20 May 24 Monday Briefing

Occupational hazards, flu bugs, and EVs

News Roundup

It must be an occupational hazard for me to be nursing a nasty bug since Friday morning, drugged up yet sleep-deprived, waking up this Monday morning to the news that Iran’s Ebrahim Raisi & Co. have been confirmed dead in a helicopter crash and my first thought is “Mossad? CIA? Or both?”, my second “I hope this isn’t escalation” and third, “I’m sure persecuted Iranians are rejoicing”. I couldn’t make this up even if I tried.

Watch/Scroll

Chinese people’s gift to democratic parliamentary procedure – snatching a bill you don’t like and running away with it. What else is new with that bunch of macaques masquerading as lawmakers on the island of Formosa? (It’s hugely entertaining and would be even more so if they could remain just that, an island spectacle of no importance.)

Singapore’s new PM (as of last Wednesday evening) has a wife and she has netizens gushing over her elite-girls-boarding-school looks and comportment. Funniest thing? Netizens on Xiao Hong Shu quipping “Singapore finally has a PM’s wife who looks like a woman” (snarkily referring to her predecessor, of course), “I feel like long hair aside, she (Loo) looks like a man” and “Loo has more PM vibes than her husband”.

Read

Depending on which side of the propaganda table you sit on – and if your table is round like mine, kudos – this week was either very good or very bad when it comes to all things EVs and tariffs. To make my point, here is the Straits Times’ op-ed headline US tariffs on Chinese-made EVs are an own goal vs The Atlantic’s China Has Gotten the Trade War It Deserves. Pity most US consumers will never get to drive or ride in a well-built, technologically-superb Chinese EV like we did in Hua Hin last week.

If you want a non-partisan industry view, then read why Kevin Williams thinks the US is cooked. If you want to understand more about the global energy transition and why “for the United States it seems increasingly clear that the energy transition as such is a second order concern and geopolitical confrontation and the struggle to form domestic coalitions, takes precedence”, read Adam Tooze.

Ponder

I suppose it was only a matter of time before we got what we deserve, the intersection of late-stage capitalism and AI – deepfakes of your dead ancestors. What a uniquely Chinese business endeavour, and what does it mean for the grief process? Will holographic images soon replace wooden name tablets on ancestral altars?

More late-stage capitalism – how many 30-second TikTok videos can a therapist make in the 90 minutes spent on one patient session, and what’s the ROI?