"Since God has accepted you to be among the holy people that He loves, you must clothe yourselves with tender mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.   Make allowances for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you.  Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must also forgive others.  

Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which brings us all together in harmony. And let the peace of the Lord rule in your hearts.  For as members of one body you are called to live in peace. And always be thankful."

Col 3:12-15

All the best for 2018

uffering, Sorrow, Loss, Hopefulness, Faithfulness, and Prayer

From Jesse's Cafe:

This morning I came across this excerpt below in William Barclay's Daily Commentary on the Gospels.

I normally do not read this commentary.  This encounter today was by a happy accident, and a tender mercy, in a response to my own ongoing thoughts and prayers.    I wanted to share it with you because it speaks to many of us, and certainly most of those with whom I have shared conversations, especially over the past year.

Luke 2:36-40  There was a prophetess called Anna. She was the daughter of Phanuel and she belonged to the tribe of Asher. She was far advanced in years. She had lived with her husband ever since seven years after she came to womanhood; and now she was a widow of eighty-four years of age. She never left the Temple and day and night she worshipped with fastings and with prayers.

At that very time she came up and she began to give thanks to God and she kept speaking about him to all those who were waiting expectantly for the deliverance of Jerusalem. When they had completed everything which the Lord's law lays down they returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth. And the child grew bigger and stronger and he was filled with wisdom, and God's grace was on him.

"Anna was one of the Quiet in the Land.  We know nothing about her except what these verses tell but even in this brief compass Luke has drawn us a complete character sketch.

Anna was a widow. She had known sorrow and she had not grown bitter.  Sorrow can do one of two things to us.  It can make us hard, bitter, resentful, rebellious against God.  Or it can make us kinder, softer, more sympathetic.

It can despoil us of our faith; or it can root faith ever deeper.  It all depends how we think of God.  If we think of him as a tyrant we will resent him.  If we think of him as Father we too will be sure that:

A Father's hand will never cause
His child a needless tear.

She was eighty-four years of age. She was old and she had never ceased to hope.  Age can take away the bloom and the strength of our bodies; but age can do worse— the years can take away the life of our hearts until the hopes that once we cherished die and we become dully content and grimly resigned to things as they are.

Again it all depends on how we think of God.  If we think of him as distant and detached we may well despair; but if we think of him as intimately connected with life, as having his hand on the helm, we too will be sure that the best is yet to be and the years will never kill our hope.

How then was Anna such as she was?

She never ceased to worship. She spent her life in God's house with God's people. God gave us his church to be our mother in the faith. We rob ourselves of a priceless treasure when we neglect to be one with his worshipping people.

She never ceased to pray. Public worship is great; but private worship is also great. As someone has truly said, "They pray best together who first pray alone." The years had left Anna without bitterness and in unshakable hope because day by day she kept her contact with Him who is the source of strength and in whose strength our weakness is made perfect."

The prophetess Anna is not much remarked or remembered.  She is 'the quiet of the land.'  I believe that there is a beautiful little church, on the slope of the Mount of Olives, the Church of Dominus Flevit, that was built on the site of an ancient Byzantine church that was dedicated to her.

Do you wish to know what God is thinking, what He is doing?  Talk to Him.  Talk also to His people, those who are yours to walk with you on the way.   And do not allow a wayward heart to make you hardened, deaf and blind.

http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.kr/2017/12/suffering-sorrow-loss-hopefulness-aging.html

REJOICE IN THE LORD ALWAYS; AND AGAIN I WILL SAY, REJOICE; LET YOUR GENTLENESS AND CONSIDERATION BE KNOWN TO ALL, FOR THE LORD IS ALWAYS NEAR. DO NOT BE ANXIOUS ABOUT ANYTHING, BUT WITH PRAYER, AND BY SUPPLICATION, AND WITH THANKSGIVING, LET YOUR NEEDS BE MADE KNOWN UNTO GOD. AND THE PEACE OF THE LORD, WHICH SURPASSES ALL UNDERSTANDING, WILL GUARD YOUR HEARTS AND YOUR MINDS, IN CHRIST JESUS." 
PHILIPPIANS 4:4-7

Tech Giants Trying to Use WTO to Colonize Emerging Economies

From Naked Capitalism:

Tech titans like Google and Apple seek to create a “global” regime to prevent developing economies from protecting their companies or data.

Yves here. Notice that Costa Rica is served up as an example in this article. Way back in 1997, American Express had designated Costa Rica as one of the countries it identified as sufficiently high income so as to be a target for a local currency card offered via a franchise agreement with a domestic institution (often but not always a bank). 20 years later, the Switzerland of Central America still has limited Internet connectivity, yet is precisely the sort of place that tech titans like Google would like to dominate.

The initiative described in this article reminds me of how the World Bank pushed hard for emerging economies to develop capital markets, for the greater good of America’s investment bankers...

U.S.-based tech giants and Chinese Alibaba – so-called GAFA-A – dominate, by far, the future of the digital playing field, including issues such as identification and digital payments, connectivity, and the next generation of logistics solutions. In fact, there is a no-holds-barred ongoing race among these tech giants to consolidate their market share in developing economies, from the race to grow the advertising market to the race to increase online payments...

he relationships of most countries with tech companies are as imbalanced as their relationships with Big Pharma, and there are many parallels to note. Not so long ago, the countries of the Global South faced Big Pharma power in pharmaceutical markets in a similar way. Some developing countries had the same enthusiasm when they negotiated intellectual property rules for the protection of innovation and research and development costs. In reality, those countries were nothing more than users and consumers of that innovation, not the owners or creators. The lessons of negotiating trade issues that lie at the core of public interest issues – in that case, access to medicines – were costly. Human lives and fundamental rights of those who use online services should not be forgotten when addressing the increasingly worrying and unequal relationships with tech power.

The threat before our eyes is similarly complex and equally harmful to the way our societies will be shaped in the coming years. In the past, the Big Pharma race was for patent exclusivity, to eliminate local generic production and keep drug prices high. Today, the Big Tech race is for data extractivism from those who have yet to be connected in the world, and tech companies will use all the power they hold to achieve a global regime in which small nations cannot regulate either data extraction or data localization.

Big Tech is one of the most concentrated and resourceful industries of all time. The bargaining power of developing countries is minimal. Developing countries will basically be granting the right to cultivate small parcels of a land controlled by data lords—under their rules, their mandate, and their will—with practically no public oversight. The stakes are high. At the core of it is the race to conquer the markets of digital payments and the battle to become the platform where data flows, splitting the territory as old empires did in the past. As the Economist claimed on May 6, 2017: “Conflicts over control of oil have scarred the world for decades. No one yet worries that wars will be fought over data. But the data economy has the same potential for confrontation.”

If countries from the Global South want to prepare for data wars, they should start thinking about how to reduce the control of Big Tech over—how we communicate, shop, and learn the news—, again, over our societies. The solution lies not in making rules for data liberalization, but in devising ways to use the law to reduce Big Tech’s power and protect consumers and citizens.  Finding the balance would take some time and we are going to take that time to find the right balance, we are not ready to lock the future yet.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/12/tech-giants-trying-use-wto-colonize-emerging-economies.html

"Let justice flow like a river, and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream."

Amos 5:24

The Web Began Dying in 2014 – Here’s How

From Naked Capitalism:

The Internet has changed considerably since 2014, and not in a good way.

Yves here. 2014 was the year Google launched a change in its search algorithm called Panda. It treated sites that did aggregation (even if only as part of its content, as in our daily Links feature) as junk site scrapers and downgraded them in a big way in search rankings. Needless to say, sites that do aggregation well compete with Google’s search function, which was crapified by then, and in our case, Google News. Our total traffic fell by 1/3.

Note in the third chart how much traffic major media sites get from Google and Facebook combined. By contrast, Naked Capitalism gets <15% of its traffic from both sources. While this guarantees our independence, it costs us greatly in terms of revenues and influence. By André Staltz, who works as an independent contractor, programming instructor, speaker, and donation-based open source developer. From 2013 to 2017 he worked as a Senior Web and Mobile Developer at Futurice. Prior to that, he worked on his own startup building web discussion forum software. Originally published at saltz.com

It may seem as though nothing has changed on the web – but since 2014, Google and Facebook hace acquired direct influence over more than 70% of internet traffic. They’re not stopping there.

Before the year 2014, there were many people using Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Today, there are still many people using services from those three tech giants (respectively, Google (GOOG), Facebook (FB), Amazon (AMZN)). Not much has changed, and quite literally the user interface and features on those sites has remained mostly untouched. However, the underlying dynamics of power on the web have drastically changed, and those three companies are at the center of a fundamental transformation of the web.

It looks like nothing changed since 2014, but GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic.

Internet activity itself hasn’t slowed down. It maintains a steady growth, both in the amount of users and amount of websites:

(Sources: https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey and http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/)

What has changed over the last 4 years is market share of traffic on the web. It looks like nothing has changed, but GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic. Mobile internet traffic is now the majority of traffic worldwide and, in Latin America alone, GOOG and FB services had 60% of mobile traffic in 2015, growing to 70% by the end of 2016. The remaining 30% of traffic is shared among all other mobile apps and websites. Mobile devices are primarily used for accessing GOOG and FB networks.

(Source: https://www.sandvine.com/resources/global-internet-phenomena/2016/north-america-and-latin-america.html)

The press, unlike before, depends on GOOG-FB to stay in business.

Another demonstration of GOOG and FB dominance can be seen among media websites. The most popular web properties that don’t belong to GOOG nor FB are usually from the press. For instance, in the USA there are 6 media sites in the top 10 websites; in Brazil there are 6 media sites in the top 10; in UK it is 5 out 10.

From where do media sites get their traffic? Prior to 2014, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was a common practice among web developers to improve their site for Google searches, since it accounted for approximately 35% of traffic, while more than 50% of traffic came from various other places on the Web. SEO was important, while Facebook presence was nice-to-have. Over the next 3 years, traffic from Facebook grew to be approximately 45%, surpassing the status that search traffic had. In 2017, the media depends on both Google and Facebook for page views, since it’s the majority of their traffic.

(Source: https://blog.parse.ly/post/2855/facebook-continues-to-beat-google-in-sending-traffic-to-top-publishers/)

The relationship between media sites and the two tech giants is difficult. In 2014, FB built Facebook Paper as an attempt to have a larger control over news consumption. Their tactic failed, but their strategy persisted through different means such as Facebook Instant Articles. The media, being dependent on social traffic and threatened by the social behemoth, reacted. They pulled out support for Instant Articles.

Meanwhile, GOOG notices how its search traffic hadn’t improved, while Facebook had picked up steam, so GOOG launches their Instant Articles alternative called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and proactively starts serving articles from GOOG servers instead of directing traffic to media sites. The press reacts similarly to how they did for FB: reported bold stories about the search behemoth’s thirst for control over news consumption.

GOOG and FB ceased competing directly, focusing on what they do best instead.

Data shows FB has dramatically improved its dominance on the web, while Google search hasn’t significantly changed. How exactly did FB achieve that, and what events were key to that development? Prior to 2014, both companies had a portfolio of multiple web services. GOOG hadn’t yet become Alphabet, so its focus was diffused. GOOG was trying to enter the social market, first with Google Wave, then Google Buzz, Orkut, and Google+. In total, GOOG has acquired 18 companies from the social media category, of which only 1 acquisition happened post-2014, while 5 of those happened in 2010 alone. FB was competing in the search market, through Bing, in partnership with Microsoft (MSFT).

During 2014, FB apparently reorganized itself to focus on social only. In February, it bought WhatsApp, for 11 times the price GOOG bought YouTube. In December, it canceled its Bing partnership with MSFT. User retention on Facebook.com grew steadily (see chart below). Through its four simple products, Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, FB had become the social superpower...

Similarly, GOOG in 2014 started reorganizing itself to focus on artificial intelligence only. In January 2014, GOOG bought DeepMind, and in September they shut down Orkut (one of their few social products which had momentary success in some countries) forever. The Alphabet Inc restructuring was announced in August 2015 but it likely took many months of meetings and bureaucracy. The restructuring was important to focus the web-oriented departments at GOOG towards a simple mission. GOOG sees no future in the simple search market, and announces to be migrating “From Search to Suggest” (in Eric Schmidt’s own words) and being an “AI first company” (in Sundar Pichai’s own words). GOOG is currently slightly behind FB in terms of how fast it is growing its dominance of the web, but due to their technical expertise, vast budget, influence and vision, in the longrun its AI assets will play a massive role on the internet. They know what they are doing.

These are no longer the same companies as 4 years ago. GOOG is no longer an internet company, it’s the knowledge internet company. FB is not an internet company, it’s the social internet company. They used to attempt to compete, and this competition kept the internet market diverse. Today, however, they seem mostly satisfied with their orthogonal dominance of parts of the web, and we are losing diversity of choices. Which leads us to another part of the internet: e-commerce and AMZN.

AMZN does not focus on making profit...

sn’t GOOG trying to guarantee the open web stays alive? Not necessarily. GOOG’s goal is to gather as much rich data as possible, and build AI. Their mission is to have an AI provide timely and personalized information to us, not specifically to have websites provide information. Any GOOG concerted efforts are aligned to the AI mission.

Mobile usage is on the rise – having already crossed desktop as the primary channel for internet usage – and native mobile apps are so far the best way of providing good user experience on mobile. GOOG collects little or no data from native mobile apps, to some extent on Android, but specially on iOS. PWAs happen to live in the neutral and open web, and are better suited for data collection while providing great user experience on mobile...

GOOG, MSFT, FB, and AMZN are mimicking (Apple) AAPL’s strategy of building brand loyalty around high-end devices. Through a process I call “Appleification”, they are (1) setting up walled gardens, (2) becoming hardware companies, and (3) marketing the design while designing for the market. It is a threat to AAPL itself, because they are behind the other giants when it comes to big data collection and its uses. While AAPL’s early and bold introduction of an App Store shook the web as the dominant software distribution platform, it wasn’t enough to replace it. The next wave of walled gardens might look different: less noticeable, but nonetheless disruptive to the web.

There is a tendency at GOOG-FB-AMZN to bypass the web, which is motivated by user experience and efficient communication, not by an agenda to avoid browsers. In the knowledge internet and the commerce internet, being efficient to provide what users want is the goal. In the social internet, the goal is to provide an efficient channel for communication between people. This explains FB’s 10-year strategy with Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) as the next medium for social interactions through the internet. This strategy would also bypass the Web, proving how more natural social AR would be than social real-time texting in browsers. Already today, most people on the internet communicate with other people via a mobile app, not via a browser.

The common pattern among these three internet giants is to grow beyond browsers, creating new virtual contexts where data is created and shared. The web may die like most other technologies do: simply by becoming less attractive than newer technologies. And like most obsolete technologies, they don’t suddenly disappear, neither do they disappear completely. You can still buy a Walkman and listen to a tape with it, but the technology has nevertheless lost its collective relevance. The web’s death will come as a gradual decay of its necessity, not as a dramatic loss...

Perhaps a future with great user experience in AR, VR, hands-free commerce and knowledge sharing could evoke an optimistic perspective for what these tech giants are building. But 25 years of the Web has gotten us used to foundational freedoms that we take for granted. We forget how useful it has been to remain anonymous and control what we share, or how easy it was to start an internet startup with its own independent servers operating with the same rights GOOG servers have. On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or FB, you would have no alternative. You could even be restricted from creating a new account. As private businesses, GOOG, FB, and AMZN don’t need to guarantee you access to their networks. You do not have a legal right to an account in their servers, and as societies we aren’t demanding for these rights as vehemently as we could, to counter the strategies that tech giants are putting forward.

The web and the internet have represented freedom: efficient and unsupervised exchange of information between people of all nations. In the Trinet, we will have even more vivid exchange of information between people, but we will sacrifice freedom. Many of us will wake up to the tragedy of this tradeoff only once it is reality.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/11/web-began-dying-2014-heres.html