The Newsletter You Didn't Subscribe To - wombats
Your daily dose of nonsense - Thursday, 10 September 2020
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Source: University of Tasmania via ABC
Source: john nasri via Instagram
Source: Pascal Renet via Pexels
Ride-hailing services and carbon emissions
You know how some retailers entice people to spend money by plastering the words “SALE” and “Up to 70% discount” on their websites / windows? And in the end, some of you might have buyer’s remorse because the reality is that you’ve not really saved anything - instead, you’ve spent money on something that you would otherwise wouldn't toss a penny to.
Enter ride-hailing services. From an asset utilisation perspective, it’s a dream come true - if you own machinery that isn’t being used 24/7, that means you are wasting opportunity to extract more value out of them. The solution? Rent it out when you ain’t using them!
But here’s the other thing that you should also keep in mind - increased utilisation increases wear and tear. Similarly for cars and ride-hailing services - if your car is being used all the time, that means that emissions are produced all the time too! So how much more emissions is this whole thing generating?
According to this study, they emit 69% more emissions than the other modes of transport they displace (if it weren’t for such convenience, people would have used the bus or the train or cycle or walked!).
So, what’s the solution to this problem? From the ride-hailing service provider’s point of view, one possible option is to only use electric vehicles. Uber has recently made a pledge to convert all cars to electric vehicles by 2040 and has committed $800mil to this effort.
But as discussed in this newsletter in July, depending on the surrounding infrastructure, electric vehicles serve to only push the burden of emissions and pollution to somewhere / someone else.
So yeah, sometimes there is no way around it. If you want to save money, sometimes you just have to actually spend less, even if you feel like you are losing out on the sale. Similarly, if you really want to reduce emissions and pollution, you just gotta do less of the activities that contribute to them.
But then again, we are only human.
Victims of geopolitics?
If you’re an up and coming superstar, but the established celebrities are throwing shade at you, how would you react? Would you adopt the “haters gonna hate” attitude and let it slide off, or are you going to (attempt to) show them who's boss?
So China is not only picking fights with the US, it is also picking fights with manyothercountries. And one country in particular for this write up is Australia.
You see, Australia’s largest trading partner is China, with AUD 136bil worth of exports (Japan is a very distant 2nd at AUD59bil worth of exports). That gives China a lot of influence on Australia.
One day after the virus has spread out of China and into Australia, Australia starts saying that China should be more accountable for the outbreak. China snapped (it was probably a cumulation of other things as well, just that this broke the camel’s back). China basically went “well, that’s a really cool economy you’ve got there. It’ll be a pity if someone, I don’t know, stopped spending money on your goods and services”.
Later, Australia said that they would help fleeing Hong Kong citizens. Well, China didn’t like that very much either, and threatened Australia further with less trade.
And now, journalists on both sides are drawn into this game of geopolitics. China arrested an Australian news anchor on “national security grounds”, then tried to detain another (the Australian embassy in China saved him). The charges? “Criminal activity endangering China's national security”.
So what has Australia done in response to this? Of course it retaliated. Australian police raided Chinese journalists’ homes in Australian soil, and revoked visas left and right.
And guess who has decided to join the fun? That’s right, it’s the incumbent world superpower who ain’t gonna let some upstart take away its title - the US has also begun stopping and detaining Chinese students at airports (paywall), confiscating their electronic devices, and combing through all their data to see if they were stealing any research data (which is kinda weird, because these are PhD students who are likely the ones who created the data themselves).
But basically my question is, are these people really complicit in this whole game of 4-dimensional chess, as each government is accusing them to be? Or are they merely just pawns for each country’s flexing? I’d like to think that they were just unfortunate to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. But honestly, who knows. History is typically written by the victor, so we will only tend to hear their side of the story.
(And no, America is likely to not back down in either a Trump or Biden administration. Here’s Biden’s “Buy American” campaign. It’ll be political suicide if Biden doesn’t do this.)
Source: The Guardian via YouTube on a video dated yesterday (09 September 2020)
Modern Warfare
I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
There are many ways to interpret the quote above. Here’s one:
What happens when two nuclear powers want to physically fight each other? But at the same time, they don’t necessarily want things to escalate to the point where they would actually start using their nuclear arsenal. What do they do?
So here is a picture of Chinese troops photographed armed with spears facing the Indian troops at the India/China border from NDTV:
Source: NDTV
I’m a pessimist, and I sadly think that fighting is an inevitable and consistent fact of human existence. But does this mean that the presence of nuclear weapons actually make battles less bloody? (I’m too afraid to answer)
Notes: None of my content is sponsored content. All opinions are my own. Nothing in this newsletter is investment, legal, business, medical, or life advice (my subtitle is “Your daily dose of nonsense”). Don’t be believing everything a random guy on the internet says.