Author: @micazev

  • Routines? No, thank you.

    Routines? No, thank you.

    How to create rewards and narratives to master your habits beyond simple robotic routines 🤖

    One more week on the calendar, and you realize you haven’t been working out as much as you’d like? 😅

    It would be great if you could automatically put on your gym clothes and go to training without thinking twice 🏋️‍♀️ but your head keeps making up a thousand excuses to postpone exercising, right?

    This internal struggle is common, even professional athletes report thinking “I don’t want to train today” — and go anyway. 💪

    Photo by Jordan Opel on Unsplash

    Even worse is when you go a long time without exercising. Resuming can be horrible — the body aches, the perspiration is intense, the heart is racing… 😓💦💔

    Creating a habit is getting through the first moment of awkwardness.

    This initial stage can last for days, months or even years.

    Establishing a habit involves consciously repeating something over and over again until memory recognizes that, after suffering, there is a worthwhile reward. 🔄🏆

    So exercising goes from being just a habit or routine, to becoming a ritual. 🧙‍♀️✨

    Habits and Routines

    You’ve probably heard of the books “The Power of Habit” and “Atomic Habits”. Let’s recap the three essential components of a habit:

    1. Trigger
    2. Routine
    3. Reward

    In the example of the gym, the trigger for going to work out could be a motivating playlist 🎶, leaving your gym clothes in a visible place 👕, or asking a friend to remind you. 📅

    We’ll see more about routine and reward below later on.

    The Hook Model

    Large companies build habits for both employees and consumers, making their products and services part of everyone’s daily lives.

    To do this, they generally use the hook model, which involves four phases:

    Trigger: The starting point that prompts a behavior, an external stimulus such as emails or notifications that direct specific actions. 🔥 The purpose of the trigger is to instigate a simple run action.

    Action: The user responds to the trigger by performing a known, simple task and then receives a reward for doing so. The simplicity of the action combined with the motivational drive plays a crucial role and facilitates the formation of this initial habit of the process. ✅🚀

    Variable Reward: After the person performs the action, for example, clicking on a link, the reward that follows is variable. This unpredictability releases dopamine in the brain, making the hook cycle more addictive. This principle is common in slot machines and lottery games. 🎰🤑

    Investment: Let’s assume that the user has registered on the site, dedicating time and effort to enter their information there. This process establishes more solid ties with the company and increases the probability of repeating the engagement cycle, that is, going back there to see the profile, buy from the website, etc. Other investment examples are:

    create favorites lists,

    meet the store owner,

    close an annual plan,

    have friends who go there,

    follow famous people on a network,

    learn new features of that platform… 💼📈

    Note that it is similar to the trigger-system-reward system that we saw in the previous topic, but the unpredictability factor makes the method a little more powerful, so much so that it can make us addicted to bad habits for ourselves, as Fumio Sasaki reminds us:

    “People who are encouraged by companies to work too hard may feel euphoria from self-sacrifice, working too hard is recognized by their peers, so their pain is its own reward (social approval). Even if they want to get out of that situation, it can be hard to isolate yourself from the corporate community.”

    An easier way to create a new habit is to tie it to an existing one, creating a logical sequence of actions, as if it were a cake recipe.

    Habit stacking

    For example, whenever I make coffee, I’ll wash the dishes while the water runs out, then I’ll sit in the armchair — and leave a book there for me to read 10 pages — while I drink coffee. ☕📖

    Gradually, these routines can evolve into ingrained habits in your daily life — even more so if they include addictive substances, such as coffee or cigarettes, which is also why it is difficult to break bad habits. 🚫🚬

    Rituals

    Rituals are meaningful practices charged with purpose and intention.

    While routines are daily tasks that require conscious effort to maintain, rituals go beyond the mere completion of activities, they have greater meaning even when dealing with simple activities.

    Here are some examples:

    Cooking for the week, even just for you, can have a sense of community and service if you consider that each experience in the kitchen hones your cooking skills, allowing you to better serve your loved ones when you cook for them. 🍳👨‍🍳

    The task of cleaning the house can transcend the action itself, turn into a moment of meditation or a ritual of internal and external purification if, for example, you commit to maintaining mindfulness and focusing on your ownBreathe throughout the cleansing process, breaking up stray mental patterns and providing mental clarity. 🏠🧘‍♀️

    Going to the gym can turn into another act of service if you think of physical exercise as a means of strengthening your muscles, allowing you to become a stronger, healthier person to care for children and the elderly. 🏋️‍♂️👶👵

    Rituals are intrinsically linked to your sense of identity.

    This special link facilitates the formation of rituals, as we can see with followers of religions, people who see themselves as part of a country or school, for example, they see a relationship to doing certain activities with the group they belong to. 🙏 👥

    No activity is special in itself or exclusive to a particular type or group of people. However, they gain this status when we build positive narratives around them. 🌟

    Building a Custom Strategy — and Testing

    By understanding the difference between habits, routines, and rituals, you are empowered to strategize and experiment with different approaches to incorporating habits into your life. This is similar to how companies test various strategies to build customer and employee loyalty. Here are examples for each concept we saw earlier:

    Trigger: Set alarms for your desired activities and add unique ringtones to each one, creating a unique call to action.

    Simple action: After the trigger, go do something simple, like drink a glass of water, wash your face, pet your pet, write a sentence of gratitude…

    Unpredictability:

    • on the task: Write down different types of physical exercises on small pieces of paper. Fold them and place them in a pot. After completing your simple action, grab a paper and go to training 💪
    • on the reward: Still using the idea of the jar with pieces of paper, write rewards, after performing a task, choose one.

    Investment: Call people to go to the same gym as you or commit to making a bond at the gym — with the receptionist or with the teachers — so you increase your bond with that place.

    When something becomes a habit, it’s like we teach our mind to like a new reward. Sometimes we prefer things that give us quick satisfaction over waiting for something better in the future. It makes us avoid challenges and choose easy things.

    Things that look cool will never go away.

    Creating rituals is a journey to educate the brain to recognize that it’s not just a promise: the reward will SURELY come.

    For this to happen, we need to repeat the activity many times, which strengthens the connections of synapses in our brain. Gradually, the brain records the information: there are bigger rewards ahead. Thus, activities of immediate pleasure lose their fun, little by little.

    Now is the time to act. Identify the habits you want to cultivate and routines worthy of turning into rituals ✨

    Finally, I leave you with a quote from Murakami in his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

    Certain processes do not admit variations. If you need to be part of the process, just transform — or perhaps distort — yourself through constant repetition, making the process a part of your own personality.

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  • 80sqm house renovation

    80sqm house renovation

    In 2021, my boyfriend and I embarked on a thrilling renovation journey, our soon-to-be new home, an 80-square-meter, almost 100 year old, two-story house close to the city center of we both hail from, SãoPaulo. After +6 months, we start seeing the results…

    Kitchen

    One of our first challenges was to brighten up the kitchen, which was previously separated from the laundry area, casting shadows over this vital space, so we opened up the layout to invite the light in.

    We chose a terrazzo floor for the kitchen, drawing inspiration from the original staircase but introducing geometric patterns and a mix of colors to achieve a more contemporary and stylish aesthetic.

    Here are the highlighted items:

    • The Italian stove on the kitchen island (Amazon link for similar).
    • The very Brazilian clay water filter on the counter (Amazon link).
    • The linear terracotta-colored ceiling lamp, so beautiful (Amazon link, but it’s from Rekka).
    • The handy washer-dryer (Amazon link).
    • And our super-analog microwave, without buttons and screens (Amazon link) – as a statement! Because I always say that using printers, connecting to the car’s Bluetooth sound system, and setting the microwave clock are the most challenging things in today’s technology 😅

    Living Room

    Our commitment to preserving the house’s authentic character led us to a few essential restoration projects. We lovingly restored the original hardwood floors, hidden beneath a worn-out vinyl cover, giving them a new lease on life.  (I’ve been repeating myself for years, but I just love this type of flooring. 😂)

    Home Office

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  • How did we become people who buy something every day?

    How did we become people who buy something every day?

    With the infinity of content on the internet, isn’t it strange that we spend so much time looking at products for sale?

    Why is it more common to make a list of products we’ll never buy than of the works of art we love the most? We spend hours and days looking at trinkets:

    we add them to the cart,

    favorite them,

    save them for later purchases…

    how did we get here?

    The act of buying has drastically transformed over the last two centuries: what was once for survival or products to simplify daily activities has evolved into an anxious compulsion that permeates all areas of our lives and transforms everything from how we have sex to how we think and build our cities.

    We live in a global hyper-consumerist culture:

    • Driven by marketing,
    • Funded by large corporations, and
    • Based on individualism.

    This triad has proven to be a catalytic force for social abysses in marginal economies, like Brazil’s, and has been a recurring theme among influential thinkers since the late 19th century.

    In 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen published “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” where he observed that consumption is a new form of socialization and morality, as well as a social differentiator, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu also wrote in his book “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,” in the mid-20th century.

    More than a hundred years after Veblen, philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky was able to create his own timeline for the issue of consumption and what he and his contemporary Zygmunt Bauman (philosopher and sociologist) called the culture of hyper-consumption.

    According to Lipovetsky’s periodization in his book “Paradoxical Happiness,” published in 2006, there are three stages of consumer capitalism:

    Democratization of desire

    The first stage, from 1880 to World War II, is characterized by what the author calls the “democratization of desire.”

    During this time, electrically powered technologies forever changed the way we communicate and move.

    Productivity began to generate surplus, and new forms of distribution for these goods were created, such as department stores.

    Going to department stores became a fun way to pass the time. People still had the habit of saving leftover salary, but it was exciting to discover new things.

    Increase in productivity

    In the second phase, between 1950 and 1970, new Taylorist and Fordist production methodologies brought changes in the way we work and think about time, which began to be measured by the clock. ⏱

    During this time, the saying “time is money” became popular. In addition, the first forms of planned obsolescence appeared when producers created less durable products to increase sales.

    These years were marked by the second industrial revolution and production at full speed. However, people needed to be convinced to buy. According to the author, in the early 1960s, advertising gained more space and an American family was impacted by about 1500 messages a day.

    From the 1970s onwards, the philosopher identified the third and final phase of hyperconsumerism. Elements such as mass marketing, optimized production and planned obsolescence are common practices in the industry and widely discussed in academia.

    In the beginning, marketing instigated the purchase of products so that people could show that they belonged to a nobler social class (which Bourdieu brings extensively in his study of cultural capital as class representation). Now, consumption is no longer about socially differentiating yourself, but about experiencing something individually.

    The pillars of the hyperconsumer tripod: marketing, promoting individualism, were very well seen in these three phases mentioned above, but I would like to point out better how these two pillars are financed by the third, the large corporations.

    A clear example of this collaboration is the real estate market: until the Second World War, few owned their homes, there was not a large luxury market around the real estate market, but as Bauman puts it in his work “Consuming life” in 2007, consumerism has become part of our social agreement and has expanded into all areas of life, including living, which has also moved from consumption to hyperconsumption.

    Differentiated mortgage loans appeared for government employees and larger companies, so-called “white and blue collar” employees who could now buy their own homes. Today this practice is already common and institutionalized, today employees of large companies have special credits in various sectors.

    In summary, over the last hundred years we have seen a gradual increase in the consumption of goods, but none of this has happened “naturally” and Lipovetsky has given us a good starting point to better understand this reality: “When competition struggles are not more the cornerstone of mercantile acquisitions, the civilization of hyperconsumption begins”.

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  • notas sobre o livro da brigitte vasallo “piensamento monógamo — terror poliamoroso”: não monogamia e reconhecimento

    notas sobre o livro da brigitte vasallo “piensamento monógamo — terror poliamoroso”: não monogamia e reconhecimento

    O casal monogamico não é necessariamente definido pela exclusividade sexual, muitos continuam juntos apesar de traições… o mais importante é a hierarquia entre o casal e os outros amantes (amizades, familia etc): apenas uma pessoa é considerada legitima. Há constante competição para alcançar e conservar o “núcleo casal”.

    No entanto, mesmo com a pretensão da segurança e eternidade desses relacionamentos, hoje temos monogamias consecutivas (namoros e casamentos curtos) que deixam pra trás muitos cadáveres afetivos e quebra total de relacionamentos em rede.

    • Assim como outros sistemas de controle, a monogamia tambem costuma ser justificada como “natural”, mesmo quando no resto do reino animal não exista como categorizar seres sempre estritamente monogamicos.

    A questão do genero binario vem junto no pacote, mas temos diversos casos, como dos amerindios (EUA) em que as comunidades validavam, pelo menos, 5 tipos de generos diferentes em seu grupo. Brigitte também comenta que muitas especies tem individuos que trocam de sexualidade de acordo com a necessidade social do bando.

    • O sistema monogamico foi se formando juntamente com o cercamento de terras, controle populacional… a igreja, que já teve ritos iniciaticos de sexo grupal para gerar maior coesão de grupo, passa a perseguir essas práticas e usar seu poder para fortificar o imaginário da família heterosexual patriarcal.

    ✨ No seculo XX já não temos memória de outras possibilidades.

    • Hoje a positivação da exclusividade esta relacionada com os mecanismos do consumo e da publicidade: Produtos exclusivos, férias exclusivas, clubes exclusivos, diplomas exclusivos, bairros exclusivos, assentos exclusivos… o que não passa de propagandas para produtos efêmeros, como também acabam sendo os relacionamentos.
    Photo by Francesco Labita on Unsplash

    O tabú da fidelidade, encobre algo maior e mais importante que são a responsabilidade ou a co-responsabilidade, o compromisso ou a interdependência em comunidade… O medo da solidão atual não é apenas sobre não ter redes, há pessoas que estão sós no abismo de nossas vidas contemporâneas, não porque não tem companhia, mas porque ninguém se preocupa com elas.

    Brigitte acredita que é possível fazer da nossa experiência amorosa coletiva uma ferramenta de transformação política, que distribui os direitos e deveres de forma mais equitativa do que a formação jurídica e reprodutiva da “família tradicional”, essa que não necessariamente forma vínculos de comunidade, mas sim torna facilmente identificável quem pertence a quem, inclusive no quesito de privilégios hereditários ou no que diz respeito às nacionalidades…

    • Ela alerta, porém, que romper esse vínculo sexo-afetivo sem abrir outras perspectivas comunitárias também é aventurar-se a solidão que é real no território de desemparo que habitamos de indiferença generalizada…

    Na relação poliamorosa, todas as partes se conhecem, sabem da existência umas das outras, por outro lado as redes afetivas não se conformam com o conhecer mas em construir reconhecimento, coletivizando os prazeres e também as dores, tendo o reconhecimento como base da possibilidade de existência comum. Afinal, quando um dos afetos conhece a outra parte, mas não reconhece sua implicação na rede, a rede não existe, só existem
    fragmentos..

    • Por outro lado, ela reconhece que estamos caminhando para uma sociedade cada vez mais individualizada e ainda androcentrica (pautada no patriarcado, como no caso da ficção das fotos e vídeos de mulheres feitas para “servir” O prazer de “um” só homem) pautada no desenvolvimento de tecnologias que tornam até mesmo o prazer em algo virtual, nos afastando cada vez mais da real intimidade e vulnerabilidade do afeto, nos aproximando cada vez mais de um sistema altamente controlador, cada vez mais preditivo e opressor, transformando até mesmo nosso prazer em algo limitado e mecânico.

    Brigitte Vasallo é uma escritora espanhola conhecida especialmente por sua crítica da islamofobia de género, a denúncia do purplewashinge o homonacionalismo, bem como por sua defesa do poliamor nas relações afetivas. (fonte: wikipedia)

    Segue o link para o livro: piensamento monógamo — terror poliamoroso

  • how did American urban policies ruined Brazilian cities?

    how did American urban policies ruined Brazilian cities?

    Rich neighborhoods very well delimited and far from the poorest, several subcenters that don’t talk to each other, have you ever had the impression that visiting São Paulo is like visiting many different cities?

    The city has a disjointed and segregated formation, mainly the result of the adoption of foreign urban public policies, instead of having created our own policies based on our existing reality.

    These policies were driven by foreign capital and were practices that created the financialization of land in other countries, forming a more complex real estate market.

    As the policies prioritized the profit of some agents and not the better socialization of the population, as a consequence, there was the breakdown of community life, the super individualization of lives, the difficulty for all classes to connect, among other hallmarks of the capitalist system and hyperconsumption.

    Even knowing that these policies generated social problems, the Basic Urban Plan (PUB), prepared in 1969 by a consortium between two Brazilian and two North American companies, included among its elements the same American practices that were sold as innovative measures to stimulate the urban development through subcenters.

    Instead of enriching and strengthening the existing infrastructure in the city, new centers were artificially created, not because the population indicated this need, but to create spaces where new investors, mainly foreigners, could operate.

    One of the emblematic cases was the corporate and financial center, which was previously located on Avenida Paulista and was driven by developers to be dispersed and built from scratch on the banks of the Pinheiros River.
    In her Ph. adequate housing and relocation for these people.

    book sao paulo cidade global click to buy the book

    This process is very similar to the zoning that expelled the poor from New York City in the 1920s: when the number of people in the city increased significantly, it forced different social classes to live very close to each other. Middle-class people, who had access to industrialized consumer goods, now no longer wanted contact with millions of poor and indigent people.

    This started the process of gentrification or ennoblement of urban areas, done through higher taxation or definition of uses for each area, among other zoning tools that make it illegal or very expensive for the poor to be in certain districts of the city, these mechanisms bureaucratic led to the expropriation of the tenements and the poor were induced or forced to leave the centers and live in distant housing complexes or found other ways of (over)living by themselves, sometimes with access to mass transportation, the subway.

    Left: “Should we save New York?” Announcement, New York Times, March 5, 1916 Right: Final Report, June 2, 1916, Commission on Building Districts and Restrictions (fonte)

    These urban decentralizing tendencies are considered by the sociologist Bauman — precursor of the concept of liquid modernity and who also thinks about urbanity in this key — as strategies that aim, purposefully, at the segregation and disintegration of community life, since coexistence in the city starts to depend on the Mobility and Time, two luxuries.

    Thus, the city entered the 20th century. With the increase in wealth, there was a search for the materialization of comfort in the territory through demolitions, requalifications, landscaping and adequacy of spaces for transport.

    Rectification of the Pinheiros River — fonte

    On the other hand, part of the wealthy portion decided to move away from the centers and it is also at this time that the suburbs appeared: neighborhoods further away from the city center, but for richer people, generally composed of houses with a garden.

    the suburb

    In the United States, the pioneering city in this model was Los Angeles, described by Peter Hall as “the city by the side of the highway”, because the suburban neighborhoods were built where the ranches by the side of the road used to be. Those cheap, devalued lands were bought at a bargain price, separated into lots and sold as special, peaceful spaces for family homes.

    That is, ranches adjacent to the city were intentionally purchased for real estate speculation. This decentralization model became a great opportunity for developers, it was a life project to be sold to the middle class public.

    Around here, more than 50 years later, we copied the model: the Alphaville region was formerly land of traditional and wealthy families in São Paulo, but inhabited by a hundred small producers, the region began to be expropriated and divided into lots from the 1960s onwards. 50 and was launched as a product, a new concept in housing, in the early 70’s.

    Alphaville from scratch— fonte

    It didn’t happen that the rich naturally went there, the plan was ingenious to build a new independent urban core: there was a plan to induce people to actually live in these neighborhoods, the condominiums imposed strict rules for building permanent residences to prevent subdivisions become just vacation homes.

    To attract these residents, advertisements made appeals such as “Verteville 4 — in Alphaville -, real solutions to current problems” or, as the psychoanalyst Dunker brings in his book on Alphaville “Mal-Estar, Suffering and Symptom: A psychopathology of Brazil between walls”, condominium advertisements are even more explicit: “Vila das Mercês. The right not to be disturbed”.

    At the time, articles for the newspaper Estadão, Alphaville is stated as a neighborhood that overcomes the “embarrassment” of the chaos of the city, among other speeches similar to those of the promises in Los Angeles in the 20s-30s, condominiums that would be the “construction of authentic communities”, an oasis of collaboration, protected by private security.

    It is not known, however, where such high expectations of advertisements came from, as the housing model in suburbs had not worked in Los Angeles, which suffered impacts as early as 1920.

    In his book “City of Quartz”, Mike Davis discusses the decline of the city with the decline of commerce in pre-highway areas, the segregation of recreational facilities, the closing of community centers and the increase in street violence.

    Here in Alphaville, the consequences can be clearly seen in the documentary “from the inside of the wall”:

    In his book “Confidence and fear in the city”, Bauman defends the need for an urbanization that creates communities without walls, even though it is known that this urban integration is a permanent clash, an eternal struggle of interests.

    Didn’t the propaganda say the poor were going to stay away?

    In the decades following these decentralization movements in the city of São Paulo, social differentiation in became increasingly evident due to the location where people transit, mainly due to the relationship with individual purchasing power, which brought striking consequences for Brazilian society.

    In 2001, Alphaville received an additional barrier with the inauguration of the first toll booth in the region, located on the Castelo Branco Highway, a few kilometers from the neighborhood.

    This measure was met with criticism, because residents of neighboring cities had waited a long time for a faster route to go to São Paulo and, now that it was available, they could not use it due to the high abusive amount charged in tolls, which only thought of profiting from on top of the rich in Alphaville or, in a double movement, push the poor from that neighborhood even further away.

    In São Paulo, we saw social segregation intensify, as with private security, walls and electric fences monitored by cameras and other new technologies.

    Photo by Guilherme Madaleno on Unsplash

    In 2008 the mechanisms were even more subtle and far-fetched, when, at the inauguration of Shopping Cidade Jardim, the city was faced with a novelty: there was no entrance for pedestrians, to avoid those who did not have cars and, moreover, there was no square food at the mall.

    Two years later, between 2010 and 2011, residents of the wealthy Higienópolis neighborhood, with less than 5,000 inhabitants, opposed the construction of the subway line in the region, as they believed that this would bring “unwanted people”.

    A resident of the neighborhood said, in an interview, that they were “different people”. The dispute for the territories materializes a few weeks later, in response, hundreds of people came together via the internet to hold a barbecue as a protest against the segregationist stance of some residents of the neighborhood, known as “Churrasco da Gente Diferenciada”.

    In 2014, the issue related to the low-income population’s access to shopping centers was again highlighted in the media with the well-known “rolezinhos”. In them, low-income young people agreed to go in groups to the most expensive malls in the city, where before they were usually expelled when they went alone, separately. At the time, a well-known columnist ended up highlighting even more the prejudices rooted in society, saying that these young people were “incapable of recognizing their limitation and were jealous of wealthy youth, wealth and educated people”.

    In 2019, another criticism surfaced when a famous person said that the airport was becoming a bus station, shamelessly exposing that he considered the clothes and mannerisms of the poorest people inappropriate for environments that until then were only frequented by the richest, like the airport.

    Cologne 2.0

    It is clear that many of these class conflicts are just a continuation of a society with a history of slavery, where the separation between the main house and the slave quarters becomes even more refined. Added to this, we have a scenario of globalization that induces the continuation of Brazilian submission to stronger economies, keeping the country in a position of colony, but with more refined economic-cultural-political mechanisms as well.

    At the beginning of the 20th century, Brazil quickly entered the industrialized international market. However, during the second industrial revolution, countries like the United States and Germany invested heavily in research that generated new, more refined production technologies, increasing international competitiveness. Economist Wilson Cano argues that, at that time, the investment needed for Brazil to reach international levels in new technologies and scale of production was greater than what the Brazilian state could organize.

    Foreign capital then enters under the pretext of modernizing what already existed and industrial policies are open to this, leading to the dismantling of various sectors, opening up even more space for foreign capital to denationalize the financial system. This scenario made it impossible for Brazil to become an independent neoliberal country.

    In this scenario, São Paulo, the corporate capital of the country, seeks to become a modern and attractive city for investments by foreign companies, which come to “replace” the now obsolete and outdated Brazilian industry.

    For this, it adopts public urban planning policies in the United States, such as “cities for cars” and “zoning plan”. This dynamizes capital and complicates the real estate market, still incipient in the city.

    As a consequence, we observe an increase in the physical distance between those who can and cannot buy, live and visit areas of the city. The land, the territory and the city, now, are no longer places for coexistence, but products to be bought and financed by foreign capital.

    None of this came as a surprise, as the US land planning models implemented did not promote socializing and community, but opened up a huge market for real estate developers. By bringing these models to Brazil, the side effects of such policies had been known for decades, but the weak economy made the dispute between foreign capital and state power unfair.