ITK Daily | February 11

Happy Saturday.

Here’s today’s ITK Daily.

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Insight | Media trends + tendencies 2023

Here's the deck I presented to a trade association with geopolitical business concerns around global trade, supply chains, the China Plus One strategy, and the US-China commercial relationship.

This presentation covered the media trends and tendencies for 2023, focusing on today's communications rules and environment and the top US media organizations covering international commerce and American multinationals.

See the deck?here.

WP: Quake toll passes 23,000 as search continues in Turkey, Syria

Turkey earthquake puts Erdogan in defensive mode: In regions affected by Monday's earthquake, criticism against the president is mounting.?Le Monde

+ The attempt to offer comfort while threatening critical voices, so typical of the Turkish leader, comes at a particularly difficult and tense moment in the handling of this human disaster, the scale of which had not been seen since a 1999 earthquake in Izmit.

+ In the rubble, survivors were outraged at the authorities' failure to act, saying that they had been "abandoned" out in the cold with no water or electricity.

+ In a video posted on Twitter on Tuesday which was viewed more than 16 million times, the leader of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), Kemal Kili?daroglu, formulated serious accusations against the president.

+ Until Monday's earthquake, from a strictly political point of view, Erdogan's election campaign was faring well. Despite skyrocketing inflation, rising poverty and a downward spiral in the value of the lira, Erdogan's popularity ratings had been steadily rising.

+ In 1999, the handling of the earthquake led the government to lose the 2002 parliamentary elections which were won by the AKP, the party created a few months earlier by Erdogan. In all likelihood, Monday's event will influence the upcoming elections.

Recep Tayyip Erdo?an: Turkey’s president confronts disaster: The fallout of the catastrophic earthquake comes as the country’s leader faces his toughest re-election campaign yet.?FT

Pentagon looks to restart top-secret programs in Ukraine: If approved, the move would authorize US Special Operations troops to employ Ukrainian operatives to observe Russian movements and counter disinformation.?WP

+ The Pentagon is urging Congress to resume funding a pair of top-secret programs in Ukraine suspended ahead of Russia’s invasion last year, according to current and former US officials.?

+ If approved, the move would allow American Special Operations troops to employ Ukrainian operatives to observe Russian military movements and counter disinformation.

FT: Ukraine pleads for ammunition ‘immediately’ as Russia steps up attack

Behind Macron’s scramble to get Zelenskyy to Paris: The French president had plans to go to the theater. Then images of Zelenskyy’s red-carpet welcome in London hit TV stations.?Politico

+ If there was a time when European leaders were expected to rise to the occasion and put petty differences aside, it was during Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s tour of European capitals almost one year since Russia invaded Ukraine.

+ And yet, predictably, they couldn’t help themselves.

+ As images of Zelenskyy’s triumphant arrival in London started beaming out of the United Kingdom, followed by a solemn address in Westminster Hall and later a meeting with King Charles III, the mood in Paris shifted. Suddenly it was important to get Zelenskyy to the French capital.

+ According to an Elysée official, the visit was “decided quite spontaneously … on the hoof.”

+ But France doesn’t do casual. Within hours, preparations were kicked off to give Zelenskyy an honors ceremony at the Invalides monument in Paris — a memorial to French veterans steeped in history.?

+ Arriving in Paris for dinner at 10 p.m. — late even by continental standards — Zelenskyy couldn’t help a tongue-in-cheek reference to Macron’s “spontaneous idea” to organize a get-together, before turning to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and thanking him for “finding the time” to fly over to Paris.

+ It appears now that Macron was gunning for much more than a leg on a European tour. The French president wanted Zelenskyy to come to Paris for “a diplomatic initiative” on the anniversary of the invasion, said a French government adviser.

Meloni’s miffed: Spat between Rome and Paris widens: The Italian prime minister lashed out over not being invited to co-host Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Paris.?Politico

+ Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni lashed out at France on Thursday at an EU leaders summit in Brussels, blasting her French counterparts for not bringing her into a meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Paris Wednesday night.

+ France is seen as a bridge between the EU’s southern countries, which want to send more arriving migrants elsewhere in the EU, and the bloc’s northern contingent, which is more focused on enforcing existing asylum rules, which require people to apply for asylum where they first arrive in Europe.

+ In an effort to defuse tensions on Thursday, an official at the French economy minister said the two sides had agreed to a meeting in Rome in March to discuss economic issues and try to accelerate joint work on the issue.

+ @maxbergmann: It’s interesting that Zelensky is visiting the EU while in Brussels but not NATO HQ. Indeed, Stoltenberg is in DC today. Clear optics reason for this - NATO not at war with Russia. But also reflects Ukraine’s diplomatic focus on EU membership, which will be a tough slog.

+ Putin will speak to the Russian Parliament on February 21 - days before the one-year anniversary of the attempted full invasion of Ukraine.

+ Biden will head to Poland Feb. 20-22.

Journalist who cried ‘no to war’ on Russian TV fled to France: WSJ reports Marina Ovsyannikova has been living in France after being smuggled out of Russia last fall, she said in Paris.

WP: Moldovan premier resigns amid Ukraine war pressures

UK economy likely to avoid recession - think tank: BBC reports The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (Niesr) said the economy would grow marginally despite high prices hitting household budgets. But it warned while the UK may not fall into recession, it will feel like one for at least seven million households.

China, still trying to play down balloon, finds it’s getting harder to do: Beijing has accused the United States of waging “information and public opinion warfare.” But analysts say a lack of credible messaging from China is not helping.?NYT

+ China in recent months has striven for a more conciliatory tone in its diplomacy, compared to the abrasive “Wolf Warrior” style often assumed under China’s leader, Xi Jinping.?

+ he bipartisan political pressure and anxiety about China’s rise. “It makes the US actions a little more unpredictable than China’s.”

Pentagon shot down object over Alaska, US officials say: NYT reports the incident comes less than a week after a US fighter jet shot down a Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic.

CNN: US developed method to track China’s spy balloon fleet within last year, sources say

AP: US test launches unarmed intercontinental ballistic missile

+ US not ruling out North Korea's nuclear test before early March.

Bloomberg: US seeks critical-mineral pacts with Japan, UK to curb China

+ Deals would open eligibility to Inflation Reduction Act perks.

+ US wants new critical mineral buyers club, officials say.

Biden prepares largest Pentagon budget in history as spending cuts loom: Politico reports lawmakers have threatened defense cuts in the larger battle over the debt ceiling.

Biden’s speech was Trumpian: He was deft and merry, and the GOP foolishly took his bait. The president had a good night.?Peggy Noonan

Why the beltway loves the Second Gentleman: Kamala Harris may be struggling with Washington insiders, but they’re making her once nerdy husband the most high-profile vice-presidential spouse in history.?Politico

Puff piece alert.

Sen. Tim Scott?(R-SC) has hired former CO Sen. Cory Gardner and longtime Republican operative Rob Collins to co-chair a super PAC supporting the senator’s political efforts.

Donald Trump aims for YouTube return as campaign social-media strategy takes shape: WSJ reports Trump is expected to resume posting on Twitter eventually.

Bloomberg: DeSantis preps 2024 bid behind scenes while waiting to declare

+ DeSantis team vetting GOP consultants and state operatives.

+ Palm Beach retreat with donors planned for late February.

Rep. Lee planning to launch Senate run in Calif. this month, as rivals ramp up: WP reports the Democrat is aiming to time her announcement to coincide with Black History Month, according to a person with knowledge of the plans.

Bloomberg: Ford plans to build EV battery plant in Michigan with Chinese partner

+ The carmaker will create about 2,500 jobs at a factory west of Detroit.

+ Virginia withdrew from the bid for the site over VA Governor?Glenn Youngkin's objection.

Adidas needs the last Yeezy shoe to drop: The German sportswear giant just revealed €700 million worth of bad news. New CEO Bjorn Gulden has to prove there are no more ugly surprises.?Andrea Felsted

How to destroy (what’s left of) the mainstream media’s credibility?Bret Stephens

+ Chris Licht sets his sights on bringing Charles Barkley to CNN.

‘She won’t be manageable’ they said. Now she’s in charge.?Her father doubted her much of her career. Les Moonves launched a bid at CBS to overrule her. That was before sexual misconduct allegations came to light. Now Shari Redstone controls the media empire.?NYT

Comeback in factory jobs appears to be for real: After decades of employment declines, manufacturing is looking like a growth sector — if it can find enough young people willing to work in it.?Justin Fox

+ For the first time since the late 1970s, US employment in manufacturing has surpassed the peak set during the previous business cycle.?

+ One explanation for this shift is that globalization, while perhaps not going into reverse, is no longer proceeding at anything like its pace of the 1990s and 2000s.

+ Manufacturers have been reassessing the risks and rewards of having supply chains spread across the planet and “reshoring” some production closer to consumers in the US and elsewhere.

+ Measuring productivity is hard, and interpreting the results even harder. In an 18,000-word research roundup published in 2021, BLS economist Shawn Sprague pointed to a slowdown in adoption of new technologies, a decline in competition, a rise in inequality, the hangover from the Great Recession, and other possible causes for the productivity funk but cautioned that “only time — and additional data in our time series — will tell” if this represents “new normal” of lower productivity growth or just a pause.

+ All in all, it’s looking like a new employment era for Americans without college degrees, which seems as if it could reshape the US economy and society in lots of mostly positive ways. It also seems as if it will pose big challenges for the manufacturers and other employers that need to hire them.?

The Super Bowl’s most reliable stock market indicator? The ads: The Eagles and Chiefs will play second fiddle to the commercials for many Americans, but investors looking for ideas should brace for an upset.?WSJ

Lessons on leadership from fantasy football?Scott Edinger

+ There are many connections between leadership and fantasy football and in both disciplines strategy is of the utmost importance.

How Florida beat New York: People are leaving superstar blue cities and moving to red states.?Jerusalem Demsas

+ In 2017, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies concluded that almost 44 percent of all households and slightly more than 27 percent of renter households in the New York–Newark–Jersey City metro could afford a median-priced home in their area. In the Tampa–St. Petersburg–Clearwater metro, those numbers were about 63 percent and 51 percent, respectively.

Inside BP’s decision to dial back its green transition: WSJ reports the oil company’s pullback on fossil-fuel cuts reflects uncertainty ricocheting through governments and board rooms about the speed of energy changes.

Northern VA is the heart of the internet. Not everyone is happy about that.?WP

+ Northern Virginia is home to about 275 data centers, handling at least a third of the world’s online use, with dozens more of the massive structures either under construction or planned as local officials seek to tap into the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue generated by an industry that requires few government services in return.

+ Amazon plans to invest $35 billion by 2040 to build multiple data centers across the state.

+ Debates about local land use policies in neighborhoods where data center buildings — some the size of several football fields — sit less than 100 feet from the nearest home.

+ Loudoun County collects about $576 million in annual local tax revenue from its 115 data centers, a third of its property value stream.

+ The demand for more large data centers will only increase as the world turns to self-driving vehicles, smart refrigerators, virtual-reality software, and other forms of cloud-based technology.

+ In the future, smaller “edge data centers” serving self-driving vehicles from one location to the next and connected via fiber-optic cables to larger data centers will also become part of the local landscape.

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Why chatbots are bound to spout bullshit: Some of what they say is true, but only as a byproduct of learning to seem believable.?Tim Hartford

+ ‘There’s plenty of demand for bullshit – if it’s cheap enough, it will be supplied in enormous quantities.’?

+ "ChatGPT doesn’t have a model of the world. Instead, it has a model of the kinds of things that people tend to write. This is why it sounds so believable. It also explains why it can find it challenging to deliver true answers to straightforward questions."

China’s ChatBot advantage may come from a dark place: Censorship and information control are unfortunate aspects of training accurate artificial intelligence machines.?Tim Culpan

+ Rapid developments in generative artificial intelligence mean that for the first time in more than a decade, Chinese and US internet companies are rivals in a race for supremacy over the same realm of technology.?

+ Domestic internet companies had an advantage in the previous battle over search engines and social media because of protectionist policies and an unwillingness by overseas firms to comply with censorship requirements.

+ ChatGPT, a hybrid search engine and text generator developed by startup OpenAI, burst onto the scene in November when it was offered to the public.?

+ Access to vast swathes of unverified information and a tendency to allow anyone to say anything online may continue to trip up Western attempts to develop accurate and useful AI content-creation machines.?

?+ To be clear, Chinese incarnations aren’t immune either, but assuming they only tap into local data pools, then they already have a circuit breaker in the form of Beijing’s vast army of censors.

+ Content self-regulation is built into the DNA of Chinese internet companies.?

+ We may expect Chinese incarnations like Ernie Bot to be both more accurate — or better vetted — and more circumspect in the immediate future, which could in turn mean faster uptake and a higher level of trust in the prose they write.

+ Attempts by governments to halt the spread of TikTok show how unlikely it is that an AI chatbot from a Chinese company will be allowed to take hold overseas, while there’s zero chance US versions will be allowed entry into China.

+ That will at least allow both sides to claim victory when, once again, a true head-to-head technology battle won’t even be allowed to take place.

We’ve always been distracted: Worried that technology is ‘breaking your brain’? Fears about attention spans and focus are as old as writing itself.?Joe Stadolnik

+ Even the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger was worried about new technologies degrading his ability to focus.

+ Sometime during the 1st century CE, he complained that ‘The multitude of books is a distraction.’

+ For as long as technologies of writing and reading have been extending the mind, writers have offered strategies for managing that interaction and given advice for thinking properly in media environments that appeared hostile to ‘proper’ thought.

+ Getting lost in books, in novels, has been recast as a virtuous practice in modern life: the habit and the proof of a healthy mind.?

+ Tech nostalgia tends to look wrong-headed eventually, whether it longs for the days before Gutenberg, or before daily newspapers, or before Twitter.

How Salvador Dalí built his brand: As a young artist in the 1930s, the Spanish surrealist developed a dark, shape-shifting style.?WSJ

+“The Image Disappears,” a new exhibition opening on Feb. 18 at the Art Institute of Chicago, explores the clashing impulses that made Salvador Dalí tick.

Mexico City seeks to grow reputation as international art hub:?Artists and collectors from around the world are descending on Mexico City this week for several fairs aimed at consolidating the capital's position as a Latin American hub of modern and contemporary art.?AFP

+ The headline event, Zona Maco, counts 216 exhibitors, nearly half of them foreigners, according to organizers.

A waitlist of 60,000: Why women are flocking to this members-only club: Some 20,000 senior leaders in the private network help elevate and support women in the workforce.?Bloomberg

+ Membership starts at $5,800 a year.??

+ Chief is also a successful business. The startup is now a $1.1 billion unicorn, while its members collectively manage $800 billion of assets globally.

How do bettors love football? Let us count the ways: There is enough scoring and enough different types of scoring to create good gambling opportunities. Aaron Brown and?Richard Dewey

+ For the first time, the Super Bowl is being held in a state where sports betting is legal — and at a stadium with its own sportsbook.

+ A big part of the appeal of football is the scoring system, which was developed nearly 150 years ago by the “father of football,” Walter Camp, and is unique among the globally popular team sports.

+ Football allows scores of 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8 points, unlike sports like soccer and hockey, which allow only single points per score, and scores are low.

+?In the 2022 World Cup, only 2.7 goals were scored on average by both teams in matches, and in the 2021-2022 NHL, the average was 6.2.?

+ At the other extreme, in the 2021-2022 NBA season, fans saw an average of 115 scoring events per game, for 1, 2 or 3 points each.

+ Soccer, hockey, and basketball games have a uniform feel. Teams play similarly — maybe a bit more or less aggressively — regardless of the score.?

+ Football, on the other hand, can move by leaps and bounds. There is enough scoring and enough different types of scoring that teams can make up deficits and produce final scores in myriad ways.

+ In the 2022 World Cup, 64 games resulted in only 15 different final scores, and 70% of those games were 0-0, 1-0, 1-1, 2-0 or 2-1. In the 2022 NFL regular season, 272 games produced 181 different outcomes

+ The most common NFL score, 20-17, happened only eight times in those 272 games, while three World Cup scores happened more often in only 64 games (2-0 12 times, 2-1 11 times and 1-0 10 times).

+ The NBA has plenty of different outcomes, 749 in 1,264 games in the 2021-22?season, but a 115-109 game is not much different from a fan or gambler perspective than a 116-110 game.

WP: Ukrainian president makes passionate plea to ban Russian athletes from Olympics

AFP: Zelensky says Russian athletes at Olympics a 'manifestation of violence'

The Nets fell apart from the top: Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant have become the faces of their superteam’s failure, but the Nets leadership could have averted disaster several times, and didn’t.?NYT

+ Over the past three and a half years, the Nets’ ambitious plans to form a championship-winning superteam have fallen apart in fits and starts, finally imploding over the past week with the trades of Irving and Durant.

+ Coaching is typically considered a crucial piece for superstar-laden teams. Coaches must manage egos, maximize talent and manage workloads, all while winning basketball games. Only Golden State’s Steve Kerr has won a championship as a rookie head coach without having been an assistant coach first.

+ Irving almost immediately undermined Nash during an appearance on Durant’s podcast, saying: “I don’t really see us having a head coach. You know what I mean? K.D. could be a head coach. I could be a head coach.”

+ “It was just, there was no structure and even superstars, they need structure,” Harden said. “That’s what allows us to be the best players and leaders.”

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc?

Marc A. Ross | Chief Communications Strategist @ Caracal

Caracal produces ITK Daily.

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