Once again, Time Magazine picks the peak If Time Magazine features something on its front cover, you know that "something" has jumped the shark. I'll never forget the breathless article about the new generation of internet entrepreneurs - the cover featured a guy whose genius idea was an online dating concierge service for nerds, and had attracted huge amounts of venture capital. That was back in 2000 (I think) and looking at that cover I knew instinctively that the internet bubble was close to collapsing - too much money being thrown at bad ideas, and the clueless editors of Time Magazine had fallen for it.

So earlier this year, on the cover of Time Magazine, they featured the headline "NYLONKONG: A Tale of Three Cities". See what they did there? New York, London, Hong Kong. The article goes on to describe the three cities as:

Yet these are places that know how to meet a challenge. They've done it before. From being dismissed as long past their prime a quarter of a century ago, New York, London and Hong Kong have gone on to extraordinary heights. Tying themselves together, they have also knitted the world into a seamless fabric, financing and transporting the container vessels and the streams of data that have made today's global economy a phenomenon that has increased the life chances of countless millions. Welcome to Nylonkong, and the world it made.

Contrast and compare with this quote from today's Wall Street Journal:

The financial crisis is hitting many drivers of London's growth as a global financial capital in recent years. London's economy appears to be changing in fundamental ways, and, with it, the psyche of the City.

And in The Standard

Thousands of workers gathered outside a shuttered toy maker in Dongguan, southern China, demanding unpaid wages as factories in the region, hit by falling demand and now the global crisis, struggle to survive. Manufacturers in the once-booming Guangdong province have suffered over the past year and a half from tight curbs on loans, rising labor costs and China's stronger currency, which makes their products more expensive.

And of course New York is the home of Wall Street, where all this mess started anyway.

So the lesson is this - if you, or your industry, or your country, or your culture, are featured on the cover of Time Magazine, your time is over.  ¶ 10:21 AM (1) comments links to this post

  Milk, Panics Living next door to a leviathan is disturbing in some ways - there is always a general 'background noise' of things happening in China, but every couple of months or so something happens that directly impacts our life in Hong Kong. So for the last couple of weeks it's been the Melamine in Milk Scandal. This is a truly horrible scandal - farmers and producers adulterating their milk with melamine, that milk being turned into infant formula, and 50,000 children in China developing kidney stones because of it. And that's just the infant formula - the milk has been used in a huge variety of products - coffee, cakes, biscuits, sweets and more. It seems like every time I go to the supermarket here now I see people gingerly examining cartons of milk, trying to work out where it was produced. You can almost see them thinking "Will this milk kill me?" as they stare at the label.

We've always had the feeling that we don't really know what we're consuming here in Hong Kong - it seems like there's simply too much for the local authorities to test, and the events of the past weeks (where supermarkets are announcing product recalls before the government does) seem to confirm that feeling.

What's also interesting is the secrecy - the Chinese government knew about the tainted milk months ago, but didn't want to spoil the Olympics!

Meanwhile, a blast from the past. Riding the bus the other night I found an old Team Clean poster from 2003, which was part of the HK government's efforts to clean up the city in the wake of the SARS crisis - a crisis incidentally that was made worse by the Chinese government's deliberate suppression of news about the disease.

Nothing changes.



Discarded fishballs are particularly worrisome...

  ¶ 3:28 PM (0) comments links to this post