“Most mornings I learn more from New Items than I do from all of the traditional papers I read combined.” — Michael Blair, former presiding partner, Debevoise & Plimpton.
1. Asia Times:
For most of modern history, the household was a bundle.Under one roof, families pooled rent and meals, raised children, cared for parents, kept each other company and insured one another against bad luck. Nobody itemized it, and national accounts barely noticed.
. The loneliness economy is the usual name for the result; the unbundling of the family household is the more accurate one.[Across East Asia, that arrangement is coming apart, and one line item after another has turned into something you pay for]In South Korea, single-person households are now
[36%]of the total, the largest category. Japan was at 38% in 2020 and is expected to reach[44%]by 2050; Tokyo is already past half.China’s 2020 census found
people living alone, equal to one in four households. Fertility has fallen in step. South Korea’s rate is[125 million], Hong Kong’s is[0.80][0.84]and Taiwan’s births fellin 2025 alone.[20%]The money has followed. Discovery Reports, a Chinese research firm, puts spending by singles in China at more than
USin 2025, up about 50% in two years. The “silver economy” serving the elderly is expected to reach[$1 trillion], about $4 trillion, by 2035. Pop Mart, the toymaker behind Labubu, reported[30 trillion yuan]in revenue last year, up 185%….[$5.4 billion]Markets are good at unbundling meals, entertainment and paid company. They are bad at unbundling the two things families did best: insurance against catastrophe and the last mile of care.
You can buy a single-serving hotpot. You cannot buy someone who notices that you did not wake up. Hence the check-in app bluntly named
[“][Are You Dead][?”]that topped China’s paid app charts in January: miss two daily check-ins, and it alerts an emergency contact. It is a paid substitute for a job that, until recently, needed no product. (Sources: asiatimes.com et alia)
2. Niall Ferguson:
In its latest (fourth) report on AI “misuse”—more essential reading—that its most popular models (Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus) are being, or have recently been, misused by a variety of Generative Threat Groups (GTGs) in “seven harm areas: cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development, and distillation.” In each case, AI was making bad human behavior much more effective, until Anthropic spotted what was going on.[Anthropic revealed]The interesting thing is who out there is up to no good. GTG-20006 (Anthropic gives each case a number) was the inevitable Russians, “attacking military intelligence targets in Ukrainian and European governments as well as diplomatic and defense organizations and individuals connected to U.S. foreign policy.” Putin and his little green men have been doing this kind of thing for years, of course. But AI makes the mobile exploitation kit, the credential-stealing tool, and the phishing platform all work better and faster as well as helping evade detection.
