Expanding the Legacy
Total posts: 245
Making Republicans See Red
It takes the gumption of a hero to identify as a socialist in the United States, and something of a miracle to get elected to public office under a red banner. But that is what 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did when she pulled off a massive upset in the 2018 midterm elections, beating incumbent Joe Crawley in the primaries and thus ejecting the chair of the Democratic Caucus from the House of Representatives.
The Semiconductor Challenge: China Plays Catch Up with the West
The current plight of tech giant Huawei is indicative of the troubles large Chinese corporates may experience as they seek to augment their footprint and become global players. The poster boy of China’s technological prowess, Huawei Technologies’ corporate growth mirrored the country’s economic ascendancy: the Shenzhen-based company quintupled its revenue in barely ten years to around $90 billion (2017). Since mid-last year, Huawei churns out more smartphones than Apple. The company is expected to overtake Samsung in the next twelve months, becoming the world’s largest manufacturer of handsets.
The Will of the People Manipulated
Stumbling or sleepwalking towards the exit of the European Union, Great Britain has put its national fate and destiny into the hands of voters who, for over forty years, have been spoon-fed a sheer interminable succession of half truths and outright lies about a body nearly everybody loves to blame for whatever ills the nation is suffering.
‘Father of the Internet’ Looking for Ways to Preserve His Work
He had absolutely no idea that his creation would be hijacked by big business, encourage tunnel vision, and spread misinformation. Vinton Cerf just wanted to build a medium that allowed for the sharing of useful information. To that end, Mr Cerf and his colleague Bob Kahn at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency came up with both the Internet Protocol (IP) and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in the early 1970s: technologies that underpin – and made possible – the internet.
Ambitious Morocco Determined to Bridge Two Worlds
In November, the first high-speed railway line of Africa entered into service, linking Tangier and Casablanca via the country’s capital Rabat. Over the entire 350-kilometre stretch, the ‘Al Boraq’ (named after a mythical winged creature) slashes journey times by more than half to barely two hours between its two termini.
A UN Start-Up with Big Ideas
Shaping innovative ways to help implement, and deliver on, the United Nations 2030 Agenda, the Geneva-based SDG Lab seeks to bring together multiple actors to bundle and deploy their expertise, and exploit opportunities that offer shared benefits and add real value. In existence since June 1, 2017, SDG Lab is small and nimble as it engages with multiple stakeholders with a foot- or toehold in what is, arguably, one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.
S&M: When Adam Met Karl
Standing on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution which promises to fuse the physical, biological, and virtual (digital) worlds, the capitalism that Karl Marx dissected and analysed seems to be running out of steam – at least in its present form. Though corporate earnings reach into the stratosphere, Adam Smith had already observed in the eighteenth century that the ‘rate of profit is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin’.
The Sage of US Foreign Policy Has More to Say
To the minders of the literary establishment, he peddles ‘boneheaded nonsense’ (David Rieff in The New Republic) or takes ‘intellectual shortcuts’ (David Lipsky in the New York Times Review of Books), yet Robert D Kaplan remains one of the most-widely read commentators of present times. His often polarising work – dismissed as ‘cheap pessimism’ by most in academia – has been mandatory reading for US foreign policy mandarins of Republican and Democrat administrations alike. Mr Kaplan (66) attained sage-like status for predicting and documenting the rise of religious fundamentalism in Central Asia and for warning about its capacity to redefine warfare, long before the clash of civilisations became a global concern somewhere in 1996.
Diversity and Net Neutrality
It wasn’t meant to be this way. The domain of a mere handful of tech giants, today’s internet is a far cry from the almost anarchic virtual space – a chaotic online universe that encouraged diversity, innovation, and – yes – revolution, or at the very least, the good-humoured subversion...
Mercedes-AMG: The Need for Speed
Visions of the autobahn – the surrounding countryside reduced to a fast forward flash, propelled along by the drone-like beat of Kraftwerk (‘Weiser Streifen, Grüner Rand’) – whilst marvelling at the absence of speed limits. Germany, land of free drivers and petrolheads on steroids, is of course also home to...
