Sunday, March 17, 2024

Contemporary Art: Adrift On The Lonely Etheric Ocean @ The Hole New York


 (Drivebycuriosity) - Some galleries have funny names. "The Hole" on Manhattan`s popular entertainment mile Bowery (312 Bowery, New York thehole) seems to specialize in experimental art. They have frequently interesting shows (I have reported about this gallery before here  here  here).

 



Recently I saw a group shop called: "Adrift On The Lonely Etheric Ocean", curated by Brooke Wise ( exhibitions). On top of this post you can see Lizzy Gabay`s "Big Sister" followed by Kate Meissner`s "Shadow Play (Green)" & Aisling Hamrogue`s "Bad Blind".

 



Above follow Brittany Shepherd`s "Satin (Rose)" & Catherine Mulligan`s "Untitled (Ads)".

 




and then you can see another work by Catherine Mulligan: "Influencer" plus Sam Lipp`s "Fog" & TM Davy`s "Blue Fairy".  

 

To be continued

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Economics: What Is Happening On The EV Market?


 (Drivebycuriosity) - If we believe the Biden administration there is too little competition and concentrated markets are causing inflation and stifle innovation. Biden, Warren, Sanders & Co. see monopolies everywhere. Really? A look on the market of electric cars shows quite the opposite. The table below displays how much the shares of the EV producers had dropped since their peaks:

 




(source)

Apparently the valuations of the majority of the EV producers shrank close to zero. The stock market losses are caused by too much competition on the EV market. The EV specialists in the table also have to compete against Volkswagen, BMW, Ford, Honda and many other traditional car producers, who entered the crowded market for EVs. Obviously there are more EV producers than the market can support.

The Biden administration does not understand markets and ignores history & economics. Whenever there is hope on high future profits, a lot innovators & investors try their luck. The EV market is just one example. The prospects of the EV market initiated a gold rush mentality which reminds of the Railroad Wars of the 19th century, when too many investors set their bets on the exploitation of the North American continent by railroads (wikipedia ).

The heated competition forced even market leader Tesla to cut prices several times - and the competitors had to follow. As a result the average price for a new EV dropped 21% over the past 12 months ( caredge). So we see deflation instead of inflation.

Apple already responded and cancelled their electric car project. I suppose the market will consolidate and many EV producers will quit or go bankrupt. Only a few will survive - the producers which are the most productive and cost efficient. The survivors will benefit from technological progress and the still bright future of the EV market. Competition works!

Books: The Moon And The Other By John Kessel


 (Drivebycuriosity) -  In a not too far future the moon will be settled. There are many science fiction novels that speculate about this. "The Moon And The Other" by John Kessel is one of them, unfortunately is does not belong to the best ( amazon). 

On Kessel´s moon the population is spread over a set of communities, buried deep under the surface. Keller describes elaborately infrastructure & technologies, which are adapted to the moon`s  low gravity, hard vacuum and other characteristics. These parts remind me of Heinlein & Clarke. But the ambitious plot seems to be inspired by Ursula Le Guin`s anthropology and her descriptions of exotic families & tribes. There are a lot conflicts & domestic violence. There is an augmented dog, who has a PhD in Philosophy, and there are monkeys who work as security. Nothing makes sense. The book is forgettable.






Sunday, March 3, 2024

Movies: Napoleon


  (Drivebycuriosity) - In the recent 2 centuries lived two men who conquered most of Europe and led a disastrous military 
campaign into Russia, destroying the lives of many millions. One of them is still popular: Napoleon.

Ridley Scott`s movie "Napoleon" had just 2 hours 38 minutes to tell the conqueror`s complex story ( imdb). The director and script writer David Scarpa did a good job and Joaquin Phoenix personified Napoleon convincingly. The actor seems to be specialist for playing troubled men ("Joker", "Fredie" in the "Master"  ). His acting reminded me specially of his role in "Gladiator", where he played Cesar Commudus, a similar egomaniac.

The cinematography was the icing in the cake: "The Emperor" conversing in the Egyptian desert with the mummy of a Pharao, the icy graves at Austerlitz or the lethal choreography at Waterloo were pieces of art and bloody entertainment.

An afterthought: What would have Kubrick created if he would have been able to realize his long-year Napoleon project?  

Friday, March 1, 2024

Books: The Shards By Bret Easton Ellis


  (Drivebycuriosity) - Bret Easton Ellis belongs to the stars of contemporary American fiction, albeit controversial. His most recent novel "The Shards" justifies his reputation ( amazon).

The book is written in first person, as a fictionalized memoir (this is a spoiler free blog). "Bret", who is now in his fifties, recalls his life as a 17 years old in the year 1981, when he attended an exclusive school in Los Angeles. He was part of a bunch of spoiled über-rich kids who enjoyed their privileged lives in Los Angeles with driving the Jaguars & Porsches of their negligent parents, having sex, using a lot drugs, partying, boozing and watching movies. "Bret", who almost continuously was stoned on Quaalude, a hypnotic sedative, got increasingly bewildered by ongoing reports about a bizarre & grizzly murder & home invasion series in his L.A. neighborhood and developed a growing interest in a dubious newcomer at his school, driven by his "overactive" imagination as ongoing writer, lust and mental issues.  

Being grown up in modest conditions in post-war Germany I don´t really care about spoiled rich kids but I got drawn into "Bret`s" narrative for several reasons. The plot builds up slowly tension by frequent clues about the bad things to come and develops into a thrilling tale about "teenage horniness", paranoia, drug abuse & obsession.

I like the author`slick prose and enjoyed his long complex sentences; his descriptions of the lush Southern Californian homes, gardens, hotels, movie palaces and his analytical depictions how "Bret`s" buddies and their relationships are changing. 

There are intense spooky parts with a hitchcockian atmosphere and creepy & violent episodes that Hieronymus Bosch could have painted on a horror trip. And we learn a lot about "Bret", his mental problems, his obsessions and his various - mostly gay - sexual experiences & longings, which are explicitly and elaborately described.

It is hard to escape this vertigo of "fear mingling with lust", drug abuse, lies, control loss & insanity. After I had finished the book it stayed in my mind for a while and I was wondering what really happened, besides what "Bret" - and the author - tell us. "The Shards" belongs to the most challenging but also fascinating novels I read in a long time.



Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Economics: Amazon Is Losing Market Share - Why Does The FTC Call Them A Monopolist?



(Drivebycuriosity) - The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a massive law suit against Amazon.
America`s mighty antitrust authority claims that the corporation is a monopolist and stifles emerging competition (ftc.gov vox.com). Really?

Let´s check the facts. In the fourth quarter 2023 Amazon`s online stores advanced just 8% YoY, while Walmart`s e-commerce segment expanded 17% YoY in the US and 23% worldwide, obviously eating Amazon`s market share, at least part of it (amazon cnbc)

Amazon is also losing market share to Shopify. The E-commerce platform boosted her gross merchandise volume (the total volume of merchandise sold on the platform) by 23% YoY, rebutting the claim that "Amazon stifles emerging competition" ( cnbc)

The FTC law suit also ignores innovative newcomers ("emerging competition") who are aggressively entering the highly competitive e-commerce market (economist). Last September the Chinese online service TikTok launched its e-commerce shop, called TikTok Shop, in the U.S. "in an effort to translate the app’s cultural relevance among young consumers to sales" ( apnews npr.org). More than 200,000 sellers have already registered for the TikTok Shop!

And the Chinese shopping app Temu, known from their Super Bowl commercial, is rapidly gaining ground (retailbrew ). CNBC reports: "Since the Chinese shopping app launched in the U.S. in September 2022, it has become the number one e-commerce app in the country, with downloads skyrocketing 50x from 600,000 to 30 million in just one quarter, according to Bernstein analysts. In contrast, Amazon’s downloads have dropped off a cliff, falling 40% in a year. Known for wild discounts and dirt-cheap prices that severely undercut Amazon’s, Temu has ratcheted up its ad spend to infiltrate the American consumer, set to spend an estimate $2 billion in marketing in 2023" ( cnbc). Temu’s parent company PDD Group said revenue rose by 94% to 68.84 billion yuan ($9.62 billion) in the quarter ended Sept. 30 from a year ago ( cnbc).

Amazon is also losing market share to Shein, "the ultra-cheap fast-fashion app" (nymag). New York Magazine claims that "Shein Found Amazon’s Weakness". According to the magazine "Shein, which is headquartered in Singapore but was founded in and operates largely out of China, commands a network of thousands of suppliers to churn out on-trend clothing at impossibly low prices". Amazon already responded to the new competition and was forced "to dramatically decrease the commissions it takes on cheap clothing “ (nymag ). 

The real purpose of the FTC law suit is to gain control over one of America´s largest corporations and to be in charge of Amazon`s business (I elaborated the issue here). FTC Chair Lina Khan wants to tell Amazon what it can do and what not, how much the corporation charges their customers and how they deal with the business partners (nationalreview ).

How corrupt would a court be if it accepts a law suit which is based on lies and false accusations?

 

P.S. The FTC Amazon lawsuit reminds me of a famous article by the Guardian 

 


 

 

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Economics: Why We Need Trillionaires!

 


(Drivebycuriosity) -  There is a lot talk about billionaires. 
"I don`t think billionaires should exist", tweeted Bernie Sanders (blairbelle). Sanders is mistaken, we need even trillionaires in the not so far future.

America`s rise was driven by inventors & entrepreneurs who often became billionaires (in today´s money). In the early 1920s Henry Ford, who was obsessed with driving production costs lower, made cars affordable for the masses and created so a huge industry and wealth for the whole nation. Today´s billionaires Gates, Bezos, Musk & Co. became extremely wealthy by giving us cheap computers & software, by delivering goods fast, cheap & reliably to our house doors or pioneer cars, that don´t burn fuel. iPhone creator Steve Jobs, who would be member of today´s billionaires club, created tiny computers that changed the live of almost everyone. These innovators & entrepreneurs became über-rich, but they also improved the productivity of the society and raised global wealth.

The society gained even more indeed. Prof. Nordhaus, winner of Economics Nobel Prizes 2018, wrote in his 2004 paper “Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement,”: “Only a minuscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.” (aier.org). According to Nordhaus "producers, on average, capture a mere 2.2% of the total benefits of their successful introduction into markets of technological advances. A whopping 97.8 % of those benefits are enjoyed by people each of whom as a consumer did nothing other than exercise his right to spend his money on those options that he judges best for himself".

Tomorrow´s billionaires will be visionaries with the talent to realize their visions. They will become ridiculous rich by creating something new. Maybe a cancer vaccine, a life expanding pill, cold fusion, room temperature superconductivity or something unknown today. We all - and the future generations - will be winners.

The wish to become a trillionaire might not be the driving motif; maybe the future trillionaire wants to save humankind like Musk, who is pioneering technologies like electric vehicles, space flights and more.

The trillionaires of the future will help to make the world even a better place.