Massive Luxury Market Contraction

Industry insiders across a broad range of so-called 'luxury sector' products are reporting that there have been deep cut-backs in production numbers implemented by the top-end brands.

Rolex, for example, has cut its total production almost in half, according to knowledgeable sources. And this mirrors the huge drop-off in exhibitors at this year's Basel World trade show for high-end watch makers.

I have been saying here for quite a while now that it has been my own personal impression that there was a sudden implosion in the high-end market co-incident with the commencement of the last US Presidential cycle - before the actual rise of Donald Trump even just as a leading contender. You could see that one by one all the high-end glossy magazines were being bought out or just quite obviously declining in the quality of their presentations and also in the standard of the journalism within the magazines themselves.

It isn't the Rolex that is the truly great product here,
it is the Swiss Super-Luminova lighting ceramic pigment

Now the thing I can't understand about what is going on is - what happens to the remaining numbers of high-end customers, do they get to have to live with absolute rubbish for content or product? I mean to say presumably they still have plenty of cash so how do they get serviced? Do they have to live down in the dumps along with everyone else because Hillary lost, do they? And how come this all started BEFORE she lost, anyway?

No. Frankly, I'm a little bit 'weirded out' by what has been going on.

You look at what happened to Volkswagen for one thing - they got into trouble over their supposed deceit concerning the company's claims about fuel efficiency of some of their engines, and so because of that, the whole company has gone to hell overnight, has it? I think not. 

Even if you accept the narrative that the fuel efficiency claims were wrong - and I don't, because the whole argument was made on the strength of actual driving conditions in America, versus factory test parameters, and everybody knows that American roads were in serious disrepair (my god, I was shocked when I drove there compared to what I had been experiencing in other countries) - there was never any basis for suggesting that other performance parameters were not outstanding. And yet, from my perception of things, you could tell that there was a hole punched in the morale of everybody associated with the brand...

A rare pic with a meaningful shot composition
in terms of the particular product as a modern urban culture item 

I have never seen a worse set of professional photo compositions for the outstanding 'world vehicle' package, namely the Golf R or GTI -  I mean what happened to the brains of the photographers?

Just look through any Google Image search for 'Golf GTI's' and you will find a consistently bad bunch of images and photographs; weak backgrounds, terrible angles, utterly careless, indeed mindlessly poor shot compositions with ugly backgrounds or just plain careless backgrounds.

This car is an outstanding product, an outstanding design package for what it is meant to do for the driver and the owner. And the company has completely let the product down in their marketing standards and brand selling.

There is room for all kinds of opinion when it comes to expensive high-end items, and I am not the sort of person who parrots slogans for a dumbed-down public: at 25,000 dollars, the cheapest entry level Golf is not the same price as a loaf of bread! And at 60,000 dollars the Oettinger Sportsystem aftermarket tuned version or the factory 'Wolfsburg Edition' Golf R is a very expensive piece of merchandise.

This is a truly beautiful car,
and this is the only pic I could find with decent shot composition

VW's are not poor people's cars.

The point about 'luxury market' stuff is that they represent two entirely different sets of values and propositions - there is the technical one, that is to say 'scientific excellence or advancement,' and 'performance parameters,' and there is the poetic, 'design intelligence, and aesthetics' proposition. And sometimes the two even meet in the same final product, but that is rare and not necessary at all for the application of the classification 'luxury product' or 'high-end' item. 

The world's best mechanical watch is not a Swiss watch, with a Swiss style of mechanism, it is a Japanese watch, with an entirely different type of mechanism - a spring-drive mechanism with a MEMS passive quartz component regulator which provides 50,000 beats per hour mechanics that vastly out-guns even the Rolex for smoothness of movements, and the world's most accurate mechanical time-keeping. At almost 8,000 dollars the thing is not by any means 'cheap.'

Seems utterly old-fashioned conventional - the GS 'snowflake.'

As we approach a new 'Roaring Twenties' era in financial markets (oh yes, no one else is predicting this but I am) I laugh at the way in which 'experts' are dealing with the high-end of things in the consumer markets...

Trust me, you think you are broke, perhaps, or less well off than you desire to be, with not a lot on the horizon to inflame your enthusiasm - but...

...you simply cannot imagine where the world is heading over the coming ten years or even more from here.

SECRETS for you who read here...

Now look here, I will post this article up, and then after awhile, I will probably simply HAVE to delete it. (Edited/New: have deleted only some parts...)

There are things which, were they widely known to the public and to the media at large, would be apt to be taken the entirely wrong way.

What I intend to do in the upcoming few blog-posts is show all of you who come here regularly and read (and of course, I can see from the site stats that there are a few of you...) how you can make some money basically from zilch to begin with, using social media and advanced sophisticated networks that function on-line. Obviously by now most or all of you know that you can make micro-parts of Bitcoin and other crypt-currencies very easily via the iFaucet sites and processes. And all you require to have is a digital wallet, which is something free to acquire. Still, even this approach may not suit you and, indeed, it was much more favorable when the price of Bitcoin was lower - before its first big climb.

Quickly, to summarize some important elements:

1. Twitter account is free

2. iFaucet registering is free

3. A digital wallet so that you can receive money is free

Now the thing that is something akin to a loaded gun, in the hands of the general media, is that groups like Kaspersky and various RUSSIAN technical consultants were around the place pretty openly about four or five years ago, and were attempting to spread the message of 'expanding populations' on-line and in social media. [A section deleted here] And so, this is the element that I cannot allow to remain 'uploaded' in this or any other post after awhile. [And has been deleted].

Now what 'design aesthetics' is this...?

This is how these things (rapidly expanding populations in a social media matrix) work - the Google search function critically operates off prioritized digital information delivery channels such as Twitter (or most other of the well-known ones - Snapchat, Tumblr, stuff like that). So that, if you have a 'label' or name for a certain commercial product, for instance, it will not necessarily easily show up on people's Google searchers - but if that same 'label' is repeated even just a few times on Twitter and so-called 're-tweeted,' then the 'label' and its web-address leaps to the top of the search results.

[Another bit deleted here].

Now here's a practical instance that draws on the commercial products of someone that I know reads here - he produces a small, highly-portable, flat-pack-able, battery wiring accessory, which makes it possible to have any DC current output from any kinds of available (and different) batteries, and, his product also enables wireless re-charging. This is an amazing thing for the military, for crisis response teams, for those infamous 'doomsday preppers,' for roadside breakdown kits - indeed for many many kinds of applications. And it's a very inexpensive product.

And no one much knows about it.

Well, every one of you here could get a Twitter account, tweet about it using one key phrase, and the next thing you know, he could have ten million people become aware of his product.

...For example.

And there could be a lot of other things you (or 'we') could do - especially if any of you guys come up with some suggestions. 

Absorb This First...

Here is a pic of the latest Zagato Design Center treatment of an already amazing automotive - the Aston Martin Vanquish:

The Zagato AM Vanquish

So, I suppose everyone generally accepts that Italy plays a very strong hand in the world of industrial design. Zagato is an obvious and visible 'name' (to car aficionados) of one of the countless ateliers and industrial design studios that exist in Italy.

American industrialists may argue that it is the US that produces the true leading edge of 'design' in the modern world because of the leading role it plays in high speed assembly technology/automated production lines, and in computing and industrial chemicals - all of these elements have led to widespread and commercial and practical utility that the US provides for markets across the globe. And you cannot argue with that proposition when it comes to ranking which country contributes most financially, to industrial creativity and design... Because of the post-WWII 'Marshall Plan,' it is really American know-how and management that produced the economic miracles of Japan and Germany. 

However another way to look at things is to consider the aesthetic aspect of design - and when you go down this route, you inevitably end up in Italy.

Aesthetics is a study of the mind which concerns how our brains interpret things as being ugly, or beautiful. But 'aesthetics' in the most sophisticated modern sense, is also a language with a large and complex vocabulary - and which spans all the senses. The Italians have a lot of words which convey highly-nuanced meanings: 'spianato' for instance, is a word seen in classical music - EG 'Chopin's Andante Spianato.' It means 'smoothed.' In industrial design you can start with a solid shape that has - begins with - sharp edges, and then when you smooth those edges down you get a different final object, with a totally different visual and tactile sense about what it, the object, is or is meant to be compared with the underlying original basic model.

Because we live in a world today in which it has become 'normal' to have a design 'brutalism' expressed in ordinary usual communications, a virtually only semiotic language with no grammar, complex syntax, or subtlety, we would ordinarily never even realize when sophisticated people are employing a complete language in front of our eyes using some other sensory channel than that of words and hearing...

A photograph taken by Brutalism Architecture
photographer, Deane Madsen

A Slightly Silly Example

Okay well it might seem like a silly example...

Culture, at least I believe anyway, is tied to the economic tides. Because it is superficially the story these days, that everyone cares exclusively about science and facts and evidence (they don't; they are psychologically motivated through feelings and not through logic virtually at all), academia in particular fails to preserve cultural memory and is a deep black sink-hole for social and cultural knowledge memory.

There is no more outstanding an example to my idiosyncratic mind, than when it comes to the recipe for an 'American Sundae.' (There's the silly example bit!).

Fortnum and Mason's American Sundae,
not far off but still not the real thing

All the same, regardless of whether you think this example is silly or not, you will not find anywhere on-line any recipe or photograph for and of a genuine original 'American Sundae.' You will find countless (literally countless) things that look like an American Sundae, but you will not find one single actual American Sundae...  

Now who do we blame for this exemplary evil omission? Oxford University? Cambridge, where Stefan Halper lectures? Harvard? Yale? Princeton? ...Where?

The Sundae is a story tied to technology (the invention and industrial manufacture and widespread commercialization of refrigeration systems), and to war and patriotism, as well as to big money.

What happens if we get 'the Roaring Twenties' again?

John Jacob Astor IV is intimately associated with the invention of certain iterations of the general basic ice cream parfait, which became famous among the very well-to-do and the upper crust. Now I have been into this aspect somewhere previously but this time, I shall simply skip to the actual recipe - or so much of it which will allow you to understand that I am fundamentally correct here: nobody today has much remaining social-cultural memory of what exactly the 'Old Glory Ice Cream Sundae' is.

Categorically, it was first invented by an African-American cook. He styled his invention after the American flag - aka 'Old Glory.'

As you know, the American flag consists of 'the stars and stripes.' And the colors are Old Glory red, white, and Old Glory blue. The study of flags is known as 'vexillology.' The American athlete Martin Sheridan, said: 'this flag dips to no earthly king.'

Some people have proposed that the stars are meant to have originally been gold because gold doesn't tarnish, although they may have been originally silver, which does tarnish and turn black or green.

I have no fixed or firm view of it other than that I know what the original 'Old Glory Ice Cream Sundae' is. It includes vanilla ice cream, and cherry syrup and strawberry ice cream, and something which appears like 'star dust.' And I will not go into the 'Old Glory blue' aspect because I'm keeping most of the recipe a secret; still.

Astor owned the Knickerbocker hotel at a time when the the US was flooded with money, and when the Knickerbocker ballroom actually had specific velvet roped-off areas marked 'champagne only.' And tickets into these areas went for hundreds of dollars when the price of a hotel room for the night was $2. 

Afterwards, of course, you had the Prohibition Era - 1920 to 1933. But until then, the Knickerbocker was probably one of the most alcoholic-indulged places on the planet ever outside of Bacchus's palace!

The 'Old Glory Ice Cream Sundae' contains copious amounts of alcohol. The colt cherries or maraschino cherries used are steeped in maraschino brandy, for one thing.   

Minister Anthony Loke Cancels MH370 Search

I am utterly no fan at all of Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad, but the very first thing his new Minister for Transport Anthony Loke did when assuming that office, was to announce the immediate cancelling of the search for the missing Malaysian Airliner, MH370.

The total amounts of money that have been spent by a range of countries is uncountable, in the sense that largely, the expenditure is not transparent. Firstly, the so-called Joint Agency Coordination Center was lead by an ostensibly 'Australian' identity, retired Air Chief Marshal Sir Angus Houston, with the Australian government agreeing to spend $200 million dollars on the search, the People's Republic of China spending $20 million, and the Malaysian government $120 million.

Anthony Loke aka Asian rapper 'Ton-loc.' Not.

On top of that there have been various payments to consultants, offshore (mainly US and European) contractors, and suppliers of in one case, $60 million directly from the Malaysian government to one particular US service provider and contractor. Additionally of course, there are insurance pay-outs to families. 

The funny thing about huge troughs of cash... ...especially those initiated by governments and politicians - they virtually never achieve their stated actual goals but do still manage to 'spread the love' around their little circles.

And I'll not say any more about that. Nod nod wink wink, know what I mean?

Sir Angus received the US National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal in 2011. 

...Let it never be forgotten, that who set up the Pakistan Army in the very first place directly after Partition - who else, than, yes, the Australian Army. They love us in Pakistan and we understand them and why not? You show me the money and I'll prove to you cows walk on the moon too.

A spicy hot-sour soup - Russian chilies in there, too,
as you can see. 

It's all about the money boys and girls. It's always about the money - sure Stefan Halper is a lunatic, but in the end, his masters in Whitehall are not that crazy and need the bribes from those run-away ex-Russian oligarchs that hate VV Putin and friends. What, do you seriously think the average UK politician is in it for the good of the people??? LOL