Good morning  from Canada

Good morning Peter and others!

Big Brother is watching. Her name is Alexa.

The rise of the “smart assistant” speaker has been swift, with Alexa, the voice issuing from the Amazon Echo, leading the charge. A few years ago, the idea of placing an always-on Internet-connected microphone in every room of your house would have seemed like a ludicrous surrendering of our privacy, but millions of us have now invited Amazon, Google and others into our homes, our kitchens, our bedrooms. It’s been a truly amazing feat of marketing, but some observers find the whole thing kind of ominous:

“When I talk publicly about the right to be forgotten, all I get are blank stares,” says Donovan Molloy, the information and privacy officer for Newfoundland and Labrador. “When I ask an audience if they have read the instructions on how to set the privacy settings on their internet-connected devices; when I tell them that the toy they just bought for their child is watching and talking to their children, they have no idea what I’m talking about. 1984 is here and it’s voluntary—it’s not being imposed on us. It’s here and we signed up for it!”

Link: Maclean’s

Willpower is overrated

The conventional wisdom is that people with greater willpower—the ones who can, say, refrain from eating a delicious fresh-baked cookie at the request of a psychologist in a lab—are higher achievers and happier in the long run. But recent experiments are undermining some of our assumptions about the nature of willpower. It looks more and more like people who report having more willpower might just be better at planning ahead. And that’s a much easier skill to work on:

In 2015, psychologists Brian Galla and Angela Duckworth published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, finding across six studies and more than 2,000 participants that people who are good at self-control also tend to have good habits — like exercising regularly, eating healthy, sleeping well, and studying. “People who are good at self-control … seem to be structuring their lives in a way to avoid having to make a self-control decision in the first place,” Galla tells me. And structuring your life is a skill. People who do the same activity, like running or meditating, at the same time each day have an easier time accomplishing their goals, he says — not because of their willpower, but because the routine makes it easier.

Link: Vox

Think beyond this bitcoin bubble. Waaay beyond.

Several cryptocurrencies plunged in value yesterday: Bitcoin was down around 15% over the course of the day; Litecoin was down 18%; and Ethereum dropped 20%. That has some observers saying the crypto party’s over, but true believers are thinking longer term, beyond the current bubble, to something greater. After all, the dotcom crash of 2000 was a calamity at the time, but in hindsight it cleared the way for the companies that became today’s tech giants. Perhaps cryptocurrencies need to experience a similar trial by fire so the ideas they make possible can mature:

For our purposes, forget everything else about the Bitcoin frenzy, and just keep these two things in mind: What [bitcoin originator, the anonymous Satoshi] Nakamoto ushered into the world was a way of agreeing on the contents of a database without anyone being “in charge” of the database, and a way of compensating people for helping make that database more valuable, without those people being on an official payroll or owning shares in a corporate entity. Together, those two ideas solved the distributed-database problem and the funding problem. Suddenly there was a way of supporting open protocols that wasn’t available during the infancy of Facebook and Twitter.

Link: The New York Times

The auto industry gets real

The car companies were front and centre at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier in January, showing off slick concept cars and touting concepts like autonomy, all-electric vehicles and “mobility as a service.” But now the rubber really hits the road with the North American International Auto Show, which started Sunday. The story the automakers are telling in Detroit is a little more down-to-Earth than the one they were peddling in Vegas:

While it’s great to think big, the market takes a long time to adapt to manufacturers’ moonshots. Electric vehicles — theoretically, an easy concept to get consumers on board with — comprise only about 1% of the U.S. market, per FleetCarma. That’s largely a result of the perceived inconvenience surrounding battery technology, and fully autonomous vehicles will be a much tougher nut to crack in terms of both the adoption of the underlying tech and government regulation.

Link: Axios

Is this the market’s manic phase?

Markets started the year strong and continue to ride high—maybe a a little too high. Like the famous fable of Joseph Kennedy receiving a stock tip from his shoeshine boy and promptly liquidating his holdings just before the Great Depression, the list of worrisome signs and portents of investor mania seems to grow by the day:

There is the time that Tony Robbins and Pitbull headlined a real estate conference in Toronto, the time that a painting went for $450 million, the time that a wristwatch went for $17 million, the time that SoftBank invested $300 million in a dog-walking app, the time that bonds of a corporate borrower rated BBB traded at a negative yield in Europe, the craft beer bubble, the Instagram “influencer” bubble, and Tiffany’s “Everyday Objects” campaign, with a ball of yarn selling for $9,000. Some people don’t like to trade by anecdote, and you could certainly dismiss one or two of these anecdotes in isolation, but taken together, there is a great big pile of evidence that financial markets have reached the speculative mania phase. It is a frenzy.

Link: Bloomberg

• Market manipulation is rampant in bitcoin: new research says a single user, controlling a series of bots, orchestrated the rise in BTC’s price from US$150 to US$1,000. (ScienceDirect)
• April 22, 2018: the date that Cape Town, South Africa (pop. ~430,000) will run out of water, according to the latest estimates. Once drought-stricken reservoirs run dry, residents will have to collect 25-litre daily rations from 200 checkpoints. The first major city in modern history to run dry, if it comes to pass. (Time)
• Australia has filed a formal complaint against Canada with the World Trade Organization over the rules governing wine sales. Australian wine producers say provincial retail policies promoting Canadian growers amount to an unfair trade barrier. It’s the first time Australia and Canada have faced off at the WTO. (Reuters)
• Bayer Crop Science has developed a new variety of “tearless onion” that will go on sale for the first time in March. The “Sunion” isn’t genetically modified; it’s the product of decades of old-fashioned selective breeding. (Independent)
• Carving out a new niche in an era of advancing graphene development

Thanks for reading!