China and Australia’s Special Relationship. The Online Uncanny Valley.

“Those who know don’t tell and those who tell don’t know.” – Michael Lewis, Liar’s Poker

“Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.” – Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

A Trade War That Benefits Australia: The big winner of the budding US-China trade war might just be Australia. China is Australia’s largest trading partner. President Trump pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which Australia is still part of. And it has a series of bilateral deals with regional neighbors, such as the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement. Australia produces many of the things the US exports to Beijing that are now on China’s list of 128 US goods that will have tariffs of 15% to 25% slapped on them in retaliation for Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on Chinese aluminum and steel.

Take wine, for example. Last year China imported about $80 million worth of US wine, an amount dwarfed by France, Australia, and Chile, which also has a free trade agreement with Beijing. Chinese customs duties for US wines are currently 14%. The new tariff would increase them to 29%. Compare that to customs duties of 0% on wines from Australia and Chile. Robert Koch, CEO of the Wine Institute, warned: “This new increased tariff will have a chilling effect on US wine exports to one of the world’s most important markets.” And the president of the California Citrus Mutual trade group worries what the new tariffs will do to US exports of fruits and nuts as the value of Australia’s tree nut exports is already growing exponentially.

China Leverages Technology to Conduct Surveillance: When Xie Yinnan, vice-president of Megvii, China’s second largest artificial intelligence company, is asked whether he questions how his product will be used by police, he just says: “We just provide the government the technology, and they do their job with it.” The technology developed by both Megvii and SenseTime, China’s largest AI company, is being used in the “Smart City” program, a plan described by the Chinese government as using facial recognition and other personal data to “help cities run more efficiently.”Xie stated: “If a government is using it to control locals, we’d think twice about doing business with them. Our principle is to empower humans, not to control them.” Sounds innocent enough, right?

The companies also sell to public security bureaus throughout China as part of its “Smart Eyes” program, a plan to integrate existing security cameras into one nationwide surveillance and data-sharing program. Surveillance makes up a third of SenseTime’s business, whose clients include private security firms, financial services companies, banks, mobile operators, and the smartphone industry. Xie insists the government is using Megvii’s technology to keep cities safe, stopping street crime and protecting residents from pickpockets and other criminals. But political activist Ji Feng says the government is also “using this technology to catch people who are considered threats to social stability.” Ji said police routinely escort him out of Beijing on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre or on World Human Rights Day. And after a fellow activist visited Ji’s house recently, the police used facial recognition cameras to identify the visitor and informed his landlord, who then threatened to kick him out of his apartment.

There’s also the hugely lucrative consumer angle for this technology, addressed by another of SenseTime’s products. It’s a marketing application that studies your face and always gives you a flattering “facial attractiveness” score. Why? So you’ll buy merchandise selected for you based on data gleaned from your face.

– The first person to be sentenced in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe is a 33-year-old lawyer based in London who was charged with lying to investigators about his emails and phone calls with a former Trump campaign aide. Alex van der Zwaan received 30 days in jail, a $20,000 fine, and two months supervised release. (NBC News)

– A UN fundraising conference in Geneva to aid Yemen’s war victims has raised nearly $1 billion from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, one day after the Saudi-led coalition conducted airstrikes that killed a number of Yemeni children. Asked if he saw a contradiction in the Saudi stance toward Yemen, the UN general secretary said “a country’s humanitarian commitments and military actions should be kept separate.” (The Guardian)

– Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr holds no official position in government or politics, but he has hundreds of thousands of religious followers. Now, preparing for elections in May, he is forming a new alliance with Communists and secularists. (NPR)

– There are an estimated six to twelve million Catholics in China. The Vatican was reportedly planning to make concessions to Beijing in exchange for retaining some influence over bishops who are chosen in the future. But a Chinese senior official’s statement during a briefing on religious affairs in China threw ice water on that idea. (NYT)

– Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu succumbed to right-wing pressure and reneged on an agreement with the UN refugee agency to relocate some 37,000 African asylum seekers who entered Israel illegally by trekking across a desert border with Egypt. (Reuters)

– Yesterday at YouTube headquarters, three people were injured before the attacker, Nasim Aghdam, took her own life. ABC7 News in San Francisco reported that “Aghdam is a YouTube user who maintains ‘a website with an alleged manifesto that targets YouTube for censorship and demonetization of her video content,’ indicating the shooting could have been motivated by a decline in her viewership and loss of revenue.” (Slate)

Trump Wants a Militarized Mexican Border: President Trump launched a virulent tweet storm against immigration after viewing a Fox & Friends report on Sunday. He spent Easter weekend at Mar-a-Lago dining with family, watching TV, and commiserating with conservative supporters like Fox host Sean Hannity and policy adviser Stephen Miller, a chief architect of anti-immigration policies. At the White House on Tuesday, Trump continued his diatribe against illegal immigration and what he called “open borders, drugs, and crime” during a meeting with leaders of Baltic countries. Trump vowed to deploy the US military to guard the southern borderwith Mexico to prevent “caravans” of migrants from invading America and warnedMexico to halt the passage of immigrants or risk US abandonment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). “We cannot have people flowing into our country illegally, disappearing, and by the way never showing up for court,” he said.

Trump was apparently referring to “Stations of the Cross” caravans that have been held in southern Mexico for at least the last five years. They began as short processions of migrants, some dressed in biblical garb and carrying crosses, and as an Easter season protest; they typically do not proceed much further north than the Gulf coast state of Veracruz. This year’s procession involved about 1,100 people, mostly from Honduras, who have been marching along roadsides and train tracks in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The march was scheduled to end this month with a conference on immigration in the central Mexican state of Puebla. The Mexican government said it had stopped the caravan Monday night.

– Earlier this year, we mentioned an Oxfam report that revealed that “approximately 82 percent of the money generated last year went to the richest 1 percent of the global population.” Inequality also exists within countries. The following countries are the most unequal: South Africa, Namibia, Zambia, Brazil, Colombia, and Panama. (CNBC & NPR)

– Speaking of global rankings, two countries that handle student debt in the most efficacious manner are Australia and Sweden. (NYT)

– “People who suffer a sharp drop in wealth experience a 50 percent increased risk of dying in the next two decades.” (NPR)

– In real life there’s the uncanny valley that separates Blade Runner robots from humans. But online, this uncanny valley doesn’t seem to exist. Instagram has real accounts with fake, made up influencers. “Gorgeous, popular, sought-after by brands…but these models on Instagram aren’t real. They’re digitally created. And to a lot of people, that doesn’t matter at all.” (BBC)

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