Despite the leaps of progress made by Chinese capitalism in recent years in cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (whatever the term means), next-generation 5G networks and optical fibres, there …
Ali Baba alone
Amazon’s well-known chinese competitor, alibaba, introduced its marketable cloud, primarily for use within china, in 2009. In the middle of last year it started offering cloud services for commercial use …
Falling onto the tracks doesn’t stop the train
Washington is trying to brake the global expansion of Chinese-origin 5G communications technology, codenamed Huawei. Right now Huawei is far ahead of every competitor worldwide: not just in research but …
Closed stores
Retail stores are closing as if they’ve been struck by an epidemic. In the USA, the world’s largest retail chain, Sears, announced it will shut more than 70 stores in …
Don’t even think about escaping!!!
If the (rather intimidating) machines in the photo above remind you of bulldozers, “you’re close.” They are robotic deep-sea excavators. These particular ones can dig down to depths of 1,000 …
Practical spirit
While the American “pioneer” Musk symbolically launches his Tesla into the space junkyards, the Chinese manufacturers appear much more grounded: beyond electric/autonomous cars (for which the Chinese market is secured…), …
A red car with two rockets
Every season of capitalist transition, of model change, has its own corresponding opportunists. Musk is one of them. Under different conditions—say, twentieth-century capitalism—he would have ended up in jail or …
Catapults
The technology used at CERN, that of electromagnetic acceleration, is also being developed elsewhere — and not for subatomic particles, but for weapons. The latest phase of military research concerns …
Suitcases… and kisses to mom!
It is a sign of the times. The last time the philosophy of “migration to other planets” went mainstream was when the Americans globally showcased their moon landing. The “Apollo” …
The scientific epic
Anyone who thinks (or will come to think in the future) that the innovative recipe for genetic editing called Crispr/Cas-9 (see Cyborg 8: genetic cut-and-sew) is a pure product of …
The culture of honesty:
This is the declared goal of the Chinese state in a plan that formalizes what capitalist enterprises are already doing, only placing it under official state control by unifying it …
Orphans – and golden
Pharmaceutical companies chase “rare diseases”: they make crazy profits from the drugs for these cases. When a disease affects up to 5 people per 100,000, it is considered rare. In …