pass the Almas for another episode of McMafia(c)

I’ve been watching that new McMafia series. The one with the frequent jump-cuts around the world of high-end corruption. Trafficking, drugs, laundering, floating casinos the list goes on. All overlaid with bursts of sudden violence.

I read Misha Glenny’s McMafia book some years ago. His original book deals with the same themes, but is quite different from the fictional story presented in the TV show.

For me, the book put many encounters into place, like finding the picture for a jigsaw puzzle. I’d travelled around and run into the edges of things explained in the book.

An example was in the streets of Bari and Naples, where young kids would run up clutching 10 packs of cigarettes. 200 cigarettes to sell for a few dollars. There were too many packs and too many brands for it to be a random truck heist. No, I realised this was organised, but had no real sense of the scale. Glenny’s book describes this, complete with the (alleged) involvement of the manufacturers, the manoeuvring of the untaxed bonded goods, the speedboat dash from Montenegro to Bari. And then suddenly the goods become presentable as good value. And everyone in the chain has made some money.

A similar scheme when I worked around Moscow. There it was gasoline being sold in plastic containers from paste tables. Not just one or two, but again a whole industry. This relied upon smuggled fuel, and routes had been set up from the Balkan states to get the fuel across the border in organised shipments. It could be an ostensible NATO convoy of 100 tankers, topped and tailed with a NATO vehicle. It could be a convoy of smaller adapted cars, each of which could take up to 500 gallons of fuel.

These schemes and the ones that shipped caviar at 10,000x margins were part of a much bigger web of corruption. Get the small money and turn it into big money. A complex web of transactions but always with a net flow of cash upwards.

Add in the drug cartel inputs and it is easy to see how the streets of Moscow were filled with armoured Mercedes, top flight Porsche and convoys of dark-tinted Hummers.

The Glenny book covers a lot more of the way the businesses worked and describes some of the major centres, such as the Balkans. I also spent time in the old Yugoslavia, on the cusp of its split. Despite the League of Communist rule, a walk around Belgrade showed a divided city. Both the well-heeled and poor farmers jostled together, ahead of the extremes of Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia. Glenny’s book (I suspect more overtly than the TV show) talks about some Serbians and their use of violence as enforcers for the various crime syndicates.

Another suspicious area was Bulgaria. I’d visited via the comedy of Plovdiv International, where the baggage handling was literally a chain of men who threw the luggage between one another to get it into the terminal. Stark, cyrillic communist posters were the main form of advertising, yet the street rates for currency exchange were ten times the official ones. As westerners we could live very well for pennies. Contrast it now with the shiny modern terminal at Sofia, although still raise an eyebrow towards the many bonded warehouses positioned around the borders.

And so it continues today, with the upper money washed and filtered via London's Global Laundromat into empty apartments and mansions (money at rest) with the bulk of it tucked away into neat British Virgin Island brass plate shells with the small change providing funding to support hard-done-by politicians.

Revealing to me is the robustness of the systems used. Their resilience to changes of government or regime, and the way they can operate so flagrantly in the public eye. The TV show illustrates a part, but it is also salutary to think that most of the ultra-rich extras in the well-heeled crowd scenes have equivalencies of the main story being told.

We can only wait for the stories of money laundering around –ahem- 5th Avenue to finally break.

meitu worlds collide with added HoneyCC, meipai and a few quiet hacks

We had our little get-together at the end of 2017 and even took some photos. We were rank amateurs compared with the full-on selfie generation, we even had someone extra holding the phone to take some of the pictures.

At least it was on an iPhone X, so we could claim to be up-to-date. Or were we? We Brits don't get the same exposure to technology as some parts of the world. Back before the iPhone 6 came out, I ordered a GooPhone from China, for about $50. It was a functional iPhone 6 body clone, running on Android re-skinned to look like iOS. And it was before Apple released the real thing.

Of course, I only did it for entertainment, although the now several years old phone does still work and even has a PAYG simm inside and a proper phone number. The headphones were rubbish, but the iPhone compatible charger and cables would have cost about as much as the phone if bought in an Apple store.

Anyway, back to our little 'do' with our Chinese contingent present. We briefly talked about the latest Chinese gadgetry, which nowadays decides into 'proper' and 'knock-off'. In the proper category are those Meitu phones, which seem to be a big deal in Shanghai. They are the ones designed to take selfies and have a whole raft of facilities to make the subject of the photo look good. The picture below shows one of the latest sought-after phone models, clearly aimed at a specific market.


The selfie stick is an integral part of the design and can be wielded like a kind of sword for maximum effect.

Protocol says that a combined selfie (ie a +1) should only be released to the world after extensive editing to make everything look wonderful. It's become a mini industry in its own right and the latest Chinese phones include both super duper lenses and also photo editing software to help the whole process. A leading proponent of the cause is HoneyCC, who is as well-known in China as, say, Lady Gaga. That's her at the top of this post, at the Mercedes Showroom in Shanghai for the 2017 Victoria's Secrets show. Note the glamour glow, catchlights, bokeh and skin-toning.

But here we are with the aspirational part of the Chinese economy. The fuerdai trust funders. Rural China might pull in $1.2K over year. A factory worker in a big city could earn around $3k-4k and an office worker around $5k. Then there's the enormous gap to the well-heeled who can buy the German cars, French perfumes and the fancy phones.

Some of it might be the 'wild east'. There's all kind of nefarious hacks in the coding of this photo software. Blend the GPS co-ordinates, take a riffle through the user browser history, some recent shopping locations, maybe? It could all be fair game, like those hidden browser hacks that probe stored password libraries to see which things you might use or own.

It reminds me. I'll need to stay off the candy for 2018.

Happy New Year

Let's have a good 'un.

salt caked, but no smoke stack

I've had to slow the pace on the blog over the last couple of weeks.

I'm still on the road at the moment and my car looks like an asteroid racer after earth re-entry. Those trace lines of salt and rain all over it.

Now if only they perfected Astral Gates for high speed long distance travel. I seem to remember that 2021 is the first key date although unfortunately the gate adjacent to earth was involved in the Gate Accident.

Back to reality and it's looking like the whole discovery process has slowed right down with people distracted by other things.

By now we should have discovered Spatial Alternation Dynamics, based on the idea that our universe phases in and out of existence many times every second, blinking on and off like a strobe light. That Downsizing movie about miniaturisation of people is fun because it plays with America, but misses the phase difference space.

So while our universe is in its "off," state it is temporarily replaced by a more compact universe called Phase Difference Space, apparently 1/240th the size of our universe. That's smaller than (1/220) Z scale. Travellers timing entry and exit just right, can go 240 times faster within Phase Difference Space, creating the illusion of high-speed travel in our universe.

Earth to Mars in less than a day instead of six months? Meanwhile, I'll be driving back home tomorrow in my salt caked craft, after tonight's little shindig.

no I don't have a list of things to watch, but jessica jones is on it anyway

For now I'll bookmark Jessica Jones 2 in March.

Season's Greetings

twiglets no longer

We broke into the twiglets, but discovered several differences.

The obvious one is that they are shorter. Then there's the colour, which is more yellow and less brown. The taste has been dialled down. Less Marmite and more burnt. And they are not sticky like the originals either. I expect my hands to be slightly brown, sandy coloured after a handful of twiglets.

office party protocol: operational

Many offices are already running under Xmas operating protocol. The staggered time off to go shopping, The staggered evening drinks. The team lunch party which lasts all afternoon. The less-awesome-than-they-used-to-be big parties. Did we really used to hire Dodgems, a bucking bronco and those slammer slides? Yep we did. And we bussed everyone to the venue. Seems to have quietened down since those heady days.

Forget clean desk policies when there's analogue Xmas cards to be placed.

Like that rule of thumb about a desk being too busy when it was no longer visible. The 'see the desk' rule. The rule that can also be applied to cupboards (see the floor), fridges (see the back), rooms (again, it's see the floor).

I also have one for a laden car, which is 'see out of the back window'. It's a particularly useful adaptation at this time of year, although we nearly broke it on last week's trip. It turned out to be a mini-circuit of England, starting from Exeter, to Brighton, to London, to Newcastle, to Gloucester and so on.

That's just the first three hops depicted, and three more below.


My next stages are back across London and then to Swindon, before returning home, so we can keep things going almost up to Christmas Eve.

I can tell that many folk don't have similar rules. Witness the cars piled high with stuff in the festive jams.

Here's my annually blogged Chris Rea 'Driving Home for Christmas' filmed as we wend around Sloane Street, Pont Street, Beauchamp Place to around San Lorenzo, if you know your London.

It's #MixtapeXmas tonight @livetheatre

Yes, #ukmixtape tonight. The last chance to see the current delightful craziness, and only the merest handful of tickets left. And don't forget, there's also an afterparty @livetheatre.

cameras at the ready #showtime

Time for a bit of tech, setting up cameras and video for the show. It does mean my twitter channel has been a bit stuffed with show tweets for the last couple of days. Normal service will resume from Sunday.

pushing the problem forward

Two things about air travel. One is the amount of noise generated by a passenger when trying to get an upgrade doesn't achieve better results. Proper gold cards (or above) always win. Second, there's a technique called that ground staff use which is basically 'push the problem forward'. Thus, at the gate, without a magic card, there's not much that a noisy passenger can do. Get on the plane or go home.

I can't help wondering whether the 27 remaining members of the EU are using an airline playbook? They each have a golden card, but our number 28 British one is already kind of suspended.

As for Theresa and and occasionally David - they are both letting the problems roll forward, making statements without tangible plans or solutions for what they are accepting. It might be occasionally noisy, but they are still getting closer to the gate without an upgrade.

Oh yes and there's another negotiating tactic, called 'get the boss out of bed' (a variation on the union negotator's 'send in the fish and chips'). Sound familiar?

shops

I was caught out last Thursday evening, when I had to be somewhere at 7pm, but hadn't anticipated the thousands of additional people on the move.

I'd headed to a usually empty car park, but on this occasion it was so full that there were cars queuing and blocking both the way in, and as importantly, the way out.

Yes, everyone was out for late night shopping.

Today was much easier to get around, even despite the 2 millimetre of snow that briefly melted over Central London.