[ed. Sorry, been away for a couple days. I'll be gone this weekend and a few days after. Enjoy the archives.]
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Monday, March 30, 2015
Dropbox Versus The World
"What’s preventing Google from disrupting your success?"
Drew Houston’s company may be valued at $10 billion, but here in GSB Faculty West 104 on the Stanford University campus he’s being grilled like a newbie on Shark Tank. The three dozen students in this class, called "Disruptive Innovation", are relentless, even though he’s been invited as a guest. Another pupil brings up what he believes is another giant threat: "Amazon [Web Services] was this huge competitive advantage for you when you were first starting," he says. "But now they have this competing Cloud Drive."
Houston is the epitome of Northern California cool. With his full beard, hair sticking straight up, and a silver hoop piercing the middle of his left earlobe, he leans back in his chair and placidly fields the queries, no matter how snippy. "Pretty much any big company, for any sufficient market, is gonna have some chips on the table," Houston says, explaining why he thinks Amazon and Google now have services that compete with Dropbox. "That doesn’t mean it’s gonna work."
Houston, 32, finds himself in the dead center of one of the tech industry’s most fearsome turf wars. Dropbox has the distinction of being the only cloud service—and perhaps the only startup—ever to compete simultaneously against Apple ($748 billion market cap), Google ($369 billion), Microsoft ($357 billion), Amazon ($173 billion), and Tencent ($160 billion).
The stakes are clear: whomever controls your stuff may control the digital future. Over the last few years, storing and sharing data in the cloud has become an almost ubiquitous habit. Conventional wisdom had been that cloud-based storage was a commodity business, a digital file cabinet. But a better metaphor for the potential of cloud-based storage might be a portable office. "Your whole computing environment ought to follow you around," explains Houston. "Your financial records, your health information, your music playlist . . . anything that’s ‘mine.’ It’s a pretty long list." Better yet, you should eventually be able to interact seamlessly with everything in that portable office: work on documents with colleagues, send email, chronicle inventory. About storage, he says, "that’s kind of the easy part. The more interesting part is, What can you do with it?"
Unlike his amply financed competitors, which were all founded during the desktop computing era, Houston has been embedded in the cloud for eight years, ever since launching Dropbox in 2007. He’s not building smartphones, holographic lenses, or self-driving cars: his sole focus is solving the annoyances created by the invisible networked quilt that is modern computing. The cloud makes it possible to work from anywhere, anytime, but keeping everything safe and in sync is a massive software challenge. Our economy’s workforce is increasingly independent, mobile, and flexible, and the line between work and home continues to blur. The traditional design of business computing was not built for how we work today. "[Employees] are basically saying, ‘I need to get my job done,’" says Maureen Fleming, a VP at the analyst firm IDC. Those employees will gravitate to whichever service makes it easiest for them to do so.
No one yet dominates the new global network, but Dropbox just may be the most adroit cloud company in the world, the one that has solved more problems for its users than any other. That’s why Dropbox is not just surviving its onslaught of competition, but is thriving. The company says it has more than 300 million users and 4 million companies using the service. According to IDC, Dropbox owns 27% of the consumer market for file-syncing and sharing documents, more than Microsoft and Apple. It is also the most popular file-syncing and sharing service used by businesses. More than 100,000 organizations, including Hyatt, Under Armour, and Spotify, pay $15 per employee per month for Dropbox for Business, while a tiny fraction of its consumers pay $99 per year for the Pro service. Our conservative estimate of all those paying customers (assuming five employees in each business and 1% of consumers) puts Dropbox’s revenue at approximately $450 million annually, which is why the company is rumored to be going public before too long.
A potential IPO is just one of the many reasons 2015 is a critical year for Dropbox. Houston is already rolling out new features that enhance Dropbox’s utility, letting users do things such as save any file within an iPhone app to Dropbox with two taps, and edit Office documents without having to save them to a computer. These new additions will be a test: of Houston’s bet that Dropbox is a business and not merely a feature; of Dropbox’s ability to stay rigorously focused on solving customer problems at a time when it is growing madly; and of Houston’s ability to fend off his rivals’ cloud initiatives.
Toward the end of the Stanford class, another future disrupter named Jordan bluntly asks Houston, "What made you the right person to start Dropbox in the first place?" In the jargon of Silicon Valley, he’s asking about what’s called founder-market fit. Why, Jordan wants to know, does Houston have more than a puncher’s chance against Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the rest?
by J.J. McCorvey, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: Dropbox
Drew Houston’s company may be valued at $10 billion, but here in GSB Faculty West 104 on the Stanford University campus he’s being grilled like a newbie on Shark Tank. The three dozen students in this class, called "Disruptive Innovation", are relentless, even though he’s been invited as a guest. Another pupil brings up what he believes is another giant threat: "Amazon [Web Services] was this huge competitive advantage for you when you were first starting," he says. "But now they have this competing Cloud Drive."
Houston is the epitome of Northern California cool. With his full beard, hair sticking straight up, and a silver hoop piercing the middle of his left earlobe, he leans back in his chair and placidly fields the queries, no matter how snippy. "Pretty much any big company, for any sufficient market, is gonna have some chips on the table," Houston says, explaining why he thinks Amazon and Google now have services that compete with Dropbox. "That doesn’t mean it’s gonna work."Houston, 32, finds himself in the dead center of one of the tech industry’s most fearsome turf wars. Dropbox has the distinction of being the only cloud service—and perhaps the only startup—ever to compete simultaneously against Apple ($748 billion market cap), Google ($369 billion), Microsoft ($357 billion), Amazon ($173 billion), and Tencent ($160 billion).
The stakes are clear: whomever controls your stuff may control the digital future. Over the last few years, storing and sharing data in the cloud has become an almost ubiquitous habit. Conventional wisdom had been that cloud-based storage was a commodity business, a digital file cabinet. But a better metaphor for the potential of cloud-based storage might be a portable office. "Your whole computing environment ought to follow you around," explains Houston. "Your financial records, your health information, your music playlist . . . anything that’s ‘mine.’ It’s a pretty long list." Better yet, you should eventually be able to interact seamlessly with everything in that portable office: work on documents with colleagues, send email, chronicle inventory. About storage, he says, "that’s kind of the easy part. The more interesting part is, What can you do with it?"
Unlike his amply financed competitors, which were all founded during the desktop computing era, Houston has been embedded in the cloud for eight years, ever since launching Dropbox in 2007. He’s not building smartphones, holographic lenses, or self-driving cars: his sole focus is solving the annoyances created by the invisible networked quilt that is modern computing. The cloud makes it possible to work from anywhere, anytime, but keeping everything safe and in sync is a massive software challenge. Our economy’s workforce is increasingly independent, mobile, and flexible, and the line between work and home continues to blur. The traditional design of business computing was not built for how we work today. "[Employees] are basically saying, ‘I need to get my job done,’" says Maureen Fleming, a VP at the analyst firm IDC. Those employees will gravitate to whichever service makes it easiest for them to do so.
No one yet dominates the new global network, but Dropbox just may be the most adroit cloud company in the world, the one that has solved more problems for its users than any other. That’s why Dropbox is not just surviving its onslaught of competition, but is thriving. The company says it has more than 300 million users and 4 million companies using the service. According to IDC, Dropbox owns 27% of the consumer market for file-syncing and sharing documents, more than Microsoft and Apple. It is also the most popular file-syncing and sharing service used by businesses. More than 100,000 organizations, including Hyatt, Under Armour, and Spotify, pay $15 per employee per month for Dropbox for Business, while a tiny fraction of its consumers pay $99 per year for the Pro service. Our conservative estimate of all those paying customers (assuming five employees in each business and 1% of consumers) puts Dropbox’s revenue at approximately $450 million annually, which is why the company is rumored to be going public before too long.
A potential IPO is just one of the many reasons 2015 is a critical year for Dropbox. Houston is already rolling out new features that enhance Dropbox’s utility, letting users do things such as save any file within an iPhone app to Dropbox with two taps, and edit Office documents without having to save them to a computer. These new additions will be a test: of Houston’s bet that Dropbox is a business and not merely a feature; of Dropbox’s ability to stay rigorously focused on solving customer problems at a time when it is growing madly; and of Houston’s ability to fend off his rivals’ cloud initiatives.
Toward the end of the Stanford class, another future disrupter named Jordan bluntly asks Houston, "What made you the right person to start Dropbox in the first place?" In the jargon of Silicon Valley, he’s asking about what’s called founder-market fit. Why, Jordan wants to know, does Houston have more than a puncher’s chance against Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the rest?
by J.J. McCorvey, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: Dropbox
What’s an Industry?
Once upon a time, those delineations established a fairly clear-cut world. Car companies made cars, and they were in the automotive industry. Phone companies ensured that we could speak to one another over great distances, and they were in the telecommunications sector. Broadcasting companies made television shows, and they were in the media sector.
Everything was neat and orderly. Analysts could easily categorize companies and tell the markets what they were worth, boards could oversee firms with a view to shareholders’ happiness, and all was right in the world. Until it wasn’t.That world – in which clearly defined sectors enable easy classification of what a company does – is disappearing before our eyes. Is Apple a technology company or a luxury watchmaker? Is Google a search-engine firm or an up-and-coming car company manufacturing driverless vehicles?
But, for every Apple or Google, there are companies that seemed innovative but became obsolete or fell behind. Kodak and Nokia, for example, provide a cautionary tale for companies that began life as innovators.
Nokia, in particular, was long held up as a case study in corporate reinvention – the very epitome of constant, top-to-bottom change. Here was a company that entered and exited sectors as needed: paper, tires, rubber boots, and telecoms. And yet it has lost its way; with the sale of its mobile-phone business to Microsoft, many doubt that it can recover and reinvent itself yet again. (Of course, even if Nokia has run out of road, its loss may be Finland’s long-term gain, as startups begin to blossom from the minds of the company’s highly skilled ex-workers.)
Many traditional companies, too, have fallen behind because they hewed too closely to their traditional definitions. Like Kodak, other storied brands have not innovated: Polaroid, Radio Shack, Borders, Aquascutum, Blockbuster, and the list goes on. Their managers thought they were doing the right thing: not losing sight of the “core business.” Their board members knew the industry and had all the right credentials to oversee the managers.
But both managers and board members were wearing blinders. They did not make room around the table for those who could see that the company’s destiny did not lie only straight ahead, but also off to the side.
by Lucy P. Marcus, Project Syndicate | Read more:
Image: via:
Wi-Fi Barbie
Ever since Siri appeared as a regular feature on the iPhone, certain young children — and, let’s face it, some of their parents — have spent hours chatting up the virtual assistant, curious about the details of her humanoid back story.
Siri, where do you live? Siri, do you have a boyfriend? Siri, how old are you?
At a time when grown-ups can use voice commands to find restaurants, change channels on their TVs or get directions, it seems logical that children would now expect devices to understand their speech and respond in kind.
“To converse with a mobile device is an assumed truth if you are 10 years old today,” Oren Jacob, the chief executive of ToyTalk, a company that creates conversational characters for children, told me recently at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. “That is not true of high school students.”
Founded in 2011, ToyTalk already produces popular animated conversational apps — among them the Winston Show and SpeakaZoo — that encourage young children to engage in complex dialogue with a menagerie of make-believe characters. Now the company’s technology, originally designed for two-dimensional characters on-screen, is poised to power tangible playthings that children hold in their hands.
This fall, Mattel plans to introduce Hello Barbie, a Wi-Fi enabled version of the iconic doll, which uses ToyTalk’s system to analyze a child’s speech and produce relevant responses.
“She’s a huge character with an enormous back story,” Mr. Jacob says of Barbie. “We hope that when she’s ready, she will have thousands and thousands of things to say and you can speak to her for hours and hours.”
It was probably inevitable that the so-called Internet of Things — those Web-connected thermostats and bathroom scales and coffee makers and whatnot — would beget the Internet of Toys. And just like Web-connected consumer gizmos that can amass details about their owners and transmit that data for remote analysis, Internet-connected toys hold out the tantalizing promise of personalized services and the risk of privacy perils.
“Is this going to be some creepy doll that records what is going on in your home without you knowing it?” asks Nicole A. Ozer, the director of technology and civil liberties at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “What is being recorded? How long is it being stored? Who is it being shared with?”
The advent of connected toys that can record and talk back to children is likely to deepen this debate over the Internet of Things because of the potential for these intelligent toys to powerfully affect children’s imagination, learning and social development.
Siri, where do you live? Siri, do you have a boyfriend? Siri, how old are you?At a time when grown-ups can use voice commands to find restaurants, change channels on their TVs or get directions, it seems logical that children would now expect devices to understand their speech and respond in kind.
“To converse with a mobile device is an assumed truth if you are 10 years old today,” Oren Jacob, the chief executive of ToyTalk, a company that creates conversational characters for children, told me recently at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. “That is not true of high school students.”
Founded in 2011, ToyTalk already produces popular animated conversational apps — among them the Winston Show and SpeakaZoo — that encourage young children to engage in complex dialogue with a menagerie of make-believe characters. Now the company’s technology, originally designed for two-dimensional characters on-screen, is poised to power tangible playthings that children hold in their hands.
This fall, Mattel plans to introduce Hello Barbie, a Wi-Fi enabled version of the iconic doll, which uses ToyTalk’s system to analyze a child’s speech and produce relevant responses.
“She’s a huge character with an enormous back story,” Mr. Jacob says of Barbie. “We hope that when she’s ready, she will have thousands and thousands of things to say and you can speak to her for hours and hours.”
It was probably inevitable that the so-called Internet of Things — those Web-connected thermostats and bathroom scales and coffee makers and whatnot — would beget the Internet of Toys. And just like Web-connected consumer gizmos that can amass details about their owners and transmit that data for remote analysis, Internet-connected toys hold out the tantalizing promise of personalized services and the risk of privacy perils.
“Is this going to be some creepy doll that records what is going on in your home without you knowing it?” asks Nicole A. Ozer, the director of technology and civil liberties at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “What is being recorded? How long is it being stored? Who is it being shared with?”
The advent of connected toys that can record and talk back to children is likely to deepen this debate over the Internet of Things because of the potential for these intelligent toys to powerfully affect children’s imagination, learning and social development.
by Natasha Singer, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Christopher Stark
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Asia’s City-Statesman
[ed. See also: Lee Kuan Yew and the Myth of Asian Capitalism and The Curse of Lee Kuan Yew]
There was no vainglory in the title of the first volume of Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs: “The Singapore Story”. Few leaders have so embodied and dominated their countries: Fidel Castro, perhaps, and Kim Il Sung, in their day. But both of those signally failed to match Mr Lee’s achievement in propelling Singapore “From Third World to First” (as the second volume is called). Moreover, he managed it against far worse odds: no space, beyond a crowded little island; no natural resources; and, as an island of polyglot immigrants, not much shared history. The search for a common heritage may have been why, in the 1990s, Mr Lee’s Singapore championed “Asian values”. By then, Singapore was the most Westernised place in Asia.
Mr Lee himself, whose anglophile grandfather had added “Harry” to his Chinese name, was once called by George Brown, a British foreign secretary, “the best bloody Englishman east of Suez”. He was proud of his success in colonial society. He was a star student in pre-war Singapore, and, after an interlude during the Japanese occupation of 1942-45, again at the London School of Economics (LSE) and Cambridge. He and his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, both got firsts in law.
When Geok Choo first appears in “The Singapore Story” it is as a student who, horror of horrors, beats young Harry in economics and English exams. Mr Lee always excelled at co-option as well as coercion. When he returned to Singapore in 1950, he was confident in the knowledge that she “could be a sole breadwinner and bring up the children”, giving him an “insurance policy” that would let him enter politics. He remained devoted to her. Before her death, when she lay bedridden and mute for two years, he maintained a spreadsheet listing the books he read to her: Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen, Shakespeare’s sonnets.
In his political life he gave few hints of such inner tenderness. Influenced by Harold Laski, a British academic whom he had met at the LSE, he was in the anti-colonial movement of the 1950s, and in Britain had campaigned for the Labour Party. But for him ideology always took second place to a pragmatic appreciation of how power works. He also boasted of his streetfighting prowess: “Nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul-de-sac.” He was a ruthless operator, manoeuvring himself into a position at the head of the People’s Action Party (PAP) to become Singapore’s first prime minister when self-governance arrived in 1959. He remained so for 31 years.
Just once in that time the steely mask slipped. Having led Singapore into a federation with Malaysia in 1963, Mr Lee led it out again when it was expelled in August 1965, with Malaysia’s prime minister accusing him of leading a state government “that showed no measure of loyalty to its central government”. For his part, he had become convinced that Chinese-majority Singapore would always be at a disadvantage in a Malay-dominated polity. Still he had believed in and worked for the merger all his life. Announcing its dissolution, he wept.
In compensation, he turned Singapore into a hugely admired economic success story. As he and his government would often note, this seemed far from the likeliest outcome in the dark days of the 1960s. Among the many resources that Singapore lacked was an adequate water supply, which left it alarmingly dependent on a pipeline from peninsular Malaysia, from which it had just divorced. It was beholden to America’s goodwill and the crumbling might of the former colonial power, Britain, for its defence. The regional giant, Indonesia, had been engaged in a policy of Konfrontasi—hostility to the Malaysian federation just short of open warfare—to stress that it was only an accident of colonial history that had left British-ruled Malaya and its offshoots separate from the Dutch-ruled East Indies, which became Indonesia.
Singapore as a country did not exist. “How were we to create a nation out of a polyglot collection of migrants from China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and several other parts of Asia?” asked Mr Lee in retrospect. Race riots in the 1960s, in Singapore itself as well as in Malaysia, coloured Mr Lee’s thinking for the rest of his life. Even when Singapore appeared to outsiders a peaceful, harmonious, indeed rather boringly stable place, its government often behaved as if it were dancing on the edge of an abyss of ethnic animosity. Public housing, one of the government’s greatest successes, remains subject to ethnic quotas to prevent the minority Malays and Indians from coalescing into ghettoes.
That sense of external weakness and internal fragility was central to Mr Lee’s policies for the young country. Abandoned by Britain in 1971 when it withdrew from “east of Suez”, Singapore has always made national defence a high priority, although direct threats to its security have eased. Relations with Malaysia have frequently been fraught, but never to the point when a military conflict seemed likely. And Indonesia ended Konfrontasi in the mid-1960s. The formation in 1967 of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, with Mr Lee as one of the founding fathers, helped unite the region. Yet Singaporean men still perform nearly two years of national service in the armed forces. Defence spending, in a country of 5.3m, is more than in Indonesia, with nearly 250m; in 2014 it soaked up over one-fifth of the budget.
Singapore’s vulnerability also justified, for Mr Lee, some curtailment of democratic freedoms. In the early days this involved strong-arm methods—locking up suspected communists, for example. But it became more subtle: a combination of economic success, gerrymandering, stifling press controls and the legal hounding of opposition politicians and critics, including the foreign press. Singapore has had regular, free and fair elections. Indeed, voting is compulsory, though Mr Lee said in 1994 that he was “not intellectually convinced that one-man, one-vote is the best”. He said Singapore practised it because the British had left it behind. So he designed a system where clean elections are held, but it has also been almost inconceivable for the PAP to lose power.
The biggest reason for that has been its economic success: growth has averaged nearly 7% a year for four decades. But Mr Lee’s party has left nothing to chance. The traditional media are toothless; opposition politicians have been hounded into bankruptcy by defamation laws inherited from Britain; voters have faced the threat that, if they elect opposition candidates, their constituencies will get less money; constituency boundaries have been manipulated by the government. The advantage of Mr Lee’s system, proponents say, is that it introduced just enough electoral competition to keep the government honest, but not so much that it risks losing power. So it can look round corners on behalf of its people, plan for the long term and resist the temptation to pander to populist pressures.
Mr Lee was a firm believer in “meritocracy”, or government by the most able, defined in large part by scholastic success. “We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think,” as he put it in 1987. His government’s ministers were the world’s best-paid, to attract talent from the private sector and curb corruption. Corruption did indeed become rare in Singapore. Like other crime, it was deterred in part by harsh punishments, ranging from brutal caning for vandalism to hanging for murder or drug-smuggling. As Mr Lee also said: “Between being loved and feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I’m meaningless.” As a police state, however, Singapore is such a success that you rarely see a cop.
There was no vainglory in the title of the first volume of Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs: “The Singapore Story”. Few leaders have so embodied and dominated their countries: Fidel Castro, perhaps, and Kim Il Sung, in their day. But both of those signally failed to match Mr Lee’s achievement in propelling Singapore “From Third World to First” (as the second volume is called). Moreover, he managed it against far worse odds: no space, beyond a crowded little island; no natural resources; and, as an island of polyglot immigrants, not much shared history. The search for a common heritage may have been why, in the 1990s, Mr Lee’s Singapore championed “Asian values”. By then, Singapore was the most Westernised place in Asia.
Mr Lee himself, whose anglophile grandfather had added “Harry” to his Chinese name, was once called by George Brown, a British foreign secretary, “the best bloody Englishman east of Suez”. He was proud of his success in colonial society. He was a star student in pre-war Singapore, and, after an interlude during the Japanese occupation of 1942-45, again at the London School of Economics (LSE) and Cambridge. He and his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, both got firsts in law.When Geok Choo first appears in “The Singapore Story” it is as a student who, horror of horrors, beats young Harry in economics and English exams. Mr Lee always excelled at co-option as well as coercion. When he returned to Singapore in 1950, he was confident in the knowledge that she “could be a sole breadwinner and bring up the children”, giving him an “insurance policy” that would let him enter politics. He remained devoted to her. Before her death, when she lay bedridden and mute for two years, he maintained a spreadsheet listing the books he read to her: Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen, Shakespeare’s sonnets.
In his political life he gave few hints of such inner tenderness. Influenced by Harold Laski, a British academic whom he had met at the LSE, he was in the anti-colonial movement of the 1950s, and in Britain had campaigned for the Labour Party. But for him ideology always took second place to a pragmatic appreciation of how power works. He also boasted of his streetfighting prowess: “Nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul-de-sac.” He was a ruthless operator, manoeuvring himself into a position at the head of the People’s Action Party (PAP) to become Singapore’s first prime minister when self-governance arrived in 1959. He remained so for 31 years.
Just once in that time the steely mask slipped. Having led Singapore into a federation with Malaysia in 1963, Mr Lee led it out again when it was expelled in August 1965, with Malaysia’s prime minister accusing him of leading a state government “that showed no measure of loyalty to its central government”. For his part, he had become convinced that Chinese-majority Singapore would always be at a disadvantage in a Malay-dominated polity. Still he had believed in and worked for the merger all his life. Announcing its dissolution, he wept.
In compensation, he turned Singapore into a hugely admired economic success story. As he and his government would often note, this seemed far from the likeliest outcome in the dark days of the 1960s. Among the many resources that Singapore lacked was an adequate water supply, which left it alarmingly dependent on a pipeline from peninsular Malaysia, from which it had just divorced. It was beholden to America’s goodwill and the crumbling might of the former colonial power, Britain, for its defence. The regional giant, Indonesia, had been engaged in a policy of Konfrontasi—hostility to the Malaysian federation just short of open warfare—to stress that it was only an accident of colonial history that had left British-ruled Malaya and its offshoots separate from the Dutch-ruled East Indies, which became Indonesia.
Singapore as a country did not exist. “How were we to create a nation out of a polyglot collection of migrants from China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and several other parts of Asia?” asked Mr Lee in retrospect. Race riots in the 1960s, in Singapore itself as well as in Malaysia, coloured Mr Lee’s thinking for the rest of his life. Even when Singapore appeared to outsiders a peaceful, harmonious, indeed rather boringly stable place, its government often behaved as if it were dancing on the edge of an abyss of ethnic animosity. Public housing, one of the government’s greatest successes, remains subject to ethnic quotas to prevent the minority Malays and Indians from coalescing into ghettoes.
That sense of external weakness and internal fragility was central to Mr Lee’s policies for the young country. Abandoned by Britain in 1971 when it withdrew from “east of Suez”, Singapore has always made national defence a high priority, although direct threats to its security have eased. Relations with Malaysia have frequently been fraught, but never to the point when a military conflict seemed likely. And Indonesia ended Konfrontasi in the mid-1960s. The formation in 1967 of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, with Mr Lee as one of the founding fathers, helped unite the region. Yet Singaporean men still perform nearly two years of national service in the armed forces. Defence spending, in a country of 5.3m, is more than in Indonesia, with nearly 250m; in 2014 it soaked up over one-fifth of the budget.
Singapore’s vulnerability also justified, for Mr Lee, some curtailment of democratic freedoms. In the early days this involved strong-arm methods—locking up suspected communists, for example. But it became more subtle: a combination of economic success, gerrymandering, stifling press controls and the legal hounding of opposition politicians and critics, including the foreign press. Singapore has had regular, free and fair elections. Indeed, voting is compulsory, though Mr Lee said in 1994 that he was “not intellectually convinced that one-man, one-vote is the best”. He said Singapore practised it because the British had left it behind. So he designed a system where clean elections are held, but it has also been almost inconceivable for the PAP to lose power.
The biggest reason for that has been its economic success: growth has averaged nearly 7% a year for four decades. But Mr Lee’s party has left nothing to chance. The traditional media are toothless; opposition politicians have been hounded into bankruptcy by defamation laws inherited from Britain; voters have faced the threat that, if they elect opposition candidates, their constituencies will get less money; constituency boundaries have been manipulated by the government. The advantage of Mr Lee’s system, proponents say, is that it introduced just enough electoral competition to keep the government honest, but not so much that it risks losing power. So it can look round corners on behalf of its people, plan for the long term and resist the temptation to pander to populist pressures.
Mr Lee was a firm believer in “meritocracy”, or government by the most able, defined in large part by scholastic success. “We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think,” as he put it in 1987. His government’s ministers were the world’s best-paid, to attract talent from the private sector and curb corruption. Corruption did indeed become rare in Singapore. Like other crime, it was deterred in part by harsh punishments, ranging from brutal caning for vandalism to hanging for murder or drug-smuggling. As Mr Lee also said: “Between being loved and feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I’m meaningless.” As a police state, however, Singapore is such a success that you rarely see a cop.
by Editors, The Economist | Read more:
Image: Getty
Friday, March 27, 2015
41 Things I Like About Japan
1. Hanami (Cherry Blossom Season)
It annoyed me to discover that Washington, DC has cherry blossoms that bloom at the same time as Japan’s, because my jaded Washington friend kept acting like they weren’t all that cool. The high school kids in Japan are pretty blasé, as well: “Cherry Leaf. Is… Boring.”
But I can’t walk through the park in the Spring without being swept up in the beauty of the damn things, even going so far as to write haiku:
Cherry blossoms stuck
to the bottom of my shoes,
only four months left.
2. Kit-Kats
The Kit-Kat innovation factory slowed down after 2011, but I will miss scratching the itch in the candy aisle of every new convenience store I find myself in. Visiting new towns was always tied to the possibilities of tasting a new Kit-Kat. There are regional Kit-Kats, sorted by prefecture; then there are seasonal Kit-Kats, rotated nationally every season. I’m leaving on a high note: Passionfruit.
But I’ve had Rum Raisin, two kinds of Matcha, Sakura, Sakura-Matcha, Blueberry Cheesecake, Pumpkin, Soy Sauce, Cinnamon, Sweet Potato, Strawberry, Pudding, Spicy Citrus, Pancake, Orange, Powdered Mochi, and more that I can’t even remember. Surprising highlights: Sweet Potato.
3. Silence after Sunset
The siren rings throughout my town at 6 p.m., and the children all go inside. There’s a calmness to the night then. Unless it’s summer cicada season, there’s hardly a sound in the neighborhood, just the occasional distant clanging of the subway crossing.
4. Polite Dogs
I never liked dogs. The only reasons dogs don’t attack and kill you is because the thought hasn’t crossed their mind yet. But in Japan I came around to a couple of breeds. The Shiba-Inu, in particular, is a polite dog, small enough to be cute but big enough to be a dog.There’s one that wanders around my street sometimes. It usually stops to look at me, mouth closed, straightforward and all business. It doesn’t bark or run up to me, doesn’t threaten me or run away. Just has a look and, I imagine, gives me a little bow before carrying on home.
5. Trains
Trains are great. They’re quiet and convenient. I remember looking at the road in America once and thinking, with awe for Franklin Roosevelt, that this pavement I stood on spanned the entire country. I could go anywhere from here. The trains in Japan feel that way – there’s a train to go home, next to the train to go to Tokyo. All that’s between me and an adventure is where I decide to wait on the platform.
6. Parks
There’s a park near my house with a 4.5 kilometer running path spanning a lake. Inside the lake is an island, and beside the lake is a rose garden with a windmill, a Shinto shrine, a baseball field, a public gymnasium, and a sculpture garden. All free, all just sitting there for me to run around. Urban planning, when Japan decides to apply it, is impeccable, though of course this has a lot to do with having enormous wealth to spend on them.
7. Themed Dining
You can eat dinner in a sixth-grade classroom complete with a blackboard and a pop quiz, you can get locked into a prison cell, you can get a Mongolian yurt (with a costume). There’s one bar here that is inside a cave, down the street from a bar themed like 1980’s Japan, which is down the street from a bar themed like 1940’s Japan. There are all-you-can-eat pizza buffets and places with boiling oil at your table to deep-fry your own food. The absurd eating experiences in Japan get all the attention, but that ignores another key point: The food in Japan, and the atmosphere in most restaurants, makes it ridiculously easy to spend money every weekend. Beautiful, dimly lit, romantic dining is the norm.
8. Nomihodai
This is unheard of where I’m from: Pay $30 and drink as much alcohol as you can for 2-3 hours. I’ve been served pitchers of gin and tonic. A typical night out starts with a 2-hour nomihodai and then moves to karaoke, where you get an additional nomihodai built into the cost of the booth. An exhilarating means to a miserable morning.
9. Karaoke
Private booths are the only way to go. No enduring the endless stream of drunken strangers, you can book a room with drunken friends and endure each other’s wails. Karaoke is a grand way of connecting on a level that didn’t exist for me in America: Sitting around, singing to each other in all your unabashed, off-key glory seems, somehow, to bring people closer together than anything else we could be doing.10. Okonomiyaki
An unheard-of food in the States, Okonomiyaki in my town transcends all other Japanese cuisine. Savory batter with chunks of pork, shrimp and cabbage baked in, topped with barbecue sauce and, with the modan specialty, topped off with noodles. No, this is not how it is done in the traditional okonomiyaki homelands of Hiroshima and Osaka. But, having had the dish in both locales, I can assure you that there is no better option than Bochi-Bochi modan okonomiyaki in the sleepy suburban city of Kasuya, Fukuoka Prefecture.
by Eryk Salvaggio, This Japanese Life | Read more:
Images: uncredited
Riding A $450 Motorcycle Across Vietnam
Buying a $450 motorcycle to ride across a communist country devastated by war with your own sounds like a great idea, right? I thought so. Here's how you can do it too.
I've been traveling the world for the last seven months or so. It's been amazing. But one thing that I've missed most about life back in LA was riding my motorcycle. Every. Single. Day.
Riding in the States isn't terribly popular. You can only lane-split legally in California. Insurance companies treat riding as a hobby and charge out-the-ass for motorcycle policies. Car drivers are often prejudiced against us. Overall, it's barely accepted. Which is a shame, because motorcycles make way more sense for personal transportation than a giant, heavy, inefficient car ever will.
That's not case in Vietnam, however — where the 37 million registered motorcycles (or "motorbikes," as they're called in much of Asia) zipping around have already exceeded 2020 planning. Riding motorbikes is a part of daily life. Nearly everyone has one. Entire families of four will ride on one scooter. Local people transport truckloads of goods strapped to the back of their bikes. It's amazing.
Riding here is is an elegant, yet frantic dance as thousands of bikes weave in-and-out of each lane with little regard for those around. Bumps are frequent; seldom acknowledged. Horns are used liberally as can be imagined. Put simply: it's insane.
Besides reveling in the moto madness, there are a ton of other reasons to travel to Vietnam. The landscapes are beautiful as they are diverse. River deltas define the south. Pine forests blanket the central highlands. The easternmost extremities of the Himalayas carve through the north. Lush jungles line the coast. The people are warm and welcoming. The food is delicious. And everything is cheap. Like fifteen cents-a-beer cheap.
Vietnam is an adventurer's haven too. There's world-class rock climbing. Diving. Kiteboarding. Kayaking. Trekking. Son Doong — the world's largest discovered cave is here too. (I'll be exploring Son Doong's smaller sister, Hang En in a few weeks!)
Since I was already in the region, there was no way I could not explore Vietnam — so after a three week stint in Cambodia, I jumped on a night bus to Saigon
My mission: Explore Vietnam from the south to the north, traveling through how the locals do. And that meant getting a bike.
by Chris Brinlee Jr, Gizmodo | Read more:
Image: Chris Brinlee, Jr
I've been traveling the world for the last seven months or so. It's been amazing. But one thing that I've missed most about life back in LA was riding my motorcycle. Every. Single. Day.
Riding in the States isn't terribly popular. You can only lane-split legally in California. Insurance companies treat riding as a hobby and charge out-the-ass for motorcycle policies. Car drivers are often prejudiced against us. Overall, it's barely accepted. Which is a shame, because motorcycles make way more sense for personal transportation than a giant, heavy, inefficient car ever will.That's not case in Vietnam, however — where the 37 million registered motorcycles (or "motorbikes," as they're called in much of Asia) zipping around have already exceeded 2020 planning. Riding motorbikes is a part of daily life. Nearly everyone has one. Entire families of four will ride on one scooter. Local people transport truckloads of goods strapped to the back of their bikes. It's amazing.
Riding here is is an elegant, yet frantic dance as thousands of bikes weave in-and-out of each lane with little regard for those around. Bumps are frequent; seldom acknowledged. Horns are used liberally as can be imagined. Put simply: it's insane.
Besides reveling in the moto madness, there are a ton of other reasons to travel to Vietnam. The landscapes are beautiful as they are diverse. River deltas define the south. Pine forests blanket the central highlands. The easternmost extremities of the Himalayas carve through the north. Lush jungles line the coast. The people are warm and welcoming. The food is delicious. And everything is cheap. Like fifteen cents-a-beer cheap.
Vietnam is an adventurer's haven too. There's world-class rock climbing. Diving. Kiteboarding. Kayaking. Trekking. Son Doong — the world's largest discovered cave is here too. (I'll be exploring Son Doong's smaller sister, Hang En in a few weeks!)
Since I was already in the region, there was no way I could not explore Vietnam — so after a three week stint in Cambodia, I jumped on a night bus to Saigon
My mission: Explore Vietnam from the south to the north, traveling through how the locals do. And that meant getting a bike.
by Chris Brinlee Jr, Gizmodo | Read more:
Image: Chris Brinlee, Jr
Let the Sonnets Be Unbroken
The subtitle of former Harvard president Neil L. Rudenstine’s new book, Ideas of Order, announces that it is “A Close Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” But it is not really a “close reading” in the usual sense—and that is the heart of its strengths. Rudenstine instead interprets the sonnets as a sequence, paying special attention to how the poet develops his increasingly pessimistic concerns about the honesty and durability of romantic love in these 154 lyric poems.
“Close reading” was the favored term of the New Critics in the 1930s to describe and denote the method of interpretation they advocated to replace the philological criticism and belletrism then dominating the study of literature. They wanted to study poetry not just as an instance of language, but as art. However, they insisted that literary study should be more like a science than like mere book-reviewing, with a rigorous consideration of a poem as a self-enclosed object possessing its own internal coherence. At its best, close reading is the literary equivalent of microscope work in a biology lab: scrutinizing every element of a poem, no matter how minute, and its impact on the poem’s range of meaning. The technique, which has long outlasted the doctrine that gave it rise, has forcefully shaped the way poetry is taught in the English-speaking world in both high schools and colleges. Entire class sessions are often spent on a handful of short lyric poems. It is somewhat unusual to find a syllabus assigning an entire volume of poetry by a single poet that is taught as a continuous whole rather than as a set of discrete texts.
This tendency to focus on close reading has also affected and perhaps distorted how we read lyric cycles, including the Elizabethan sonnet sequences, Shakespeare’s in particular. One symptom is that none of the major anthologies used for survey courses reproduces the sonnet cycles of Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare in full. Instead, they are presented through a kind of “greatest hits” approach that further pushes students toward understanding them not as continuities, but as collections. Within this approach lies a vestigial New Critical assumption that the proper unit of decipherment is not the sequence, but the sonnet, and that one can treat a given sonnet as an aesthetic whole, independent of the sequence of which it is a part.
Ideas of Order, a charmingly nonconfrontational book, never goes so far as to call that approach a misreading. But Rudenstine (who trained as a scholar of Renaissance poetry at Harvard, taught undergraduates throughout his presidency, and still teaches a freshman seminar on twentieth-century poetry at Princeton) obviously sees the absence of a book that teaches the reader how to consider the sonnets as a sequence—to see the joints and beams in the thematic and dramatic architecture of the work—as a mistake. Some academic work has addressed this problem (most notably Brents Stirling’s 1968 book, Shakespeare Sonnet Order), but there is little writing that presents these ideas to the general public. Ideas of Order aims to fill this gap: omitting footnotes and critical crossfire, it is clearly meant for a nonacademic audience. It also addresses the unfortunate state of affairs that Rudenstine describes at the book’s outset: despite their lofty reputation, the sonnets “are scarcely read, except for the few that are regularly anthologized.”
Rudenstine’s book consists of an interpretive essay, followed by a complete, unannotated text of the sonnets. In the essay, he sketches a loose “road map” for the sonnets that charts the progression of the poet through a succession of emotional stages and romantic situations, and traces a kind of “plot” through the cycle. Even casual Shakespeareans know that the majority of the sonnets are addressed to an attractive young man, urging him to have children, before they turn to a “dark lady” late in the sequence. But Rudenstine points out that many discernible episodes intervene. At sonnet 21, insecurities creep in. In 33-36, the young man betrays the poet; qualified pardon ensues, followed by separation, and then another, more severe betrayal, followed by plaintive condemnation. A horrible, long separation seems to fall between 96 and 97; after an uneasy reconciliation, the poet himself is unfaithful to the young man beginning at 109. Finally, both the young man and the poet fall under the sway of the dark lady. Rudenstine is far from dogmatic about this schema, noting that it is only one possible way to carve up the sequence, and that it does not account for the scattering of sonnets that seem to stick out at loose ends. But his modesty belies how convincing—and useful—his divisions are. (...)
Ideas of Order would be a worthwhile endeavor even if it only facilitated the understanding of readers new to the sonnets. But it does more than that, though its author soft-pedals his book’s interpretive climax. By approaching these poems as a portrait of an evolving mind, Rudenstine arrives at a reading of the sequence as a work that winds through mounting emotional pain to a bleak and sober terminus.
Anyone who has read the sonnets in full, even in a cursory manner, is aware that they are rarely the expressions of unqualified and worshipful praise that the popular imagination often takes them to be. They voice stubborn insecurity; jealousy that putrefies into hatred; anxiety about love in the shadow of death; and, most troubling, a crisis of confidence in the ability of language to communicate either sincerely or enduringly. Ideas of Order argues that, far from being overcome, these concerns acquire validity and intensity as the work advances. By the end, “Time has become a more powerful adversary, and in the last celebratory poems to the friend, beauty ceases to play any part. Indeed, even the ‘eternizing’ capacity of poetry itself is no longer mentioned.” The poet emerges broken of his commitment to honesty and beauty, and well versed in suspicion and duplicity.
by Spencer Lenfield, Harvard Review | Read more:
Image: Granger, NYC
“Close reading” was the favored term of the New Critics in the 1930s to describe and denote the method of interpretation they advocated to replace the philological criticism and belletrism then dominating the study of literature. They wanted to study poetry not just as an instance of language, but as art. However, they insisted that literary study should be more like a science than like mere book-reviewing, with a rigorous consideration of a poem as a self-enclosed object possessing its own internal coherence. At its best, close reading is the literary equivalent of microscope work in a biology lab: scrutinizing every element of a poem, no matter how minute, and its impact on the poem’s range of meaning. The technique, which has long outlasted the doctrine that gave it rise, has forcefully shaped the way poetry is taught in the English-speaking world in both high schools and colleges. Entire class sessions are often spent on a handful of short lyric poems. It is somewhat unusual to find a syllabus assigning an entire volume of poetry by a single poet that is taught as a continuous whole rather than as a set of discrete texts.This tendency to focus on close reading has also affected and perhaps distorted how we read lyric cycles, including the Elizabethan sonnet sequences, Shakespeare’s in particular. One symptom is that none of the major anthologies used for survey courses reproduces the sonnet cycles of Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare in full. Instead, they are presented through a kind of “greatest hits” approach that further pushes students toward understanding them not as continuities, but as collections. Within this approach lies a vestigial New Critical assumption that the proper unit of decipherment is not the sequence, but the sonnet, and that one can treat a given sonnet as an aesthetic whole, independent of the sequence of which it is a part.
Ideas of Order, a charmingly nonconfrontational book, never goes so far as to call that approach a misreading. But Rudenstine (who trained as a scholar of Renaissance poetry at Harvard, taught undergraduates throughout his presidency, and still teaches a freshman seminar on twentieth-century poetry at Princeton) obviously sees the absence of a book that teaches the reader how to consider the sonnets as a sequence—to see the joints and beams in the thematic and dramatic architecture of the work—as a mistake. Some academic work has addressed this problem (most notably Brents Stirling’s 1968 book, Shakespeare Sonnet Order), but there is little writing that presents these ideas to the general public. Ideas of Order aims to fill this gap: omitting footnotes and critical crossfire, it is clearly meant for a nonacademic audience. It also addresses the unfortunate state of affairs that Rudenstine describes at the book’s outset: despite their lofty reputation, the sonnets “are scarcely read, except for the few that are regularly anthologized.”
Rudenstine’s book consists of an interpretive essay, followed by a complete, unannotated text of the sonnets. In the essay, he sketches a loose “road map” for the sonnets that charts the progression of the poet through a succession of emotional stages and romantic situations, and traces a kind of “plot” through the cycle. Even casual Shakespeareans know that the majority of the sonnets are addressed to an attractive young man, urging him to have children, before they turn to a “dark lady” late in the sequence. But Rudenstine points out that many discernible episodes intervene. At sonnet 21, insecurities creep in. In 33-36, the young man betrays the poet; qualified pardon ensues, followed by separation, and then another, more severe betrayal, followed by plaintive condemnation. A horrible, long separation seems to fall between 96 and 97; after an uneasy reconciliation, the poet himself is unfaithful to the young man beginning at 109. Finally, both the young man and the poet fall under the sway of the dark lady. Rudenstine is far from dogmatic about this schema, noting that it is only one possible way to carve up the sequence, and that it does not account for the scattering of sonnets that seem to stick out at loose ends. But his modesty belies how convincing—and useful—his divisions are. (...)
Ideas of Order would be a worthwhile endeavor even if it only facilitated the understanding of readers new to the sonnets. But it does more than that, though its author soft-pedals his book’s interpretive climax. By approaching these poems as a portrait of an evolving mind, Rudenstine arrives at a reading of the sequence as a work that winds through mounting emotional pain to a bleak and sober terminus.
Anyone who has read the sonnets in full, even in a cursory manner, is aware that they are rarely the expressions of unqualified and worshipful praise that the popular imagination often takes them to be. They voice stubborn insecurity; jealousy that putrefies into hatred; anxiety about love in the shadow of death; and, most troubling, a crisis of confidence in the ability of language to communicate either sincerely or enduringly. Ideas of Order argues that, far from being overcome, these concerns acquire validity and intensity as the work advances. By the end, “Time has become a more powerful adversary, and in the last celebratory poems to the friend, beauty ceases to play any part. Indeed, even the ‘eternizing’ capacity of poetry itself is no longer mentioned.” The poet emerges broken of his commitment to honesty and beauty, and well versed in suspicion and duplicity.
by Spencer Lenfield, Harvard Review | Read more:
Image: Granger, NYC
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