It's true that I have sort of avoided this public introspection for some time now - gaining comfort by not questioning the fluctuating fortunes in life. The corresponding truism to that level of comport is that there is no tension and pressure to push for growth. No pain, no gain.
I was reflecting on an exchange that I had with Kahuna Uno almost three years ago, getting a memo signed off to complete the investment process where all the heavy lifting has been completed. I had completely forgotten the patronising tone in that "oh, you are probably new to this, but we need to do things like xyz, nvm you'll get used to this." The tone smacked of one so sure of himself, and so sure that I'm an insolent idiot unworthy to grace the little empire that he's delineated for himself.
Alhamdulillah - a number of calls I made were correct over time. That particular investment that prompted the above exchange is at 2x and seems on track for higher. Obviously, I can't properly pinpoint the exact sources of accuracy, it is all a combination of multiple sources and inputs. By the law of averages too, I'm due a swing, naudzubillah.
I'm under no delusions that no one is perfect, least of all me. But, this big show that Kahuna Uno displays when imitating the despotic tendencies of K's leadership style is pathetic. It's fine if various decisions are done well, but if you are left with dimes to the dollar, that's not great even if you are in audit compliance. Wha't worse is that the very people causing that loss in the first place is contrived to be given a second chance. But, at the same time the very same patronising tone is accorded to ones who are not in that priviledged profile.
It's easy to say, but I'll try my best to articulate without sounding too verbose - I'm sick of this faeces.
I'm all for startups. The small, motivated, driven entrepreneurs moving an idea to progress and hit the chinks of armour of the large, unwieldy giants of business. In Malaysia, the giants are really government agency behemoths masquerading as private enterprises, with most bureaucratic processes contained in loaded CYA behaviours, rolled over. No additional motivation to function beyond an artificially heightened glass ceiling, but a glass ceiling nonetheless. In any event, the "innovations" contained in the so-called GLCs / GLICs are more often than not the ability to circumvent typical JPA restrictions on recruitment. Ie Have your bureaucratic process but at the same time let's pay ourselves private market labour rates (and I mean the upper ranges, of course - let's not kid ourselves that we consider market rates to be anything other, certainly not mean/median/average - and here I am being mean). Also a loophole to go against artificial quotas that again restrict human endeavour.
At the end of it, it's a stalemate. Khazanah has gone a full circle now. At the beginning, its fresh mandate seemed like crashing the lethargy, and the narrative of how that has been done has been overwhelming in the intervening years. I had a contrarian view - refer my earlier posts. I was very much underwhelmed by Khazanah's first CEO appointment for TNB, the posturing and spin gave me a headache. No real focus on sweating the real resources to move things ahead, no real agenda apart from getting the best fat bonuses on offer. It was puke-worthy. Come the end of Amok's cycle, the sharks are now out - the narrative has changed. No real improvement, they say. That has to be narrative too, if by doing so the benefit can be made to accrue to a different "thought module". So, the real resources are left scratching their head in silence and thinking - WTH just happened? Was all this a sham? Were we taken for a ride?
Those questions are red herrings though. Substitute questions for not asking the right set of questions at the right times that may have changed the tide. "may" being the operational word.
The real questions are to ask what the real agenda was to bring people up, equipping them with skills, developing mental capacity, pushing the boundary. Just as the proxy questions could all be answered in the affirmative, it could be argued that the new "normal" is not sustainable, and has not been able to move things further than it should.
The solution to me is clear. Startups are way to go. Educating the right leaders to embrace risk and manage them clearly, building things up on a growth proxy would be the right approach. Business building is not easy. Business building and putting pressure to be on a continuous growth trajectory is a different scale of difficulty. FIDE rating 1500+ if I may. But it must. There is no other way.
The other way is contentment. And suddenly waking up one day that the tone has changed. The world is different. I have no place in it. And then it's too late.
May Allah grant me the strength to build a startup and give a bloody nose or two to these slowpokes.
In a way, Marc Z is doing it too well that the overall dominance is getting people scared. Having said that, Google's ubiquitousness(?) should have precipitated the same fears many years ago, and yet it does not and the Incognito mode seems to afford it an additional layer of credibility. However, digital privacy concerns are not going away.
The article points to a different effect of how "filter bubbles" based on algorithms and not "moralistic truth" wreak havoc on social structures. No one seems to care. See all the glazed eyes in MRTs and public spaces in melded extensions to their smartphones as evidence.
When the Quran speaks of your limbs communicating your truest intent seemingly against your very will to keep the truth hidden, it seems that man has found a way to carve it out, very much as what Allah had willed. Let's not get into a discussion of microexpressions yet, or whether gene expressions and DNA can embed the new behaviours into its biological programming.
Is there no doubt that this would have been discovered even before the Akhirah? Is there no doubt of the Truth contained in the God's Word in the Quran?
A former Facebook
executive has said he feels “tremendous guilt” over his work on “tools
that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works”, joining a
growing chorus of critics of the social media giant.
Chamath Palihapitiya, who was vice-president for user growth at
Facebook before he left the company in 2011, said: “The short-term,
dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how
society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation,
mistruth.” The remarks, which were made at a Stanford Business School event in November, were just surfaced by tech website the Verge on Monday.
“This is not about Russian ads,” he added. “This is a global problem
... It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and
between each other.”
Palihapitiya’s comments last month were made one day after Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker, criticized
the way that the company “exploit[s] a vulnerability in human
psychology” by creating a “social-validation feedback loop” during an
interview at an Axios event.
Parker had said that he was “something of a conscientious objector”
to using social media, a stance echoed by Palihapitaya who said that he
was now hoping to use the money he made at Facebook to do good in the
world.
“I can’t control them,” Palihapitaya said of his former employer. “I
can control my decision, which is that I don’t use that shit. I can
control my kids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use
that shit.”
He also called on his audience to “soul search” about their own
relationship to social media. “Your behaviors, you don’t realize it, but
you are being programmed,” he said. “It was unintentional, but now you
gotta decide how much you’re going to give up, how much of your
intellectual independence.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Lima. The social media
giant has faced increasing criticism for its power to polarize.
Photograph: Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images
Social media companies have faced increased scrutiny over the past
year as critics increasingly link growing political divisions across the
globe to the handful of platforms that dominate online discourse.
Many observers attributed the unexpected outcomes of the 2016 US
presidential election and Brexit referendum at least in part to the
ideological echo chambers created by Facebook’s algorithms, as well as
the proliferation of fake news, conspiracy mongering, and propaganda
alongside legitimate news sources in Facebook’s news feeds.
The company only recently acknowledged that it sold advertisements to
Russian operatives seeking to sow division among US voters during the
2016 election.
Facebook has also faced significant criticism for its role in amplifying anti-Rohingya propaganda in Myanmar amid suspected ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority.
Palihapitiya referenced a case from the Indian state of Jharkhand
this spring, when false WhatsApp messages warning of a group of
kidnappers led to the lynching of seven people. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook.
“That’s what we’re dealing with,” Palihapitiya said. “Imagine when
you take that to the extreme where bad actors can now manipulate large
swaths of people to do anything you want. It’s just a really, really bad
state of affairs.”
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Blue Planet 2 demonstrated the terrifyingly fragile state of nature’s ecosystem. One of the key messages from the BBC series was that a delicate balance exists in the oceans between predators and prey. If there are too many predators, the stocks of prey fall. The predators go hungry and their numbers dwindle, allowing the prey to recover. Balance is restored.
Humans have their equivalent of this predator-prey model. It is best demonstrated by the workings of the labour market, where there is a constant struggle between employers and employees over the proceeds of growth. Unlike the world of nature, though, there is no self-righting mechanism. One side can carry on devouring its prey until the system breaks down. Over the past 40 years, employers have been the predators, workers the prey.
Consider the facts. By almost any measure, the past decade has been a disaster for living standards. Unemployment has fallen from its post financial-crisis peaks across the developed world but workers have found it hard to make ends meet. Earnings growth has halved in the UK even though the latest set of unemployment figures show that the jobless rate is the lowest since 1975.
The reason is not hard to find. Unions are far less powerful; collective bargainingin most of the private sector is a thing of the past; part-time working has boomed; and people who were once employed by a company are now part of the gig economy.
These changes in the labour market are by no means confined to the UK or US. European countries that were at the sharp end of the financial crisis – Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Cyprus – found that the cost of help was a programme of wage cuts, austerity and privatisation.
Clearly, the financial crisis has been a factor. Earnings growth in the UK in the decade before the banking meltdown was 4% to 4.5%; since 2008 it has struggled to reach half that level. But it would be a mistake to see the financial crisis as representing a break with the past. Rather, it intensified a process that had been going on since the 1970s, a process that can only really be understood by use of the C-word: class.
Seen in the simplest terms, the story of political economy over the past four decades is a class war between capital and labour, which capital has won hands down. The battlefield is littered with evidence of labour’s defeat: nugatory pay awards, precarious work, the collapse of collective bargaining, and cuts in public spending.
And to the victors have gone the spoils: higher profits and dividends; lower personal tax rates; a higher share of national income. Life for those at the top has carried on much as before, even as the average worker has experienced the worst decade for wage growthsince the 19th century. Unsurprisingly, it sticks in the craw for those whose living standards are going down to see the 1% whooping it up. Nobody likes to have their nose rubbed in it.
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There was a time when parties of the centre-left would have been the beneficiaries of this resentment. Yet the German Social Democrats have just had their worst electoral result since the second world war; the French Socialist party has been reduced to a rump; the Greek socialist party Pasok has been wiped out; Hillary Clinton managed to lose the race for the White House to Donald Trump. In Spain and the Netherlands the story is the same. Everywhere there is palpable unhappiness about what is seen as a rigged system; but other than in the UK, it has not translated into support for parties of the mainstream left.
An explanation for this is provided by William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi in their book Reclaiming the State: the left has given up on the politics of class and concentrated on the politics of identity. And while this has led to some worthy victories, none of them has actually challenged turbo-charged capitalism, which has had the field to itself.
There are still one or two politicians around who are unembarrassed about espousing the politics of class. Bernie Sanders is one; Jeremy Corbyn is another. Neither has bought into the argument – increasingly prevalent on the left since the 1970s – that nation states are powerless in the face of global market forces. Rather, Sanders and Corbyn say the state can and should be used as aggressively by the left as it has been by the right. This runs counter to the whole third-way approach pursued by Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK, which stated that centre-left governments had to come to an accommodation with the markets, in which accommodation meant repealing Roosevelt’s curbs on Wall Street’s speculative activities and using taxpayers’ money to top up poverty wages through tax credits.
Labour’s current contortions over Brexit are evidence of the tension between these two worldviews. A chunk of the party – the bigger chunk – thinks the only way to counter the excesses of capitalism is at a supra-national EU level. Yet it is hard to square this belief with the 2007 Lisbon treaty, which commits member states to act in accordance with the principle of an open economy with free competition; frowns on state aid; and lays out disciplinary procedures for governments that run excessive deficits.
What’s more, neoliberal theory has been put into practice – which is why, when French and German banks lent recklessly to Greece, the imperative was to protect French and German bondholders rather than Greek workers.
It is a big – and debilitating – modern myth that the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s and the 1980s weakened the power of the state. What actually happened was that parties of the right refashioned and repurposed the state to undermine the power of labour and strengthen the power of capital. The enduring power of nation states was highlighted in the 2008 financial crisis, when it was only the willingness of governments to wade in with public money and taxpayer guarantees that prevented the entire global banking system from going bust.
So here are the options. Parties on the left can carry on believing that capitalism can be tamed at a transnational level, even though all the available evidence is that this is not going to happen. They can seek to use the power of the state for progressive ends, even though this will be strongly resisted. Or they can sit and watch as the predators munch their way through their prey. Even for the predators, this would be a disastrous outcome.
