Before Things Change

It was an exciting summer of 2024 with highs and lows swinging moods from 1200 km non-stop drive from Amsterdam to Gdansk with charging anxiety and back to 10-day lazy home-alone with 12 hours sleeps :)

But the most joyful part was out trip to Turkey with my youngest daughter during the hazelnut harvest season. Turkey and especially Eastern Black Sea coast presents almost 70% of global hazelnut supply. Harvesting (beginning of August) is the hottest and the most humid period in the region and in addition to steep slopes where nut trees are planted, make the handling very difficult. Summer holidays memories from my childhood contains many 7-10 days harvesting campaigns from sunrise to sunset and from collecting, gathering, carrying, separating nuts from the husk and drying without being caught by unpredictable rains of the region.

Now things are different in many ways; aging population and uninterested new generation, unavailability of seasonal workers, lower purchase price announced by the government are making the hazel agriculture unexciting and the landowners like my family have been considering to replace hazelnut gardens with olive orchards where micro-climate allows.

Hazel harvesting was not the only thing wanted to show before it fades away to my daughter and 2 days we spent in the most beautiful city in the world, Istanbul before it becomes unrecognizable due to concretization takeover the green, mass migration turns the city's unique culture to a Middle Eastern or even African tones. Istanbul has been experiencing its the Great Acceleration, centuries-long maintained texture has been deteriorated in last 20 years irreversibly especially by construction industry with all fronts of unsustainable practices.

At least she knows now; Bosporus, Hagia Sophia, Galata, Iskender Kebap, Ciya and will build up on those soon :)

Book Bits

10 Mental models that will make you a better reader from Alex Wiec 📚

Reading List of September 2024

📚 Learn To Love Reading: 365 Powerful Quotes That Will Inspire You To Read More Books [2021] by Alex Wiec 📚 As you progress from one quote to another, you will develop a deeper appreciation for the joy and love associated with the habit of/ability of reading books, as well as the blessing and magic of their existence. I recommend that you do not read this book in one sitting; instead, take your time and savor it slowly.

📚 Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management [2019] by Caitlin Rosenthal l Most business historians consider slavery an archaic, retrograde labor system incapable of innovation, and so they ignore it when chronicling advances in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century management practices. Rosenthal, in contrast, argues that innovative slaveholders were exceptional businesspeople who have been excluded from standard business histories solely because of the nature of their business. Slaveholders’ proclivity for “seeing humans as inputs of production seems to have stimulated management innovation in ways that were difficult in free factories plagued with turnover”.

Her provocative findings will be of interest not only to business, economic, and agricultural historians, but also to anyone interested in the history of slavery and in the development of modern capitalism.

📚 The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans [2011] by Mark Lynas l relies heavily on the work of the "planetary boundaries" group, a collection of scientists who recently produced strict recommendations about levels of disturbance beyond which humanity should not push the planet. These propose specific limits on carbon dioxide emissions, farming land use, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, and ocean acidification. Stick to these and earthly life should remain tolerable, Lynas states.

Nor is there a need for an economic revolution to achieve these goals. Good old-fashioned capitalism is quite sufficient. As Lynas says: "A successful environmental movement must work with people's aspirations for prosperity and comfort, not try to suppress these impulses." This is a fair point, though Lynas is vague, to say the least, about how unadulterated capitalism – which has so far failed utterly to halt the planet's current desecration – can achieve this goal.

📚 How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain [2024] by Peter S. Goodman l Welcome to the story of the global supply chain. It was nearly invisible until March 2020, when Americans faced bare store shelves for the first time in modern history. The pandemic’s peak years contained a seemingly endless cycle of shortages. First it was toilet paper, then it was flour. Puzzles were in short supply as were office chairs. People were trying to build their new at-home lives and were often faced with “not in stock” messages and bare shelves.

Many of these shortages could have been prevented if companies had properly stocked inventories. And some were just lies. “A lot of these shortages were fake. They’re manipulated shortages. Because when things are short in supply, the price goes up. You don’t need a PhD in economics to understand that,” said Goodman, a longtime global economics reporter.

📚 China, Trust and Digital Supply Chains: Dynamics of a Zero Trust World [2022] by Adj. Professor Warwick Powell 鲍韶山 | China is moving forward solidly with economic digitalisation. We watch as the digital RMB continues to expand its application use cases. We see the developments in hardware as well as in software like AI. Underpinning this ecosystem is a data integrity architecture anchored by blockchains and associated distributed ledger technologies.

“China, Trust and Digital Supply Chains: Dynamics of a Zero Trust World” is about the technological foundations that will underpin the emerging multipolar world and political economy. It’s a book that cuts across geopolitical economy + technology, exploring the evolving contours of global trade, value flow and governance. It explores the adoption of blockchains by Chinese government and enterprises, and how this infrastructure will underpin the dynamics of global trade and financial flows in the 21st century.