TIL: mobile commerce in China

In 2016, Chinese spent more than $5 trillion using their phones -- more than 50 times as much as in the U.S., according to one estimate.

Chinese spend roughly 30 percent of their smartphone time using WeChat, not just messaging one another but ordering taxis, exchanging business information, storing loyalty points for retailers. Meanwhile, Alibaba cornered 60 percent of the e-commerce market in 2016 and well above 50 percent in 2017.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-03/maybe-china-can-t-take-over-the-world

Tradeoff of the day

This increase in powers of representation is thus qualified by a positivist disclaimer, by an implicit and generalized footnote that accompanies all scientific work. It states that we know nothing of reality because all we have are models that are constructed by us.

A. Nordmann. Collapse of Distance: Epistemic Strategies of Science and Technoscience. 2006.

Math doesn't have this problem.