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Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts

Friday, March 06, 2026

6: Iran

The Brand Age For years the Japanese had been able to make cheaper watches. Now they could make better ones too. ......... A handful survived as independent companies. And the way they did it was by transforming themselves from precision instrument makers into luxury brands. ........... Now they cost a lot because brands spend a lot on advertising and use tricks to limit supply, and what the buyer gets in return is an expensive status symbol. ................

The Swiss watch industry probably makes more now from selling brand than they would have if they were still selling engineering.

.................. Instead of falling off a cliff, the revenue numbers merely flatten out for a while, and then take off like a rocket in the late 1980s as the surviving watchmakers come to terms with their new destiny. .................

one of the most powerful forces of our era: brand.

........... Cheap, thick pocket watches were derided as "turnips." .............. The best watches of the golden age have a quiet perfection that has never been equalled since. And for reasons I'm about to explain, probably never will be. .................... That's the thing about minimalism: there tends to be just one answer. ................. Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal. ................ "You're looking at the costliest stainless steel watch in the world — the Audemars Piguet 'Royal Oak'. What makes it even more precious than gold is the time that went into building it, by a vanishing breed of master watchmakers." At the bottom of the ad they turn the traditional formula on its head and describe their watches as being "priced from $35,000 and down." .................. You could wear a diamond ring or a gold chain, but those would have seemed socially dubious to investment bankers. They might have been barbarians, but they weren't mafia. ................. expensive mechanical watches now serve as de facto jewelry for men, and women don't need de facto jewelry because they can wear actual jewelry. ............... The most striking thing to me about the brand age is the sheer strangeness of it. The zombie watch brands that appear to be independent and even have their own retail stores, and yet are all owned by a few holding companies. The giant, awkwardly shaped watches that reverse 500 years of progress in making them smaller. The business model that requires a company to rebuy their own watches on the secondary market to catch rogue customers. The very concept of rogue customers. It's all so strange. And the reason it's strange is that there's no function for form to follow. ........................ The constraints imposed by brand ultimately depend on some of the worst features of human psychology. So when you have a world defined only by brand, it's going to be a weird, bad world. ............... The way to find golden ages is not to go looking for them. The way to find them — the way almost all their participants have found them historically — is by following interesting problems. If you're smart and ambitious and honest with yourself, there's no better guide than your taste in problems. Go where interesting problems are, and you'll probably find that other smart and ambitious people have turned up there too. And later they'll look back on what you did together and call it a golden age.

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Thursday, March 05, 2026

5: Marketing + AI

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5: Iran

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Wednesday, March 04, 2026

4: Iran

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Tuesday, March 03, 2026

3: Middle East

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3: Iran

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Monday, March 02, 2026

2: Iran

War, Oil and the World Economy Are we less vulnerable to an oil price shock than we were in 1979? ........... I remember how soaring energy prices were followed by soaring inflation across the board. .......... Now Donald Trump has taken us to war with the nation that was at the epicenter of that crisis. Obligatory disclaimer: The Iranian regime is evil, and it would be a good thing if this war leads to its demise. But my topic today is the side consequences of the US attack. ..............

Almost everyone assumes that the economic fallout from Operation Masculine Insecurity Epic Fury will be much less severe than the fallout from the rise of the mullahs nearly fifty years ago.

............ why did world oil prices rise 165 percent after the Iranian Revolution? Fears of disruption in other Middle Eastern nations led to speculative hoarding, followed by Saudi production cuts that kept prices high. ................ Shipments of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, which is how most Middle Eastern oil reaches world markets, appear to have come to a more or less complete halt. ................ Middle Eastern oil remains crucial for the world economy as a whole. ........... As of this morning, oil prices were about $10 a barrel higher than they were in mid-February. That will add approximately 25 cents to the price of a gallon of gasoline. So far markets are in effect betting on a short, not-too-disruptive war, although that could change. ............... The “oil intensity of GDP” is the ratio of oil consumption (measured in terawatt-hours of energy) to real GDP, measured in 2017 dollars. This indicator has declined more than 70 percent since the 1970s, which basically tells us that today’s economy uses much less oil to produce a given amount of output than the economy of the 1970s. One way to see this is to compare growth in US real GDP to the change in US oil consumption since 1978: ................. The U.S. economy has tripled in size, but oil consumption now is about the same as it was in the late 1970s. .............. the gas mileage of the average car has roughly doubled. Also, cheap natural gas has replaced oil in many uses, for example in home heating, and renewable energy is also starting to make a dent. ................ Dubai in particular is an important node in the global financial system, as well as playing host to many extremely rich people who thought they had found a safe haven. One indicator of that changing status is the transformation of Dubai International Airport into one of the world’s most important travel hubs.

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Sunday, March 01, 2026

1: Iran

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Saturday, February 28, 2026

28: Iran

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