📖 reading time: 4m 01s.
fig. 1.
some dublin clouds by artist,
chris judge
.
some dublin clouds by artist,
👋 hi - happy monday.
i thought these clouds would help to brighten your day.
on the agenda this week:
golden arches & €2bn in missing cash.
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📚 word of the week:
“lugubrious”.
mournful, dismal, or gloomy, especially in an affected, exaggerated, or unrelieved manner: lugubrious songs of lost love.
the radio slid from mournful to downright lugubrious. ridiculously lugubrious. there was even sobbing in the background. talk about melodramatic.
- molly macrae, last wool and testament.
🤪 mildly humorous:
outtakes from the twitter-sphere.
🧠 brain candy:
🍟
golden arches
.
there is a distinct change occuring in the fast food epoch as brands try to become a part of our internal lives and thought processes. moving away from the brand mascots and figureheads of yore, we now seeing underpaid interns write on-trend tweets and hamburger brands start beef online.
anthropologist conrad p. kottak wrote in the 1970s of the ‘temporary subordination of individual differences’ that occurred in the fast-growing restaurant chain, breaking ground alongside council chambers, courthouses and churches across american heartlands. ‘by eating at mcdonald’s’ he writes, ‘not only do we communicate that we are hungry, enjoy hamburgers, and have inexpensive tastes but also that we are willing to adhere to a value system and a series of behaviours dictated by an exterior entity’, chiefly the united states. as the world has changed since, however, and flags and crosses have increasingly gone out of fashion, arches remain in place across the landscape, giving no sign of going anywhere.
there is a particular power in selling hyperreality, as russell w. belk describes it, ‘a sanitized version of reality, cleansed of strife, world problems, dirt, prejudice, exploitation, or other problems of everyday life’. while most visible in the foam latex and paint-fume fever dream of a mcdonaldsland commercial, we too see it at work in restaurants around the world; the foreign-familiar of ritualised food practices exported on a global scale. thomas l. friedman teased out a golden arches theory in 1996, claiming that no two countries with a mcdonald’s had waged war against one another since doing so, but belk takes the idea like a bag from a bank and runs with it, writing that ‘with ronald mcdonald leading the way, multinational consumer goods corporations are now breaking down international barriers that have withstood armies, missionaries, crusaders, and politicians of the past’.
👉 read more via meanjin quarterly.
🏦
€2bn in cash, missing
.
wirecard, which is based in a munich suburb, processes tens of billions of euros in credit and debit transactions each year. just last week, they admitted that there is “a prevailing likelihood that the bank trust account balances in the amount of €1.9 billion ($2.1 billion) do not exist.”
so how can 2 billion euros just disappear? here, the financial times, detail a truly bizarre timelines of events that lead to the announcement of wirecard’s insolvency.
march 2019
the ft reports that half of wirecard’s business is actually outsourced, with the payments processing handled by partners who pay wirecard a commission.
attempting to visit some of these wirecard partners in the philippines, the ft instead discovers a retired seaman and his family, who are bemused to learn that their house is supposedly the site of an international payments business.
wirecard announces it will sue the financial times.
wirecard sues the singapore authorities, challenging the criminal investigation. prosecutors there name five wirecard staff and eight asian subsidiaries of the group as suspects.
april 2019
wirecard announces a €900m injection of cash from softbank, an apparent vote of confidence from a japanese conglomerate known for large tech investments.
on the same day the ft publishes further details of wirecard’s outsourced payments processing. it appears that arrangements with three partner companies in the philippines, singapore and dubai were responsible for most of the group’s worldwide profits. mr braun rubbishes the figures in a press conference, calling them inaccurate.
ernst & young approves the 2018 accounts with minor qualifications relating to singapore, and wirecard announces a dozen new compliance measures.
👉 read more via the financial times.
👂 earworm: tourist.
“you know you’re lost.”
grammy award winning artist, tourist, has a new track. and it’s beautiful.
stream now:
“last” to me, is a reflection on grief. i started this track with james a few years ago, and while writing it we noticed that we were hearing the lyric differently, i was hearing “you know you’re lost” whereas james was hearing “you know you last.” the duality of that truth resonated with me, as both meanings are applicable when someone leaves us. it has struck a more personal chord recently, as recently one of my dearest friends passed away very suddenly.
- tourist.
listen to tourist on spotify or on apple music.
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