What's this? Come on... what is it fuckers? Knew I should have gone into teaching.
It's a fit-for-century store, courtesy of DJI in Shenzen, who literally own the global drone market and if you want a better way of demonstrating how whole industries can be lifted from the US and used to advantage in China then this would be it. For the guy who started it all ~ and I recall reading about it first flying out of Shanghai where I recall trying to get in touch ~ was infused with Western values having I'm almost certain been brought up in Hong Kong listening to Led Zeppelin.
And that's why this looks like it does, why it's very obviously a showcase for a firm called Hasselblad that grew out of Germany, and why like Apple it is designed to be seamless in what it does: it's not about the drones, it's what you can do with them.
And in a world dominated by self-reflection, entertainment and the visual arts, it is what they can do for that. For in a nutshell, it's the Apple of flight and demonstrates what can be done when Western vision is allied with Eastern persistence, teamwork and let's face it... hard work. For when that Chinese foreign minister said Europeans were lazy, he weren't wrong. Although in my defence am drafting this at 04:20 a.m.
Here's a for inst for you. The world currently revolves around a firm in Taiwan that had the vision to imagine chips with transistors smaller than had ever been thought possible ~ a vision in which investors in the US, who've elevated short-termism into an art, refused to buy into. Instead, a European firm in the form of Phillips did so.
What it meant eventually was chips designed in Taiwan built by a machine shipped from Holland would come to dominate the emergent field of AI, it being the spade behind the digging for the ore that produces the gold. It would succeed to an extent that it was viewed to be in the strategic interest of the US to base such 'fabs' (or at least one of) in the US.
And here's the thing. The guy said it wouldn't work because (a) Westerners would double the cost of any such venture and (b) wouldn't get out of bed at 02:00 a.m. to fix it as they would in China, or at least a place that let's face it will one day be a part of it. Am I wrong? Or more importantly, was he? For what the world is waking up to is the fact that both the US and the UK in a Lego way have economies which on the strength of past glories and running up a credit card bill since around 1970.
I'd love to think we can all make it great again, but we'd be the first civilisation ever to have reversed its natural trajectory. If I were a betting man, I'd say nuclear war was altogether a more obvious outcome?
But let's not dwell on that, for what prompts all of this is spending an afternoon in which I again tried to get a Futaba transmitter to communicate with a Flame speed controller and from thence to a T-motor motor with even less success than last time I tried.
And then it dawned on me. The state of RC modelling is what Windows was around the time Apple too was coming into being. Like a PC you had to open up and switch circuit boards in, instead of a Mac that you had only to switch on. In a sentence, the PC and its software was designed by nerds for nerds, much like most RC equipment until a Steve Jobs emerged from Hong Kong, took the Chinese passport at such time as he had to choose and then set up a stall in Shenzen. Were once I night-stopped.
So from all of this and despite nearly taking a lump hammer to all three pieces of equipment ~ and the way things will pan out it would not make much difference if I had of done ~ I've drawn conclusions.
But those will have to wait for another day, as now I've got to go and drive a truck.
Malcolm McLaren, who managed the Sex Pistols and was behind a punk-rock culture that spread worldwide, was told at school that he would inevitably fail but should do so spectacularly... and it's what we in the West should do.
