Coronavirus, Supply Chains, and Value Systems

Japan recorded over 1000 cases of the novel coronavirus on July 28, 2020. The most ever. Out of a population of 125 million, you will have to excuse me if my alarm bells aren't bouncing off the walls. To those affected, I wish a speedy recovery. 

To alleviate my fear gauge levels, I have been using this website: https://toyokeizai.net/sp/visual/tko/covid19/en
It is filled with stats from the government pipeline, not spokespeople

Screenshot from toyokeizai.net

So while the numbers of cases have been increasing, the serious numbers and deaths have been decreasing. Whew!
A lot of people are flipping out, and I wonder how we will meet again. It is very different from the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster of 2011, and even the Lehman Shock/Great Recession of 2008 where the culprit was identifiable. This time, it was a mysterious virus that was released from China and spread all over the world, sending everyone into worldwide panic with the immediate implementation of strange wordings: social distancing, bend the curve, zoom meetings.

This is weird, and nothing makes sense. 

But what the hell is going on with our supply chains? My noggin’s ticking.

After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) locked down Wuhan City but let its citizens fly around the world, I discovered that Wuhan was a global distribution center for everything from car parts, cybersecurity equipment, telecom gear, EV/connected cars, aerospace and pharmaceuticals. Half of the Fortune 500 have facilities, operations or manufacturing sites within Wuhan. India imports 70% of its Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients from China. These imports are used to manufacture key medicines. 

The world's key supply chains have been bottlenecked into an area with wetmarkets and weaponized biolabs that can be shut down by a totalitarian government. 

Remember to thank your local manager.

The short-term profits were fantastic. 

McShipping! Just In Time Shipping for EVERYTHING!

In July 2020, Asia flooded. An atmospheric river dumped and dumped and dumped. And then dumped some more. India flooded. China flooded. The Three Gorges Dam, at risk of toppling under the weight of the surging waters battering its heights, released so much water that cities and towns downstream on the Yangtze flooded.

One example of a maintaining a supply chain during a flood

Pretty hard to keep those supply chains in check when flooded factories left without contracts after the global economy crashed during the Covid Lockdowns that caused millions of job losses in the developing world. 

American and European clothing corps usually place a lot of orders in Myanmar, Bangladesh, and countries of that order. That’s all but dried up because of the coronavirus, and now those supply chains are laying in wait, gathering dust while the workers wonder what the hell is next. Try feeding a family on 5 dollars a day and then have that resource evaporate with no promise of return except for maybe a text message to your smartphone, which mysteriously always works.

The Japanese government has announced a $500 million plan to repatriate or establish new supply chain routes outside of China and to move either into South East Asia or South Asia. I recommend South East Asia as they are more trustworthy countries with very capable supply chains. If the Philippines and Indonesia can up their infrastructure, we could see a stable supply chain network emerge.

Japanese supermarket-chain Aeon also announced a partnership with British robotics company Ocado, which is an autonomous supermarket operated almost entirely by robots. By robots, I don't mean humanoids. These robots are canisters with arms and move along a grid and prepare orders for customers placed online. 

While British robots and South East Asian networks alone may not recombobulate the supply chains bottlenecked in China, having the world's key production lines pinched on a river owned by a totalitarian regime with a growing number of human rights violations on its hands including organ harvesting and forced abortions may not be the most rewarding of structures for the consumers who are on the purchasing-end of this bizarre network of supposed efficiency. 

And generally managers don’t like a flood of blood on their hands.

To rework the supply chains, expect more automation, 5G, and humans moving into the management of robots for home delivery. You can also expect the novel coronavirus to be used as the main reason for these changes.

I run the Japan WUT? Podcast. If you like what you read here, you might want to consider listening to “the Japan WUT? Podcast”.

★Japan WUT? iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcast/japan-wut-podcast/id1489848400?l=en  

★Japan WUT? Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/77v5NR6YqKw7DizDA1jOMj  

★Japan WUT? Official Site: www.matthewpmbigelow.com  

★Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/JapanWUT/ 

Why Does the World React to Major Events in Unison Now?

➠ Blog RSS

Why Does the World React to Major Events in Unison Now?

All over Japan and the world we were/are being told to Social Distance due to the Corona Virus. There are signs everywhere in Tokyo written in English telling people to Practice Social Distancing. This is perhaps the fastest roll-out of an English campaign done in the history of Japan.

The Social Distancing English signage has been so accurate Engrish.com is probably taking a stock market hit.

This English is accurate and not readily exploitable by visiting Gaijins looking for an engrish.com scoop

At the drop of a bureaucrat's hat "Social Distance" became a global slogan. 

Imagine sloganizing the world.  "Netizens" are told to be careful! DO NOT spread fake news or fuel conspiracy theories! However, the ideas spread on social networks by us lowlifes are usually only responded to by a couple of drunk haters interacting with our awesome content somewhere on a device made in China. All of the access to the world and nobody really cares.

Yay.

Yet Social Distance took over the world in the blink of a politician's eye. 

Everyone Everywhere Suddenly Even Me:

 "Yes, we will do Social Distancing to Flatten the Curve. No COVID-19 over here! We're all in this together!"

But then…

At the end of May 2020 in Minneapolis an African-American citizen was killed in the street by an officer.

Public Execution.

Most called it racism. A few said misconduct. I don't recall anyone being happy about it. Everyone seemed shocked by the horror.

In the viral aftermath, crowds gathered, protested, and burned down what seemed to be at least 24% of America.

And now the citizen journalists documenting the chaos are asking me to subscribe to their Instagram live streams. 

Haha No.

When the protests started, the following Social Distance Enforcement stopped: 

1. Media reports scolding citizens for going to the parks

2. Officers arresting families for relaxing in their backyards

3. AI-Camera equipped drones flying around checking groups for potential COVID temperatures

—> Worldwide <— & —> Immediate <—

Did the media, police, and surveillance drones instead turn their tax-hungry eyes and scold the protestors, rioters and vloggers that appeared out of the ether in the aftermath of the public execution in Minneapolis?

For some reason no.

The virus that knew no borders decided to take a break when faced with the gooey specter of racism. 

Trust the science!

Am I supposed to get with the program? Count me out. Stop trying to hijack my mind with tragedy.

IS IT SAFE?

IS IT SAFE? IS IT SAFE? IS IT SAFE? IS IT SAFE?

I try to keep an even keel and mind my own beeswax. The last thing I want to do is spit on someone's face to protest the apparent Social Distancing nonsense. And while I understand the appeal of getting more Insta Subs by filming burning cars while race-fuelled mobs in the night scream at baton-wielding Peace Officers, I won't.

COVID-19 was/is (???) an international event which caused quite the global Social Distance pickle indeed, but the American Race War 2020 will probably not reach the shores of Japan seeing how Japan is well over 95% Japanese. There are around 12,000 Canadians in Japan. Not quite the numbers needed for a good old-fashioned Canadian Revolution.

So with a global release of something like Social Distancing, what is the after effect? In my case, Social Distancing is now Officially Implementable and the after-effects of its release remain in the real world. There are still benches and shop signs all over Tokyo with the perfectly written "Social Distancing" posters plastered everywhere. And there are probably people in bureaucracies who are now responsible for managing Social Distancing paraphernalia. Their Microsoft Excel skills are not to be wasted. And they need to be kept around to deal with the physical after-sludge of the next digitally inflamed crisis. The tech companies, seeing as how their product is wireless and without fingerprints, gets to move on without having to clean up the mess.

Some of the hottest real estate in Tokyo is still blocked off as of June 1 2020. Tokyo Midtown seen in the background.

Through these crises Big Tech companies get to add billions of dollars of value to their stock price somehow, and while Amazon and the lot vacuum up more segments of market share, local businesses suffer potential bankruptcy by being mandated to scare hopeful customers with a bunch of tacked-up crappy COVID posters. And if you want to sit on a bench with a loved one, you may have to do so with a MAINTAIN SOCIAL DISTANCING poster staring at you in the face for decades to come. 

Enjoy your free time, taxpayer, you've earned it.

I am ignoring the hysteria. Look at the facts, man. Most governments keep clean enough stats on their websites so I check those. I don't get involved in anything dumb, except bourbon. Most of the Antifas burning buildings and the Karens screaming about Social Distancing are steering teetering belief-ships built out of idiosyncratic contradictions fueled by smartphone tech. I bid them farewell. Buy the ticket. Take the ride.

I believe we can expect Big Tech and their political sponsors to continue to use the smartphone-addled populace as a training pool to iterate social algorithms while the panopticon of surveillance capitalism spreads.

As a Free Person, you can still choose where your dollar and time goes.

You can quarantine a group, but you cannot quarantine the mind.

Thanks for reading this blog. You can also listen to my Japan WUT? Podcast. 

➠ Blog RSS

Local Resident or potential Agent Provacoteur? Using bags as Social Distance Enforcer. Also a potential Karen (カレン).

COVID-19 Is Over -- Are You More Hyped Than Ever?

In Japan, the COVID-19 is finally moving behind us with little damage done. There is a heavy heart cast to those that passed.

It should be noted that it didn’t take draconian measures in Japan to “beat this thing”. People acted like responsible adults for the most part without the need of big brother stomping its heavy technocratic boots on our necks.

On May 25 7pm Japan Time PM Shinzo Abe declared the remaining prefectures of Japan “No Longer Under Emergency”.
So it’s over. Are you hyped? We are free. Maybe you enjoyed your free time. I sure did. Twas nothing permanent. More like Limbo.

Or are you wondering why? Why was all that so much so fast so willy nilly with everything pulling a 180 all the time.

Wear a mask? —> You’re stealing from the health workers. Now go to the supermarket and buy all the toilet paper and post it on Twitter!

Don’t wear a mask? —> You are going to kill my grandmother! Now quick, stay inside, don’t leave and beg for the cure from government doctors, unless they protest on Youtube, in which case — ban them!

Now let’s do social distancing for non-essential workers! —> Free money now!

Notice how the COVID-19 started in China but now… no one really talks about it? Why are people so quick to make a crises about themselves?

It blows my mind.

Kaboom.

While the crises might be over, supply chainers and business owners are left scratching their heads, and the more clever of the lot will probably start to consider the following:

1. Why was everything being manufactured in Wuhan, a remote city in China few had heard of before? From IT, to cyber security, to pharmaceuticals, to car manufacturing — for the world.

2. How was it possible for the CCP government to at first deny anything was happening then lockdown Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, and essentially comandeer a global supply chain?

3. How did China start its own businesses back up while the rest of the world essentially scrambled? (essential-scramblers?)

When most people think about Chinese goods, we are still in the mindset of cheap trinkets that line the walls of tacky electronic shops as well as the random goods we order online that arrives in the mail and soon makes it way to a closet somewhere.

In 2020, not only was a considerable chunk of the global supply chain bottlenecked in a distant city in a totalitarian regime, the products were far from cheap trinkets. Yet when I was in Beijing in May 2019 most of the tourists had never heard of the technological advancements that China had been making since the 2010s, with their QR Code payment systems making to up as much as 75% of all Fast Food Purchases in 2017, to Government Incentives of building new cities with underground tunnel networks of self-driving cars to separate pedestrian traffic from automated vehicles. There were police robots on the streets of Beijing. The tourists wanted to see the Wall. With paper maps.

While the world is now focused on their own needs and are beginning to reflect how they somehow won the COVID Crises, the Chinese Communist Party was able to study in real time on all of the open global networks how individuals, communities, countries, and global orgs like the WHO were reacting and the measures that not only the people were requesting, but the government were promising to implement with 100s of billions of currency at the drop of the hat.

Think about that kind of actionable insight. Hello Big Data. My name is the CCP, and I like what I see.

All we saw from China was either on state-run media of people putting medical supplies into relief jets, or people being welded into their homes. Information so polar and useless no one knows what to make of it.

So yes, we are free people once again, but just like how the yin and yan turns on the face of the rotating earth, in time we as free people should consider that responsibility for the COVID-19 spread is from China’s CCP, and that the COVID-19 was allowed to spread while the global supply chains were shackled by foreign powers.

Hey Free People! Are you more hyped now than a week ago? In Japan, I expect most people are over and done with it.