📈 first Derivative [84]

Monday - April 24, 2023

Apr 24, 2023

📚🇭🇰 Recently finished reading The Last Kings of Shanghai which wasn’t super well-written but covers a really fascinating story about the Kadoories and Sassoons, two Baghdadi Jewish clans that settled in Shanghai and Hong Kong and became some of the richest families in Asia (thanks in no small part to their early business of illegally trafficking drugs into China). Reminded me of one of my favorite time jump pics. I think Shanghai in the Roaring 20s would make for an incredible setting for a TV show.

🎬🛢 If you have some time, I recommend checking out this new movie, How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Aside from the troubling fact that it pretty clearly promotes eco-terrorism (my review), I think it’s a thought-provoking film that deserves to be seen, although maybe not too widely.

📺🍔 If you’re watching season 4 of Succession too, two fun articles I came across. One from my friend Sampson, on which NYC restaurants each Succession character would be seen at, and another a meticulously researched *SPOILERS* piece about the corporate economics of Waystar Royco *SPOILERS* and how much each the Roy kids stand to gain. Speaking of food, the NYT dropped a list of the top NYC 100 restaurants, of which I’ve been to 3. Let me know if there are any you strongly agree/disagree with.

Happy reading :)

-TK

📩 If you enjoy reading fD, please consider sharing it with someone you think would like it.

🇮🇳📈🇨🇳📉 India’s population surpasses China’s this year, and will reach 1.429 billion by the end of the year. By 2100, India’s population is expected to be double China’s. (WSJ | Shan Li, Liyan Qi | Apr 2023)

Despite the now-larger population, India has lagged far behind China in economic growth…

And still faces challenges such as poverty and an economy struggling to produce enough jobs for its growing population.

India has 228.9 million people, or 16.4% of the population, living in poverty—the most in the world, according to U.N. data, although the numbers have fallen.
Some economists warn that India could face internal instability if it doesn’t create more economic opportunities. Authorities last year quelled violent protests in two states after more than 10 million people applied for 35,000 jobs with the national railway system…
Out of the 20 million people who grow old enough to enter the labor market every year, only about 8 million look for work, Mr. Vyas said. India’s overall labor-force participation rate in March was 39.8%, compared with 62.6% in the U.S.

Other domestic differences between India’s vs. China’s economic picture:

Unlike China, where millions of migrant laborers moved to cities to work in factories, many Indians are reluctant to leave their hometowns for places with more jobs. At home they can more easily tap government programs like free food aid. Some face language barriers in other states. More of China’s population lives in urban areas, and its female labor-force participation rate is far higher.1

🤖🎤 One of the first AI-generated songs to go viral was taken down by UMG last week, raising legal questions about copyright and ownership that are only becoming more salient. (NYT | Joe Coscarelli | Apr 2023)

my screenshot before the track was taken down

For Drake and the Weeknd, two of the most popular musicians on the planet, the existence of “Heart on My Sleeve,” a track that claimed to use A.I. versions of their voices to create a passable mimicry, may have qualified as a minor nuisance — a short-lived novelty that was easily stamped out by their powerful record company.
But for others in the industry, the song — which became a viral curio on social media, racking up millions of plays across TikTok, Spotify, YouTube and more before it was removed this week — represented something more serious

I brought this up in fD[82] and now we’re already seeing the first moves playing out in what seems to be the Napster of our time. In my opinion, the track wasn’t very good but the vocal mimicry was convincing and the technology is only going to get better. I don’t see how it will ever be legal for people to just make new songs using real artists’ voices but I’m curious how we’ll sort out the gray area of likeness and distortion beyond recognition (ex. 25% like Drake, 75% like Sinatra?). A separate issue is the legal and financial question of who benefits and how much when these models are trained on virtually all existing music.

It seems pretty clear to me that we’ll at least see more of vocals being made and manipulated like any instrument on synths.

Grimes has already gone as far as to announce yesterday:

I'll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings… I think it's cool to be fused w a machine and I like the idea of open sourcing all art and killing copyright

🇸🇩🔫🇦🇪🇷🇺 Escalating warfare in Sudan, the third-largest country in Africa (pop. 45 million) and home to some of its largest gold mines, between “the military, commanded by Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces, a state-sponsored militia led by Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. (WSJ | Nicholas Bariyo, Gabriele Steinhauser | Apr 2023)

Gen. Burhan worked with Gen. Dagalo and the RSF to oust [Omar al-Bashir] in 2019 after months of popular demonstrations against the autocratic leader, who ruled Sudan for 30 years. In 2021, the military junta commanded by the two generals toppled a civilian-led transitional government that was meant to guide Sudan toward democracy. But in recent months, the two generals have been maneuvering for an upper hand over who will ultimately control Sudan’s powerful armed forces.

The US already evacuated its embassy in Khartoum over the weekend. Egypt is backing the military while Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group offered support to the militia, which also has ties to the UAE.

Sudan’s northern neighbor wants Khartoum’s help to oppose a massive dam and reservoir farther south on the Nile by Ethiopia. Cairo fears the project could choke off the freshwater for millions of Egyptians and cripple its agriculture…
The U.A.E., like Saudi Arabia, has spent billions of dollars buying up farmlands irrigated by Sudan’s section of the Nile to secure food for its own desert-dwelling population. It hired the RSF to fight in Yemen, supplying the militia with extra resources to take on Gen. Burhan and the military…

Russia has significant interests in Sudanese gold mining operations:

Gen. Dagalo has close ties with Russia and the Kremlin is awaiting final signoff from Sudan’s leadership on a 25-year lease for a naval base in Port Sudan, around 1,000 miles north of the biggest U.S. military base in Africa. The Russian base would hand the Kremlin’s warships access to the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean in the middle of Moscow’s greatest confrontation with the U.S. and Europe in a generation.
U.S. military officials say they believe that Russia sees the base as a way to facilitate the extraction of gold, rare-earth minerals and other resources from Sudan and Central Africa…
Officials at the Sudanese central bank and the state mining company say they estimate that around 70% of the country’s gold is exported to Russia, often via middlemen in the U.A.E. and other countries.

The Journal also has a good bullet point primer if you want a quick scan.

📷👮‍♂️ A quietly moving profile of the crime-scene investigators who documented the aftermath of Sandy Hook, shedding light real people who carry for us the full brunt of this kind of violence long after the headlines have faded from our attention. (NYT Magazine | Jay Kirk | Apr 2023)

SWAT had cleared the building, and the F.B.I. had checked for explosives and ruled out terrorism. Now it was up to them to take the photographs, measure, collect evidence and conduct the exacting work of meticulous reconstruction… They would note how the shells clustered; how the choreography of the shooter’s movements was revealed by the voids where shells or blood were absent; where someone paused to reload. And then memorialize their work with extensive photographs and video so in court an independent expert could reproduce their calculations and arrive at the same conclusions. That was ultimately the importance of the job: to see, to look — and to do so with grinding duration.
Now, here, where 20 first graders and the principal, the school psychologist and four teachers were lying dead inside, they could maintain the detached forensic mind-set for only so long before the corrosive reality of what happened here began to seep into their Tyvek shells.

On the debate over the release and publication of these photos:

After each new mass shooting, the question, the debate, returns. Would seeing the crime-scene photos have an effect on the gun crisis in the same way images of Emmett Till’s body in an open coffin had on the civil rights movement? The Sandy Hook photographs have been redacted by Connecticut state law since 2013. Even if the law were to change with the consent of the families of the victims, who pushed for the legal restriction, public viewing of the photographs would require one outlet or another to first make the decision to publicize the images. And in a culture where reality is no longer agreed on, many will not believe what they see unless it is funneled through their propaganda of choice.

🤫🧥 Leandra Medine Cohen on “quiet luxury” (The Cereal Aisle | Leandra Medine Cohen | Apr 2023)

the trend’s relationship to minimalism is a key part of it — most of the defining attributes of QL refer to the quality of material, the palette of neutral colors, and the overall emphasis on basic silhouettes, reflecting a low-key approach to getting dressed, but I think the defining element of quiet luxury that has incited such sticky cultural fixation relates more to the focus on its resemblance to an aesthetic most commonly perpetrated by the “old-money” archetype. (Think discreet and insouciant but so fancy, it’s fussy on the one hand: clothes that look like you could wear them to a pool party, but which would also never fare because what! if! they were to get wet.?; or clothes that are practical and sensible, but somehow still signal something class-related, like a Barbour coat.)
Not since normcore has a conversation become so pervasive, which makes sense when you consider that quiet luxury is an evolution of minimalism as we learned it in the 2010s (normcore was a defining aesthetic of the movement).

Which isn’t to say that Indian women not in the workforce don’t work. “They are a visible presence in the 41 percent of society that is still in agriculture, and they carry nearly all of the household burdens.” You probably don’t get India’s TFR in the first place without this kind of social arrangement