Will WeChat be the next?
Facebook brings on Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal as backers of its cryptocurrency, Libra. Crypto watchers got different feelings :
- Bullish
Billionaire crypto investorMichael Novogratz commented:
“Visa serves some 50mm merchants. I’m sure MC(master card) is pretty close to that. Meditate on that. One day you will be able to buy stuff using dollars, or global coin, or bitcoin, etc.”
- Skeptical
Izabella Kaminska, editor of the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog, commented:
“I can’t believe the term ‘stablecoin’ has now been normalized as a serious financial term. We are reinventing financial terms on an infantile scale. Mortgage backed stablecoins imminent. Or possibly even stablepluscoins for ones that bear interest?
- Number-minded
Garry Tan, managing partner of Initialized, points out:
“Most estimates place today’s crypto users worldwide at under 35M people total. There are 2.4B Facebook and 1.5B WhatsApp users. In 2020, these billions of people will have a fiat to Libra on-ramp… and from there, to every other crypto pair. This is clearly a big day.”
(There are currently 889 million WeChat users)
Playing catching up
America still leads in technology, but China is catching up fast (The Economist). In outlining the current state of U.S.-China’ tech rivalry, this article points out “it is a mistake to exaggerate China’s strengths in big-data analysis.” It argues:
“A near-total lack of privacy protection may help sweep up lots of data, but American firms are better at advanced algorithms that make AI less dependent on big data sets.”
San Jose-based reader Lei Gong reinforced it:
“ Sophistication of pattern recognition depends very much on structure of algorithms used, not the amount of data access. If efficiency and parsimony is the argument you can artificially constrain the amount of data to duplicate low data conditions.”
Sun Rises. Sun Sets…
It turns out there is a reason to for that. This WIRED story tells us our organisms “is controlled by waves of proteins encoded in just a handful of master clock genes, (and) almost all of the cellular functions in our body run on a 24-hour schedule. Keep that clock regular, and you could stay healthier, and maybe even live longer.”
A similar study also discovered that
“ … vaccines given at the right time of day produce a more robust immune response. Perhaps scientists will eventually be able to use an understanding of the circadian clock to optimize the use of [drugs]” (Quanta)
According to the WIRED’s interview on Jake Chen, a biochemist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston,
“The time has come for the biomedical research community to recognize that biological timing is a bonafide therapeutic target. .”
Because drugs that boost our circadian rhythms could save our lives.
A Short View on Trade
Blogger The Long View posted the following chart on Twitter to explain his outline of Trump’s economic plan.
The Long View argues:
“America has been flooded with cheap labor & cheap imports which have undercut the incentive to innovate, reducing productivity growth. Productivity gains are essential to improve the quality of life. Without them, we stagnate. GDP can grow, but not GDP per capita.”
However, financial blogger Logan Mohtashami differs by showing different sets of data as below and responded:
“Look at 2018 we are and still will always be consumption driven but we have had some positive export data pulled into the GDP, some tariff driven of course to get ahead of it”
Cat Fight
Michael J. Biercuk, a professor of Quantum Physics and Founder of Q-CTRL, sees a (Schodinger’s) cat fight coming. In May, NTT announced its Coherent Ising Machine and claims this D-wave base quantum computing machine solves what is called a combinatorial optimization problem, which involves selecting the optimal solution from many alternatives. However, Prof. Biercuk beleives “ Stanford’s Coherent Ising Machine (seems) to destroy @dwavesys for Ising simulation on large graphs” , according to the chart below.
Don’t do what I do. Do what I say
Recently announced by Apple, SwiftUI already received overwhelmingly positive reviews from developers. Many claim it a game changer. Not convinced? Watch this youtube video by Brian Voong, founder of Lets Build That App. (Spoiler alert: you might be taken away by the fake accident (created by SwiftUI?) and forgot the 3 Reasons Why SwiftUI Is The Future)
China Pharma: Fast and Slow
A year ago, China approved cancer blockbuster Opdivo, an event predicted to open the floodgates to China’s lucrative pharma market. Goldman predicts “China’s biotech era has arrived.”
Later, China approved Gardasil 9, Merck’s vaccine against HPV, in eight days, compared to the traditional three-year span. However, in 2019, the acceleration seems halted according to Fortune:
“the CDE (Center for Drug Evaluation in China)’s momentum slowed this year after the center failed to pay salaries to its 800 employees in January and February…Fully dependent on government funding, the CDE and its parent CFDA are among government departments that face the stiffest budget cuts this year as Beijing tightens its purse strings to support massive tax cuts amid the slowdown in economic growth.”
China Electric Car: To Be or Not to Be
In June, we learned China has whole towns focused entirely on making electric cars(Yahoo! Finance)
Meantime, we also learned China is drafting measures to curb its $18 billion electric-car bubbles (Bloomberg) to avoid a crash akin to dot-com bust
(Source: BloombergNEF)
Book of this week
Ranged (Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World) is selected CONTRAST’s book of this week. Not because it’s fully convincing that generalists win over specialists but because this book points an interesting direction to live a more fulfilled life: head start might be over rated; try to engineer a life you can try different things.
This theory recently got many echos. Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList and a startup community influencer, in his recent podcast, advocates “keep redefining what you do”. And Quartz explains to us why 40 isn’t the new 30, and that’s good news.