12 Jun 23 Monday Briefing

The experiment continues

I won’t lie, this new format takes up a lot more time than expected, but at least some of that time was spent in typical ADHD fashion going down rabbit holes. But what fun rabbit holes! I hope you enjoy what I have for you this week.

Turtles All The Way Down

Folks don’t like to see things go down when they expect things to go up, especially when it comes to investment portfolios. You could say they get quite mad and even crazy about that.

So why are office buildings tinder just waiting for a match? It might have to do with the fact that folks think putting lots of folks to work in office buildings is a sure bet, so let’s securitise and REIT the hell out of them and shove them into retirement/pension funds. Municipalities also jones for office buildings’ tax revenue and banks sit pretty collecting interest payments.

But as a saying goes, if you owe bank $1,000 they own your ass; if it’s $1 billion, how quickly the turn tables.

There is now enough panic that broadsheets are bleating about a crisis, and as far as first and second order consequences go, they aren’t wrong. But with every crisis, there are some winners, and they would be residential neighbourhoods in US cities. It’s not hard to see why workers might shy away from long, expensive, tiring commutes. They might baulk, however, if they realised the value of pension funds might be at stake.

How this all plays out will be instructional for Gen Z and the way they choose to structure their livelihoods moving forward.

A Great Week for Some in the Anglosphere

BoJo has resigned as MP, crying that he’s been forced out because of Partygate. Trump has been indicted (reliable personal sources report that folks near the DoJ looked real chipper). One a former head of government, one a former head of state, both undeniably master manipulators of populism and also, geriatric fathers.

Both their countries are also facing existential crises of identity and purpose. It is now not the case that their place in a world Britain constructed and the US inherited and enlarged is quite so unipolar, nor is it a given that other countries would all into line with their “rules-based order”. Turchin unseriously (or perhaps worse, seriously) suggests the Britain could do worse than be a vassal state of the United States, pointing out that such a state of being is default if one is not a world power.

Meanwhile, Wolf at FT rightly points out that Asia is an arena rather than an actor in this messy multipolar world we’re hurtling towards. “Asia” is the eastern half of a continental landmass shared with “Europe”, peopled by thousands of distinct tribes, languages, customs and polities. It would behoove any geopolitical watcher to remember that.

Welcome to the multipolar century that most in the west have no fecking clue how to un-puzzle.

I Skulk Truly Niche Corners of the Internet

Or, maybe not that niche if at least two of your friends are also in it. Xianyang City Bureaucrat, who makes wink-nudge wordplay with the initial consonants of their title, the same for the Minnan reference to female genitalia, wonders if Classical Chinese is undergoing a phenomenon that Latin did.

Who even attempts speaking dead languages? Delightfully weird classicists, that’s who, unpacks Xianyang CB in this fascinating Twitter thread. Do I think they they have too much time on their hands? No business of mine, but possibly. Do I think it’s awesome? Absolutely.

After all, if these nerds can create a programming language from Classical Chinese, what’s a simple thing like speaking it?

文言, or wenyan, is an esoteric programming language that closely follows the grammar and tone of classical Chinese literature. Moreover, the alphabet of wenyan contains only traditional Chinese characters and 「」 quotes, so it is guaranteed to be readable by ancient Chinese people.

I rest my case. Forza, you crazy gorgeous geeks.

Choke Me Daddy

Is it even newsworthy if it doesn’t affect New York and the Eastern Seaboard? Folks got big mad because, well, who wants to inhale orange haze in the city that never sleeps in the most exceptional and powerful country on earth?

As Bill McKibben puts it, “Today in Vermont feels like a hundred days I’ve spent in New Delhi, in Shanghai, in Beijing, in Ahmedabad.” (and the hundreds of days over the first 28 years of my life spent inhaling haze blown over from Indonesia’s slash-and-burn practices, really fun where my childhood asthma was concerned)

Now that the choking reality has filled the lungs of people that matter, let’s have a look at some punny haze-related analyses.

Hausfather (I really, really want his paternal family’s ancestral occupation to be exactly that) argues that the scientific literature suggests a strong climate/wildfire link which is possibly the biggest DUH out there, but of course, more attribution work is needed.

McKibben (I’ve just discovered his gem of a Substack) reminds us it’s all combustion and the grim statistics of breathing-fossil-fuels-pollution deaths in Asia – ⅓. Yes, I know of a perfectly healthy Singaporean who, after moving to Jakarta, contracted and died of lung cancer. I’m sure his avid insistence on continuing his outdoor running habit had no little impact on that rather final outcome.

So what’s the point of the Eastern Seaboard’s weeping and gnashing of teeth, except to highlight the weeping and gnashing of teeth that takes place when they realise that climate-related… stuff comes for everyone eventually, no matter how rich or vocal? Maybe try asking the rest of the world.

P. S. Even a month ago, many I knew in Singapore were laughing at Dyson’s latest contraption, hawked by the likes of Nicolas Tse. Suddenly the idea of looking like Bane but breathing fresh air doesn’t seem so outlandish anymore.

YEET

What goes up must come down, right? Empires rise and fall. Civilisations emerge and then crumble. But to willingly and knowingly yeet yourself? Legend.

The Tartessians of Iberia have come back into the limelight after the discovery of five life-sized human busts in April proved they weren’t quite an aniconic culture after all. This is the kind of archaeological discovery I live for.

I’m not entirely sure what the lesson or point is here, except that deliberate erasure presents a tempting alternative to reform, at least from my futures mindset. Our modern world’s systems are almost broken beyond repair. Have we as a species become so afraid of rebirth that we can no longer understand the drive to raze everything to the ground and start over?