ITK Daily | February 2
Happy Thursday.
Here’s today’s ITK Daily.
To be ITK, know this:
Insight | Build your idea flow.
Tactics to build your idea flow:
+ Choose to be creative
+ Expose yourself to new ideas and experience
+ Employ the shower effect
+ Get into the field?
+ Start with a prompt
+ Avoid benchmarking
+ Use a pencil and draw
+ Ask why questions
+ Reframe the question?
Full post?here.
How arming Ukraine is stretching the US defense industry: Detailed supply chain mapping of two weapons that changed the war reveals a complex web of companies under significant strain as the industry returns to a wartime footing.?FT
Russia has more than 320,000 soldiers in Ukraine, roughly twice the size of the initial invasion force.
Bloomberg: Boris Johnson backs calls for West to send fighter planes to Ukraine
+ Italy and France are planning to join forces to provide the SAMP-T missile defense system to Ukraine.
+ A majority (73%) of Germans said Olaf Scholz was right to take his time to send tanks to Ukraine, while 70% of those polled didn’t want to send fighter jets.
Putin is not mad, just ‘radically rational,’ says former French president: Fran?ois Hollande warns that Turkey and China will seek to act as mediators in the Ukraine war.?Politico
+ Vladimir Putin is a “radically rational” leader who is betting that Western countries will grow tired of backing Ukraine and agree a negotiated end to the conflict that will be favorable to Russia, former French President Fran?ois Hollande told Politico.
How Russia dodges oil sanctions on an industrial scale: As another embargo looms, the grey trade is about to explode.?Economist
+ Another embargo comes into force on February 5.
Wagner Group's influence spreads across Africa even as war rages in Ukraine: As the driving force behind Russian expansion, the mercenary company led by Yevgeny Prigozhin actively supports authoritarian regimes in efforts to secure their political survival, while exploiting natural resources.?Le Monde
+ Richard Wagner's 19th-century music is known for its bellicose intonations. + The modern Wagner – depicted as a mercenary in fatigues and sunglasses – is conquering Africa, with machine guns and sunglasses.?
+ Acting on behalf of the Kremlin, this new Wagner, accompanied by propagandists and establishment figures, uses the support of authoritarian regimes to gain a foothold on the international stage during times of war.
+ As observed by a French military source, "Wagner's business model is predation and direct state funding. This strategy also enables it to fund its operations in Europe."
+ The source stated that the group "does not act on the security situation, which is very degraded in Mali. But it isolates leaders. Russia destabilizes in Africa because this can help to manage conflicts in Europe. Rallying African votes so as to not be condemned at the UN also serves its interests. There is a game of strategic ponderation between the two continents."
+ The head of the Wagner group, known as a "general without epaulettes," has reportedly provided the Russian leader with tactical successes on the front lines of the conflict in the Donbas.
+ The geopolitical investment appears to be beneficial for Moscow and has the potential to become even more profitable.
+ The withdrawal of Wagner's mercenaries from Syria has opened the door for Iran to increase its presence and influence through its militias in the southern region of the country.?
Best to think of Putin not as the leader of a country but more as a mob enforcer for his country’s organized criminals (oligarchs).
Orbán is telling Ukraine to quit: Just as Western allies give Ukraine tanks, Hungary is going in the opposite direction, arguing Russia will prevail.?Politico
Who attacked the Nord Stream pipelines??The crime scene is at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. And in this global whodunnit, the US, Russia, and even Britain have all been suspects.?The Times
Can the EU keep up with the US on green subsidies??The huge incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act are provoking a debate in Europe with ramifications for the entire single market.?FT
EU sidelined in US-Dutch deal to block chips exports to China: Deal between The Hague and Washington exposes EU’s weaknesses in fighting global trade war over sensitive technologies.?Politico
+ The US scored a major win in getting the Dutch government to block China’s access to critical chips technology — and to get there, it drove a wedge between The Hague and the rest of Europe.
+ The deal put the Western European country of 17.5 million at the heart of the tech war between the US and China. But it also left its European counterparts reduced to a role of bystander, powerless to intervene.
+ Key European partners on Monday were left scrambling to respond to news of the Dutch deal. The German government on Monday said it is "a matter of the Dutch."
+ If anything, the Dutch deal with Washington is pushing the EU to play catch-up on how to handle export controls. And increasingly, European countries are open to wielding the tool more actively, several officials said.
Britain’s semiconductor plan goes AWOL as US and EU splash billions: The UK’s long-awaited chips strategy remains mired in Whitehall wrangling.?Politico
+ “Who is this Tucker Carlson? All these wonderful Republicans seem somehow terrified of his perspective.” -- Boris Johnson speaking at the Atlantic Council
UK hit by biggest strikes in a decade: WSJ reports the strikes reflect a growing challenge to the UK and some European countries of addressing falling real wages for many public-sector workers without further stoking inflation.
Pension reform poses biggest challenge to Macron’s legacy as a reformer: AFP reports A feeling of déjà-vu pervaded the French capital on Monday as hundreds of thousands of protesters unfurled their posters nationwide and strikes paralyzed public transport in opposition to the government’s announced pension reform. The proposed changes are a cornerstone of Macron's reform agenda and a high-stakes test of his reputation as a reformer. The proposed pension changes remain taboo at a time when many French households are struggling with inflation and rising energy prices.
French forces seize Iranian-supplied weapons bound for Yemen: WSJ reports France steps up military role in combating weapons smuggling.
Penny Wong tells Britain to confront its colonial past?Rob Harris
+ Britain must be prepared to face up to the uncomfortable reality of its colonial past as part of its embrace of a modern Indo-Pacific region, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong said in a landmark policy speech in London.
+ “Australia sees our investment in our future defence capabilities as essential for deterring conflict and maintaining a strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific.”
+ She also praised the UK’s decision to broaden its economic ties in the region, adding that advancing prosperity would help alleviate poverty and lessen disadvantage.
US opens embassy in Solomon Islands amid China threat: DW reports the embassy will start out with a small staff and aims to revitalize US-Solomon ties. The Pacific island nation signed a security agreement with Beijing last year.
+ The State Department announced the opening of the US Embassy in Honiara in the Solomon Islands.
Amazing what happens when competition appears.
We already have 18 intelligence agencies. We still need 1 more.?The Commerce Department needs its own intel officers to take on China.?Jonathan Panikoff
+ "Not only would Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo benefit greatly from having her own intel agency providing these types of assessments directly to her, but so too would the rest of the department, including the Bureau of Industry and Security, which is responsible for export controls, and the International Trade Administration, which defends US industry against unfair trade practices of foreign allies and adversaries."
+ "A new intel agency at the Commerce Department won’t end the national security challenges the US faces from China; but it will help policymakers mitigate and overcome them."
+ Jonathan Panikoff is a senior fellow in the geoeconomics program and director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council. He is a former career US intelligence officer.
Bloomberg: China is learning from Putin’s war in Ukraine, NATO chief warns
NATO chief says China has 'no justification' for Taiwan threats: Nikkei reports Stoltenberg warns that any Beijing move will trigger 'severe consequences.'
Czech president-elect says west must accept China is ‘not friendly’: FT reports Petr Pavel challenges Beijing by becoming Europe’s first elected head of state to speak to Taiwanese president.
+ China’s tourists are back: Gaming revenue in Macau jumped 82.5%.
FT: Pope uses Africa tour to call for peace and end to ‘economic colonialism
Jamaica ready to join international force in Haiti: AFP reports Jamaica is ready to participate militarily in an international force in Haiti, Prime Minister Andrew Holness said, an intervention the UN has been calling for without success for months to counter record violence by criminal gangs.
Bid to advance elections to quell Peru protests fails in congress: AFP reports Peru's congress on Wednesday voted down another bid to advance elections from April 2024 to this year, a move sought by President Dina Boluarte to calm unrest that has left dozens dead in seven weeks of anti-government protests.
Haley plans to announce presidential run, as GOP race starts slowly: WP reports Nikki Haley plans to officially announce her run in Charleston on Feb. 15. Some political advisers have been relocating to the Charleston area for the campaign.
+ Haley is polling only at 3 percent among Republican voters, with Trump the heavy favorite at 48 percent.
If I were announcing a presidential campaign from Charleston, I would think Marion Square or The Ordinary as the event site.
This Trump campaign will be nothing like the last two: The former president must confront not only new candidates and a changed party, but also his own damaged reputation.?Jonathan Bernstein
+ The 2024 campaign is already very different from 2016, and it’s likely to become even more so. It’s not that it’s too early to say whether Trump will win the nomination — it’s that there’s never been a presidential campaign like this one.
Michigan Republicans are in turmoil as their leaders navigate tricky Trump terrain: Republicans are now completely out of power in the Midwest battleground state and struggling to settle on a path forward.?NBC News
+ Jason Roe, a Republican strategist who resigned as executive director of the Michigan GOP in 2021 after criticizing Trump, said he believes it’s inevitable that the MAGA wing will take control of the state party this month.?
+ He is more optimistic that primary voters will choose differently in 2024.?
+ “We lost everything in the last four years — everything — and we’re now starting from scratch,” Roe said. “It’s time to try something different because for the last four years what we’ve been doing has failed us.”
+ “You’ve got a bunch of political malcontents who don’t seem concerned about winning elections but do seem concerned about who qualifies to be a Republican in their definition of the Republican Party,” Roe said. “You can’t spend all your time bashing the people that you are counting on to help win your campaigns, and that’s what they’re doing.”
+ “Subtraction is the worst way to win an election,” said former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who acknowledged to NBC News that he is considering a return to politics, possibly as a Senate or White House candidate in 2024.?
SOTU: I see the State of the Union as the prebuttal to Biden's expected 2024 campaign launch. He'll focus on 3 points:
- Accomplishments in first 2 years
- What needs to be accomplished in the next 2 years
- Why Ukraine + foreign engagement matters for America (and the world) - more aspirational
+ The SOTU is set for February 7, with the speech set to begin at 9:00 pm ET.
New PA Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro is on a GOP charm offensive: The new Democratic governor decisively won the battleground state in November with bipartisan support. He believes he can govern the same way.?WP
+ During the 2022 campaign for governor, Shapiro, Jewish and from suburban Philadelphia, traveled deep into rural counties won by Trump. He spoke about patriotism and freedom. He talked about faith and family.?
+ He talked about job opportunities for people without a college degree.?
+ The morning after his inauguration, Shapiro signed an executive order eliminating a requirement that applicants for most state government jobs have a four-year college degree, calling it an “arbitrary requirement.
Team Biden economics: The White House will likely appoint Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard to run the National Economic Council and Jared Bernstein to lead the Council of Economic Advisers, CNBC reports.
Apple and Google app stores get thumbs down from White House: AP reports a report from the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration says the current app store model — dominated by Apple and Google — is “harmful to consumers and developers” by inflating prices and reducing innovation. The firms have a stranglehold on the market that squelches competition, it adds.
+ Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft broke their lobbying spending records last year as they fended off heightened scrutiny.
Justice Dept. drops investigation of retired US general: John R. Allen, a retired four-star Marine general who was the president of the Brookings Institution, had been accused of secretly lobbying for the government of Qatar.?NYT
Wild.
Eurozone’s economy outpaced China and US in 2022: WSJ reports the currency-area grew at a faster clip than its global peers, reversing traditional positions.
Wind and solar generated more electricity than gas or coal in the EU in 2022: Le Monde reports a report by the think tank Ember found that the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis have accelerated the transition and have not caused a 'return to coal.'
The shipping industry is getting a slew of new vessels—right as demand cools: Bloomberg reports carriers plowed pandemic profits into a fleet of bigger cargo vessels. They’re arriving just as trade growth is softening.
Bloomberg: Palantir’s CEO says Silicon Valley products have ‘obviously failed’ to improve world
WSJ: OpenAI to offer ChatGPT subscription plan for $20 a month
The junkification of Amazon: Why does it feel like the company is making itself worse??John Herrman
+ You’ll have options! So many options that, unless you have strongly held preferences about spatula brands — unlikely, given that you just typed “spatula” into Amazon — you’re going to need some guidance.
+ Interacting with Amazon, for most of its customers, broadly produces the desired, expected, and generally unrivaled result: They order all sorts of things; the prices are usually reasonable, and they don’t have to think about shipping costs; the things they order show up pretty quickly; returns are no big deal.
+ But, at the core of that experience, something has become unignorably worse.
+ More products are junk.?
+ The interface itself is full of junk.?
+ The various systems on which customers depend (reviews, search results, recommendations) feel like junk.
+ This is the state of the art of American e-commerce, a dominant force in the future of buying things.?
+ Why does it feel like Amazon is making itself worse? Maybe it’s slipping, showing its age, and settling into complacency. Or maybe — hear me out — everything is going according to plan.
+ For more than five years, a clear majority of products sold through Amazon haven’t been sold by Amazon but by third-party sellers through Amazon.
+ Clawing your way to relevance on Amazon’s platform often involves spending a great deal of money on advertising with the company.?
+ “Seller services,” as Amazon refers to these and other sources of revenue, are a large and growing part of Amazon’s revenue — larger than Amazon Web Services and quite profitable.?
+ Amazon lets Chinese manufacturers and merchants sell directly to customers overseas and provides an infrastructure for Prime shipping, which is rare and enormously valuable.
+ If you understand Amazon as an aspiring megascale infrastructure company — a provider of systems, services, capacity, and labor — its junkification makes sense. Amazon hasn’t been acting like a store for a while. In its ideal future, selling things to people is everyone else’s problem. And so is Amazon.
The problem with taking TikTok away from Americans?Glenn Gerstell
+ A ban would sidestep a broader problem — our nation’s overall failure to address concerns over the huge amount of personal data collected in our digital lives, especially when that data could be used by foreign adversaries.
+ China has prohibited everything from Google to Twitter to this newspaper.
+ The recent limited bans on TikTok are mostly an effective way for politicians to sound tough on China.
+ The danger is that political winds will push us to do something bold about TikTok without thinking through the long-term consequences.
+ Keeping Chinese enterprises invested in the US economy and its technology pays indirect but powerful geopolitical dividends in the form of dampening China’s willingness to antagonize the United States.
+ Glenn Gerstell is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and served as general counsel of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service from 2015 to 2020.
YouTube shorts takes on TikTok in battle for younger users: Older videos platform introduces financial schemes to lure new content creators amid a slowdown in digital advertising.?FT
Meta?soared 18% postmarket after revenue forecasts beat estimates, and it boosted buyback authorization by $40 billion.
+ Mark Zuckerberg said Meta was working to “become a leaner and more efficient company.”?
Meta?won court approval to buy VR-app startup Within Unlimited.
How Spotify turned dance music into dance muzak?Terry Matthew
+ Spotify doesn’t just eliminate the DJ as the conduit between artist and audience. Streaming music has cultivated a new breed of creators who seem to be totally in the dark about what a DJ does in the first place.?
+ As a result we have what’s almost a new format of music that broadly fits into the parameters of club music, but will almost certainly never be played in a club — or by any DJ at all.
+ Spotify has become essentially a worldwide Muzak machine.
Bloomberg: Atlanta R&B factory Love Renaissance sets its sights on Africa
+ LVRN raised more than $25 million from investor Matt Pincus.
+ The company works with artists like Summer Walker and 6lack.
Bloomberg looks to make more documentaries, talk shows: WSJ reports the news publisher to launch climate, science, and sports shows on a rebranded streaming platform.
Americans are gobbling up takeout food. Restaurants bet that won’t change.?America’s biggest chains test digital-only restaurants and more drive-throughs, gambling that heightened consumer demand for food to go will last well beyond the pandemic.?WSJ
FedEx?is cutting management jobs by more than 10%.?
Rivian?is cutting 6%.
GM?shares jumped after CEO Mary Barra and CFO Paul Jacobson put out relatively bullish 2023 profit forecasts and said they see US car and truck sales growing in 2023.
Tesla?plans to accelerate production at its Shanghai assembly complex during February and March.
BYD?said it expects 2022 profits to be five times higher than 2021.
Travel Centers of America?will partner with Electrify America to install 1,000 EV chargers at truck stops.
Stellantis?plans to develop ethanol-hybrid vehicles for Brazil, where ethanol from sugar cane is a dominant motor fuel.
Electric cars reach peak EU market share in 2022: DW reports battery electric vehicles have climbed to a record share of new car sales in the EU, albeit still a modest 12.1%. In the last quarter, alternatively-powered vehicles outsold petrol and diesel for the first time.
+ The Sierra Nevada snowpack is at its highest level since 1995.
What is COVID actually doing to our immune systems??The research sounds scary. It’s not bunk—but it’s important to understand its purpose.?Slate
+ When the immune system goes awry, it’s bad news. A wonky immune system might mean that you’re more likely to catch colds and flus, or be infected by other pathogens—and less likely to shake them off.
+ Scientists know that during severe cases of COVID, things go immunologically haywire.
+ “Think of the immune system like a Boeing aircraft. For it to crash, you need multiple things to go wrong. Just one, or even a few things, is unlikely to be sufficient to bring the immune system down.”
Yes, there is a correct way to load a dishwasher: All those years of ignoring your parents’ pleas left you with a disorganized dishwasher? We’re here to help. (But you’re still going to have to load it yourself.)?Bon Appetit
Possibly the most important article written this year.
The horror of gastropubs: They're pricy, pretentious – and not really pubs at all.?Mark Solomons
+ Food is more profitable than beer, hence why an increasing amount of floor space is being devoted to it. But when floor space for drinking disappears, then so too does a lot of what has always made pubs such important community hubs.
+ Pubs should be where peoples take the mickey out of each other.
AFP: Beyonce announces North American, European tour from May to September
+ Latvia could join Ukraine in boycotting the 2024 Paris Olympics if Russian and Belarusian athletes are allowed to compete.
French Senate backs AI-powered video surveillance for Paris 2024 Olympics: Politico reports a majority of senators voted against introducing facial recognition.
+ The bill now goes to the National Assembly.
Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.
-Marc?
Marc A. Ross | Chief Communications Strategist @ Caracal
Caracal produces ITK Daily.
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