31 Jul 23 Monday Briefing

Soon, Supermoon

Stay hydrated, friends

Nearly every major paper had headlines about the infernal, unbearable heatwave. I can relate. We’ve had to revert to 23ºC air-conditioning at night for the past week after a brief flirtation with just a standing fan and small dehumidifier. Here in the tropics you just resign yourself to sweating year-round in the heat and humidity. Mercury may never really rise above 35ish degrees here, but honestly feels like 45 sometimes. Still doesn’t beat the 52.2ºC in Sanbao Township – thoughts and prayers. The future is only going to get worse, after all.

Look, are we in a recession or what?

Apparently, there’s something called a vibecession, in which the macroeconomy is doing quite well but people don’t feel it is. This phenomenon should prove, yet again, that while numbers are numbers and numbers rarely lie, everything else about economics is psychological. Personally, I’m looking forward to my investment portfolios’ recovery – c’mon, bull run.

But wait!

Turchin thinks we’re in for a rough 2024 in the US, which may bring my portfolios’ recovery to a screeching halt. He thinks the break point will manifest as domestic, partisan violence, but with people bleating for defence spending and hawking the language of war, will it spill over national borders?

What’s happening in Israel right now is instructional. Would an ever-increasing hardline towards one direction prompt a backlash from opponents? Could that backlash turn physically violent? Do democracies – the system, not the people – survive such violence, when “the tacit agreements that have held Israel together for 75 years are unraveling at an unimaginable pace”?

RIP, you irrepressible rebel

Sinéad O’Connor, who else. There’s no need for me to add to the list of paeans and obituaries, so I’ll leave you with the music video of “Nothing Compares 2 U”.

I asked ChatGPT to write this Monday Briefing…

… NO.

I have, so far, resisted any attempts at AI’ing my writing. For better or worse, readers, you get a writing style that I have spent more than two decades and an English degree refining. Technology fascinates me, and I’m usually an early adopter, but I have yet to see how the likes of ChatGPT would actually improve the way I write. It can and does help me when I would prefer not to go down rabbit holes of research (thanks, ADHD brain), but only as far as collation and summarisation go. Hartenberger calls ChatGPT and its ilk “sophisticated autocomplete tools”, which accurately describes what they can be best used for.

To develop a unique voice and style takes years of reading, writing, editing and refining. ChatGPT could eventually run through my corpus of text and spit out something serviceable, so for now I’m glad my output is nowhere near prolific enough. Good luck to all the writers whom studios wish to replace with AI. You’ll need it.

Bonus Briefing Read

Remember those 3AC cryptobros? Here’s a scream of a read about what they did next. In Bali. Naturally.