The coming trade crisis. Ten Americas (life expectancy). Turkey as a European manufacturing hub. China's lag in cloud computing.
Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
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Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1866-1932). “Senecio cinneraria #74” (1942). Source: Etherton Gallery
The coming trade crisis.
The US Commerce Department has announced plans to impose tariffs of up to 3,521% on imports of solar panels from four South East Asian countries. It comes after an investigation that began a year ago when several major solar equipment producers asked the administration of then-President Joe Biden to protect their US operations. The proposed levies - targeting companies in Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam - are in response to allegations of subsidies from China and the dumping of unfairly cheap products in the US market. A separate US government agency, the International Trade Commission, is due to reach a final decision on the new tariffs in June.
Source: BBC News
The 10 Americas: How Geography, Race, and Income Shape U.S. Life Expectancy
The differences in U.S. life expectancy are so large it's as if the population lives in separate Americas instead of one.
Source: Think Global Health
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Mexico and Latin America are aging
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The most dense concentration of manufacturing in “Europe” is in Turkey.
Source: @MilosMakesMaps
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932). “Adiantum pedatum.” (1898-1926). Source: MoMA
How China lags in the cloud sector
To assess the political economy of China’s cloud sector, we must first understand the global competitive landscape. The U.S. cloud industry is dominated by three major players: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. China’s cloud industry follows a similar pattern. Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud lead the market, mirroring Amazon and Google’s dominance. However, the Chinese industry lags far behind. A key measure of this competitive gap is revenue. By this measure, U.S. cloud providers dominate by a wide margin — AWS alone generates more revenue than the entire Chinese cloud sector combined. The disparity is also evident in data center capacity. The U.S. accounts for 51% of the world’s data center capacity, while China lags behind at 16%.
A major distinction between the U.S. and Chinese cloud sectors is the role of telecom firms, which have more experience, when compared to internet companies, at building physical infrastructure. Unlike the U.S., where no telecom company has successfully entered the cloud market — AT&T attempted but later sold its assets to IBM — China’s cloud sector includes firms with deep expertise in telecommunications. Huawei, China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom have all invested heavily in cloud computing, leveraging their existing network infrastructure to expand into the sector. Revenue and infrastructure alone do not fully explain the structural differences between the two cloud industries. A deeper distinction emerges when breaking down revenue by cloud service type: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) vs. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). IaaS consists of the basic building blocks of computing — compute, storage, and networking — delivered as virtualized infrastructure. Because IaaS is more about lifting existing IT operations onto the cloud, it requires less business transformation and is easier for firms to adopt. PaaS, by contrast, is more software-driven and involves deeper integration into enterprise operations. It is more profitable for cloud providers since it enables higher-margin services, such as AI platforms and business analytics.
While both the U.S. and Chinese cloud providers derive most of their revenue from IaaS, U.S. firms are far ahead of Chinese ones when it comes to revenue from PaaS. To this day, Chinese cloud firms are disproportionately reliant on low-margin IaaS, making its cloud providers more akin to commodity infrastructure providers rather than enablers of productivity-enhancing digital transformation.
Source: JS Tan in China Talk
Sloganeering
1670s, earlier slogorne (1510s, Gavin Douglas), "battle cry," from Gaelic sluagh-ghairm "battle cry used by Scottish Highland or Irish clans," from sluagh "army, host, slew," from Celtic and Balto-Slavic *slough- "help, service." Second element is gairm "a cry" (see garrulous). The metaphoric sense of "distinctive word or phrase used by a political or other group" is attested from 1704 (as slughon). The spellings also included a fully folk-etymologized slughorn.
Source: Online Etymology Dictionary
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932). “Hordeum distichum” (1898-1932). Source: MoMA
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