Blog · Dominik Mayer · Products, Asia, Productivity

Swedish band ABBA announced a new album to be released in November 2021 and a virtual concert in its own arena.

Listening to the interview it sounds as if all of this started with the virtual concert as a way to leave a legacy behind.

“We wanted to do it before we were dead", said Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus added: ”It’s good if you do that before you’re dead. Because it gets more accurate then.”

So they shaved their beards and went to work. And they wanted to add two new songs but then had so much fun doing it that they finished a whole new album.

Here are the first two songs:

The video shows the tallest building in the world between the completion of the Singer Building in 1901 and the planned opening of the Dubai Creek Tower in 2022.

Up until the completion of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the tallest skyscraper had always been in the United States. And ever since, Asia rules.

The video is from 2019 and therefore a bit outdated. Construction on both Jeddah Tower and Dubai Creek Tower is halted or has stalled.

Keith Zhai, Lingling Wei and Jing Yang write in the Wall Street Journal about Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma.

They quote former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao with calling himself a “serious student” of Ma’s. Current president Xi Jinping seems to be everything but a fan.

The article suggests that Ma’s companies are under scrutiny because of the outspokenness of its founder. But then there is this:

There also were concerns at the central bank that Ant could become too big to rescue in a financial meltdown, according to people familiar with the matter.

And:

By June 2020, Huabei’s credit outstanding accounted for nearly a fifth of China’s short-term household debt.

In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Anita Sircar writes about a severely ill COVID patient she treated. The man had not gotten a vaccination. He wanted to wait for full FDA approval to not be “the government’s guinea pig”.

“Well,” I said, “I am going to treat you with remdesivir, which only recently received FDA approval.” I explained that it had been under an EUA for most of last year and had not been studied or administered as widely as COVID-19 vaccines. That more than 353 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine had been administered in the U.S. along with more than 4.7 billion doses worldwide without any overwhelming, catastrophic side effects. “Not nearly as many doses of remdesivir have been given or studied in people and its long-term side effects are still unknown,” I said. “Do you still want me to give it to you?”

Check the article to see how the story continues.

Late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refutes the notion that the United States are such a free country because of the Bill of Rights:

But then I tell them, if you think that the Bill of Rights is what sets us apart, you are crazy. Every banana republic has a bill of rights. Every president for life has a bill of rights. The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean that literally. It was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff.

He then goes on explaining that what sets America apart is the structure of its government with checks and balances that make sure no one can amass too much power.

Full transcript on govinfo.

In the New York Times Magazine, Samanth Subramanian describes how Singapore reclaims land from the ocean. Less wealthy nations cannot afford these measures:

Kiribati, an island nation in the Central Pacific, has bought 6,000 acres of forested land in Fiji, more than a thousand miles away, hoping to resettle some of its 100,000 people if a crisis hits. The Maldives, similarly, has talked about buying land in Australia.

How is that going to work, I wonder. Moving a whole nation into another country will cause tremendous political, legal, social and cultural issues.

Matt Blodgett:

There’s a whole class of bugs that comes down to the developer followed very specific instructions without understanding the goal. And a well-meaning manager will take that to mean I wasn’t specific enough in my instructions. No! Computers need instructions. Humans need understanding.

Exactly.

I like to take developers with me when visiting customers. A common understanding of the goal removes so much friction and makes life so much easier.

I also recommend Basecamp’s Shape up to break down the barrier between product and IT and have small teams work closely together to ship a new product or feature.

Sir Jony Ive in the California College of the Arts’ virtual commencement for the graduating class of 2021:

Being curious fuels our appetite to learn, and wanting to learn is far more important than being right.

Using a public park as an example user experience consultant Paul Boag explains how to iteratively build products. And why you should do it.

Travel+Leisure portraits Anan’s Peter Cuong Franklin and Å By Tung’s Hoang Tung and mentions a couple of other fine dining restaurants.

Having been to Anan twice I’ll add some of the other places to my list.

Emirates Global Aluminium explains how Bauxite is mined and refined.

And some footage of an aluminum smelter:

Paul Simon explains how he wrote Bridge Over Troubled Water and Mrs. Robinson.

I like this line:

Everywhere I went, led me where I didn’t wanna be, so I was stuck.

Over at A List Apart Matt E. Patterson describes HTML-over-WebSockets:

What about multi-user chat? Or document collaboration? In classic frameworks and SPAs, these are the features we put off because of their difficulty and the code acrobatics needed to keep everyone’s states aligned. With HTML-over-the-wire, we’re just pushing tiny bits of HTML based on one user’s changes to every other user currently subscribed to the channel. They’ll see exactly the same thing as if they hit refresh and asked the server for the entire HTML page anew. And you can get those bits to every user in under 30ms.

Most interesting tech article I’ve read in a while.

Basecamp has been pushing this approach with Hotwire.

And Phoenix with LiveViews:

China expert Michael Schuman describing his disappointment with where China is headed:

Xi’s vision for “a community with a shared future,” as he calls it, is like a neighborhood where a man beats his wife every night, but anyone who tries to help her is “intervening in his internal affairs.” In order to show you are not “prejudiced,” you invite the guy over for pool parties, and smile as if nothing’s wrong. Maybe he’ll bring you a few beers. That’s how Xi defines “mutual respect.”

Paul Horowitz describes on OSXDaily how to add currency exchange rates to the iOS stock app:

All you need to do is search for a ticker symbol containing the two currencies, USDEUR=X, for example.

In the four years since the article was published macOS has gained support for Stocks as well and you can show the exchange rate in a notification center widget.