This post will be light on commentary. I'd just like to share that, today, I created a Hans Wilsdorf artificial intelligence bot on Character.ai. Full disclosure: I have no relationship to this startup, I just did this out of curiousity. I imagined that a few people might enjoy a chat with Hansbot. The tech behind this was developed by two Googlers who worked on the company's natural language processing model.
To give you some sense of how it works, I'm sharing a few screenshots of my first conversation with Hansbot. You can find my second conversation with Hansbot at the link here. I began by asking Hansbot about his favorite watch (it got cut off in the screenshots).
My book on the history of Rolex marketing is now available on Amazon! It debuted as the #1 New Release in its category. You can find it here.
My family and I have a tradition when we visit the beach. We search for sea glass. When jagged and sharp shards of broken glass land in the ocean the constant sluicing of sand changes them. Over decades or more the edges soften. Clear glass becomes cloudy. Given enough time the entire shape of the glass can morph, from rectangular to ovoid. Each piece of sea glass is inherently unique due to imperceptibly small forces which slowly accumulate, resulting in major changes. We know this is also true of vintage timepieces. After decades lume changes in hue. Dial faces crack, craze and fade. An object which was often mass produced consequently becomes a “pièce unique.” Watches are engineered to accurately and unchangeably mark the passage of time. We love and value vintage watches for the fact that they are altered by time itself. The story I offer here underwent similar changes. It began as an effort to understand more about an unfinished chapter in the history of Rolex. It b
I applaud the effort by watch manufacturers to minimize their contributions to climate change. Globally, we've made some progress towards "bending the curve" of greenhouse gas emissions, which is the good news. This figure from climateactiontracker.org shows that, even under an optimistic scenario, some increase in global temperatures is unavoidable. The bad news is that we clearly need to do a whole lot more to get to a point where we halt the growing cost of environmental degradation. As the graph I've presented here shows, existing policies are not enough to ensure a healthy planet for our children, their children, and all future generations. As Elizabeth Doer's outstanding coverage on Quill and Pad shows, the watch industry is discussing the challenges ahead and developing contributions to the fight against climate change. These include the use of recycled and recovered materials in manufacturing as well as requiring transparency in how raw materials are
I've read a variety of reports and commentators suggesting that, unlike the majority of businesses, the watch industry may be immune to economic downturns. The analysis of economic cycles is a specialized field and it is very tricky to assess how particular industries are impacted by fluctuations. Most of the claims I've heard about the business cycle and the watch industry could benefit from more careful inspection, so I'll try to do that here. I decided to use methodology that represents a solid "starting point" when it comes to business cycle analysis. The impact of a recession on any industry is not easily or casually measured, for reasons I will describe below. The TLDR on this is that the modern watch industry is not immune from the business cycle when we use generally accepted notions of what a business cycle represents. However, there are things that do reduce the impact of economic fluctuations on the industry: watch brands have partial immunity. I
Comments
Post a Comment