Tag: Wal-Mart

Goodbye Saigon, pt II

Another friend flew out for Thanksgiving.

There is no such a thing here in Saigon: oven-roasted turkey, croton and mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce , yam and apple pie.

Mouth-watering!  children running around and old folks reminiscing the good old days.

Yes, his destination has a few hallmarks of the American Dream.

Here in old Saigon, the only thing that changes is new names on old streets and schools (no longer segregation, so it came with a shock as I rode pass the old all-girl Gia Long High to see the new mix of male and female students)

My friend likes the quote from T.S. Eliot (In my end, my beginning).

He knows the Earth is round, and that at the end of his short stay in Saigon is the beginning of his trans-continental journey to America and Europe.

Before meeting him, I carry water and chop wood.

After meeting him, I carry water and chop wood.

But he left a vacuum hard to fill. Just like our mutual friend, before him (see Goodbye Saigon).

They have sons and daughter to attend to, paper work to sign and friends to play catch up with.

None of us gives up on Saigon. We all think the place deserves a make-over, a second chance (as if it needed our help and opinion).

Rated as most competitive in the nation, Saigon is quite poised to soar and regain its former glory (Pearl of the Orient).

Skyline and sea harbor, street signs and shops, all compete for clientele. Back-packers have a hard time configuring  their Google-map routes. But everyone here knows or are supposed to know where they are going.

Young work force pour over the key board, while street vendors peddle their wares (walking Wal-Mart).

When my friend was here, we used to sit at one of the ronde’s, French round-about, to feel and feed on the energy of bustling traffic.

Afterwards, we would retire to his quiet alley just a few feet away to recuperate. It’s exhausting and exhilarating at the same time to live the night life in Saigon. More bikes take up the space a few moments ago reserved for buses.

Years ago, they stopped allowing tow-trucks to come through before mid-night. So on this Thanksgiving eve, there is no Black Friday here in Saigon. Only window shopping and online shopping. Tourists find it refreshing to stroll the old boulevard, to discover names like Majestic, Continental hotels etc…

Time seems to freeze-frame here. And we took advantage of this to “re-enter” our past (as if it’s ever possible).

American pop songs overheard from retail shops can lure you back to a time when you were first in love or discover love.

Don’t give up on us, baby.

On the other side of the trans-Pacific flight, my friend perhaps is checking out his luggage, going through custom, with the reflexive greeting “Welcome home, mr Ngo”. I like America. When being addressed by Mr so and so, you know it’s official and that you have paid your taxes and your due.

Consumer confidence is returning with rising home prices in the Bay Areas. I hope it spills over across the pond. After all, Fukushima tsunami waves got tossed all the way to San Francisco bay. Why not this time around, with rising economic waters from the West. When my friend returns, he’ll know once again, his next stay in Vietnam would just like T.S. Elliot puts it, “in my end, my beginning”. No way around the inter-dependence and inter-connectedness of our 21st-century living.

Out of the box

We are urged to “think out of the box“, be creative etc..

Easier said than done. Having a liberal arts background, and traveled the world, I find it easier just get out of the box, then think from there.

Every place has its own charms and setbacks. Every place gets good and bad people.

Don’t assume, from the propaganda, that your place is best, and theirs worst.

Maturity comes only after you have examined and experienced places and people for yourself.

Ivory-tower and Ivy League people often organize “insulated” academic travel tours to stimulate cross-cultural thinking (most of the time, it’s West-East, and not East-West, although more Chinese can now afford world travel).

Out of these excursions, maybe emerge one diplomat or global business person.

Most came back, feeling good about one’s self that he/she is living in a well-off society, where Wal-Mart rules.

Then at work, they urge us to think out of the box once again. You can’t legislate morality, nor can you squeeze creativity out of workers.

After all, isn’t it written in company’s policies that when X happens, Y is the answer!

Without pressures, we tend to lean back into the path of least resistance.

Peak performance, heroism, and valor come in the middle of heavy fire.

One’s life and achievement are highlighted in those critical moments of choice.

This way or that way. One positive strain then another. Keep paying forward.

Keep finding that road less travel. Approach it from another angle. From other’s point of view. What you see depends on where you stand Hence, to think out of the box, sometimes, but not necessary requires one to be out of the box altogether.

I am out of the box, geographically. I hope I can see things in new light, before I too get settled into daily routine, which eventually blind-sight me. My itching and aching heart by then, will hear the call of the wild. That’s what short-trips are for.

To regain perspective, to see old things in new light. To feel refreshed. To love one’s place all over again. It’s not the place. It’s the people living in it, and how they make the most of its context. Can’t think out of the box when you have lived in it for so long.

Au cinema

When Facebook profile (soon to be called Timeline) needs me to complete my favorite movie section, I put down Cinema Paradiso.

It’s in Blu-ray now (Oscar-winning, well-preserved quality). It’s about growing up in an Italian village, with the cinema , Cinema Paradiso, as central theme. It was later demolished to make room for a parking lot. It’s a coming-of-age movie, with movie house no longer pro-fit-able (like Friendly’s ice-cream chain).  It mourned for the Best of youth, with melancholy and nostalgia.

It’s every man and woman’s twist-and-turn of fate, like an amusement park ride.

Mine was also related to a neighborhood cinema, one of dozen own by my uncle.

So I got in free, double or single features. My cousin just waved me in, no ticket was required.

I shed a lot of tears there in that darkened theatre.

I also watched Woodstock, the movie, a couple of times (Ten Years After, remember?) and was amazed at the energy and freedom of  American youth.

I even took my first date there, and half way through the movie, we sneaked out for a smoothie.

The theater is now own by someone else while both my uncle and cousin were no longer with us.

I sat across the street from it on one of my trips back to Vietnam. After I had finished my smoothie, I stood up and did not look back.

One cannot swim in the same current twice.

Yet, like the character in Cinema Paradiso, I often wonder what’s like to have lived the second time around.

Would I be embarrassed by a sudden surge of youthful feelings?

Can grown-ups like me indulge in another treat that of a child?

Will my first date and I even recognize each other however precarious the encounter may turn out to be?

I wish I could fade in the music piece (Cinema Serenade) from the movie right now.

It never fails to bring back scenes from the movie, but also, scenes from our own interrupted lives.

It’s so Italian yet so universal. “Go, don’t come back here”.

A little over ten years ago, they demolished a drive-in theater in Southern California to build a Walmart. Every time I drove past that site, I couldn’t help thinking of the old drive-in (teenagers were denied another place to hang out, unlike when my cousin took the projector home to show family wedding clips to hundreds of kids out in the open).

I guess that same sentiment was a trigger for the making of Cinema Paradiso: the loss of a gathering point, a common space and screen where we all are projectionists (self-projection). People nap, snore, kiss, eat and sometimes, just escape summer heat.

Now, we got home theaters (buy now, pay later) but it’s a solitary not communal act of viewing.

And certainly, no adult is going to take time to show a kid how to load a film reel inside the projections booth, or as in my case, wave me in to see a movie for free.

Yes, it’s now in Blu-ray: neither grainy nor counting down (or waiting for the second projector to kick in during intermission.) And certainly no attendant with flash light.

Technology (digital) brings change, at neck-breaking speed (hockey-stick curve), while our ability to adopt is bell-shaped.

I have waited for Alvin Toffler to come out with more of his series (which began with Future Shock). But apparently, yesterday’s futurist is today’s museum curator.

The thing with speed is, like the bullet train in Shanghai, no one knows how damaging the impact is going to be when two fast-flying objects collide.

I felt that gnawing in my stomach when taken up to the top of an amusement ride. I know it will soon drop me mercilessly with kids sitting behind screaming like characters in a horror movie.

The best scene in Cinema Paradiso was the one which our Toto enjoyed a stress-free ride leaving Alfredo with all the hard pedaling.

Starting a joke

50 years ago,  you would have been chased out of the pub had you painted these scenarios: the US can’t wait to open off-shored manufacturing centers, Gaga as a mermaid on wheelchair, and 90% of the population will shop at Wal-Mart, stocked with 99% Made-in-China merchandise. Dude, in the 60’s, we were living the American Dream.

No one would imagine just in 5 decades that we have debt ceiling; congress woman, shot, survived and stood up to cast her vote; (BL) got taken down while a Nordic Crusader took down people for their opposing view.

Not groovy man, you would say.

Like Austin Powers, you wake up, assuming gas stations still have full-serve (yes, but it’s the homeless man). Don’t you miss the bell and the man in clean Esso overall?

You could start a joke, but the joke was on you.

It doesn’t  take long for someone to ring the alarm bell (Putin called the US consumers “parasites”).

It’s like a line in Neil Young‘s album “I have been to Redwood, I have been to Hollywood…

in search for a heart of gold and I am getting old”.

It takes that long for a generation to process the stages of grief: imperial status right after WWII, to upheavals at home and abroad (assassination of the Kennedy’s brothers and the Diem’s brothers), to Cold War unraveling and Gulf War overstretched. Now, the hard cold reality of a dried credit market (consumer spending registered near zero growth) stands erect like a new Berlin Wall (East where 99 percent of us are living, and West, the other 1%). In Admiral Mullen’s words, “Debt is our greatest security threat.”

You could tell the 60’s Ivy League‘s kids were well-off e.g. bell-bottom pants and Indian-shirts, and all hair. At least, there was a middle class.

On some YouTube clips, you could still detect that the audience “tenue de soiree” to attend Francoise Hardy‘s concerts.(Tous les garcons et les filles): turtle-neck and leather jackets.

Most could afford a trip to Woodstock (which turned out to be free anyway).  And many if not all would take part in binge drinking before, during and after the football games. Senior panic was meant for landing a mate, not a job (now, it’s the opposite).

The future back then was in “plastic” (the Graduate). It was supposed to give rise to companies like 3M , but also, VISA and Master Card (both plastic).

Now, we have Tencent, and Facebook.

Apple’s war chest is larger than the US treasury.

What a joke. Who started it? Dr Evil calls a meeting: “Let’s hold the world hostage, for 2 Million”.

No wonder President Obama had to emphasize that the savings from the newly imposed 54-mile-per- gallon vehicles, would be in the range of 2 Trillion dollars, “with a T.”

50 years is not a long time, but it allows for many changes, exponentially. Don’t blame it on China (or Moore’s Law).

They didn’t even get started until 1979.

It’s a confluence of factors, mostly caused by the rise of the Rest intersecting the decline of the West. The best could happen to our Austin Powers is to step back into the time-machine, hoping for a better reentry point in the multipolar future.

East-West shopping

Retailers in Europe figured out a way to push merchandise in this time of austerity: shop in your underwear, leave fully clothed.

Meanwhile, a reporter from the BBC went to Hanoi to learn about another way of shopping: buying paper clothing for the dead (old Hanoi, pho “hang ma”).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00h35lv

That’s how different East and West is. The only way to deal with trade imbalance is for Western countries to export designer “paper clothes” to China and Vietnam, so people can trade up in matters of ancestral worship.

(given that most textile imports to EU and US have been from these countries). When it comes time for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, I miss my deceased parents, and the opportunity to buy them a Fathers Day, Mothers Day card.

If in Vietnam, I would be given another shopping opportunity for them: gold leaves and US dollars, all in paper, to be burned at their graves.

At the very least, I can burn an incense .

Filial duty. One of the highest virtues.

Another one is to gift your teachers on New Year.

Now with online education and home schooling, there is less human interaction . Some virtual math tutors are connected from India, the same way we reach call centers  for tech support.

It’s the best of times (to be learners) and the worst of times (to be teachers).

Characters and learning (now defined as information soaking) are decoupled.

Hence, the Confucian way of modeling characters (Tien hoc Le, Hau hoc Van i.e. first learn characters, then literature) to mold and make mandarins is phasing out.

A bunch of us know full well that those coffee servers (who wear skimpy outfits) in Vietnamese enclaves earn multiple times their customers’ income.

When in Rome, dress like a Roman.

Maybe this Black Friday, Wal-Mart can avert its earning decline by posting a sign that says “come as you were born, and leave fully clothed”. Its puritanical root in Benton, AK probably prohibits this. But those European stores already did , with much fanfare and press coverage. All these campaigns put VIrgin‘s Branson (whose airline launch was the talk of the town) in the back seat. Each generation must come up with a creative-destruction. Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake the proverbial survival tree (societies who hunt in pack figured out different ways to eliminate the unfits).

Hang in there ole friends. Live young and together in the West, die old and alone in the East (where Father’s Day and Mother’s Day extend well beyond the grave). That’s the only way to end the story. Alone again (naturally).

Trading down: Gap to Goodwill

You know how good the economy is by seeing how many Hummers are on the street. But we 2.5 per cent growth 1Q 2013, we go from Hummers to Hyundai, from Gap to Goodwill.

With 90% debt level, half-a-million debt per man woman and child, trading down is the least of our worries (Patriotic millionaires asked to pay more tax, instead of token donation of used computers or running shoes for write off).

Meanwhile, BRIC countries push up energy and environmental demand resulting in higher food costs.

Every summer, a bunch of senior citizens died of head exhaustion in their lonely Chicago apartments.

We said Goodbye to Dr Death. You can catch Al Pacino portraying him on HBO.

Here is our near-term play-outs : consumers retrenching i.e. value-shopping (Costco, Wal-Mart), the reincarnation of IKEA (renters nation) and office furniture, DIY online shopping (prosumerism meets e-com). In Micro Trends, the author already noted the return of knitting among teens.

The productivity movement is moving out of high-end enterprise, down to SME and public-sector (right!).

And the return of pig-ear antenna in our living rooms (Archie Bunker).

At the conclusion of President Obama town-hall style at Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered his signature hooded sweat saying “in case you want to dress like me” (the joke in context was that President Obama was the only one who made Mark sweated out in suit and tie).

Japanese business men were asked to dress down to save energy.

If you are familiar with Japanese business protocol, you will know how off-script this is (loosening a tie while partying already was too much. Now they are in Hawaiian shirts).

Brazil, however, has no problem with these new austerity measures: they look at this as a prolonged extension of their Mardi Gras. So much for trading down in post-Recession era.

Just make sure to buy supplies in bulk. And no traveling this summer to ease energy pressures. No wonder online ad spending is on track to double-digit grow. That’s where the action is. And where talents are flocking into, one recruitment tweet (CV) at a time. Even resume email service has disappeared as twitter now takes over. Elevator speech has “traded down”.

3D and 4G

At the most elementary level, we got the chip set.

That is about to change, from “flat like a sheet of paper”” to 3D chip, announced Intel (which made Applied Materials jump to its 3.9 Billion acquisition of Varian Semiconductor to keep pace).

Our world is about to change once again, not to the tune of 10 Billion by 2100, but 10 Billion people communicating at the speed of thoughts. At this rate of growth, we can see 3D printing soon to be a norm.

You think that self-check-out at Wal-Mart is bad. Think again. Someday, we might end up ordering an item, only to have it print out at home (watch out UPS).

We’ve got “make your own stuff animal” stores and self-serve ice-cream machines.

Our homes are about to become mini-factories, and stay-at-home dads, in-sourced blue-collar workers (Dad, I want fresh bread. Dad, please squeeze the OJ. Dad, grind the coffee beans, please).

It’s only fitting that the last known WWI vet died leaving behind a changed world.

The US itself, in order to stay in the lead, will have to become world incubator of innovation and ideas.

CNN’s United States of Innovation (51 ideas from 51 states).

Think heat-sensor technology, facial recognition, speech recognition, drone, SPAM prevention, social marketing, Facebook/Skype , Utube and YouTube. None had been around when Bill Gates penned “At the speed of thoughts” (as of this edit, MSC announced it would buy Skype at the tune of 8 Billion dollars).

Now we have professors talking about $300 houses for the bottom 2 Billion (the last time, they couldn’t make a $300 computer). Incidentally, the Hyundai’s Excel got its start in the US at the price of $5,000 where the Nano’s starting price is.

To sustain innovation, we need clusters (and luckily, from the trajectory of history, our times seems to be one of those according to Steven Johnson in “Where good ides came from”). Clusters such as Seattle, San Francisco and Austin.

A little dose of music, art and literature, mixed with a heavy dose of tech, geeks, and flower children (rebellious streak).

Ironically, people who are into their own world (eccentric) are not people who can soup up for a fund-raising session with VC’s.

For now, commoners like me can’t wait to see what comes out of 3D chip set and 4-G broadband.

When all those dark fibers got lit up, and cloud servers turned on , let the show begin.

Like Back-to-the-Future scene, we might get blown away. I suspect that won’t be the case. Change will come sporadically, with an app peppered here, and a tweaking there. Before we know it, we can design and print our own T-shirts at home.

That’s  what makes Chinese authorities awake at night. What are they going to do with the over-invested infrastructure we now call, world factory. And all the men, unemployed, then, already experienced a bite at the proverbial apple (the middle-class life style). History always reserves its best twist of plot for the end. I wish I be around to witness it, like our WWI last known pilot. RIP man of the greatest generation who lived and fought in a pure mechanical universe. We all need to have 2-D chip before 3-D, PSTN before Skype. “Hello, if you hear the sound of your own recording, you are on, for free”.

Forced leisure

MSNBC  interviews a blogger from Good magazine on automation nation.

The take away: automation is moving beyond manufacturing sector (e.g. Google test drove an unmanned vehicle in California, or Italian researchers tested a driver-less van, from Italy to China) to service sectors, such as health care .

Japan has been deep into robotic technology, a national policy to appease conservatives who were anti- immigration, and democrats who caters to its aging population.

Today, China has the fastest computer in the world.

Translation: it can develop faster elevators, bullet trains, assembly lines and bottling lines, weather forecasting, medical tech, bio tech, clean tech and up-the-value-chain services.

In short, all things that compute.

I cannot envision 1.3 Billion Chinese forced to travel and spend their leisure time away from factories and industrial parks

(take a nap in IKEA showroom, anyone?)

Unlike Japanese companies which have off shored their work force to counter balance their unfavorable currency (as of this edit, its Central Bank refuses to print more stimulus money, resulted in Asia’s stock plunge), Chinese companies have moved factories away from coastal cities as far as  Africa for cost-cutting.

Automation and offshoring  full impact will ease wage pressures and labor unrest e.g. Foxconn workers’ suicide.

It’s a Detroit way to fix Union challenge. First, they shifted manufacturing jobs South of the border, then, overseas. Then, service jobs were off shored as well. Now, even call centers in India’s major cities got further outsourced to secondary cities to shave off costs, with automation as first solution.

(I was just interrupted by a Spanish-speaking automated voice pitch from a retailer, probably urging me to rush to early Black Friday). First get someone else to do the job elsewhere. Then the machine. Then the customers.

Toffler was so prescient in observing trends such as pro-sumerism (the consumers contribute to the process of making the product e.g. stuff your own stuff animal, upload your Facebook data) and outsourcing. Kurzweil has been a thought leader in predicting that “Singularity is near“.

In the age of assembly line, Jobs the rebel, came up with the I brand (people buy the I phone cover to show individuality). Even I-robots invasion into our domestic lives. As Gordon Moore continues to see his “law” be self-fulfilling, Michael Moore will produce angrier documentaries i.e. about industrial changes and worker’s displacement.

Changes that are almost at the “speed of thought”. Bill Gates could think of the title, but his successor is left holding the bag. Knowing that change is coming is one thing, adequately preparing for it is quite another. These days, one cannot fight against the machine (winning at one chess game doesn’t guarantee much). The cat is out of the bag. Even if we took the Luddites approach, 21st  century lifestyles can’t accommodate collaboration Amish-style.  We left our farms for the factories just to end up with forced leisure. No wonder micro-trends like knitting, pawning, flannel shirts are back (knitting for boys?).

Back to frontier days, and the spirit of survival. In the Golden State, digging equipment and Levis are back. The Alpha male mentality. Off the grid.

The good thing is , blue jeans are still in. If you can still fit in those. If not, off to Wal-Mart, where jeans are cheap (thanks to logistic and automation). Have you noticed there is no one around to help you find your size? Workers have all turned shoppers of goods produced by 24/7 machines that don’t take break or demand health care.

Machines can’t afford to take time off. Neither can we, but it is increasingly forced upon us.

the infrastructure bills that come due

Infrastructure improvement could cost billions. Kids need to drive someday. And as Mr Buffet wisely put his investment dollars into railways since containers need to be offloaded to the Wal-Mart near you.

Those who travel recently can recall “boarding by zone”, “e-ticketing”, etc.. All sorts of gimmicks , except for the limited runways and slots allowed for take offs.

So, we are back to asking ourselves: to build or not to build.

No pain, no gain.

And it’s a long-term commitment.  Bulldozers and concrete. Fixing the hole while driving through it.

(reminds me of Hwy 22 in Orange County or the 405 in West LA).

Nation-building at home.

While American allies reaped benefits from its generous foreign aid ( among them S Korea, Taiwan, and to a certain extent, S Vietnam during the war – except here, more infrastructure got damaged than built) and recently Iraq, MN bridge, or New Orleans levy are illustrated cases for the new bill.

Leadership is that quality which needs to be tested in times like this. One sees what needs to be done, and one takes action. Period.

Leveraging the downturn, and solving two problems with one solution. P and P/C, the golden eggs and the goose, keeping the nation employed, while paving the road to success for next gens.

Obama can walk out to a well-paved Pennsylvania head high, just like the Clinton/Gore team did with their Information Superhighway.

I have never opined on this blog, except on empowering people, through technology or globalization.

But I know, without infrastructural improvement, globalization will stall (imported goods cannot get to their destination, leads to exporting goods stall at home as well).

Do unto others what you would like yourself be done unto. May the best plan win.

In Vietnam, the town approved a new Happyland, to make Long An Vietnam’s equivalent of Anaheim. By the time the expected 14 million visitors frequented this Happyland, we hope here in the US, 220 million travelers would tell AAA that their holiday travel were excellent due to infrastructure improvement. Our reaction and action during this downturn separates leaders from followers, visionaries from Yes men.

On self-repackaging

The age of frozen self has finally arrived i.e. you either update your web presence, or remain “frozen” in cyber space.

Years from now, people remotely connected to you will Google you  and mine all the intimate data about you or written by you. Personal digital archive.

At the turn of our century, Command-and-Control model dominated management practices. Now, with better algorithm, faster broadband and only a few degrees of separation, suddenly we all “footloose” like Kevin Bacon (who is purportedly connected to everyone in Hollywood by one film or another).

Mass media gave ways to niche media. And we start hearing voices from the fringe. It only takes a camera and an upload.

News personalities are not making nearly enough money as once thought. It’s an age of “do-it-yourself journalism” or Pro-Am.

People point, shoot, upload and save. Gone are the photographers, photo shops, post office and stationery stores.

With Wal-Mart moving in, we are just about to see a complete overhaul of small town America. The Age of Nextville.

No wonder the trend now is to move to North Dakota and the likes. As long as there is broadband connection, a heater and a Wal-Mart.

Online, it doesn’t matter where you live. Or that you are a dog, as they say.

As long as you can repackage yourself, brush up your web presence and leave behind well-orchestrated digital footprint.

It’s a new world. It’s a beautiful world i.e. a hybrid world of on and off-line, virtual and organic relationships. Charlie Chaplin was only partially correct. We are not just an extension of the Machine. It’s the Machine that has become us, shaped and repackaged according to our narcissistic image. I am beautiful. So are you. As long as there is still Photoshop. .