Bloomberg

Investigators never figured out precisely why the pilot abruptly sent the Colgan Air turboprop into a fatal dive 10 years ago as it neared Buffalo, N.Y.

But they did learn enough from the Feb. 12, 2009, crash, which killed 50 people, to make it one of the most important milestones in the history of aviation safety, leading to changes in everything from pilot training to managing fatigue.

The reforms have contributed to an unprecedented decade of safety: There hasn’t been another accident with multiple fatalities on a U.S. passenger carrier anywhere since the Colgan disaster. In fact—outside of crashes of foreign carriers or cargo planes—there has been only one passenger death.

“Colgan Air was truly a watershed event,” said Robert Sumwalt, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board who served as a board member when the accident occurred. “The safety record bears out the impact that this crash, that this tragedy, had in ultimately improving safety.”

Coaxed and prodded by an unusually well-organized group of family members representing the victims, Congress passed a law in 2010 enshrining several of the safety board’s recommendations from the accident into law.

The action broke a decades-old logjam that had stalled new regulations on pilot fatigue as airlines and unions sparred over proposed rules. Under orders from Congress, the government completely revamped how airlines schedule pilots. It also helped prompt dramatic improvements in how pilots are trained to handle flights that go out of control, which is by far the biggest killer in commercial aviation.

Other actions increased the use of flight data to probe for hidden risks, improved vetting of pilots before they were hired, and required major airlines to disclose to passengers when they were flying on a separate regional carrier.

Continental Connection Flight 3407 from Newark, N.J., to Buffalo—a turboprop operated by the now-defunct regional carrier Colgan Air—had taken off late. As it approached its destination shortly after 10 p.m., other pilots were reporting icing conditions as light snow fell.

About six miles from the airport, the plane shot up, quickly lost speed as it climbed, and then plummeted into a neighborhood in Clarence Center. All 49 people aboard and a man on the ground died as fire engulfed a house.

At first, attention focused on the potential that ice had disrupted lift on the wings. But flight data soon revealed the real reason for the abrupt maneuvers: Captain Marvin Renslow, reacting to a cockpit warning, had commanded it, according to NTSB records.

The warning occurred because the plane had slowed to below the recommended speed, but it was not yet in danger. Instead of adding power or lowering the nose—techniques every pilot learns from the time they begin flight training to handle such a situation—Renslow did the inexplicable, violently yanking the nose skyward, according to the NTSB.

Investigators spent months without success trying to figure out why he had reacted that way. But they did find clues about the accident and aviation safety in general.

Both Renslow and co-pilot Rebecca Shaw hadn’t slept much the night before. Renslow had apparently slept in the airline’s crew room in Newark, but was up at least part of the night. He had logged in to an airline computer system at 3:10 a.m. Shaw had taken red-eye flights from the West Coast the night before and was recorded in the cockpit saying she didn’t feel well as they prepared to depart.

Renslow’s flying skills also came into question. Records revealed that he had repeated difficulty passing the flight tests pilots undergo as they qualify for new planes or periodically demonstrate proficiency. In all, he had outright failures on six occasions, an unusually high number, according to the NTSB.

Family members of the victims began learning these details in May 2009 as the NTSB held a hearing on the crash. They were stunned, said Scott Maurer. His daughter Lorin, 30, was on board the flight.

“It was just an avalanche of bad news that clearly pointed out that this thing could have been prevented,” Maurer said in an interview as the group, known as Families of Continental Flight 3407, prepared for a series of memorial events being held this week in Buffalo.

There was no one thing that stood out. Instead, a litany of issues emerged, including how pilots commuted to the job, a failure to follow rules barring nonwork conversations in the cockpit, and inadequate training for emergencies, he said. Family members fanned out to the halls of Congress and federal agencies, relentlessly pushing for change.

Margaret Gilligan had just taken over the Federal Aviation Administration’s safety oversight branch a few weeks before the crash. The public’s view of aviation accidents was changing, spurring more outrage, and the Colgan crash hastened the shift, Gilligan said.

“It came at a pivotal time” in which the public became “much less accepting of risk in aviation than it had been,” she said. “It took on a very different perspective than other accidents had up until that time.”

The actions that followed on pilot rest rules are a good example, she said. Even though the NTSB ultimately decided there wasn’t enough evidence to say pilot fatigue had contributed to the accident, the investigation exposed widespread practices allowing flight crews to operate with limited sleep. Congress ordered the FAA to rewrite its regulations on pilot scheduling.

“It gave us the chance on all sides to really come together to do something we knew needed to be done,” Gilligan said.

There have been deaths since the Colgan Air crash, but there haven’t been any accidents involving multiple fatalities on a U.S. passenger carrier.

Two United Parcel Service Inc. pilots died on Aug. 14, 2013, when their plane struck a hill short of the runway in Birmingham, Ala. There was also a fatal accident in 2013 on U.S. soil involving Asiana Airlines that killed three. Asiana, as a foreign carrier, wasn’t subject to many of the post-Colgan reforms.

Other recent events haven’t injured anyone but could easily have become catastrophic. An Air Canada plane passed within feet of several planes on the ground in San Francisco on July 7, 2017, after pilots mistakenly tried to land on a taxiway instead of the runway.

By contrast, there were 474 deaths on passenger carriers in the decade prior to the Colgan crash. That doesn’t include the 265 people killed on planes in the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which are classified as criminal acts rather than accidents.

Elsewhere in the world the accident rate also has improved steadily but it still lags in nations that don’t adhere to standards as rigorous as the U.S., according to data from the Aviation Safety Network. It uses a broader definition of commercial aviation that includes charter operators and cargo carriers.

There were 556 deaths in 15 fatal accidents last year in all nations, which is well below what was typical 10 years ago, according to the group.That includes 189 people lost in the Oct. 29 crash of a Lion Air jet off the coast of Indonesia.

Sumwalt and Maurer said more needs to be done to finish the changes ordered by Congress in the wake of the Colgan disaster. The FAA still hasn’t finished a database mandated by the law that would contain records of pilot performance so airlines can easily check on job candidates, for example.

The database has been delayed by software problems, the agency said in a statement. “In the 10 years since the accident—and with the help of the Colgan families—we have made significant progress across the industry in reducing pilot fatigue, improving pilot training, and raising crew qualifications to reduce or eliminate the types of errors that caused the accident,” the agency said.

By any measure, the safety record since the crash is unprecedented. Out of more than 90 million flight departures on U.S. airlines carrying billions of passengers since then, there has been just the single death: A woman died on April 17 on a Southwest Airlines Co. flight near Philadelphia when an engine failed, sending debris into a window next to where she was sitting.

“Here we are 10 years after this crash, and thankfully there hasn’t been another crash,” Maurer said. “In some way, our family group does feel like we’ve helped make that happen. But credit has to go to everybody. Airlines have stepped up. The FAA has stepped up. All the stakeholders who participated can share in the credit.”

Bloomberg

Alphabet Inc., which is almost entirely Google, had 98,771 employees as of December. That news, contained in the annual 10-K report the company released last week, got me thinking. Google, you may remember, passed the entire U.S. newspaper industry in advertising revenue in 2010. The numbers are now not even remotely close.

This is not a perfect comparison: Google’s ad revenues are global, while the U.S. newspaper industry’s are not. Still, it’s directionally correct, and pretty telling. So I wondered whether Google/Alphabet was about to do the same on the employment front. 1 Formal answer: They’re getting there.

With 139,900 payroll employees as of December, U.S. newspapers are still ahead of Alphabet. The trend is clearly not their friend, though, and there’s a twist to the story. Last July, Bloomberg’s Mark Bergen and Josh Eidelson reported that Alphabet employs about as many “red-badged contract workers” as white-badged full-benefits staff.

Earlier this year, those contractors outnumbered direct employees for the first time in the company’s twenty-year history, according to a person who viewed the numbers on an internal company database.

If Alphabet’s contractors in fact outnumber its employees, then it may really have 200,000-plus people working for it, far more than the U.S. newspaper industry. Yes, newspapers have stringers and other contract workers who don’t show up in their payroll employment counts, either, and the Alphabet numbers are global while the newspaper numbers are not. It’s not that meaningful a comparison. But it’s still … unsettling.

In the second half of the 20th century, newspapers in the U.S. made money mainly by selling ads. They used some of that money to hire journalists, but they also had lots left over for the owners. In 1997, the average operating profit margin of American newspapers was 19.5 percent. Gannett Inc.’s was 26.6 percent. These big margins came under lots of criticism as newspapers began to struggle in the 2000s. I remember talking to Craig Newmark of Craigslist in those days and his message was that newspaper owners needed to stop whining so much about lost classified-ad revenue, stop laying off journalists, and get used to smaller profit margins. 2 They did get used to lower profits — Gannett’s operating margin for the four quarters ending in September was 6.1 percent — but, as is clear from the above chart, they didn’t stop laying off journalists.

Now, of course, it’s Google and Facebook Inc. that make scads of money selling ads and boast big operating margins: Alphabet/Google’s was 22.9 percent in 2018, Facebook’s 44.6 percent. They assemble audiences in a far more cost-effective and targeted way than newspapers ever did. In recent years, they have also gotten to be big employers (Facebook reported a headcount of 35,587 as of Dec. 31). What they don’t do, with occasional exceptions, is hire journalists.

At first glance, it looks like the overall job losses stopped in 2010. But that ungainly and fast-growing category of “Internet publishing and broadcasting and web search portals,” while it includes a lot of digital-only journalists, covers most employees at Alphabet and Facebook, too. 3 “All other information services,” which has also been growing, includes, well, me, alongside libraries, archives and some other things. The broadcasting sector, which has shrunk a little but held up much better than newspapers and magazines, has lots of its employees on the entertainment side. 4 (The motion picture and sound-recording industries employ almost twice as many people now as in 1990, but as they’re even more heavily entertainment-focused, they didn’t seem to really belong on the chart.)

A more direct if less reliable and timely measure here is the annual count of “reporters and correspondents” from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual Occupational Employment Statistics. There were an estimated 38,790 in the U.S. in May 2017, down from 53,060 in 2006. The same basic story, in other words — with the added twist that by now there are probably fewer reporters and correspondents than Facebook employees.

Lots of other jobs have been wiped out by technological change over the centuries, so it can seem a bit self-involved when a journalist dwells on lost journalism jobs. OK, it is self-involved. But journalists do play a useful societal role, one that has yet to be effectively taken over by artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing or other innovations. And while a mix of new business models, previously neglected older business models (subscriptions, mainly) and nonprofit funding sources will probably be enough to keep national journalism going on a tolerably effective scale, at the local level, things really don’t look encouraging.

Scholars are starting to quantify the effects of this loss of local journalists. A study published in December by two communications professors and a political scientist concluded that local newspaper closures made voters more likely to vote a straight political ticket, thus increasing partisan polarization. “When they lose local newspapers, we have found, readers turn to their political partisanship to inform their political choices,” the authors concluded. Earlier last year, a study by three finance professors found that municipal borrowing costs go up 0.05 to 0.11 of a percentage point after a local newspaper closes, with the authors arguing that “loss of government monitoring” accounted for the rise. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but as Bloomberg’s Danielle Moran explained, “For a $65 million debt issue, that amounts to about $71,500 annually — enough to cover a teacher’s salary — or about $2 million over the life of a 30-year bond.”

Google does lots of useful things, and it now employs lots and lots of people. But they generally don’t show up at city council meetings and ask difficult questions.

I include the name Alphabet when I talk about employment but not when I discuss ad revenue because Alphabet has employees outside of Google, but it doesn't contribute to ad revenue.

Newmark has since changed his tune somewhat, donating $20 million last year to what is now called the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

The BLS aims to measure payroll employment by establishment, not company, so a free-standing Facebook or Google data center or Google Fiber operation might show up under another industry category. Also, no, I’m not sure where the BLS found 29,000 internet publishing and broadcasting and web search portal employees in 1990. AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy can’t together have had that many employees then, can they? The current internet publishing and broadcasting and web search portals category descended from bits and pieces of a bunch of earlier industry categories that you can trace here, but doing so still doesn't really answer the question.

Also, in this accounting, broadcasting includes cable TV.

Bloomberg

A mining company claiming interests in copper and gold reserves estimated at $58 billion on the Pacific island of Bougainville said its rights are under threat by efforts to revive the resource sector in the run up to a independence referendum.

At the heart of the dispute is the Panguna mine, which was operated by Sydney-listed Bougainville Copper Ltd. for 17 years before shutting in 1989 amid clashes that killed as many as 20,000 people in the autonomous region of Papua New Guinea. Now the company, known as BCL, is warning investors that legislation proposed by Bougainville’s government will make significant changes to its mining law, including granting powers to a new British Virgin Island-registered company to take mining leases across the island.

“These proposed bills appear to further undermine our rights under the Bougainville Mining Act,” Company Secretary Mark Hitchcock said by email. “We still assert our rights to ownership.”

Officials with the Autonomous Bougainville Government and Executive Council didn’t respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment.

Buried Treasure

Legislation could allow mine with $58 billion of copper and gold to re-open

The changes to the mining law come as Bougainville moves toward an independence referendum as soon as this year, which may push it to seek new revenue streams to replace current subsidies from Papua New Guinea. The Panguna mine has an estimated 5.3 million metric tons of copper and 19.3 million ounces of gold, according to BCL, worth about $58 billion at today’s prices, according to Bloomberg calculations.

When it was operating, Panguna was one of the largest mines in the world and accounted for 44 percent of Papua New Guinea’s exports, according to BCL. Protests by communities demanding greater compensation for absorbing the impacts of the mining operation turned violent in 1989 and revitalized an independence movement, prompting BCL to shut the mine and the Papua New Guinea government to send in troops. A peace agreement in 2001 set up the region’s autonomy and paved the way for an independence vote.

The proposed legislation includes an amendment to the country’s Mining Act of 2015, which details rules and regulations as well as rights and compensation principles for landowners and communities. The proposed change would supersede the 235-page law with a 1-page section that gives all available mining rights to a new company, Bougainville Advance Mining Ltd., according to documents provided by BCL.

In a separate filing Monday to the Australian Securities Exchange, BCL also said that Bougainville Advance Mining will be 40 percent controlled by Caballus Mining, which it said is owned by Jeffery McGlinn and “and other unknown foreign investors and sovereign states.” Caballus and McGlinn could not be reached for comment.

BCL, which has a market capitalization of about $41 million, estimates that it would take seven to eight years and $5 billion to $6 billion to resume operations. Rio Tinto Group, which controlled BCL when it operated the mine from 1972 to 1989, gave away its stake in 2016, effectively abandoning the mine for no gain. That left the governments of Papua New Guinea and Bougainville with 36.45 percent each of BCL.

BCL dropped 9.4 percent, the most in three weeks, to close at 14.5 Australian cents a share. The benchmark S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.3 percent.

The Bougainville government denied BCL’s request to extend its temporary exploration license in January 2018, according to the company. The government argued that the company’s past operation of the mine ignited civil strife, so allowing BCL to re-open it threatens to ruin the region’s peace and unity ahead of the independence referendum, the filings show.

Bougainville may not see revenue from reopening of the mine for at least five years after first production because tax resource laws typically allow profits only after capital costs and debt repayments are recouped, said Luke Fletcher, executive director of Jubilee Australia Ltd., a non-profit that has tracked the effect of resource extraction on the economies of Papua New Guinea and Bougainville.

Resuming industrial-scale mining before a full reconciliation of the civil strife it contributed to also has the potential to rekindle resentment, he said.

“The thing about Panguna is, the community is fiercely divided about whether there should be mining or not,” he said. “It’s a tinder box.”

Reuters

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the Mexican found guilty in a U.S. court on Tuesday of running a criminal enterprise that smuggled drugs into the United States, is likely headed to a "supermax" prison where repeating his past escapes would be nearly impossible.

No one has broken out of Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado, since it opened in 1994 to house the most dangerous inmates in the U.S. prison system.

"ADX is the kind of prison that was designed for a high-profile inmate like El Chapo," Larry Levine, a former federal inmate who is the director and founder of Wall Street Prison Consultants, said in a phone interview.

Guzman, 61, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel who escaped twice from maximum-security Mexican prisons before his most recent capture in 2016, faces a possible life prison sentence at a hearing scheduled for June 25 in New York.

U.S. authorities have been tight-lipped about where Guzman will be imprisoned. But it has been widely anticipated that, if convicted, he would be sent to ADX Florence, ever since his extradition to the United States in January 2017.

"For someone like Guzman, the chances of escape from a facility like that are nil," said L. Thomas Kucharski, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Officials from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

ADX Florence, located in a complex of prisons in a remote area about 115 miles (185 km) south of Denver, is nicknamed "Alcatraz of the Rockies" after the prison in San Francisco Bay that held gangster Al Capone in the 1930s and other notorious criminals.

ADX Florence inmates are held in specially designed "control units" that function as prisons within prisons.

"It's like a self-contained area within a self-contained area within a self-contained area," Levine said.

The prisoners are confined to single-person cells for 22 or more hours a day, depriving them of virtually all contact with the outside world.

ADX Florence's most infamous inmates include Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York; convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, according to the BOP website.

Special restrictions are designed to ensure some inmates have no means of exerting influence or threats beyond prison walls, which is useful for U.S. authorities to control those with sway over militant groups or criminal enterprises.

Not all of the facility's prisoners are famous for their crimes. Some were transferred there because they attacked guards or inmates at other facilities, Levine said.

In fact, about 90 percent of the more than 400 inmates are there because of discipline issues, according to a report released last October by the District of Columbia Corrections Information Council.

Inside their cell, the most highly guarded inmates have a television with content designed to provide them with education, psychological help and religious services, the report said.

Each cell has a narrow window, 42 inches (107 cm) tall and angled toward the sky, and inmates cannot see each other from inside their units, it said.

The Verge

Amazon sure does love surprises. The original Echo came as a bolt out of the blue and even after the business was well established, the company just last September saw fit to unveil literally dozens of new Alexa products and features to an unsuspecting world. Last night’s announcement that Amazon intends to acquire the Eero mesh routing company was another surprise, but the out-of-nowhere nature of it shouldn’t have surprised anybody. That’s how Amazon does things.

Amazon’s stated reason for buying Eero is about what you’d expect: “We have a shared vision that the smart home experience can get even easier, and we’re committed to continue innovating on behalf of customers,” wrote SVP Dave Limp in the press release. Wi-Fi is crappy in most homes and crappy Wi-Fi means crappy performance for smart home gadgets. Amazon needs smart home gadgets to work well.

Maybe Eero’s mesh network could be built-in to future Echoes. Maybe future Eeros could get microphones built into them. Maybe Amazon will hug Eero so tightly it will die or maybe Amazon will let it live as an independent unit, much like Ring. Maybe Eero Plus — which includes a VPN and anti-malware and even a subscription to a password manager — would get bundled for free into an Amazon Prime subscription.

There’s a lot you could speculate on — and in reply to emailed questions Amazon itself refused to speculate (or, for the record, to comment on the terms of the deal beyond noting every Eero employee would be receiving an offer from Amazon). Still, though, you can see a lot of possibilities when you apply Amazon’s vast resources to a scrappy little company like Eero.

But this time, the surprise might be on Amazon. The first reaction from people who know and love Eero wasn’t speculating on any of those possibilities. Instead, the overwhelming reactions were consternation, concern, and exhaustion.

Consternation. Specifically that an independent company was once again snapped up by one of the big tech giants. We all feel trapped — or maybe captured — by the various ecosystems we live in. We all use excellent products every day made by behemoth companies, but increasingly only made by those companies. iPhone or Android, Chrome or Safari, Surface or Mac, Windows or Chrome OS, and even Facebook or Twitter: all, in one way or another, come from one of the big guys.

Eero was different. It was a tiny little company that made a great little product. Something simple, elegant, and reliable. Would it have been too much to ask that it stay independent? Perhaps, but we don’t know Eero’s financial situation. But it’s getting harder to find independent hardware startups that can scale up to something big without getting bought.

Concern. Over data privacy, of course. You can’t turn on a screen anymore without wondering who is profiting from what your eyeballs are seeing. Eero didn’t really participate in that and Amazon does. So it’s assumed that nothing good can come of Amazon getting yet another potential treasure trove of personal data.

And it could absolutely be a treasure trove. Short of handing over the PIN for your phone or the password to your Snapchat account, there’s not a much more intimate set of information about you than what your Wi-Fi router knows. It knows when you’re home and when you’re away. It can suss out what websites you visit (before the SSL kicks in, anyway) and how many movies you’re streaming.

Now, Eero doesn’t collect that information. It specifically says so in an easy-to-read help page. (Oh, making such policies easy to read is another reason that we’re sad to see Eero get snapped up by a company that probably has much more loquacious lawyers.) I asked Amazon what it plans to do with the data Eero routers could potentially gather, and the company tells me it has no plans to change Eero’s privacy policy.

But as we’ve learned: plans change. And even if Amazon sticks to an ironclad promise, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other, more sideways ways for Amazon to utilize what Eero might know about you. A quick perusal through Eero’s app reveals that it pretty much knows the make and model of every gadget that I own. That’s potentially valuable information to a company that sells gadgets, no?

Does Amazon need that information to figure out what gadgets to sell or produce? Maybe, or maybe not. It seems like having Alexa in your house is more than enough for Amazon to gather all sorts of information about your habits, anyway. But years down the road when management changes, will it be hard for those new managers to remember why they kept Eero’s privacy policy and resist quietly updating the terms of service? You can’t help but worry about it.

And so: Exhaustion. It’s exhausting thinking about how rapacious big companies are when it comes to our data. It’s exhausting to think about how difficult it is for independent companies to stay independent. Amazon buying Eero just feels different after we’ve spent the past three years realizing just how much control all these tech giants have over our lives.

But if you want to lessen that control, what are you going to do? Buy a Netgear Orbi? Sorry, that’s getting Alexa too.

The Verge

Huawei’s reputation in the US took a serious battering in 2018, a year bookended by major carriers shelving high-profile phone launches and the arrest of the company’s chief financial officer on fraud charges. Last week, however, a report and survey from the Financial Times suggested that the external controversies could actually be helping Huawei in its domestic market.

The FT report claims that Huawei’s struggles are “leading to a surge in the brand’s popularity among Chinese consumers and a sharp rise in the sales of its smartphones,” citing a 33 percent rise in consumers expressing an intent to buy a Huawei phone next. The authors also asked sales staff in smartphone stores for comment; one said that “the arrest of [CFO] Meng Wanzhou has made Huawei a patriotic icon.”

No doubt there are customers in China whose purchasing decisions could be swayed by the disputes. People often do feel strongly about the provenance of the products they buy, and not just in China — the “Made in the USA” mark is a powerful, emotional symbol for many Americans even in times when the country isn’t locked in a fierce trade war with an adversary. “[It’s] probably not the key criterion most of the people use in their purchase decision,” says Kiranjeet Kaur, a senior research manager at IDC. “But the nationalist sentiment is definitely not helping Apple in China and could likely sway the decision in Huawei’s favor when someone is on the fence.”

Whatever nationalist boost Huawei might receive, however, is unlikely to do much to change its fortunes in China. The reason is simple: Huawei has been on an upward trajectory in its home market for some time and had an absolutely astonishing 2018 — largely at the expense of Apple and Xiaomi, among other competitors. There can be no serious analysis of the company without the recognition that, outside of the US, it is now a hugely successful consumer brand as well as a highly advanced technological force.

“This [nationalist] sentiment might help Huawei’s overall brand image in China, however without competitive products, it’s impossible for Huawei to achieve such a success in 2018 in its domestic market,” says Mo Jia, an analyst with Canalys in Shanghai. “I think the major factor is Huawei’s aggressive technological innovation, which brings it to the same level as the top two smartphone giants, Samsung and Apple, in the global market.” Counterpoint Research director James Yan agrees, saying, “I don’t think it is a significant factor in purchasing decisions,” instead citing strong photo capabilities, battery life, and performance from Huawei’s own Kirin processors as bigger reasons for Chinese consumers to choose the brand.

Describing the Huawei Mate 20 Pro as “the best phone America can’t get,” The Verge’s Vlad Savov cited its “huge battery, slick design, and a superb processor, constrained by bad software and international relations.” The software isn’t an issue for most Chinese users, and the international relations certainly aren’t a negative for them either. In that light, it’s not surprising that Huawei is continuing to establish itself as a top-tier phone manufacturer in the world’s largest market.

Canalys puts Huawei’s share of the Chinese smartphone market at 27 percent, up 7 percentage points year on year, while the company’s shipments are said to have grown by 16 percent. This is particularly impressive given the overall stagnant state of the phone market in China, with IDC yesterday reporting a 10.5 percent contraction in shipments. Oppo and Xiaomi managed to slightly increase their share, for example, but saw overall shipments decline year on year. The market is maturing and consolidating, with Huawei the biggest benefactor yet.

“[Huawei’s] attempt of strengthening the brand image through technological innovations [has] seen strong progress,” says Jia. “It has significantly helped Huawei’s high-end performance with the P and Mate series, most importantly. The halo effect also helped Huawei’s overall brand image, thus, to become an attractive and trustworthy brand in China. Besides, Huawei is the only brand that could compete with Apple in terms of brand image in the high-end space in China after Samsung’s failure.” Samsung’s share of the Chinese market shrunk to a single percent in the final quarter of 2017, according to Counterpoint.

That’s not to say that Huawei is necessarily up there with Apple in terms of high-end brand perception, even within China. The company sells phones across all price points, helped out by its lower-end Honor brand — which Yan says makes up 45 percent of Huawei’s shipments — so it can’t quite be described as exclusive. IDC’s Kaur tells The Verge that “its flagship series are considered high-end enough, but [it’s] too early to say they have the ‘aspirational’ status that the iPhones have seen in the good days.“

But Apple had a disastrous 2018 in China, with IDC estimating that its 11.7 percent slump in sales was greater than the slowdown in the market overall. Its market share was flat at around 9 percent, the only one of China’s top five phone brands not to grab more share in 2018. “The ultra-high prices limit the audience of XS and XS Max as it’s hard to place an above-8,000-yuan smartphone as a mass market device,” says Jia. “The XR was originally placed at 6,499 yuan (~$950), which is around the price of a high-end Android device [like] Samsung’s Note 9 or Huawei’s Mate 20 Pro. Although the China market has become one of the largest high-end smartphone markets, the positioning (entry iPhone with high price point) of the XR failed to ensure the volume play.”

There are other reasons behind Apple’s poor performance relative to Huawei. Kaur cites the higher prices, of course, saying that Huawei’s flagships have been “filling the gap” left as other brands go higher-end, but other factors include “lower telco subsidies (which has been the case for a while), higher-tech innovation from China players that resonates with Chinese consumers, better brand perception of other brands, and a strong portfolio of flagships. The options in the market are a lot more now, which the people are willing to consider rather than pay a huge premium.”

Market share isn’t everything, of course, and Huawei’s phone business isn’t anywhere near as high-margin as Apple’s. But Apple largely blamed the iPhone and China for its unusually poor quarter last month, and it can’t ignore the fact that it’s losing customers to Huawei in the region, particularly as it continues to push the narrative that it’s a services company. It also seems very possible that Huawei could overtake Apple to the position of second-biggest global smartphone vendor — just behind Samsung — over the whole year even without any presence in the US market. (That actually happened in the second and third quarters of 2018.) Apple CEO Tim Cook has blamed currency fluctuations for the high cost of iPhones in China, and the company will reset prices for affected regions. “We’ll see how that works out for us,” Cook told NPR.

It could be tough for Huawei to replicate its market share gains in China in 2019, however, because much of its recent performance has been at the expense of smaller players. “Huawei’s gain was mostly from the smaller vendors like Gionee and Meizu in China, as the share from smaller vendors out of top five has decreased from 27% in 2017 to 12% in 2018,” says Jia. “In 2019, it would be harder for Huawei to take share as the competition will remain largely among the top five vendors, and Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Apple have their stable user bases. It will be extremely hard for any vendor to gain share from others.”

“The big Chinese players, including Huawei, have grown at the cost of some of the smaller domestic players in a market where smartphone penetration has already reached quite high levels,” agrees Kaur. “There could be some further consolidation in the China market which could help players such as Huawei further consolidate their share in the market.” Counterpoint’s Yan, meanwhile, predicts that Huawei’s Chinese market share will grow because of a lack of “outstanding highlights” from competitors over the next year.

Ultimately, however, Huawei has global ambitions, and the intercontinental controversy surrounding it isn’t likely to help it in the long term — even if there does turn out to be a small patriotism-fueled sales bump in the short term. “Huawei’s success in some of the western markets has improved its credibility back home and its growth in China has helped provide scale to grow outside of China too,” says Kaur. “All this has also helped Huawei drive R&D and improve its brand image, and it could become challenging to drive this if there is international slowdown and financial challenges arising out of that.”

The decision to buy a particular phone can be intensely personal, and there are countless factors that affect it. What is clear is that in China, and many other countries in the world outside of the US, there are a lot of strong reasons for customers to pick Huawei devices. Of course, the popularity of consumer products isn’t going to shift any government’s position on, for example, the national security issues raised by allowing a Chinese company with a dubious history to build 5G infrastructure. But it’s worth reflecting on how and why Huawei is able to beat companies like Apple in China. However much patriotism might come into play, it’s less of a factor than the reality that Huawei has emerged as an inarguably strong competitor at every tier of the market.

The Atlantic

The potential judgment of students can lead a teacher to do strange things. For Monique Mongeon, an arts educator in Toronto, starting a job teaching adults sparked a small crisis of confidence. “I was in my mid-20s, and I was looking at things I could do to make myself feel like a person who had authority to stand in front of a bunch of other 20-somethings,” she says. After ruling out fancy bags and shoes as too extravagant, Mongeon settled on a sleek $45 water bottle. “I was scrolling through websites thinking, Which of these S’well bottles looks like the kind of person I want to be?”

Nine years ago, there was only one S’well, and it was blue. Now you can get the curvy, steel-capped bottles in more than 200 size-and-color combinations, including some that look like marble or teakwood. Many are customizable with your initials. The big ones will hold an entire bottle of wine, and smaller versions are made for cocktails or coffee. Teens offer S’well bottles to propose to prospective prom dates. They’re a common sight in Instagram photos of artfully stuffed vacation carry-ons and aesthetically pleasing desk tableaux.

S’well’s success is impressive, but the brand has a host of competitors nipping at its heels in what has become an enormous market for high-end, reusable beverage containers. If nothing in S’well’s inventory calls out to you, maybe you’ll like a Yeti, Sigg, Hydro Flask, Contigo, or bkr. A limited-edition Soma bottle, created in collaboration with the Louis Vuitton designer Virgil Abloh and Evian (itself a legend of designer water), was recently feted at New York Fashion Week. VitaJuwel bottles, which can cost more than $100, promise to “restructure” your tap water using the power of interchangeable crystal pods.

On the surface, water bottles as totems of consumer aspiration sound absurd: If you have access to water, you can drink it out of so many things that already exist in your home. But if you dig a little deeper, you find that these bottles sit at a crossroads of cultural and economic forces that shape Americans’ lives far beyond beverage choices. If you can understand why so many people would spend 50 bucks on a water bottle, you can understand a lot about America in 2019.

The first time I coveted a water bottle was in 2004. When I arrived as a freshman at the University of Georgia, I found that I was somehow the last person alive who didn’t own a Nalgene. The brand’s distinctive, lightweight plastic bottles had long been a cult-favorite camping accessory, but in the mid-2000s, they exploded in popularity beyond just outdoorsmen. A version with the school’s logo on it cost $16 in the bookstore, which was a little steep for me, an unemployed 18-year-old, but I bought one anyway. I wanted to be the kind of person all my new peers apparently were. Plus, it’s hot in Georgia. A nice water bottle seemed like a justifiable extravagance.

Around the same time, I remember noticing the first flares of another trend intimately related to the marketability of water bottles: athleisure. All around me, stylish young women wore colorful Nike running shorts and carried bright plastic Nalgenes to class. “With Millennials, fitness and health are themselves signals,” says Tülin Erdem, a marketing professor at NYU. “They drink more water and carry it with them, so it’s an item that becomes part of them and their self-expression.”

Now, across Instagram, you can find high-end water bottles lurking around the edges of stylized gym photos posted by exercisers and fitness instructors. Usually these people aren’t being rewarded for the placement with anything but likes. Sarah Kauss, S’well’s founder and CEO, says people have been photographing her water bottles since the company began in 2010. “I’d receive hundreds of pictures a week from customers,” she says. “I wasn’t giving them anything for it. There wasn’t a free bottle or a coupon code or anything other than customers just wanting to show their own experience.”

Kauss says she always knew the bottle’s appearance would be important, even though positioning something as simple as a water bottle as a luxury product was a bit of a gamble. “As I moved up in my career, I was upgrading my wardrobe, and the bottle that looked like a camping accessory really didn’t serve my purpose anymore,” she says. When she noticed fashionable New Yorkers were carrying luxe disposable plastic bottles from brands such as Evian and Fiji, she realized reusable bottles could use a makeover, too.

Kauss and her contemporaries struck at the right time. The importance of fitness and wellness were starting to gain a foothold in fashionable crowds, and concerns over consumer waste and plastic’s potential to leach chemicals into food and water were gaining wider attention. People wanted cute workout gear, and they wanted to drink water out of materials other than plastic. Researchers have found that the chance to be conspicuously sustainability-conscious motivates consumers, especially when the product being purchased costs more than its less-green counterparts.

Nearly a decade on, the water-bottle trend shows no signs of slowing, and people just seem to like their fancy bottles a lot. The insulated metal variety, the most popular, does a far better job than plastic of keeping beverages at ideal temperatures. They’re durable and useful. When I put out a call for opinions on Twitter, I heard from hundreds of people about how much they loved theirs. Rebecca Thomas, a 28-year-old in Atlanta who owns three S’wells, says she once paid a ransom to an Uber driver after she left one behind in the car. (“That’s when I decided I’d never put wine in one again,” she says.) Others were similarly dedicated. “I will be buried with all of my different sizes of Hydro Flask,” says Elizabeth Sile, an editor in New York City. “Maybe by then Hydro Flask will come out with a coffin, so I can be buried in that, too.”

The trend’s Instagram visibility might make it seem like high-end water bottles are the sole province of women. Indeed, brands such as bkr, whose bottles are pastel glass and can come with a special top meant to hold lip gloss, are explicitly marketed as products of feminine beauty. (Drinking water, after all, is often lauded as the ultimate skin-care product.) But the category’s origins in camping gear mean that it started out with a strong foothold among male Millennials as well, and brands such as Yeti and Hydro Flask have continued to court a more masculine audience. Mike Ferguson, a 37-year-old in Los Angeles, has four Yetis of various sizes that he usually uses for iced coffee and water. “I have very few vices, but this is one,” he says. “Am I a brand loyalist? I don’t think so, but the evidence suggests otherwise.”

Ferguson, like many other people I spoke with, got his first Yeti as a gift. Kauss says that’s a trend she sees with S’well’s customers, too: People will buy one or two, presumably for themselves, and then come back to the website around the holidays and buy six. Most brands also customize orders for large corporate clients, meaning your employer might hand you a logo bottle at the end of the year. Even if spending 40 or 50 bucks on a water bottle sounds bad, getting one for free can turn reluctant consumers into evangelists.

When those factors are taken together, it’s hard to be surprised that so many $50 water bottles exist, or that people have snapped them up in droves. On a certain level, a nice water bottle fulfills its promise in the way few things do. They hold water. They stay cold. They look nice on your desk. They don’t leave an unsightly sweat ring on your nightstand. For people such as Mongeon, the art teacher, they look like things that are owned by people who know what they’re doing. For a lot of people, they spark a little bit of joy in the otherwise mundane routine of work, exercise, and personal hygiene. For a generation with less expendable income than its parents’, a nice bottle pays for itself with a month of consistent use and lets you feel like you’re being proactive about your health and the environment.

A container of any kind, whether it’s a rented storage unit or a decorative basket, promises order and control. Marie Kondo’s Netflix show about organizing American homes in disarray was a hit for a reason: There’s a small amount of serenity in finding the right vessel and filling it with the right thing. Consumer choices might not be an effective solution to structural problems such as pollution, but it’s nice to feel like you’re making ethical choices. If nothing else, Millennials can buy the best water bottle they can afford and try their best to stay hydrated.

The Atlantic

I belong to a private Facebook group of middle-aged women who share stories of age discrimination, infidelity, sexual dysfunction, depression, hot flashes, melanomas, empty nests, ailing parents, and other baubles of midlife mirth. Every so often, a new post will appear, announcing the rupture of a decades-long marriage, the wound of it so new and gaping you can practically taste the blood dripping off the words. This is a caring group, though most of us are strangers in real life, so the comments below include heartfelt nuggets of empathy (“I’m so sorry. It gets better, I promise ...”). But it is also a proactive group, and tends to advise a take-no-prisoners practicality. “Lawyer up!” each future divorcée is exhorted, by those who’ve been there. The call to arms is a directive, not a suggestion.

But what if the future divorcée—like me, like so many—cannot afford a lawyer? What if, even if she had the means, the built-in antagonisms and financial excesses of the American divorce industrial complex leave her longing for a less corrosive option, one that might put a more reasonable punctuation mark at the end of a failed marriage than an ellipsis made of tiny grenades?

Divorce in the U.S. is a multibillion-dollar industry, pitting spouse against spouse in a potentially endless arms race of fees. “Make no mistake,” my former therapist, a man not prone to hyperbole, once warned me, “divorce is a war.”

When I first made the painful decision to end my marriage, after years of dysfunction and thwarted attempts at reparation, I was told I’d have to pay a lawyer something like a $30,000 retainer just to get the process started. Granted, those were New York City prices, but that’s only slightly higher than the average cost of a divorce in the U.S., where estimates run from $15,000 to $25,000, depending on whose inexact data you’re looking at, whether children and excessive conflict are involved, and whether the case goes to trial. My ex and I had only debt between us, no assets, so we decided to ask a mutual friend to be our mediator, at a friends and family rate.

Big mistake. Though we both had a stated desire to keep things civil, the nature of our particular dysfunction—control issues, if I may be both coy and precise—was evident within the first two sessions, torpedoing mediation as a viable alternative. It also left us $1,400 in further debt. Why were we in debt? For the same boring reason so many middle-class Americans are in debt: Our basic living expenses (child care, health care, student loans, rising rents, college tuition, food, clothing, etc.) were greater than our joint income.

More specifically, we were still in debt from the exorbitant hospital fees from our first two children, born in 1995 and 1997, as well as the unpaid maternity leaves I’d taken back then as the main breadwinner in our family. By the time our third and final child was born, in 2006, those hospital fees had only increased, so I freelanced throughout the first months of his life to keep us afloat, even as my industry, magazines and publishing, contracted, buckling under the strain of free content and lost advertising. In 2013, the rent on my home, for which we were paying $3,500 a month, suddenly shot up to $5,000 a month when new landlords took over at the same time as my marriage collapsed, and my ex moved across the country. I took in boarders to stanch the flow but ultimately had to move to smaller, cheaper digs, which was itself another financial setback. Several serious and unexpected illnesses and their resulting chaos—including losing my executive-editor job at a health magazine and suddenly having to pay exorbitant COBRA fees—were the final nail in my financial coffin.

Suffice it to say, like 40 percent of Americans in a 2018 study by the U.S. Federal Reserve, I would have been hard-pressed, after the separation, to deal with a $400 emergency—let alone $30,000 in lawyers’ fees. Some weeks, there was not enough money for food.

So for two and a half years post-separation, my not-yet-ex and I did nothing on the divorce front. I felt hopeless. Trapped. Paralyzed by our lack of options. But the system in place—hire lawyers, go to court—held nothing for those of us living hand to mouth but not poor enough to qualify for free representation. As we moved on from the marriage, I didn’t even know what to call him. “My ex” wasn’t exactly accurate, but neither was “my husband.” A friend suggested “was-band,” but no. Whoever he was to me, he was no longer physically present or available to parent, so in one sense I was lucky: I didn’t have to petition the court for custody, because I was the de facto parent 24/7 for two and a half years. I considered going to court to ask for child support, but when I factored in what it would cost me in lawyers’ fees to do so—not to mention the logistical issues of getting us both in the same courtroom, because my ex was living in California, and I was in New York—it didn’t seem like a good use of my time, energy, or money. I was in survival mode, trying to make it from one day to the next.

Then I sold a TV pilot, which finally gave my kids and me access to affordable health insurance through the Writers Guild for 18 months. I put my still-husband on my plan, too, because as his still-wife, I would be still-liable for his bills were he to get sick. My ex and I thus patched together our individual post-marital lives, a continent between us. I paid down our shared debt, tried to put money aside, and prayed for a day when we would have enough to call it quits officially.

At one point, in pursuit of this goal, I had five jobs, a stress-related skin rash, and a brand-new heart condition that had me occasionally passing out at work: a direct result, some physicians suggest, of intense emotional turmoil. Meanwhile, life was inching forward. My ex moved in with a new girlfriend. I was occasionally dipping my toe into the dating-app pool, with its attendant joys and degradations, when I could afford a babysitter. Maybe, I thought, my ex and I could simply officially stay married until we could afford to split up while simultaneously pursuing lives with new partners. That could work, right? I actually know a couple who did just that.

But then came thousands of dollars in unexpected taxes, which I was suddenly mutually responsible for, because we were still married. I paid it in full, wiping out all my savings. My ex returned to New York, during our third year post-separation, and found an apartment near us. Our two older children were already out of the house, at college, so we only had to work out a custody agreement for our youngest, then 9. We did so relatively quickly, based on a suggestion from my divorced friends: Sunday through Tuesday night at Mom’s, Wednesday and Thursday night at Dad’s, plus every other weekend. Holidays would alternate year to year. Having easily agreed to a shared-custody schedule without rancor, maybe, I thought, we could figure out a frictionless way to get divorced in the eyes of the law, too, if only to disentangle our finances. But how?

That’s when, at a Yom Kippur break fast three years after our separation, I learned something I had not known was possible in the U.S. “You know, you can just represent yourself,” said Antoinette Delruelle, a lawyer with the New York Legal Assistance Group, who was also attending the gathering.

“You’re educated, you speak English, you’re rational, you’re not fighting over custody, and you’ll be civil to one another in front of a judge,” she said, in my recollection of the conversation. “Already you’re way ahead of the game. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. You just have to do everything in a highly specific, counterintuitive order.”

“Meaning what?” I said.

“Meaning, first you file for custody, then child support, and then, only once you have those two rulings firmly in place, you can file for divorce.” This seemingly reverse order is important, she explained. Normally one spouse files for divorce first, then both spouses hire lawyers who begin the battle over custody, alimony, and child support. But once a judge sees that a couple is in agreement on what’s usually a key sticking point—the material and custodial care of the kids—then the divorce can usually proceed smoothly from there. Especially if the parties are willing to forgo maintenance (a.k.a. alimony) and the equitable distribution of marital assets and debt, which was the case for me and my ex-husband.

While it was nice to have Delruelle’s advice to go it alone, for those who want a bit more of a leg up, any divorce lawyer in any state can kick-start the pro se process at minimal cost (an hour or two of their time), provided the client is willing to do all the filing, legwork, and self-representation in court, as well as bone up on state-specific laws. This is called “limited-scope representation,” meaning the lawyer is there only to give you advice and help you weed through the paperwork by yourself, nothing more. With legal fees being what they are, more and more couples are opting to do so, but you can also do all this without ever speaking with a lawyer. All the information you would ever need to get divorced yourself is available online, as long as you’re willing to dig for it. In some states, courts offer nighttime seminars for those seeking pro se divorces, with the hours of the classes posted on fliers they hand out with the reams of paperwork. The fact that New York, my state, finally has no-fault divorce—the last of all 50 states to have enacted it, in 2010 (California went first, in 1970)—was key. That meant I could check off the “irreconcilable differences” box and not have to accuse my ex of cruelty, infidelity, or abandonment.

I emailed my still-husband: Would he be game to try the lawyer-free route? I would do all the legal legwork; he’d just have to show up in court on the appointed days. He was hesitant, but Delruelle told me I did not need his consent or permission to start the process by filing for custody, just as one does not need permission to file for divorce. Filing for custody, just like filing for divorce or child support, is judicially identical to filing a lawsuit. I am embarrassed to say I did not know this. Then again, having never attended law school, why would I?

I went to family court on April 20, 2017, and filed the paperwork for custody, on which I scribbled down the exact shared arrangement we’d already had in place for more than a year that had been working well. Only later, as I was walking through Washington Square Park, would it occur to me with one whiff that today was not just special for cannabis enthusiasts, but that 4/20 was also the 27th anniversary of our first date.

My ex, in a flurry of emails, expressed fear that this would now cost him $30,000 in lawyer’s fees. I assured him, once again, that it would not cost him a penny. More emails followed, which I either ignored or responded to by saying we shouldn’t get into it over email: that’s why we have a judge. Had we actually had lawyers, all those emails would have been read and processed by both lawyers, at an hourly rate.

On the day of the hearing at family court, we arrived separately at the appointed hour. Then we waited. And waited. We were the only couple in family court actually sitting together on the same bench. Everyone else had lawyers and was scattered as far away from their former spouses as the space in the room allowed. By doing it pro se, we were being forced into something resembling civility. I suddenly felt slightly smug about how well this was going. Then my ex began to lose patience as the first hour of waiting stretched into a second, and I was worried he would leave. Now I was feeling much less smug. I Googled What happens if you don’t show up in court for a custody hearing? while my ex left to use the restroom, which was, of course, the exact moment we were called into court.

“All rise,” said the Honorable Douglas E. Hoffman. My ex stood alone at his table, I stood alone at mine, the width of a wedding aisle between us. My heart was racing. Doubt crept in once more: representing myself in family court? What was I thinking? I kept forgetting to say, “Your Honor.” The judge asked whether the custody arrangement I’d stated on the filed papers was the arrangement we wanted to keep in place, and I said, “Yes.” Pause. “I mean, yes, Your Honor.”

He turned to my ex and asked the same. Had he answered, “Yes, Your Honor,” we would have been done.

But he said, “No, Your Honor. I want 50–50 custody.” Our current arrangement was almost exactly 50–50, minus a few hours of Sunday-night sleep. To make it perfectly equitable, we’d have to alternate Sunday nights. I was confused. Not only had our custody arrangement been working well for more than a year, our son, who’d just turned 10, had told us he wanted to keep it as it was, because it allowed him to know where he’d be on any given school morning.

Suddenly, what should have been an easy day in court became anything but. I quickly Googled 50–50 custody under the table. With precise, down-to-the-hour 50–50 custody in New York State, I learned, the higher earner would be responsible for paying child support to the lower earner. Never mind that both of us knew precise 50–50 custody was impossible: I was, had been, and would always be our children’s primary caregiver. This was one of the many issues that tore us apart, the inequity in our domestic responsibilities. My smugness was gone. I longed for a lawyer. The only way this custody hearing would work without representation is if we presented a united front.

The judge asked whether I would be amenable to a strict 50–50 schedule, which would add every other Sunday night and two afternoons a week at his father’s apartment to the existing schedule. I explained that since my ex’s return to the East Coast after a two-and-a-half-year absence, I’d relinquished as close to half of physical custody as an odd-day week and his professional schedule allowed. Be that as it may, said the judge, he could not “so order” a custody agreement upon which we did not agree. He asked us to meet in his private chambers with his clerk, who would help us draft a temporary agreement. But for now—down came the gavel—our hearing was over.

I cried in those private chambers. My great experiment in self-representation felt as if it had failed. Our new hearing was scheduled for three weeks later, exactly one week after I was scheduled to have major surgery to remove my cervix. I begged my ex, with the clerk sitting between us, to just keep the arrangement we had in place. He refused. The clerk, a woman, reached out and squeezed my hand. Fearing losing momentum, I said yes to the new court date and agreed to a temporary order of custody, acquiescing to everything my still-husband now wanted until a permanent agreement could be reached.

“But you promised!” my son accused me through...

Gear Patrol

There’s a reason you don’t hear the term “Asian watchmaking” often: watchmaking in the East, though powerful, is most easily grouped into Japanese, Chinese, and other country-focused categories. Studying these markets together is like lumping together British, Swiss, and German watchmaking — they have different histories, different priorities, and different meanings to the modern watch collector.

Yet there’s value in exploring the wide scene of watchmaking in Asia, if only because it’s understudied and under-appreciated. So let’s ask the question: what could we mean when we talk about these separate groups and their meaning to global watchmaking and watch ownership?

China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are important production hubs — not just for low-end, mass-produced pieces, but for many parts that go into watches made by worldwide microbrands and, yes, your “Swiss-made” beauty, since that label means that only 60% of each timepiece must have been produced in Switzerland. Hong Kong, for instance, was second only to Switzerland for watch exports by value in 2017. China, its industry at different times hobbled and intensified by intense government control, leads exports based on number of units, and exported 688 million completed watches worldwide between 2013 and 2017.

Asian countries are not just producing watches — they’re buying them at historic rates. Both China and Hong Kong are monsters of the luxury watch market share. Together, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, Asian countries accounted for 40% of the total Swiss luxury watches purchased worldwide in 2017 — more than $8 billion. With that sort of purchasing power, you better believe that the whims and taste of Asian buyers drive the market for the rest of us.

And then, of course, there’s the story of the East’s most iconic brands themselves. These center around Japan, whose history and modern prominence form the most important narrative for Western watch collectors. In the 1890s, Japanese watchmakers began building pocket watches with lever escapements; by the end of the Meiji era, in 1912, according to the Japan Clock & Watch Association, 20 factories turned out 3.8 million timepieces a year. Practically all Japanese watchmaking industry was destroyed during WWII, but in the 1950s and ‘60s, Japan determined it would become the “Switzerland of the East.”

Production during the Korean War boomed in the 1950s, and by the 1960s and ‘70s, technological innovation and quality had made Japanese watchmaking famous worldwide. There might have been a “Quartz Crisis” in Europe, but not so in Japan, where the new technology drove innovation of all kinds (a small wonder, since the Japanese invented the quartz watch). Today, Japanese makers are some of the largest manufacturers of mechanical movements and of completed watches, and shipped some 65 million timepieces in 2017.

Though there are much deeper histories of these watchmaking feats, burgeoning markets, and industrial powerhouses, the best way to study such a wide swath of watchmaking is to look at the watches themselves. This is truly what differentiates Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian watchmaking from the Germans, the British, the Swiss, and the Americans. Asian brands have strived, and in many cases succeeded, to match quality from these markets; they’ve become some of the largest manufacturers of watches, and mechanical movements, in the entire world; they’ve shaken the watch world to its very core with a technological revolution, and steered the way we think about our favorite kinds of watches, from divers to dress watches.

Here’s a quick primer on the brands you should know, and the watches that matter.

Seiko

Japan’s most iconic brand started its journey some 138 years ago, when Kintaro Hattori opened a small watch shop in Tokyo. It’s led Japanese watchmaking ever since, making Japan’s first wristwatch, its first chronograph and its first dive watch. And worldwide, Seiko has made some of the biggest marks on watchmaking of any company. It innovated quartz with one of the first quartz watches, the first six-digit LCD display quartz and the first analog quartz chronograph. It is a dominant force in movement making.

Though the company doesn’t publicly share production numbers, Seiko movements — both mechanical and quartz — drive a huge number of watches worldwide. For over fifty years, Seiko has made a steel sports watch that’s one of the most beloved affordable timepieces ever. There’s a lot of beauty to be captured at Seiko, but its most important and iconic watches all intersect at unique design, affordable prices, and bulletproof build quality.

Orient

Founded in 1950, Orient found success in Japan and China focusing on mechanical watches throughout the 20th century. In 2009, it was bought by Seiko, and today continues making mostly mechanical watches, operating relatively freely from its parent company. Its designs and manufacturing are handled separately, and its movements are made in-house. Many of its watches feature a power reserve indicator or other complications, which in this case is done with remarkable affordability. Orient, like Seiko, is a wonderful value proposition, and an easy landing pad for Seiko fans who want a Japanese watch with a different look and appeal.

Citizen

The early history of Citizen is actually one of a Swiss-Japanese partnership. The company was founded in 1930 by a group of Swiss and Japanese investors; it took over a Japanese factory founded in 1912 by Rodolphe Schmid, a Swiss. Citizen became a worldwide name after the second World War, but its impact on watchmaking worldwide really began in the 1970s and 1980s, when it made important innovations in electronic watches.

The other side of the Citizen coin is Miyota, one of the most ubiquitous mechanical movement makers in the world, which is a 65%-owned subsidiary of Citizen. Every year, Miyota makes 1.8 million watch movements, most of them affordable workhorses that find their way into not just Japanese watches, but watches produced worldwide. Together, these two names are a force of nature in both quartz and mechanical watchmaking.

Casio

The wonder of Casio is this: Before 1974, it solely dealt in computers, calculators, and a ring that allowed you to smoke a cigarette the whole way down. The quartz revolution diverted the river of watchmaking right into Casio’s waterwheel, if you will; the company began watchmaking with a bang in 1974, with a digital quartz watch called the Casiotron. Take a look at that Casiotron and you’ll see all the hallmarks that still make Casio great today: utilitarianism with style and brazenly embracing technology, rather than trying to make it fit in a classic package. No other watch company ran wild with technology this early on, from touchscreens to digital readouts to novel specific functions, like fitness trackers in the 1990s.

Grand Seiko

In 1960, Seiko handed a team of its master watchmakers a new assignment: Make a whole new sub-brand of watches with the same Seiko ethos, but at a higher level of excellence, and, of course, cost. In the almost sixty years since, Grand Seiko has maintained the kind of quality and excellence that makes it a favorite brand of watchmakers around the world. Today, every Grand Seiko is still touched only by master watchmakers as it’s made — their watches combine incredible finishing quality with a range of movements, including, interestingly, high-end quartz. Each movement meets a stricter accuracy requirement than the vaunted COSC standard.

The Tianjin WuYi watch factory was one of eight production facilities created by the Chinese government in 1958, and played a major role in Chinese watchmaking throughout the 20th century, in part thanks to it being granted an exemption from production of the Chinese government’s Chinese Standard Movement, the Tongji. It made one of China’s first noteworthy watches, the WuYi, based on Swiss designs, in the late 1950s. In the 1960s, with the Chinese army in need of a chronograph for its aviators, Tianjin was outfitted with tooling equipment purchased from the Swiss firm Venus, and eventually made the first Chinese chronograph, the ST3.

In 1966, it produced what was considered the first Chinese-designed and built wristwatch, the ST5, which was thin and dependable, and was prized for its bridges’ hand-engraved “seagull stripes.” Later, during the chaos caused by the quartz crisis, the Tianjin factory was privatized, and since has been known as Tianjin Sea-Gull. Since then, it’s made a number of important movements, including a tourbillon, but its largest effect on the global watch market has been a huge number of ETA 2824 clones. Today, Tianjin Seagull’s most prominent watch is the 1963 chronograph, which uses an affordable chronograph movement and pays homage to the ST3.

Zelos is a product of Kickstarter. But unlike other microbrands, it doesn’t just source its materials from Singapore — it’s also based there. Its founder, Elshan Tang, is a mechanical engineer who pairs a range of movement options from ETA and Seiko with divers made from unique case materials like bronze, carbon fiber, and Damascus steel. His Abyss 2 and Helmsman 2 are good examples of young and exciting watchmaking coming out of the East.

Kiu Tai Yu

China’s watchmaking industry has turned out several excellent watchmakers. Kiu Tai Yu is the most world-renowned. He was born in 1946 and, after a stint making watches in the state-run Suzhou factory, moved to Hong Kong and began designing and building his own, including China’s first ever tourbillon. His most famous watches, the “Mystery Tourbillons” of the 1990s, featured free-floating movements, without a cage or any visible means of support. These incredible watches earned him a place as an honorary member of the Academy of Independent Creators in Watchmaking, which includes some of the best independent watchmakers in the world.

Barry Ritholtz

Don’t put anything in writing. Because then you have plausible deniability.

One thing about Trump, he’s proven to be surrounded by third-rate attorneys who are really henchmen, lawyers that would be disbarred if their activities ever came to light.

And now we have Dylan Howard and Jon Fine of American Media extorting Jeff Bezos in print, as if they’ve got no idea how the world works, never mind the law.

This is what happens when you’re drunk with power, when you serve those with agendas in the world of gotcha, believing if they’re the biggest bully they will always win.

That’s not only David Pecker, but Donald Trump.

Oh, don’t get your knickers in a twist. Trump doesn’t believe in sunlight, no tax returns, no information on the most powerful man in America, just the way he likes it. And when he’s squeezed, he squeals. And isn’t it interesting the only person who can really get his goat is Nancy Pelosi, a woman.

Now if you’ve been paying attention for the past few years, you know that Nancy Pelosi is an over-the-hill, ineffective hack out of touch with America. That’s how the Republicans and right wing press have depicted her. It’s a veritable war of words, with the Democrats historically playing defense. To the point where when Elizabeth Warren and AOC play offense traditional Democrats decry them, playing into the Republicans’ hands.

But then Pelosi maneuvers herself into the Speaker gig and it turns out that unlike the President, she knows how to play the game, she even runs circles around Chuck Schumer. Because she’s willing to dress up nice but still throw a punch, without looking like she’s even losing control. Sure, Republicans still hate her, but Democrats who bought into the right wing’s depiction of her no longer do.

It’s a veritable club I tell you, the politicians and the news media. Same faces, owed favors. And we never know what’s really going on.

Which is why it’s so great that Jeff Bezos published his story on Medium.

He OWNS the “Washington Post.” He could act like a dictator and insist they include his words. But he could see the negative effect of that, he doesn’t want to tarnish the “Post,” so he publishes on the web.

And goes from zero to hero overnight.

We saw this with David Letterman, extorted over an affair, he exposed the situation on television, and the story no longer was about his moral failings, his duplicity, his stepping out on his wife, but his honesty!

Jeff Bezos acts like an adolescent, then gains his cool and plays like Jordan in the NBA Finals. Or should I say LeBron?

Bezos lays it all out, at length, and it reads like it was written by him.

Now what?

This is bad for the “Enquirer,” this is bad for Trump.

But it’s good for our country.

You see this is how the world has been run for eons. Backroom dealings. You’ve got to know the players to know what’s really going on, in all businesses.

Which is why Pelosi succeeds and Trump fails. Being a politician is a profession. The aforementioned Michael Jordan proved that being the best basketball player of all time didn’t make him a world class baseball player.

But those are both sports.

It’s like saying Mark Spitz would be a great Senator.

Or Howard Schultz would be a great President.

Conversely, I doubt Nancy Pelosi could run Starbucks.

Then again, you or me gets caught up in a scandal and we’ve got no options. Peter Thiel sues Gawker out of existence and Bezos spends bucks to find out what happened at the “Enquirer.”

Meanwhile, like Manafort before him, David Pecker believes the law doesn’t apply to him.

But to quote Bob Dylan:

“For them that think death’s honesty

Won’t fall upon them naturally

Life sometimes must get lonely”

We’re all human, we’re all the same, with similar desires and similar lives.

But in the era of billionaires, there’s a whole coterie of wealthy people who think they’re better than us.

Then again, those without cash believe money rules.

But they would be wrong, money is trumped by power.

That’s what David Pecker had and has.

Fox News is not worth as much as Netflix, but it’s much more powerful.

This is what insiders know.

And when you play the power game, you’ve got a number of cards.

Pecker believed that Bezos’s ego would not allow him to have his sexual peccadilloes exposed. All the money in the world could not make Pecker and the “Enquirer” go away.

But the honesty card put a knife in the “Enquirer”‘s heart.

And the truth is, if you lay it out for all to see, they’ll look.

You should now.