Economist, Jan 5, 2019

choi

(1) Computer chips | Armed with a Crystal Ball. Arm Holdings' chip designs already power the world's phones. Its owner, Masayoshi Son, wants them  to enable the rest of tech.
("Arm's designs "are computer codes which give Arm's customers a blueprint for the construction of microprocessors * * * Those clients ('customers' in the precious sentence] -- consumer-hardware giants such as Apple and Huawei; chip companies such as Broadcom and Qualcomm -- pay Arm one-off license fees to access the design code, add to it what they will, then pay royalties on every product they ship containing it. Apple's popular A-series mobile processors, for example, are built this way.  This model also gives Arm and its newish owner, SoftBank, a Japanese internet and telecoms conglomerate, a way of peering into the future of tech. Masayoshi Son, SoftBank's founder, has repeatedly called the firm his 'crystal ball' ")

My comment: there is no need to reda the rest of this article.

(2) Schumpeter | Shirt Tales; Robots will help Chinese firms cope with rising wages and the trade war.

Quote:

"the PYE stores in China * * * The name PYE 派, the brand enthuses, 'combine the Chinese character for flair with its homonym, the mathematical constant π.' Its white shirts are named, unfashionably, after mathematicians; Euclid 歐幾里得 and Newton 牛頓 for ones with a western collar [also: 高斯, 坎托 Immanuel Kant, 斐波那契 Fibonacci (c 1170 – c 1250; Republic of Pisa)], Zu [祖沖之 (南北朝)] and Liu [劉徽, 漢三國時代數學家] for Mao-like Mandarin ones [also: 沈括 (北宋)].

"Esquel [Group: 1978- ; based in Hong Kong; private; 'manufacturing facilities located in China, Malaysia, Mauritius, Sri Lanka and Vietnam": Esquel's website] 溢達集團, owner of PYE and a big shirtmaker for Hugo Boss, Tommy Hilfiger and other global brands, is not just serious about its shirts. It is also concerned with the upward mobility if its 56,000-odd employees, half of whom work in factories in China.

"Walk through Esquel's biggest factory in Foshan * * * the hundreds of workers sitting, heads down * * * They are also outnumbered by machines. On some lines, robotic arms swish, trimming collar bottoms and pressing plackets. The devices do gofflu jobs like making sure that tiny pearl-coloured buttons for Banana Republic have the word Banana on the top. Israeli cameras, adapted from military devices, use artificial intelligence to scan for flaws in the fabric, automating one of the most mind-numbing of jobs.

My comment:
(a) 我們的故事.
http://www.pyeshirts.com/tc/our-story/
(b) In the entire Web, "trimming collar bottoms" is found only in this article. Americans are unfamiliar with "collar bottoms." But look for "bottom of collar" and you will find a lot: ""Shirt Length (rear [or backside], bottom of collar to bottom of Shirt)."
(c)
(i) "In modern usage, the term placket often refers to the double layers of fabric that hold the buttons and buttonholes in a shirt. Plackets can also be found at the neckline of a shirt, the cuff of a sleeve, or at the waist of a skirt or pair of trousers."  en.wikipedia.org for placket.
(ii) Types of Plackets in Clothing. Clothing Industry, undated
https://clothingindustry.blogspo ... ckets-clothing.html
(top illustration)
(d) fiddly (adj): "British informal complicated or detailed and awkward to do or use  <replacing the battery is fiddly>"
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fiddly
(e) Despite enthusiasm of the author (about robotics in shirt making and in China's use of them), I am pessimistic (about robotics in clothing -- making or folding). The last quotation lists what robotics can do presently, which seems little to me. There is no need to read the rest.

(3) history of India and China from the perspective of water:

Water in Asia | After the Floods.
https://www.economist.com/books- ... -in-india-and-china
(book review on Sunil Amrith, Unruly Waters; How rains, rivers, coasts, and seas have shaped Asia's history. Basic Books, 2018)

Quote:

"ON THE LAST day of 1956 Jawaharlal Nehru, first prime minister of an independent India, took Zhou Enlai, his Chinese counterpart, to visit the Bhakra dam, on the Sutlej river in the north of the country.

"As Sunil Amrith notes in his enthralling, elegantly written and, ultimately, profoundly alarming history, nowhere 'has the search for water shaped or sustained as much human life as in India and China.' Between them they have perhaps 36% of the world's population, but just 11% of its freshwater—and, in both countries it is distributed hugely unevenly. Their hydraulic priorities have differed: 'India's great need was irrigation; China's was flood control.” But their approaches have had much in common: the massive investment of labour, capital and technology * * * Mr Amrith concentrates mainly on India, using China for comparison and contrast. He notes that more than 40m people in India have been displaced by dam-building.

"Thanks to the most expensive infrastructure project the world has ever seen, two-thirds of Beijing's tap-water now comes from a reservoir in central China, nearly 1,500km (930 miles) away.

"And both countries have sucked ever increasing volumes of water from underground. The Green revolution in India, which, in the 1970s, transformed its ability to feed itself, relied on electric tube wells. Groundwater now accounts for 60% of India's irrigated area * * * And India, after the repeated drought-induced famines inflicted by British rule, and its dependence on food aid into the 1960s, has become a big agricultural exporter.

Note:
(a) Bhakra Dam
ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakra_Dam

In this Web page, click Sutlej River. In the new Wiki page (for the river) you will find a map which labels "Satluj River" on the eastern side of Indus river, atop "New Delhi."
(b) tube well  ("a type of water well in which a long, 100–200 millimetres (3.9–7.9 in)-wide, stainless steel tube or pipe is bored into an underground aquifer. The lower end is fitted with a strainer, and a pump lifts water")  en.wikipedia.org for "tube well."