and when that data is 5G based Huawei data will grow faster and faster whilst Google data will end up coming to a standstill, 6 million predictions become 2 million, become 666,666 (I had to go there), in two hardware revolutions (less than two years) the system has to deal with collapse. OK, it is only partial exaggerated, but that is what happens when everything goes positive for Huawei, when they deliver 5G, when the others falter to a larger degree, when their infrastructure is not ready for latency and congestion this is what we will face, the Trump administration was actually that stupid.

And then we get to the final part where the ball is struck out, not out of the field, but merely the ball is out. When we see: “Surveillance capitalists are rich and powerful, but they are not invulnerable. They fear law. They fear lawmakers. They fear citizens who insist on a different path“, I can tell you right now that they do not. The largest issue with tax laws is that they catered to big business for two decades, and that will not stop, if you think that there is no one willing to compromise to the largest extend, I will introduce you to a politician and they will compromise to the largest extent, it is merely towards big business and we have decades of examples in a whole league on nations, so do you really think we have nothing to fear? We do and until proper taxation is in place and until the large corporations are given a proper tax invoice we will see more and more. So when you get another headline like: ‘Australia targets cryptocurrencies in international tax crackdown‘, you better believe that it is a joke, it will be high visibility with claims like “J5 was formed a year ago because of growing concern that tax avoidance, cybercrime and crypto currency abuse were escalating as criminals exploited differences between national tax laws“, you better believe that you are sold some bag of goods. ‘growing concern‘ and ‘exploited differences between national tax laws‘ and consider that the first is not proven and the second is stated in such a way that it is optionally not even a crime, the laws are not properly in place, so consider these empty efforts and the facts below

Apple

  • Apple’s statutory 30 percent tax bill of $76.6 million was compounded by a number of additional tax expenses, adding up to a total income tax expense of $183 million for 2017
  • Apple has paid its largest Australian tax bill in years as it reached $8 billion in local revenue for the first time.

Google

  • Australians paid Google $4.3 billion for consumer items/software.
  • Google had a corporate tax bill of only $26.5 million.

Facebook

  • Facebook scored more than $500,000,000 for services in 2018.
  • Facebook paid a mere $11.8 million in corporate tax.

These are merely three of the larger players and we haven’t even considered Amazon and Netflix yet. Is it really about crypto currency whilst there is an optional one billion ($1,000,000,000) up for the taking once we get politicians that actually fix taxation laws. You really thing that these people fear laws when they can make a deal (read: national economic agreement) with whichever politician is elected? Go cry me a river please.

Oh and let’s not forget that this is merely Australian number for merely three firms, so let’s get real about data currency and the value it has, because as I see it the law will still not be up to scrap and ready in another 10 years, we will at that point be optionally in (or towards) a 6G stage and most cannot even comprehend the impact of that much data per minute on a national economy at present, there is really no way to tell.

In the end there is part that is an attack on democracy, yet not in the way that we see it. You see, we see that numbers, statistics and dashboards help us make our place more efficient, you see it in shops and in offered services, but when the streamlining begins and the shop becomes more efficient we see the impact, it is not that we cannot have a democratic voice, we see
(yet not realise) that the choices are no longer there. It is the most dangerous of democratic impacts as it tends to be subtly. A clever question was asked of me once, a consideration: ‘What if we only please 80% of our customer base, not 93%?‘ It is the immediate and direct impact of the cost of doing business. The question makes perfect sense, but what happens when one of the lost 13% has a direct link to a large player like Johnson & Johnson, McKesson or Marathon Petroleum? What happens when we cannot get their business because we limited ourselves through the cost of doing business? You cannot answer that can you? That is fine, it was not a test, it is to show that there is always a price to limiting choice and or those chosen it works out fine, but real innovation comes from inclusion, not limitation and that is where we are, we are so streamlines, all the same people living in San Francisco (I wrote about this in an earlier blog), it is all the same, we all become the same, we all become a limited version of ourselves and the people in charge cannot learn that lesson because they do not care, their pocket were filled, which was their priority. It was the only goal they had and that is why my IP is not available (merely to a chosen few), that is why I wait, in the end it is either lost or I win, perhaps someone else will have the same idea in 5-10 years, but at that stage I will no longer care, I will already have moved on to different and better challenges as well as new puzzles.

My creative mind allows me to redesign almost anything and create based on what I see, the creative mind only stops at death and that is not even proven at present, I remain hopeful that the people figure it all out before it is too late for them.

 

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July 2, 2019 · 11:51

From Location to Innovation (loss)

It is a real estate dream, to talk about the location and therefor get a better price; we are all about getting a nice home, yet we look at places where we know it will sell for the 100%-200% of the price we paid for it, preferably within 5 years. Most of us looking for something oversized have at some point seen 924 Bel Air Road, Los Angeles, California. It is so over the top, so expensive that most billionaires might not even consider it. No matter how much of a technological, arts and lifestyle monument it is, complete with helipad. A house like that makes you a target of some sorts. There will always be envy, there will always be the next challenge and there will always be the next addition. To live in a house that has it all is for most you desire is unsettling. Weirdly enough it is within us, when we see this and we think ‘this is as good as it will ever get’, when we have that thought before we are 40 it becomes the limitation on us, it boggles our need of creativity. Now, for the most we need not worry, 99.99% of the population will never get near to 50% of that marker, but it is there, our minds creates this. So when a few articles passed my way, they started to add up and weirdly enough it is an opinion piece by John Naughton on June 16th that started it all. With ‘How Silicon Valley’s whiz-kids finally ran out of friends‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/16/how-silicon-valley-whiz-kids-finally-ran-out-of-friends) it begins.

With: “Once upon a time, Silicon Valley was the jewel in the American crown, a magnet for high IQ – and predominately male – talent from all over the world. Palo Alto was the centre of what its more delusional inhabitants regarded as the Florence of Renaissance 2.0“, I was never there, but I was linked to some degree and I say early on how greed took over, how opportunity seekers would resort to Machiavelli and other means to get what they desire and they never cared how they got there, it was their ‘political game’. Then we see a truth as the quote “the commentator Alexis Madrigal identifies no fewer than 15 different groups preparing ambushes. They include angry conservatives and progressive politicians, disillusioned tech luminaries, competition lawyers, privacy advocates, European regulators, mainstream media, scholarly critics, other corporations (telecoms firms, for example, plus Oracle and other business-software companies, for example), consumer-protection organisations and, last but not least, Chinese internet companies. With enemies like these, the US tech companies are suddenly discovering that they really need some friends.” the reason is actually simple. these US tech companies were heading in a direction of maximisation through iteration, as the need for true innovation was lost (not that innovation that places like Apple claim to have), others caught on and the drive that Silicon valley once had was no longer there, it was stepwise progression whilst the marathon runners like Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China caught up. Microsoft wasted its console world through mere stupidity and a spreadsheet (and being dumb and short sighted). That is why none of them are allowed near my IP (with the optional exception of Google). As innovation becomes iteration the margins went down and it brought regulators, tax haven needs and other players like competition and IP attorneys into all of it (as fore mentioned) and suddenly the grape season was out, the harvest had diminished and what in whiskey terms is called ‘the angel’s share’ grew leaving little to the others. I believe that the writer nails it with: “And we are beginning to realise that the immense power that the valley’s uber-geeks have acquired is what Stanley Baldwin memorably nailed as “power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”” but there a mistake is made, there are two kinds in that valley, the dreamers and the combined needs of the operators and facilitators, that second group is more important to watch mainly because it stopped the first group. the second group thought that by putting their stallion in a paddock, fenced in and limited to a smaller part it would be more effective, and having 5 fields will lead to 500% of the goal, but that was stupidity speaking. Wild horses, real stallions need to race, the strongest takes the lead and together as they burn the ground under their hooves they become more agile, stronger players and their race goes towards the dream that they had no envisioned yet. that is how the iPad came, that is how Smartphone came that is how Nano technology comes and through iteration the next tier is not merely slower, the dreamers forgot to dream, they needed to produce in larger amounts with less resources, less space and that is how they got overtaken by said Korea, Japan and China. The results are in front of us and now that India is catching up in more than one way the dream of more fortune becomes the nightmare of losing it all. So when the final wisdom comes: “And once they went public they did what corporations do: maximise shareholder value, come what may, avoid regulation and pay as little tax as possible. Just like tobacco companies and arms manufacturers“, there we have it, the larger system was ignore thought compartmentalisation and no one realised just how stupid they were. that is one of two more reasons why I do not trust my IP with 98% of the tech firms, they will not learn because the inner parts are all about profit and maximisation, and through that weakness billions in revenue are lost, because of the fake dream that iteration brings the same in twice the time but at only a part of the resources, the biggest flaw is setting a profit stage to a spreadsheet, innovation can never be gained through predictive analytics, because predictive analytics gives the continuation of a product, not the consequence of a new technology beheld by a dreamer, there will never be data to do that and that is how it was all lost.

Round two

And that is how we got to round two last Saturday as Ruha Benjamin (associate professor at Princeton University) and even as she starts with ‘We definitely can’t wait for Silicon Valley to become more diverse‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/29/ruha-benjamin-we-cant-wait-silicon-valley-become-more-diverse-prejudice-algorithms-data-new-jim-code), she gives a truth that I partially oppose (not the diversity), as it was always about the dreamers. Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg they were all dreamers to some degree. That world needs dreamers and facilitators that push dreams into the reality of innovation. The more diverse that world is, the more diverse the dream becomes and the greater the achievement could be. It is true innovation in its purest forms and whilst the CEO’s took the words of CFO’s and marketeers that reality was forgotten. Marketeers hope and drive hypes, they cannot dream on something that they cannot fathom, it is the most destructive vicious circle imaginable. So when I see: “She founded the Just Data Lab, which aims to bring together activists, technologists and artists to reassess how data can be used for justice. Her latest book, Race After Technology, looks at how the design of technology can be discriminatory” I see both hope and failure. the hope is that as diversity of ‘activists, technologists and artists‘ unites, we see new paths, the artist sees a path and draws it, the technologist can devise it the activist can oppose the path and scream for a meadow to walk on, that is how innovation came, quote literally, the Dutch a nation the size of New Jersey gave us: ‘Dutch Solar Bike Path SolaRoad Successful & Expanding‘ (which gave me another idea with a more metropolitan and rural opportunity approach), innovated roads by catching sunshine to power the evening lights, it is true innovation in action and an optional path to reduce the carbon footprint, whilst getting the surroundings powered. When we see first results: “with 3000 kWh generated, the solar panels were outperforming the 70 kWh annual per square meter expected threshold set in the lab. In its first year, the SolaRoad produced 9,800 kWh, roughly equivalent to the annual average consumption of three Dutch households“, we see a path towards innovation. There is no doubt that data can be used for justice, but in which direction? Yet I too adhere to idea’s, I am a different dreamer and even with a law and a technology degree (including a master) I have not dreamt in that direction, perhaps this is for another dreamer, the need to recognise it is essential, to find the right dreamer.

And this is not an attack on Ruha in any way, she gives a clear premise with “Many of these automated systems are trying to identify and predict risk. So we have to look at how risk was assessed historically – whether a bank would extend a loan to someone, or if a judge would give someone a certain sentence. The decisions of the past are the input for how we teach software to make those decisions in the future. If we live in a society where police profile black and Latino people that affects the police data on who is likely to be a criminal. So you’ll have these communities overrepresented in the data sets, which are then used to train algorithms to look for future crimes, or predict who’s seen to be higher risk and lower risk“, you see this is observation towards risk, a path we have seen clearly in the last two decades, yet the opposite is also there, but how to set its dimensionality? It becomes big data in observation towards opportunity, a path never walked because opportunity is one identified once it is walked, a system cannot predict the dream if it cannot comprehend the dream, or the dreamer. It is designing a computer that will design computers. It is the ability to design Skynet (I just had to go there), with the optional danger of our own end (see the collected works of Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger). It is always most likely to fail because Ruha forgot to include a philosopher to her team. The computer fails because we forgot about philosophia, the love of wisdom, and as we forgot about that we merely ended with really clever calculators and calculators are never about predicting the future, it is about limiting cost and maximising profit in any endeavour (more money, more reserves, more energy, more resources) and these margins never lead to wisdom or innovation because the dreamer was missing and dreamers do not constitute a positive influx in that engine, sales and marketing did away with that, they always will.

To illustrate this let me give you a personal side. In 1997 I send a mail to a sales executive. I had recently by accident found the Warner Brothers Angelfire partnership site. They had united and every person could freely sign up to get a Buffy Address, a Babylon 5 address, a Charmed address and so on. It was static, you got access to fan art, you got 20Mb web space and an email address. In those days (pre Gmail) it was actually really cool, but there was no way to reach out, So I suggested that we have something similar and allow the people to reach each other and we would be in the middle being able to market to all of them. The sales executive laughed in my face, stating that it would never have any business premise, it was a useless use of resources, it was not in ‘the mission statement‘. I dropped it knowing it was a lost opportunity. Now we have Facebook. My idea was nowhere near it, it was not advanced it was merely messaging and marketing, the direct impact of no vision, 4 years before Facebook shown in two colours, Black and White, I still have the email somewhere, 4 years before the launch of Social media, I tried to introduce a path towards it. I have no doubt that Facebook would have overtaken me, I did not dream that advanced, but at least I had the dream and it is also for that reason that my IP will never go into hands like the limited ones I had to work with.

A limiting amount of opposition (from to her) is seen in “Part of that has been spurred on by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and the US election. More and more people are realising that this idea of big tech coming to save us, it’s really been dismantled. Part of it is shifting from a kind of paranoia around technology to what my activist colleagues like to say: from paranoia to power“, I believe that data is data, it is not wisdom and I also believe that data can aid in finding solutions, yet to do that you must drive a solution, you must devise a way where data is the inspirer towards innovation and software cannot directly lead towards it, you can dashboard it to see where the needs are, you can report on it where the shortages are and you can make a slice and dice app to let people get a scope of information to feed the dream, but you cannot directly feed the dreamer as you cannot predict in what direction his dream goes. You can merely hope to bring the spark that makes the dreamer dream in his or her direction and hope it leads to innovation and at that part the CEO, COO, CFO and CTO will have come crying half a dozen times to stop the squandering of resources. She does address my view correctly when she gives us: “More diversity in Silicon Valley is important, but won’t automatically address algorithmic bias. Unless all those diverse people are empowered to challenge discriminatory design processes, diversity is a ruse” and she is correct and perhaps she also answers her own question.

In all this we forgot one group, we forgot about the children, we need to be able to look at data like a child and learn to randomly look at answers to questions that we aren’t even asking, it is the initial option of a spark (not a given) that leads to the insight we get with: ‘What If?‘, the need to embrace the obvious, not ignoring it, all this in data is required to get insights leading to wisdom, the question becomes how can this be addressed and form my personal point of view is to teach people about data as early as possible, not in a light of statistics, but in a light to something I got in the early 70’s, looking at the question ‘What is the chance something happens?‘, a simple ‘kans tol‘ (Chance spinner) which would give the younger watcher an indication on chance and statistics. When we add that to the equation what happens when creativity takes over and they start looking at what they can find, or even better, what they cannot find. The younger mind is more eager to find, and equally find missing. It is that part that we are missing out of and it matters, because it is the first step in learning the question that we are not phrasing, optionally overlooking the obvious.

Part Three (Final)

Finally we get to part three with ‘Why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformed‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/01/san-francisco-big-tech-workers-industry). And we see part of the drive with “Even Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce and a San Francisco native who has long urged comity between the techies and the city, has taken to calling his hometown a “train wreck”“, we can only conclude that now that he bought Tableau it will get worse for him. Even as it is not about him, but the failing infrastructure with “one-bedroom apartment reached an all-time high of $3,700 a month“, which is more than twice the price for a real decent two bedroom apartment in Chicago, we see the impact, but not what is around all of them, yet it is not new, London has similar issues. As the people who can afford to live somewhere, we see that greed takes over turning the city into a carcass because it lacks a sustainable infrastructure. As people cannot afford to live near where they work, infrastructure becomes an increasing problem and as cities cater to large investors, they forgot that affordable living is essential; they merely pushed that issue forward and forward again and again. We see he escalation even further when we consider the quote: “San Francisco has become more of a satellite campus, with South Bay stalwarts including Apple, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn competing for office space in the city proper. They’ve joined the San Francisco-native companies Twitter, Uber, and Airbnb in the cramped confines of a city of just 49 square miles, surrounded by water on three sides” instead of diversifying and clustering over a much larger area, they all moved together, and as such thousands of employees need to live where they work and now prices are through the roof, it also impacts the bottom line, so as others decided to keep their stomping grounds in Columbus Ohio and as we see those in Madison Wisconsin, we see that the bottom line changes, yet they too push for space in San Francisco, so what was once the United States of America is not the Marketing needs of California. the sad part is that these people are all separated and isolated form one another through intellectual property, and as I am happy to make fun of Zendesk and their need to “file oppositions at the United States Patent and Trademark Office to 49 trademarks including the word “zen”“, all whilst we know that “Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism” that is reported and registered as something that is 1200 years old, so to see that there are at present well over 724 active trademarks which include the word “Zen” we see the replacement from inner peace to turf wars and it links to all of it, these people all think and associate alike, and as we have seen, it leads to iteration not innovation. And there we see the hoax in the serious setting. As we are introduced to: ““I feel like San Francisco is between Seattle and New York, but rather than the best of both, it’s the worst of both,” said Beth, a 24-year-old product manager who asked not to be identified by her real name. Beth moved to the city directly after graduating from Stanford to work at a major tech company, but recently transferred to Seattle. “Everyone I met was only interested in their jobs, and their jobs weren’t very interesting,” she said of her time in San Francisco. “I get it, you’re a developer for Uber, I’ve met a million of you.”” When you cluster together you create new bias and new limitations that merely stop you from dreaming. When you are in San Francisco, North of SF International Airport, you are now mostly all the same, think the same, work the same and you are all separated on three sides by water, and a failed infrastructure, you have no way to go. There we see the benefit that the two other locations have, space created opportunity and the chance to dream, a path to innovation, and I fear that things will turn from bad to worse for San Francisco. As greed pushed out the infrastructure, it removed diversity, it is not merely the diversity that pushes us to lows, the fact that some ideas came from watching someone do something else, the ability to see their interaction with the environment that allowed for new thoughts and that cubicles took that away, even if it is not called open space, it merely made the entire open space a cubicle. So whilst these people ‘enjoy’ their 55Km bus ride to Mountain view, we see that the same distance gets us to Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay, all with opportunity and other considerations and it is the ‘other considerations’ that are the treasure trove in this, because it changes the mindset of people, considerations lead to opportunity, opportunity is the foundation of innovation, it always has been, whether the innovation is accepted or rejected does not matter, it is the one that does go through that becomes the innovation that fills a corporate coffer, iteration merely lets it go on a little longer. Diversity shows that as others embrace an idea it can truly be improved on and create a new innovation, not a new iteration, but that only happens when the accepting diversity is large enough, and that is when we get the one quote that shows the disaster. With: ““It was really hard to stomach the indifference that I witnessed from folks who’d been living in San Francisco for a while, simply stepping over the slumped bodies of people who lived outside or just cold ignoring people asking for money,” said Jessica Jin, who moved to San Francisco from Austin, Texas, to work for a tech startup, of her first impressions of the city. “I wondered how long it would take me to also become numb to it all.”” we need to see that this is the largest danger. It is not that Jessica Jin moved to SF, it is ‘how long it would take me to also become numb to it all‘, that will be the moment that her dreaming to innovation ends, when we become numb, we merely create a shell to ignore what is around us and that is the first thing to thump innovation into silence, as I see it that has always been the first hurdle to lose innovation and soon thereafter they lose the ability towards iteration as well.

It is the larger issue to a much larger problem that we never properly defined, how did we lose the ability to properly dream a path to innovation, it is what drowns the creative mind and soon thereafter we get exactly what the CEO’s and CFO’s wanted, result driven worker bees, but that is what killed their company, the dream is lost and so is creation of innovation attached to it.

It is about location, location, location, but not in the way you thought it was. It was about the space to truly dream, too bad these hundreds of board members all forgot that one simple lesson, all whilst it was in front of them all along, most of them got into the board of directors using that path in the first place, how quaint!

 

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June 24, 2019 · 11:37

Falling off the wagon

It all started with a success story, it then ‘evolved’ into the age of complacency as it was lying in a lazy floating chair in a swimming pool. America was lazy, complacent and greed driven.

Huawei overtook Ericsson in 2012 as the largest telecommunications-equipment manufacturer in the world, then casually overtook Apple in 2018 as the second-largest manufacturer of smartphones in the world, still behind Samsung Electronics, and rose to the 72nd rank on the Fortune Global 500 list. In December 2018, Huawei reported that its annual revenue had risen to US$108.5 billion in 2018 (a 21% increase over 2017).It is at this point that America was a mere 3rd position, Huawei is presently servicing 47 of the 50 largest telecom operators on the planet, for the first time in history America no longer really matters as a technology provider. Sources like the Economist, the Guardian, Fortune and TechRadar all give the same news. It is at this point that the USPTO has to give the goods (read: the bad message) that Asia has surpassed America with registered patents by a lot, and the US has to deal with more and more bad news as they get strangled by a debt that surpasses $22,000,000,000,000. 22 trillion and no end in sight to turn it around, now that 5G is off to the races more bad news is given as the American and Nokia 5G solutions are decently inferior to the ones that China (Huawei has). The American overreaction is astounding and it comes with additional levels of humour. When we see an article by cyber security expert Zak Doffman in Forbes ‘Huawei ‘Slams FedEx Vendetta’ After Courier Refuses To Deliver P30 Phone To U.S.‘ (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/06/23/huawei-slams-fedex-vendetta-after-courier-refuses-to-deliver-p30-phone-to-u-s) where we see: “Parcel returned by FedEx due to U.S. Government with Huawei and China Government—return to sender“, the humour is here as we also saw a month ago: ‘Drug traffickers’ favourite way to move fentanyl is FedEx and USPS‘, so Fedex can stop a Chinese mobile phones, yet is incapable of stopping drug traffickers. It has become that bad and for the life of me, the idea that that stupidity has grown to this degree at the moment has made me realise that pretty much my only option left is to offer my IP at 10% value to China as America clearly can no longer be trusted to stop the stupidity in its own ranks.

And it gets to be worse. Now we see: ‘The U.S. blacklists five Chinese supercomputer firms, including AMD joint venture THATIC‘ (at https://www.pcworld.com/article/3404464/the-us-blacklists-five-chinese-supercomputer-firms-including-amd-joint-venture-thatic.html). So as we are now introduced to ‘U.S. firms will be forbidden to do business with the companies‘ we are shown more than stupidity. I have been an avid fan of the segregation, isolation, and assassination triangle in tactics, but this is pretty much the first time in history that a nation is doing it to itself, implying that American bankruptcy is so close to the collapse that they need whatever they can to delay the collapse of their economy. I can never trust any government in that position to be honest about any trade it holds. Handing my IP over to China is perhaps the only option to get any decent amount of funds out of them, and I have to pay the rent at some point.

Do I care about these Chinese companies? Not really! Apart from my trusty Huawei mobile, I do not know any of them and there is no real reason to know or care about them, but the actions of America to the degree that they are doing it, like they are the biggest whoring bully on the block also implies that they can do it to anyone else and as I see it, there are plenty of UK (BT), Swedish (Ericsson), Finnish (Nokia) and other firms they can do this to when things do not go their way. They will come up with some kind of National security scheme like Finland is next to Russia or something like that. It is nice to advocate open and fair trade when you are the only one dealing (IBM, Microsoft) but that is no longer the case and Microsoft has become too self-indulgent as they screw up market after market just to push their Azure solution. America can no longer be trusted, that is the short and sweet of it, they know it and Americans know it too, but they are too desperate and there is no stopping a desperate bully who is about to no longer matter.

And the world is not ready for a bully like that. Japan is too deep into its own problems, Europe is desperate to avoid whatever recession comes next and the others have no independent voice. In all this India is as isolated as it gets and that takes 12.5% of the global population out of the equation. As the risk of a 2020 recession in Europe is nearing an almost certainty there is panic, there is panic on Wall Street because the 2020 recession will hit the US squarely in the chest during the elections, ending whatever small edge the Republicans have and it changes everything for them. The 2020 recession will be worse than ever because the ECB squandered their reserves on incentives and stimulus as there are no reserves left. The ECB, IMF and Wall Street all knew that this could come and the 5G hype was all about avoiding it so that the new economy could restart what was lost, but their lag against Chinese Technology vendors (read: mainly Huawei) is so large that it will help the Chinese economy, but the others will only get a fraction of the IP they do not own and that fallback (or non optional fallover) is a lot larger than some are willing to admit to.

Now the short sighted American bias against Huawei and China is hitting new heights as they try to isolate China, yet in the end they are isolating themselves as Europe is seeking another option, they are seeing the value of Chinese IP and they want alternatives, especially if it could delay or even turnover their own impending recession, in that scenario America will lose more and more because their own technology is flawed, untested and lacks innovation. It will hit Europe, whilst benefitting the Middle East as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar have signed up with China, America lost more than just weapon deals there.

What Cisco achieved with UTS in Sydney a decade ago is now happening in Qatar, Qatar University College of Engineering now has a similar deal with Huawei, implying that Qatar might be the first place where Huawei trained 5G engineers and innovators are born pushing 5G innovation. For Qatar this is more than good news, there is a first stage where Al Jazeera could become technologically more advanced than CNN, another blow to American pride and Al Jazeera is eager to really get there. They have miles to go, yet with 5G fully deployed they can do it in less than half the time we expect. All elements that push America back further and further. When I stated that this was a stupid move by America in 2018, I actually had no idea that they would lose to this degree, but at present they are and their decisions are making things worse not better.

As we see the first Huawei Authorised Information and Network Academy (HAINA) programme launched in Qatar, we also recognise that this will enable Saudi Arabia and the UAE more and more, so there might be a diplomatic stance ending the unfriendly border issues between the three and they will profit stronger and stronger.

There is absolute truth in the statement: “Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education and Higher Education Dr Ibrahim Al Nuaimi, said developing the technology capabilities of Qatar’s youth will have a significant impact on the smart evolution of society and country, contributing to the growth of Qatari economy.  “Initiatives such as this one between Qatar University and Huawei demonstrate the power that cooperative action can have in shaping the future of a nation,” he remarked“, it still requires the foundation and the nurturing of how to grow innovation, yet I have seen again and again that the hungry will find alternatives to make food and Qatar is clearly famished at present.

And there is one more nightmare to face. You see if China gets any IP hands on anything that could replace x86 technologies, the US is truly done for. At present they will laugh, scream and make all the claims that an ego driven nation could make, but then there is the history. We have 1975 when Federico Faggin and 11 employees created the Z80, there was a small team led by Chuck Peddle who came up with the 6502, it hit Intel and Motorola hard, a chip at less than 15% of the cost of an Intel or a Motorola processor. It would fuel an industry that would sell well over 15 million computers in an age where computers were not popular. We recognise that America was the driver in all this, it drove RISC to be the factor for the creation of Summit, still the fastest Supercomputer in the world, yet now that China surpasses America in patents, they have the core to create a new age of computer technology. We see that from 2017 onwards the Huawei Mobile Phone is the personal server to have; the fact that it is a mobile is beside the point. My IP was a security pass on personal mobile servers and that is the foundation of the next decade. It is not the personal computer or desktop, there is still the laptop and Chromebooks (and likeminded devices) have the option to be the next power drivers, but Huawei has the hand with 4 aces, they have the foundation of mobile personal servers and it scares America. My idea for what would have been (optionally) the Google Tome was founded on that idea as I created a solution to stop the NHS collapsing. Now that most elements are with Huawei and Chinese operators, America actually matters less. Even as Microsoft is still screaming Azure (whenever they can), we see that there are other options that could do similar and could surpass Microsoft within 4 years, that realisation is scaring America to death. They have no options when that happens. Complacency got them there and the next generation of these so called ‘captains of industry‘ are holding a hand with a two and a seven and they are playing Texas hold’em. A proverbial Snake eyes for the craps dealer in the house, which is the setting and the stage they can no longer escape. It is where they are at and their overreaction merely shows their levels of desperation.

In 2021 we will see that not only will they have lost 5G to a crippling degree, the other players will fare even worse. If China gets a decent deal with Japan, America will have segregated itself, they isolated themselves as Europe and the Commonwealth will seek whatever keeps them afloat and at that point with the debt closer to $25 trillion, they will end up cutting their own wrists with all the uber wealthy Americans seeking sunny shores in their mega yachts. Suddenly places like the Riviera, Dubai, the Virgin Islands and Italy will be swamped with Americans who will be quiet as mice as they wait for America to reinvent itself in the span of 2-3 decades, and America needs to get lucky to do it that fast. As the world is set to the currency of IP and patents, it might take a whole lot longer than that.

When I decided to get my Master in IP in 2010 I knew that there was a change in the winds, it was the clearest in IT, but I saw how it would impact to a much larger degree, I saw the shift to mobile patents in 2012, and now I see the other shifts too. I feel certain of my view, I cannot tell how politicians will react because that too impacts the changing tides, but overall they seem to align to the need of greed too often as such, my predictions are more likely than not coming true. It’s a sad world, if only American firm had not been so lazy relying on iterative technology for a decade, things would be very different indeed.

To complete the change China really only needs three more innovative steps in 5G communication to make it certainty and turn these steps into nail to service the coffin that is America, with the Middle East in play, there is every chance that they will pull it off, the rest of us (the non-Americans) will need to decide on how that future serves us best, because that too is a choice we face, and we have to make it ourselves.

And if you were in doubt until now, the Wall Street Journal reported only hours ago: “U.S. President Donald Trump is looking to require next-generation 5G cellular equipment used in the United States to be designed and manufactured outside China, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.” So consider this quote really clearly: the entire China matter has been going on for weeks, yet yesterday we see that equipment is to be ‘designed and manufactured outside China’, a discriminatory tactic that shows that there was no clear tactic in play, and clearly the Americans are not up to scrap at present. What else was not anticipated on?

Someone fell of the wagon and others were unable to see the dangers clearly, The US still does not recognise that it has a real problem; the first stage of solving the problem is at present not met. Do you really need more convincing?

 

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June 21, 2019 · 11:49

The seventh guest

Yes, it is a game, but this is not about gaming, it is the game we detest, but it is being played and we sit in the middle, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sits in the middle and the Trump administration is uniting behind “the shooting down of a US drone could have been carried out by a “loose and stupid” Iranian officer without authorisation from Tehran“. So good morning it is Friday, no throw back Thursday for us, just the start of meaningless banter from the political isles.

To get to the 7th guest, you have to understand the content. It was a brilliant puzzle game released by Virgin in the 90’s. The story was over the top but cool, it was a journey to stay alive until the next morning. The house was filled with puzzles that needed to be solved to continue. It was a little more like an interactive movie (in those days). The first puzzle was to carve a cake in equal pieces, there were 6 guests to each person and the cake was 6 by 5 squares. Simple you think, but the clue was ‘2 skulls and 2 stones, the rest is just icing‘, and now cutting the cake was not as easy as initially seemed.

Now we get to the icing of Yesterday (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2019/06/20/the-ice-and-the-icing/) where I quoted in response: “It is seen when the most stupid of all actions is given with: “If Iran did breach the uranium limits, the deal, known as the joint comprehensive plan of action, gives both sides time to go into a disputes mechanism before it is declared void“, is it really that bad, after the ‘breach’ Europe still wants to talk?” It seems that boar mongering President Trump is now trying diplomacy, to not let things escalate too much. The biggest bully on the block is eager to not get into a fight, when did logic ever prevail?

So when we see: “We didn’t have a man or woman in the drone. It would have made a big, big difference,” Trump said. Asked how the US would respond, he said: “You’ll find out.”“, as well as ““I find it hard to believe it was intentional if you want to know the truth. I think it could have been somebody who was loose and stupid that did it”

This is how Iran has ‘sanctified’ the weapon deployments to Hezbollah, is Mr. Bad Hair Cut really going to play the card that enables Iran? Apparently these $120,000,000 drones are well insured, or is he taking the loss out of his own pay check?

I can only wonder how the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia feels after the disappointing support that both the United Kingdom and United States are giving them at present. So as we see that the allies of Saudi Arabia are backing down when the drums of war are sounding with the increased cadence of (what they call) vigor by Iran, Saudi Arabia needs to reconsider who their real allies are. I am certain that Russia and China will use this opportunity that opened up, I just do not know how at present. In addition now that we know that President Trump is not about sticking to his guns, I wonder how long his own party will suffer the blunders he makes day after day, it will optionally be the first impeachment that gets full support from BOTH the Democrats and his own Republicans.

How to continue?

That is the larger question and I feel certain that this is on the mind of the ruler in Riyadh as well. Saudi Arabia must do what is best for Saudi Arabia, Israel needs to do what is best for Israel and so does Europe and the US, yet in this there is no real skin in the game for Europe and the US. Iran will strike at Israel and Saudi Arabia when it can and keeps the other two at bay with fear and both are now facilitating towards Iran through the fear of removing all diplomatic options.

CNBC gives us that a mere 5 hours ago with: ‘EU top diplomat says Europe will try to make sure ‘escalation is avoided’ between US, Iran‘, there is a time and place when avoiding escalation is the best of all options, I personally feel that it is way too late for that, again, the proxy war utilising the terrorist organisation Hezbollah is evidence of that. And the escalations are still going on, the strike a mere 12 hours ago as we are told (by Al Jazeera) that ‘Attack by rebel group on facility in southern province of Jizan the latest in string of attacks on Saudi targets‘ gives rise that Iran is actually still playing both an offensive game optionally with their offensive group Hezbollah and a defensive play where officers get a bonus and a promotion if they hit an American drone. Yet when we see: “The Houthis have stepped up missile and drone attacks in Saudi Arabia in recent weeks amid rising tensions throughout the Middle East fuelled by a bitter standoff between Iran and the United States” no one is asking how these drones are paid for, because Yemen is out of money and has no technological stage to make them. I wonder how to see the statement: “US, Iran and Saudi Arabia have all said they do not want a war to break out in the region“, in my view Iran is telling any story that the others are willing to swallow, America is broke and Saudi Arabia has no real allies to rely on, the weapon case in the UK and the US president doing a 180 degree direction on previous statements, It puts Saudi Arabia in a poor place, that is unless Germany and China get out of the dug-out and properly give support to Saudi Arabia.

I don’t get it, what purpose is served to cater to the needs of a child called Iran to this degree? I stare at the maps and I look at the places being hit, and to be honest, for the life of me, I do not understand how Saudi Arabia is able to keep calm at present, the moment highway 30 is hit in multiple places, the direct threat to Riyadh will be visible and all options will be taken off the table and I fear that this is sooner than we think, giving Iran more time to use the misdirection to finalise their Uranium requirements. At that point WW3 is almost the only step left to us, there is no way that Saudi Arabia and Israel will accept such a threat.

Yet there is an upside, with 5-9 million dead Iranians, the carbon footprint goes down a little, a small victory for the environment, you see, give me a lemon, some water and I will sell you a melon juice smoothie.

If that is what is required to play the game, I am in!

I will end this part with a personal message to Chinese President Xi Jinping (and to Chen Wenqing: ‘No, I am not trying to corrupt him with western ideology‘).

Dear Sir,

I would like to discuss the purchase of 20-30 Chengdu J-20 fighters. In light of both a first order discount, as well as a student discount (we are all students on the path of life), I believe that should the talks be successful, that 20-30 planes at a unit cost of $27.35 million (with rebates, discounts and commission applied), in addition the 2 years of full service with no regards to hours flown, mileage traveled or missiles fired. This is based on 2016 flyaway cost. The benefit is that these fighters will be directly engaging Iranian forces and as such you will have access to a massive amount of data enabling you to start on the 6th generation fighter, optionally making you the first country to have one. We would also be interested in the testing of the Xian H-20 prototype that is now nearing completion. If the specs are as they are claiming to be, it will help us in removing morale from Tehran and from the IRGC as a whole. In this the unofficial word is that the sky is the limit as regarding to the price of this place (my 2.17% commission still applies). My client is ready to upgrade several army based parts (both light and heavy guns), however I hope that this part can be tabled until Iran decides to attack directly, at which point Saudi Arabian boots on Iranian ground becomes a direct first.

Kindest regards,

Lawrence van Rijn

I look forward to a mutually fruitful support towards presenting the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia a proper defense option that will result towards strength and stability in the Middle East region, under the guiding lights of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

That was not hard was it?

So in one strike the BAE loses 2 years of commerce, but the British anti-weapon league is happy, the UK loses well over $4 billion in business opportunity in the long term but you can get the green party to sell grass to a place called whatevernation, can’t you? The US loses its arms options overnight and enables China to economically grow 9%-12%, and as other options fall away for Europe and the US to a much larger degree, Russia will be ever ready to pick up a few scraps in the process.

It was a really simple equation and by choosing the facilitating side of a route that goes nowhere, other options came out to play. Let’s be honest, in light of what has happened, does the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have any cause to trust the US or Europe in any of this at present?

In the end the 7th guest was about another person in the house (hint) that only showed 6, it makes the game decently apt to the situation the Middle East faces at present. The question is that when that puzzle is solved, will some of the political voices in Iran, Europe, America, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Yemen stay in denial?

 

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June 20, 2019 · 12:52

The ice and the icing

Ah, it is the environment that was taking a hit yesterday. The Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/18/arctic-permafrost-canada-science-climate-crisis) is giving us: ‘Scientists shocked by Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years sooner than predicted‘, and at this point, we can all agree that we have a really serious problem. I know, the people at Wall Street would more likely than not be in a stage to dismiss and debunk the news, yet this is not about merely melting ice, this is about permafrost melting. This is no small matter; you see the Arctic and Antarctic both have places where the ice never melts, that ‘never melting’ ice is now actually melting. Consider if you can, a piece of ice on Antarctic, twice the size of the state of Texas, close to half a mile high, that is now becoming water (which in Antarctic terms does not seem much). Now we also know that ice loses volume when it melts, yet it is only 10%, so over the foreseeable future we end up with a water mass 800 meter high and the size of Texas being added to the oceans. Water levels will rise and to a decent amount, in all this, there is also the arctic to consider, it is not land, it is all water and they too will add levels of water to it all.

Then there is a new development, which we see at (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/19/himalayan-glacier-melting-doubled-since-2000-scientists-reveal), the problem is are we have been sold for too long and too often a package of goods? Is it such a stretch that the media ‘suddenly’ has a whole range of ‘revelations’? I am not stating that these are fabricated, but the timing is an issue. As I personally see it the people have been ‘handled’ for far too long, giving less and less reliability on what we see. Even as we see ‘Himalayan glacier melting doubled since 2000, spy satellites show‘, more important, why did it require a spy satellite? Yes, I get it when we see “more than a quarter of all ice lost over the last four decades, scientists have revealed“, so when was that revealed? It gets to be worse when we see: “This is the clearest picture yet of how fast Himalayan glaciers are melting since 1975, and why“. Fair enough the work ‘Acceleration of ice loss across the Himalayas over the past 40 years‘ published in Science Advances 19 Jun 2019: Vol. 5, no. 6, eaav7266; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav7266 is seemingly an academic work by J. M. Maurer, J. M. Schaefer, S. Rupper and A. Corley might be good and it might all be top notch work, but the timing of it all gives it a little bit of a bitter taste. Now, this is not some hidden attack, the work looks really good (at https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/6/eaav7266), it has uncertainty assessments, how it was dealt with, how the data was captured, this is a real piece of academic work with references and all (a lot of references), yet timing is everything we know that and it still feels like we are being handled. Part of me is speculating that this game is not by the scientists, but that certain previous white house players have been suppressing or delaying certain reports. It is highly speculative and I have no evidence, but that is what it feels like, the more the political player gets into bed with big business, the less environmental consideration we tend to see.

The entire matter increases when we consider: “The analysis shows that 8bn tonnes of ice are being lost every year and not replaced by snow, with the lower level glaciers shrinking in height by 5 meters annually” this implies another part which we see in the National Geographic (at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/sea-level-rise/). When we see: “Rising seas is one of those climate change effects. Average sea levels have swelled over 8 inches (about 23 cm) since 1880, with about three of those inches gained in the last 25 years. Every year, the sea rises another .13 inches (3.2 mm)“, we see the other part of the coin, so how about your beachfront property in 2045?

We can go long on the yay and nay sayers, but in all this, the media needs to stop facilitating to their shareholders, their stake holders and their advertisers, because the bulk of them are clearly in denial of environmental changes, as well as clearly opposing change. In 2012, the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/may/30/companies-block-action-climate-change) gave us: “An analysis of 28 Standard & Poor 500 publicly traded companies by researchers from the Union of Concerned Scientists exposed a sharp disconnect in some cases between PR message and less visible activities, with companies quietly lobbying against climate policy or funding groups which work to discredit climate science“, I believe that this is still going on, however these companies have become more clever in their actions and acting indirectly. In 2014 we see a Journalist names Mark Green giving us (at https://www.api.org/news-policy-and-issues/blog/2014/10/21/americas-oil-and-natural-gas-industry-be) “97 percent of all oil and natural gas company stock – held by millions of Americans across the country. These include retirees and middle-class Americans saving for retirement“, it is now less about the opposition it is that being ‘in favour’ is dooming the middle class a reversed reverse psychology if you will.

Do you still think that shareholders and stake holders are a stretch? How many financial institution advertisement have YOU seen in the last week alone? And when it comes to the sceptical and the 197 excuses they have, let me add utterly bogus excuse 198: “Women warm the hearts of men and with 4 billion men one woman can raise the planetary temperature by at least 1 degree, so what about the other 99 in the hot 100 (graphic evidence added)?” We see lists of excuses yet to overall need to take a serious look at the matter and give serious airtime to those trying to warn us is also a topic for debate.

When we pass over that episode and we add to the matter (Antarctica, Himalaya, Arctic, Greenland) there is a stage where we have surpassed essential milestones, milestones that can no longer be undone (not within the next two generations). Me, I am still all in favour of culling the human population by 85%, and fortunately for me this time around, the politicians are actually helping me.

It’s the Icing

When it is about the icing we can go in two directions, in the first it is about the topping of a cake, we all have tried it, yummy chocolate icing, marzipan topping, our sweet tooth desires a scrumptious load of icing and the larger your slice of the cake, the better the sugar rush. The second direction is mostly for Canadians (LOL), it is seen in hockey when a player shoots the puck from behind the centre red line, across the opposing team’s goal line, whilst the puck remains untouched. It is a rule to oppose a quick win, netball has a similar option; you need to win by being the better player in each segment of the field. It nullifies a play like Matt Prater of the Denver Broncos achieved in 2013 by kicking that piece of air filled leather for 64 yards, an achievement for sure, but at that point the game becomes about the kickers and it becomes less about the full game. An icing stops this option, making it about the game and this matters as we see in: ‘Diplomatic offensive aims to dissuade Tehran from breaching uranium limits‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/19/uk-france-germany-last-ditch-effort-save-iran-deal), you see I am slightly less convinced that they are not their yet (or disgracefully close to it). When I see: ““We want to unify our efforts so there is a de-escalation process that starts,” Le Drian said. “There is still time and we hope all the actors show more calm. There is still time, but only a little time.”” to be honest I wonder what drugs Jean-Yves Le Drian is on (and can I have some please?) The idea that Iran adheres to any kind of agreement is short sold to begin with, the entire Hezbollah proxy war counts as evidence in that matter.

So when I see: “We need to de-escalate through dialogue. It is a time of ‘diplomacy first’ and that’s what we are committed to” I merely wonder who is fooling who. It is seen when the most stupid of all actions is given with: “If Iran did breach the uranium limits, the deal, known as the joint comprehensive plan of action, gives both sides time to go into a disputes mechanism before it is declared void“, is it really that bad, after the ‘breach’ Europe still wants to talk? Did you learn nothing from the Adolph Hitler European tour of 1939-1945? We could ask the State of Israel with its 15 million votes, oh sorry, there are apparently 6 million absentee ballots, they can no longer vote; does anyone remember that little fact in the entire equation?

If it is slightly too crude, then it is intentional. We have facilitated for tea parties and long winded talks going nowhere for too often and for far too long. It is now time to act before it is too late, or merely accept the culling that comes afterwards, which will be good for the environment as well.

Ice and Icing, all events linking to intentional violations to norms, to boundaries and to standards of life and living, how many more violations will we endure until we are given the sad reality our children and grand children face soon enough, we have left them nothing and for too long we would not adhere to that reality until it was too late for the next generation. We are shown too much pieces of evidence that we are doing this, whilst denying the facts presented. This might be the best evidence that we are bad parents and that we are unworthy of titles of parent and custodian, the evidence is all out there in colour, in black and white, on all levels including the academic one.

If this was a match, then it would be the face-off between the two Global Hockey teams: the Bogusses versus the Professinators, the problem is that no matter who wins, the people lose, this game has been on for too long and time is a luxury we actually no longer have and the media have been all about getting the limelight and the time to let all the voices be heard letting exploitation reign (aka circulation and clicks). The Great Barrier Reef with over 50% now bleached to death (source: National Geographic), is merely one casualty of all talk and no actions, I wonder how many more needs to be lost for people to finally force actions against politicians and corporations. In opposition we see the New York post giving us (at https://nypost.com/2018/09/12/the-great-barrier-reef-was-never-dead/) “Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is “showing signs of recovery,” a new study shows, after massive bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 threatened the world’s largest living structure”. It is time to properly vet the media for what they publish and cater to on a much larger scale, because in this age of strife they win, as do their advertisers. We could of course accept the second option and allow for the culling, it will solve both matters at hand as it means that there are too few left to advertise to.

6 of one, half a dozen of the other is a term we see, and we think that it is the same, yet we are too often not told that it was no longer about apples or oranges, it was relabeled as an issue about fruit, now we get to deal with fruit whilst our individual preference of apples and oranges is no longer an option to cater to, did you realise that small part of the equation as well?

 

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June 18, 2019 · 12:41

London Bridge had fallen

This is not some event involving Mike Banning as the never failing US Secret Agent, it is also not a movie involving Gerard Butler in command of a Nuclear Submarine (Cool movie though). No this is reality!

In 2017, on June 3rd an attack took place, the inquest is still going on 2 years later. 3 people ramming pedestrians and after that ran into the public in the Borough Market area and decided to stab a whole lot more people. They were wearing fake explosives, carrying knives. That pretty much sums it up. In the end 8 died and 48 were wounded, the three ‘terrorists’ were killed in the process.

According to all sources these three were ‘inspired’ by ISIS.

I took notice of it initially, but it was not high on my radar, it got my attention again last week, but i was looking into the Strait of Hormuz issue. It kept at the back of my mind. So let’s start with last week: ‘MI5 admin errors meant attackers link ‘was missed’‘, it got to me as MI-5 does a whole lot of things, errors are actually quite rare and anyone stating that there should not be any errors is an idiot. Anything involving intelligence gathering is prone to issues. The right stage, the right interpretation, the right connections and the right actions. These are all matters that influence the stage. You can check this for yourself, go to any recruiter and apply for a job, what are the chances that he/she places you wrong or gives you less useful advice, considers you not to be the ‘right’ person for the job? That chance is rather high.

So when I see the BBC article (at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48626134) giving me: “Youssef Zaghba was stopped at Bologna airport in 2016 after telling staff he was going to Turkey to be a terrorist“, so in the clear setting of a first, a terrorist does not tell anyone he/she is one. The more verbose version is: “Asked why he was going to Turkey, he said to be “a terrorist” before quickly changing his answer to “tourist”, the court heard“, o now we get a person who is basically an idiot and customs has to deal with hundreds if not thousands on a daily basis. This part is already numb and done for. So at best we have a video game wannabe, at worst we have a person with mental health issues. At present neither two score high on the list, at most a police chat would have been warranted.

Regarding Zaghba we also see (at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40169985) In 2016, Zaghba was stopped at Bologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport by Italian officers who found ISIS-related materials on his mobile phone. So what materials were they? He apparently was placed on a watch list, which is shared with many countries including the UK, as such is he merely watched when he travelled or 24:7? There is a difference and one does not warrant the other.

Yet now there is a clarity of optional failure that is increased with: “Witness L, who is head of policy, strategy and capability for MI5’s international counter-terrorism branch, told the court MI6 did not translate the Italian request for two months – and then sent it to the wrong person in MI5“, not only is my question:

  1. ‘How could this be send to the wrong person and why was there no return/response on wrongful send information?‘
  2. Then we get: ‘The optional escalation had 1 year to find corrections and optional change in surveillance. Why was this not done?‘
  3. How often is the shared list vetted and checked for additional information whether the watch list is still accurate and more important useful?

Three direct questions that now put MI-5 on the radar for a few failings. In addition we also need to enlarge the scope, if SIGINT is GCHQ, how was this optionally missed twice over?

There are also serious questions regarding the Lawyer of the 6 victims. When we see that he had: ‘previously told the court there had been missed opportunities to prevent the attack.‘ It is important to see this part. In another story we get: “Gareth Patterson, the lawyer representing several victims’ families, said there was evidence the attackers had been in contact since January 2017“, here I disagree to some degree, and with ““any reasonably competent investigation” had the chance to detect the planning that was going on between the three men” I disagree even further.

You see, when we look at the elements. The fake explosives means that it could have been made in any way, for the most stuff from a toy store might have sufficed, at most a stroll through B&Q or Wickes would have sufficed. Then there is the stage of interpreting the Zaghba part, a terrorist claiming to be one is not one. I would have been able to do all the needed parts without setting off any flags or alarms. The biggest risk I run is getting a lorry, they did not get one either for mere payment issues that one element also shows that they commenced a terrorist act, but were not terrorists (or almost the worst prepared one). The absence of planning, the absence of dotting the ‘i‘ and crossing the ‘t‘ is what sets them apart. Merely three men with water bottles, pretending that to be explosives, knives that one can buy at IKEA and when we learn that the Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/10/worse-terror-attack-on-london-bridge-foiled-by-chance-police-say) that the van had “13 wine bottles containing flammable liquid with rags stuffed in them, essentially Molotov cocktails” that were either forgotten, or just ignored by these three, we see a wannabe terrorist who forgot that they had options to increase the death count by a lot. These are all elements that count, because MI-5 is there for serious threats and these three were seemingly ignoring all their options even during the event. Going back to the lorry, that one might be easy when I stalk the right bars and mickey the right person, with him tied up in the back of the van I could start my spree, no flag raised at all. In my case I would have been able to get the stuff that goes boom; I merely needed to change perspective on the how. All issues that would never raise a flag; that is what MI-5 has to deal with and they have the one additional benefit that they are on an island.

We agree that steps were missed on Zaghba, but none of this is still evident that it would have prevented the attack. The higher part is Khuram Shazad Butt, he has enough flags that warrant consideration, his presence is a real issue, yet how much flags did he raise before the attack? We seem to blame after the effect, yet in the UK we see more whingers and whiners on freedom and privacy than in most other places in the world, well, congratulations! If MI-5 had that data this might have been prevented, they did not. You wanted the Data Protection Act 2018, you got it, you wanted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and it was handed to you, you also face additional dangers because of it, so stop crying!

Back to the attack! I see Rachid Redouane as the actual fuse here. An illegal immigrant, a failed asylum seeker and he remained under the radar, also implying he could get a lot of stuff done whilst not being noticed, not getting noticed and working as a pastry chef, so how did he get that job? He was the part that Butt needed, and as such MI-5 had optionally even less to work with.

You see, when we look after the event, we might see issues to blame MI-5 (optionally GCHQ) with, but there are a lot more markers making at least 1 out of the three a dud from the start. And in all this, no one seems to realise that a failed Asylum seeker was hopping back and forth between the UK and Ireland, there is a larger failing in all this, yet I am stating that MI-5 was not it.

Yesterday

The Guardian yesterday (at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jun/17/communication-issues-left-london-bridge-attack-casualties-without-first-aid) gives us the larger failing, but not in regards to the attack. When we see: ‘police waited for help that wasn’t coming‘ we feel anger and frustration, yet in which direction?

The first is seen with: “police and members of the public being left to treat victims of the London Bridge terror attacks and not knowing why paramedics were not coming to their aid“, as well as “when paramedics were told to evacuate the area, the officers in the courtyard were left treating the casualties on their own awaiting help that did not arrive” we get the first gist of it. You cannot send paramedics in a dangerous situation, we get it we understand it and we accept it. I believe that an alteration to the armed response unit is required. I believe that any armed response unit requires a trained medic to give first aid like in a metropolitan war zone. Yes, it would be great to send in the paramedics, but let’s be honest how would you feel when a police officer tells you: “Look, there are three terrorists over there somewhere, can you go into that place ad see if you can treat some of the wounded people?” I get it, plenty of them medics would, but it is optionally super reckless and highly irresponsible. The fact that the police was not properly warned on the spot could have been for several reasons, all unintentional. This is a situation that is not merely fluid, it involves a lot of people thinking on their feet, whilst running trying to scope the size of the issue in absence of reliable information. These are not mistakes made, they are to some extent coming from experience and actual successful attacks have been really rare, besides that at some point you cannot just call for boy scouts (SAS) at any point, time is a factor. So when I see: “Five people died in or around the courtyard, one of whom, Sebastian Belanger, 36, a French chef, could possibly have been saved if he had received swifter, higher-quality medical attention“, I accept the stage and I accept the premise, but the score on getting ‘higher-quality medical attention‘ is optionally not a realistic one, not in a location of armed conflict and so there we see the stage of time versus location versus available intelligence. We can jump high and low, but reality is a factor and I feel that the after the fact Monday morning quarterbacks are now feeding an inquest of what ‘might have been done’, and I accept I am in this view a Monday morning quarterback as well.

For the larger view we need to go to the actual inquest and I noticed something in day 20 (at https://londonbridgeinquests.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/LBI-Day-20.pdf). The transcript gives us a side that was not part of the actual attack, yet it does involve Khuram Butt, it is actually a lot more important than you think for two reasons on opposite sides of the scale. The transcript gives us:

Witness M, you will appreciate that the investigation that you are here to help us with lasted for something in the region of two years, so I ’ ve got a fair amount to cover but I ’ ll try to be as concise as I can be.

You were asked questions by Mr Hough about the Transport for London employment and you told us that there came a time when you and your team learnt about this job that Khuram Butt obtained working at Westminster underground station.

A: That is correct , yes.

Q: So can I be clear : you learnt about this after he had begun working at that station ?

A: I cannot recall at what stage we learnt about him either seeking out employment or having that employment.

Q: Was that something that you – –

A: But we were aware of the fact that he was working at London Underground.

Q: So it wasn’t something that you learned at the application stage before the decision had been made as to whether they should give him the job?

A: I cannot answer that.

Q: Were arrangements in place at the time for the counter terrorism police to be notified by Transport for London of the names of people applying to be employed by Transport for London in vulnerable locations ?

A: I ’m not aware of any such arrangement. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist , but it ’ s not something I’m aware of .

Q: So to this day can Transport for London receive applications by people who might be terrorist suspects, the subject of ongoing investigations , and then a decision made to employ them without you or your partner agency being notified ?

A: So, again, I can’ t categorically say whether that process exists . That sounds to me that it’s something, if it did exist , would be more in the ”protect” side of our business.

It is important, and let us look at both sides of this equation. On the one hand if there was stronger vetting there was a chance that Khuram Butt might have been stronger on the radar, yet the attack would not have been prevented as the London Underground was not a stage and was not used to set the stage, more importantly there was a chance to set off alarms within Khuram Butt making him a lot more cautious, optionally resorting to a different style of attack. On the other hand, we see that this path would have given MI-5 up to 1500% more work, so a lot less resources to deal with optional more serious threats.

We see more in Day 20 (on page 4, paragraph 9, 10). Here we see the flags issue I raised earlier and the questioning party who is seemingly not all up to date on intelligence, more on finding a part to blame. When we see:

Q: In September 2016 the categorisation was downgraded to P2M, so the risk is now a medium risk, you told us?

A: That is correct. Yes, it was categorised down to a P2M.

Q: And when you dealt with this in your report at paragraph 5.9, you linked this decision to the fact that there had been no indications of actual steps to plan an attack.

A: That’s correct, that is in my report.

Q: But as you’ve accepted a number of times, from the very start, this is somebody who had, throughout, exhibited a degree of operational security.

A: We see that across the entire range of individuals we investigate.

Q: Yes. But an ordinary member of the public with nothing to hide is unlikely to be taking steps to avoid surveillance or to hide their activities; would you agree?

A: He’s not an ordinary member — he was not an ordinary member of the public; he was under investigation.

Q: But that of itself rings alarm bells, doesn’t it , if he is positively taking steps to disguise what his activities are?

A: It’s concerning, but it becomes more concerning when it is attached to other intelligence around other activity. And that will elevate the risk and elevate our posture and our response.

Q: After that decision to recategorise as medium risk, he then re-engaged, you told us, with ALM in the autumn of 2016.

A: So that – – that’s correct, that was the assessment at the time that he started to re-engage with other ALM individuals.

Q: He was also identified as having an inflammatory presence around other extremists, wasn’t he?

A: How do we know that?

Q: Well, you confirmed yesterday that you were aware of that and that’s information that reached you via MI5. We see it in the report of Witness L at paragraph 116.

A: Okay. So I can’t say with any certainty I was aware of that before that time, but just the mere presence — the mere fact that he was associating with other ALM individuals or becoming further engaged is of concern

I see this as an issue. The issue is not the interview, the issue is the available resources and the questioning party seems to live in la la land as there is the consideration that at any time all resources are available, that one clear failure makes the inquest a problem to some extent and that is merely looking at one day, merely Day 20. The focus on Khuram Butt being an ‘inflammatory presence‘, we could argue that this is a good thing, we could argue that pushing other extremists before they are ready is one clear sign to botch attacks (MI-5 will be pleased), the two parts in the transcript give rise to a larger failing, in part the inquest is set to a stage it does not comprehend, it does not facilitate a stage of comprehension where it concerns lone wolves and wannabe’s. In the second degree we see the push regarding re-engagement and the consideration of a medium risk person. Even as there is no valid intelligence giving us that direct action was called for (implied at least). So when I see ‘there had been no indications of actual steps to plan an attack‘, my less diplomatic view towards the barrister would be ‘move the fuck onwards barrister‘, if there is no indication of actual steps, there is no indication for acceleration of increasing profile surveillance, the resources are just not there.

It is the largest failing, not merely the fact that there is no SIGINT working on data that could have been worked on, the stretch on resources, what is available, its definition and the stage of recognising on how to use resources are in the wind and that failing matters, because that recognition is essential to stop attacks by an actual terrorist, a lone wolf or a wannabe, and as long as that part is not clearly in play, there will be more successful attacks and here I regard the premise of a successful attack any attack where more than 5 lives were lost.

We need to accept that choices have impact, we need to see that the attacks will continue and until we find a better way to register dangers this is how it will be and we need to see that the failing was larger, but there is no one to actually blame.

Consider blaming customs for allowing a failed asylum seeker (Rachid Redouane) going back and forth between the UK and Ireland, getting other places to live, is that landlord to blame? There are cogs that are not working for numerous reasons and when we realise that ‘the machine‘ is off its mark by a decent amount, we do not get to blame MI-5 (or GCHQ for that matter). When we consider that Youssef Zaghba might have made a claim and if GCHQ had a right at that point to capture all data regarding that person, there might have been a chance that together with the Khuram Butt data there was a decent chance that this could have been stopped (in theory), but that was not an option was it? Here the Data Protection Act 2018, as well as the application of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) stopped GCHQ from getting essential results to report to MI-5, you wanted this so from my point of view you have to accept the dead people too. You cannot get it both ways, it is just not on.

There is, as I personally see it a larger failure in play, it is not MI-5, it is not GCHQ, it is not the police, it is us and the bullshit setting of privacy whilst we hand over all of our private lives to Facebook and mobile game data collectors, we are doing this too, we ourselves. We can optionally argue that there needs to be a better direct action armed response unit with a trained medic in these teams, but that is an optional investigation for another day, one that is far far away.

 

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June 2, 2019 · 13:40

When stupid people aren’t

Something woke me up from relaxed to fuming. It started when the headline ‘Austerity to blame for 130,000 ‘preventable’ UK deaths‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/01/perfect-storm-austerity-behind-130000-deaths-uk-ippr-report) was given.

And it is all from the IPPR think-tank. This was nice because this gives us a target to look at. The first thing to realise is that Austerity is a tool to get out of debt, from the 90’s onward, the UK amassed a debt that is now approaching £2,000 billion, the debt is now getting to multiple trillions and a democracy that is at the mercy of banks and corporations is not a democracy at all, it is not even a monarchy, it becomes a feudal stage. Like the US, the UK let slip their tax laws and was a bitch of the EU when tax laws were pushed that gave freedom to really large companies to end up paying a mere 1% or less (the FAANG group being a very nice example).

So whilst the penny is out there, remember that the British people as a voter should have voted down excessive spending, but that was never done and now two decades of austerity will follow. The British children get to pay for what their parents spend, or used. In addition, the IPPR joke gets to be a little larger with ‘Two decades of public health improvements have stalled‘, Lets go back 8-10 years when we learned that the Labour government launched an IT improvement that never worked. It comes down that the NHS ended up spending £11.2 billion on a computer system that never worked. It is a collection of stupid people, short sighted demands and lack of comprehension that pushed for a system that never came. So where will the NHS get these funds to fund health improvements? Well they spend it on a computer system that never worked. I wonder if that is in the think tank research (me thinks it is not).

So when we are confronted with “An estimated two in five (44%) of health visitors reported caseloads in excess of 400 children, well above the recommended level of 250 per visitor needed to deliver a safe service.” The report recommends another 5,100 training places for health visitors. In a statement, the Local Government Association said the government urgently needed to reverse the £700m reduction in public health funding since 2015 and plug a £3.6bn gap in funding for adult social care by 2025“, a finding that is most likely correct and on the money is on the money for funds that the UK does not have. As the UK government is in the red to the degree of two thousand billion pounds, it needs to cut costs or increase corporate taxation to a degree that is acceptable, until the debts go down we would all have to make do with what is left until there is more. So when I see: ‘The IPPR calls‘, in addition to ‘radical new prevention strategy‘, I say, let’s call a spade a spade and not give it the illustrious stage of calling it a money scoop, because there is no money. In addition, the stage of ‘radical new prevention strategy‘ tends to refer to untested actions that have not been proven to be successful and we have had more than enough of those.

So when I start looking at the IPPR I find a few interesting parts. First, their HQ address is: 14 Buckingham Street, WC2N 6DF, not the address of the charity, the address of their headquarters. Now apart from it being right in front of the Victoria Embankment gardens, a place where real estate that is so expensive, I get to wonder how a charity has any money left. Its Director Tom Kibasi also draws flak from others; one Editor in Chief was able to give us all: “Tom Kibasi is at one or other of the leftish think tanks and therefore, by definition, doesn’t know his economic arse from his elbow. This coming into stark relief when he starts to talk about the effects of Brexit. For he’s claiming that the European Union will, through general nefarity, manage to steal away all Britain’s industry. Without realising that they’ve simply not got the ability to do so“, as I myself have admitted to have no economy degree at all (more than once), I feel slightly too short on economic qualifications to counter one side or the other, but the article (at https://continentaltelegraph.com/brexit/its-a-pity-tom-kibasi-doesnt-know-anything-about-the-economics-of-brexit/) shows a few sides to consider. Yet I feel that the editor giving us: “Getting the basics of the balance of payments wrong is embarrassing for anyone purporting to tell us about economics. We can’t have a balance of payments crisis. It’s simply not possible” a larger consideration to address and what I saw and he might have seen is the danger behind the quote: “the UK is heavily reliant on foreign investment – the “kindness of strangers” – which would likely collapse“, this is only half a truth, what is set through “giving sufficient time for firms like Airbus, Nissan or AstraZeneca to relocate production” is a larger danger. You see these companies have been hiding the ‘discounted taxation or we leave’ card over our head for the longest of times. The car industry left Australia because there were cheaper deals to be found elsewhere, in that time Australia basically legalised slave labour, what a rush!

Yes, these people can relocate, yet to players like AstraZeneca we can impose a no trade deal, we give their competitors (like India) the option to giving generic medication. Let us push to pharmacy button who claims ‘It is all the same sir, it is just cheaper‘, and see how that goes. As I see it, when Astra Zeneca has to report a lost consumer base of 68 million, the game changes for them by a lot, will it not?

The issue with IPPR is larger, it is seen in their own funding, those who fund over £50,000 (at https://www.ippr.org/about/how-we-are-funded). Do you not think that they have their own agenda? Stephen Peel, a former senior partner at the global private equity firm TPG CapitaLand private equity investor? Some might call him a philanthropist, but you have to spend money to make money is merely one example. The IPPR is not evil, they are political presenters, they are politically left inclined, optionally far left and they want to stage the labour needs to end austerity, but that government spend so much we are all still paying the bills. But I will make a counter offer to Tom Kibasi:

Any action regarding ending austerity requires a balanced budget to be presented on time, any government that does not achieve that is liable for prosecution and prison sentence for no less than 3 years and all their assets are to be auctioned to recover losses. In addition, that party is not eligible to sit in office until the agreement ends (after the completion of the election of 2097), it is time to deal the banks the chains that they are putting around the necks of governments and people.

I agree that my solution is Draconian, but people like Tom Kibasi aren’t leaving us any options are they?

Do they have a case? Well, yes they do to some degree, there is truth in the matter, there is no denying that, merely the stage where the ‘presenter’ has a case of the denials when it comes to fact that the children (parliament) used mommy’s credit card (HRH Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor) to an unacceptable degree is a fact the UK faces, there is a cost of doing business and a consequence to excessive overspending, the mere issue that most players refuse to look into that direction is additional cause for concern. The fact that they still refuse to look there is a danger as they will do this again and after an £11.2 billion spending spree on an IT system that never worked is too large a danger to allow for. The fact that the IPPR found it not to be important to look at these budget cuts (which regarding their paper) might be relevant, but in light of their conclusion the so called: “if improvements in public health policy had not stalled as a direct result of austerity cuts” was seemingly not done. The actual need for austerity in all this was utterly ignored, how does that make for a functional think tank? Should the board not be observed from all angles? And if that was not the goal for whoever requested that study? What this study conceived by Director Tom Kibasi? He just woke up and said: ‘Let us look at this issue‘, or did he get a call from someone who told him to look into that matter, as exposure would be profitable for those who need these results in the open? The stage that this part of the Think Tank occupies is (at present) utterly in the dark raises other questions too, do they not?

When someone uses a charity to expose the need to spend money, someone is making money in the process; the human condition has shown that to be a truth for the longest of times.

 

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May 30, 2019 · 13:25

Want a cake? Buy a bakery!

There was a man (not me) who loved cakes so much (definitely me) that he decided to buy a bakery (not on my income), so he spend £1,475,000 and now he has a cake every day until he dies, and that was the happy ending, or was it?

Consider that at the Cake Store, an outlandishly super cake (birthdays) from £45 onwards (up to £850) which will give you colour choice for inscription, 4 levels of cake (the 4th being a Rubik cube cake), choice of filling and selections of candles and sparklers. So it does not get any better than that. Yet we all agree that the most expensive cake is not a daily choice, anything below that tends to be around £100, so a fair cake and there plenty of cakes are 16″ and a mere £69. So at that stage we see that the man paid upfront for 19,666 cakes, implying that he will have a daily cake for 53 years; and that is when we ignore the interest he could have gotten on the £1,475,000 which in an optimum stage is interest that pays for 983 daily cakes a year, we call that a bad choice when the goal is to have cake every day. Now when it is about government policy it is not that simple.

And this gets us to the actual story, the fact that the Guardian gives us: ‘Government spends almost £100m on Brexit consultants‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/29/government-spends-almost-100m-brexit-consultants), I get that consultant might be needed to some degree, but Brexit is something new, so how would they know? Yes, I very much understand that one of Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), or Ernst & Young was needed, but all three? Even if that was the case, for example manpower, the issue is not merely the £100 million; it is the stage of what knowledge did these civil servants not have?

Before we go bashing civil servants left, right and centre, we need to acknowledge that you want consultancy to some degree on international tax issues, on international legislation, yet is that knowledge not available within the government? We apparently have Law lords, we apparently have treasury and tax experts and the fact that they came up short by £100 million in knowledge is a much larger issue than I am happy about.

The fact that the end of this is not near, a premise we see with: “Marked “official sensitive”, the investigation warns Whitehall spending on Brexit consultancy work could hit £240m by 2020, as officials scramble to plan for departure from the EU” should be a larger concern. Then I notice a name which I have stumbled upon. With the mention of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), I go back to ‘The Repetitive Misrepresentation‘, A May 2016 story (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2016/05/28/the-repetitive-misrepresentation/) where I stated: “The quote in the Business Insider gives you “I got the analyst who wrote one of the reports on the phone and asked how he got his projections. He must have been about 24. He said, literally, I sh*t you not, “well, my report was due and I didn’t have much time. My boss told me to look at the growth rate average over the past 3 years an increase it by 2% because mobile penetration is increasing.” There you go. As scientific as that“, this was at the core of the issue I had with PwC earlier. The final Gem the Business Insider offered was “They took the data from the analysts. So did the super bright consultants at McKinsey, Bain and BCG. We all took that data as the basis for our reports. Then the data got amplified. The bankers and consultants weren’t paid to do too much primary research. So they took 3 reports, read them, put them into their own spreadsheet, made fancier graphs, had professional PowerPoint departments make killer pages and then at the bottom of the graph they typed, “Research Company Data and Consulting Company Analysis” (fill in brand names) or some derivative. But you couldn’t just publish exactly what Gartner Group had said so these reports ended up slightly amplified in message; even more so with journalists. I’m not picking on them. They were as hoodwinked as everybody was. They got the data feed either from the research company or from the investment bank“. This all from an article in The Business Insider from February 18th 2010! (Yes, more than 6 years ago).” I am not stating that BCG did anything wrong, illegal or immoral, I merely wonder how they got their numbers, Brexit is an unseen event and there are no scenarios that fit the bill, so how were their results gotten (or is that begotten?); these are questions that reside with Bain & Company, as well as the BCG. PwC is not out of that firing line, it is for the most only Deloitte who gets a pass (based on previous work), as well as some of the people I know (from) there.

If there is one part I get then it is the entire Defra mess (mess still an optional word). The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has to deal with all kinds of legal and policy issues that have never been transparent, I would be surprised if there is not a whole range of other issues floating up from there in regards to food matters from all over Europe (France being an obvious first). An example that was seen last year when those reading Wine magazines were introduced to: “It’s made from outlawed jacquez and herbemont grapes, he explains, and is produced by a coop of rebellious vignerons in the Ardéche region of southern France.” Wine that is banned by the EU, so that is one part that Defra might not have been prepared for at present and that is merely a top line result I looked at, when we start looking at the Romanian Equine Beef Burgers the matter becomes truly adventurous. None of it is the fault of Defra mind you, merely the stage in which they find themselves at.

That also raises the issue seen with: “Whitehall report criticises departments for lack of transparency“, at that point, what are the chances that the Border Delivery Group with £10.2m and Defra with £8m have been doubling up on data and reports? More important, if they are from different sources, the data will not match and cannot be compared, or better stated, until the questions and data are not rigorously inspected, there will never be a way to tall on a few levels how valid and optionally how replicated the issues are. There is clear overlap between the two, yet the lack of transparency implies that they are not aware of each other’s work until the final report was handed to all the players.

In addition when I see: “the DHSC employed Deloitte for “management support … in ensuring the supply of medical devices in case the UK leaves the EU without a deal”“, questions are shaped in my mind. I get it; there are questions, very valid questions. Yet in all this, Philips Healthcare has 6 locations in the UK, the same for Siemens Healthineers UK. So suddenly they would not be able to provide? They had their tax breaks for decades; as such they are responsible for delivery. It is time to look at these places and see just what tax breaks they got and hold them accountable (to some degree). I am merely mentioning two elements, there are many more where they had the deductibles and now they would walk away? Did the Department of Health and Social Care ever look at that part of the equation? Because if these people ‘walk away’ we can undo these tax breaks immediately, for the next decade or two.

It could be my version of ‘the sun also rises’.

It all comes to blows when we see: “But the report says it has taken an average of 161 days for basic details of Brexit consultancy contracts to be published, compared with 83 days for all consultancy contracts“, the fact that details are withheld for almost 6 months, beckons the question, was that before or after the contract was signed? In addition to this, when we look at “In February, analysis found government and public sector bodies had awarded contracts worth £107m for “professional services” in relation to Brexit planning. Tussell, a private firm that analyses public contracts, said the figure included 28 consultancy contracts worth nearly £92m.” gives me the questions on how much Tussel costs to check all this and are these contracts checked for doubling up, or are the merely checked for validity, hours versus billed, as well as how the contract was set up and what was required to be delivered? Merely the basic stuff and as such, as these contracts are compared, will I find a doubling of data as similar questions are to be answered?

Even as I partially agree with the government spokesperson giving us: “It is often more cost-efficient to draw upon the advice of external specialists for short-term projects requiring specialist skills. These include EU exit priorities such as ensuring the uninterrupted supply of medical products and food to the UK.” I do end up with questions on the arrangement of short term contracts and the fact that the treasury coffer is now out of £100 million. The fact that we see ‘such as’ is also a problem, the people were so over the moon on being a member of the EU, the fact that the government never looked at contingency issues within any government since the UK became a member of the EU is also a failure on several levels, especially when we consider the fact that this looks like an impairment of national security (or is that on levels of national security) whilst we see unproven Huawei accusation left, right and centre, an issue that does matter as you are about to find out.

The Washington Post gave us two days ago (at https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/28/its-middle-night-do-you-know-who-your-iphone-is-talking) ‘It’s the middle of the night. Do you know who your iPhone is talking to?‘ with the added: “Our privacy experiment showed 5,400 hidden app trackers guzzled our data — in a single week“. It relates in a simple way, we accuse Huawei whilst apps are according to the Washington Post: “On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with. And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address -— once every five minutes.”

It seems that there is a flaw, not merely in transparency and regarding the consultancy groups, there is a flaw in the way we think, the government is set to a stage, what would we have to do, whilst the tax breaks have been ignored to the stage where companies have a responsibility to deliver, which of these reports takes a look at that part and when we see that Apple did not do enough, when we are told that the user should not have installed a certain app, the fact that the app should not have been allowed in the apple store (or android store) is equally a setting to look at, the lack of transparency implies that this was not done, not once.

So when we divert (for a moment) to: “According to privacy firm Disconnect, which helped test my iPhone, those unwanted trackers would have spewed out 1.5 gigabytes of data over the span of a month. That’s half of an entire basic wireless service plan from AT&T.” I made a similar mention in January 2017 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2017/01/30/taking-xbox-to-court/) where in ‘Taking Xbox to Court?‘ where Microsoft uploaded almost 6 GB in a fortnight whilst playing single players games. The fact that Microsoft hid behind: “we have no influence on uploads, that is the responsibility of your ISP!“, as response the Xbox helpdesk (read: party line) that their support gave me when I called still makes me angry. But now it is not merely consoles, it is happening all over the place and the government either does not care, or has no clue, so when we see ‘privacy’ driven issues, I wonder who they are trying to fool. Especially when I was confronted with ‘possible civil contingency need‘, there are optionally so many contingency needs transgressed upon (as I personally see it), how about recognising that in all the elements clear transparency was an essential first, the fact that the large players are not willing to be transparent, we see a much larger issue all over the place.

Even as part of one of the DHSC reports gives us: “It is difficult to prepare detailed predictions or plans for such unpredictable concerns“, so if we see the impact of ‘unpredictable concerns‘, at what point do we ask more serious question on where the foundation of £100 million came from? And it is not merely the spending, those who asked the questions and the exact questions themselves would also need to be scrutinised, because the private firms merely facilitated and they did nothing wrong, the other side needs to be looked at, to a much higher degree than ever before.

Now consider a paper by DLA Piper (at https://www.dlapiper.com/en/uk/insights/publications/2019/04/no-deal-brexit/data-protection/) only a month ago where we see: “UK data protection law is governed by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect across all EU member states (including the UK) on 25 May 2018, and creates a harmonised legal framework regulating the way in which personal data is collected, used and shared throughout the EU. Should the UK leave the EU, the GDPR will cease to have direct effect in the UK. However, as the UK is committed to maintaining an equivalent data protection regime, a UK version of the GDPR will effectively apply following the departure date (exit-day)“. This is fair enough, yet as the Washington Post two days ago and I was able to show (850 days ago) that the collection of personal data is already off the wall, so at what point will we see recognition that the point of no return was passed a few hundred days ago?

So at what point are there questions on DLA Piper (who did nothing wrong) regarding; “The GDPR imposes restrictions on the transfer of personal data to a ‘third country’” and as the Washington Post gives us an iPhone example, we see that Huawei is clearly 0% guilty in that part, so how is the entire: ‘President Trump is clueless on true national security in the first place‘ not directly on the mind of all, especially when the transgressions are seemingly global. Perhaps when we realise that these are American Apps there is optional no national security infringement and privacy is merely a concept for all the players of that issue in town. At what point will the UK realise that they have much larger issues?

Even as there is complete acceptance of: “It is important to be aware that SCCs cannot be used to safeguard all transfers – for example SCCs do not exist for transfers between an EU-based processor and a UK-based controller (ie where a UK controller hosts personal data with an EU processor). This is a known area of risk to regulators, which impacted organisations may decide to ‘risk manage’ where data repatriation is not a realistic options“, I am willing to state that not only is ‘data repatriation is not realistic‘, it was not an option well over two years ago and the loss of data  (read: data copy transfer) under 5G will merely increase by a speculated 500%.

It is the realisation of these elements where we need to revisit: ‘those who asked the questions and the exact questions themselves would also need to be scrutinised‘.

I wonder if that was done and more important to what degree. We can agree that investigation on what might happen might have a steep price, I get that, yet overall there are larger issues regarding the exact question what was asked, the model, the data, the collection and the integrity of data regarding the question that needed to get answered. I wonder (because I actually do not know), how far did Tussel go regarding that part of the equation?

So how did this get from a bakery cake to 4G and 5G privacy?

It is about the cost of doing business, not merely the stage of prepared for what comes next and I feel that in light of what we are shown by the Guardian, the ‘cost of doing business’ and the ‘next stage of enterprising’ is not aligned, when we realise that there is a large non-alignment of issues, how large is the gap in these reports, not merely on legislation and policy, but on operational levels that will get hit first. The DLA Piper part makes perfect sense, yet when you realise that the mobile application status is already nowhere near it needs to be, how useful is the DLA Piper part, which is technically speaking flawless? When we see that part of non-alignment, how many reports costing £100 million have an operational discrepancy when tested to the actuality of the events?

In equal measure we get the additional question, would transparency have solved that, which is likely to give the answer that require us to take a hard look at those phrasing the questions. One led to the other, and I merely looked at the digital part, when we look at actual shipping (and ships), we see the realisation that the UK is still an island, one tunnel does not solve that, how do we see the filling of the prospect of the danger that a lot more contingency plans are missing, not because of Brexit, but because they already should have been there, the IOS data tracking part is evidence of that.

 

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May 28, 2019 · 10:35

Danger on the Australian shores

There is a danger lurking, it took over Japan, the US and Europe, now we see Greg Jericho (aka gorgonomics) vocally giving us: ‘The government needs to get into more debt, our grim economy depends on it‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2019/may/28/the-government-needs-to-get-into-more-debt-our-grim-economy-depends-on-it) and my first reaction is: “You have got to be out of your bloody mind“. In the first politicians should never be trusted with the option of deeper debt, the US and Europe are clear evidence of that. The second is that giving that much power to the banks is just unacceptable. We see transgression after transgression and they walk away with mere fines. Reuters gave us less than two months ago: “The largest ever money laundering scandal in Europe is rippling through the region’s banks“, these people think that they can get away with murder, and whilst we hear politicians proclaim that they will use the full power of the law, we have yet to see any banker do any serious prison sentence since 2004.

Latvia’s ABLV, the Estonian branch of Danske Bank, Sweden’s Swedbank and it is all about €200,000,000,000 between 2007 and 2015. So far the chief executive of Swedbank was let go, and how much money did they make? These issues are connected. Deutsche bank and the Dutch ING, which was ‘forced’ to pay a $915 million last year for example, yet when their takings are part of billions upon billions, these players go home with a pretty penny. So far the Australian banks are decently clean large debts will optionally change that, anyone telling you different is lying through their teeth. When we realise that EU banks payed over $16 billion in fines between 2012 and 2018 because of lax money-laundering checks, we think that there is a solution, yet how does $16,000,000,000 compare to €200,000,000,000? Someone is going home rich and whilst the banks pay of the fine making it a mere cost, the cost of doing business goes up and so do the fees.

the Singapore Independent (at http://theindependent.sg/nigerian-based-in-singapore-jailed-for-role-in-citibank-money-laundering-scheme/) gave us last week “Paul Gabriel Amos was sentenced to three years’ jail after he pleaded guilty to two counts of dishonestly receiving stolen property amounting to more than S$1 million and one count of money laundering” ad this is still about a 2008 case, it took over a decade to get this far, and when we see “Amos agreed to help in exchange for a cut of the criminal proceeds“, that is how it works and this is in places where banking is a lot more sophisticated than anything Australia has. You might hear accusations that these cases are not connected, but they are. They are connected to greed and ‘opportunity’. My issue is that the Australian government has no business taking out large loans of any kind until they fix the tax system, no matter how long that takes. It gets to be even worse is we take the Business Insider (at https://www.businessinsider.com.au/maxine-waters-deutsche-bank-subpoena-trump-kushner-2019-5), the fact that we see: “The chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee told INSIDER on Tuesday that a New York Times article detailing how Deutsche Bank buried reports of potentially illegal financial activity linked to President Donald Trump and Jared Kushner “reinforces the need” for the panel “to obtain the documents we have subpoenaed from the bank.”“, when we consider that the banks facilitated for someone who is not President of the United States and we consider on how willing any bank is on the criminal path as the worst thing they face are fines at a mere percentage of the takings, when they call that the cost of doing business, how long until Australia is thoroughly tainted in a similar way?

the fact that ABC gave us 4 weeks ago (at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-01/google-facebook-make-billions-in-australian-sales-pay-little-tax/11060474) ‘Google, Facebook make billions in Australian sales but pay less than $40m in tax‘, do you not think that overhauling the tax system so that these players pay a fair share is a much better solution? Do you think that paying 0.000002% or less is acceptable? Besides that, the least said about the former car industry and their option for legalised slave labour the better.

Should we not prosecute every treasurer over the last 10 years, and after that see what we can do? I am not some anti-capitalist, I understand that capitalism is a driver and a powerful one, yet even at 1% (giving us at least $200,000,000) would solve a fair amount of issues, would it not? So whilst politicians are wasting our time with “Both companies are facing various probes by regulators in Australia and overseas over issues relating tax“, the entire tax mess should have been addressed well over a decade ago, as such can we get the incomes off al treasurers between 2009 and 2019 back please? This treasurer, if he does not adjust tax laws would be allowed to keep $1 for his attendance.

When we make this law the issues change and yes, we will get all kinds of threats, but they can equally fuck off and bleed someplace else dry. I am certain that a market share of 20 million will draw in other potential investors, because 20 million consumers will want all kinds of stuff.

And whilst people like Greg Jericho are talking about the sweet spot, they all overlook the issue that debt will have to be paid back, that whilst we see that Japan, the US and Europe have no exit strategy to end debt, at present that debt will be there for generations, making them the bitches of banks and fortune 500 companies, plain and simple. When the debt matures the quality of life in these places hit another snag, we did not and will not sign up for that.

I would love to see infrastructure fixed and improved upon, but whilst these idiots are unable to fix the tax system they have no business pushing the tax payers into deep debt.

And whilst there is no doubt that Greg is working from logic, he truly is; the issue is not: “Imagine being able to get a loan to upgrade machinery and equipment for your business at 1.5% – lower than inflation! – and you didn’t take advantage because you have a theory about how debt is bad“, he seemingly forgets that politicians are inherently stupid (they are optionally dumb and greedy in a nice compact package), these politicians ignore and push forward what they had to resolve, the amount of evidence on a global scale is overwhelming. And in the end, we the taxpayers get to pay that hardship, all that whilst tax laws were not dealt with a decade ago, how is that fair to anyone?

 

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