Tag: John le Carré

This side of the curtain

It would have been stuff taken from” The spy who came in from the cold.”

For three months now, I have lived in the alley behind the local police station.

My big brother would have fainted just to learn about it.

He is a pharmacist, retiring, but still goes to work per diem.

He was drafted during the Vietnam War, like everyone else. But he only stationed in town, to teach a class in Medical Tech (X ray machines etc..)

He would never come back, would never hang out in the alley.

I even wanted to trade place with one of the guys in passing. Would you let me have your place, with you going to CA, and me staying here.

The guy politely declined, or brushed it off.

Times has changed!

This side of the curtain has mostly old files, not yet digitized.

People are in a hurry to consume and to spend.

It has been mild lately. Some people caught a cold.

It would be a funny movie to show a spy who caught a cold, instead of coming from the cold.

Now, we got virus, but from Iran, as they attack data centers.

Try to wake up to a different world. A connected one. And in it, most of the truths and threats we once held as absolutes, have become irrelevant. Yesterday’s fear should not hold us hostage today. I am just holding up the mirror : modernity infects everyone on both sides.

Technology is agnostic. Now, instead of iron curtain, we got firewalls.

Instead of flu virus, we got Iran-originated virus.

John Le Carre or James Bond, all need to update their software version.

Sometimes the virus is in us. Our James Bond character finds himself recede into the dark corner of his own.

We are the bad guys as well. Just didn’t realize it.

Until someone  shows us who we truly are. Mr Bond, tear down that curtain.

Heterogeneous country, homogeneous thought

Google CEO blurted out what we all know (that tech moves at 3 times faster than other business sectors, who in turn, are 3X than the government). We are analog-built e.g. eating,  buying and thinking habits, while techies thought processing power is on a different plane e.g. Cold-War B53 bomb in TX is finally being disassembled and junked.

A Swedish public health expert gave a TEDx talk some years ago. He put up some slides which span 200 years just to show how entrenched we are in yesterday’s thinking (e.g. that women in emerging nations have a lot of children while the opposite is now true). In short, formative years continue to cloud our lenses (or our teachers’ who got their data from post- War textbooks). Another stat: more deaths from suicide in the US (mostly men in their mid-50’s) than from automobile accidents. Or more Christian in China, than the membership of the Communist Party.

Or  thanks to rural broadband, the creative class in the US can finally afford housing and pursuit their passion, let’s say in software programming, in 2nd-tier cities like Seattle, Austin (as opposed to New York and San Francisco).

One more thing. Back in the days when America found it hard to accept a President who was Catholic

and the only “Muslim” brother who left his last name blank (X). The Big Three in Detroit, Big Three in Broadcasting, and a healthy middle class, with Union wages. Now, things get splintered of, with MNC’s paying zero domestic tax (GE), and CDO peddlers paying no COD (it’s still a mystery that Madoff was the only fall guy – whose rehearsed bio was …”I was an underdog when I started in brokerage, so I got to have my revenge at ‘them'” ” we contemplated suicide but it’s our son that followed it through). The same tax codes hasn’t been 21st-century compliant enough to catch clever white-collar looters.

Meanwhile, across the pond, it will take another three decades for China’s branding to rise (The Chinese Dream) just as it has taken them 3 decades to ramp up manufacturing and exports. Reverse engineering will be followed by reverse branding. Their state machinery will be hard at work to take apart every element that make Cola and IBM global brands.

(try to top Steve Jobs, the marketer who still got marketed in his death: simple and elegant cover featuring his signature stare).

First wave will be tourists. Second wave, engineering students . Third wave, marketing catalysts, Huawei and Haier, try to pry open the US-EU domestic markets (foreign in their perspective). At today’s speed, even Toyota with its continuous improvement still can’t compete with revived brands like VW.  It seems that John Le Carre is not the only one whose career and mindset are stuck in Cold War era. Cuba still has 1950’s automobiles crowding the streets. At least, we must admit they don’t make things like that any more. Should have kept jobs in Indiana, and not India.

Things were moving quite rapidly at the bottom line, and slow at topline.