Just Trolling along
Nice satirical poster at a London bus stop.
Quote of the Day
”In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
- Charles Mackay (in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds)
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Beethoven | String Quartet in A Major, Menuetto | Avalon Quartet
Long Read of the Day
The Three Types of Money Behind Silicon Valley’s Rise to Dominance
Illuminating essay by Dave Karpf, who’s a very sharp observer of the tech industry.
Sample:
A company’s stock is, in theory, supposed to reflect its underlying fundamentals. There is meant to be a direct relationship between the company’s current profits, its potential for future profits, and its stock price.
Nearly 90 years ago, John Maynard Keynes raised questions about whether this was actually the case. In his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), Keynes described the stock market as more akin to a beauty contest where each judge was encouraged, instead of selecting the most beautiful contest, to pick which contest the other judges were likely to select. This concept has been referred to ever since as a “Keynesian beauty contest.”
In modern parlance, we might describe a Keynesian beauty contest as vibes-based.
Tesla stock soared after Donald Trump’s November victory, not because a Trump win presaged a surge in Tesla sales, but because LolElonJustWonThePresidency. The Elon-vibes were immaculate. Tesla’s stock, today, stands at 311.47/share. That makes it nearly a trillion dollar company, with a price-to-earnings ratio of 152.69. Tesla’s last few quarterly earnings reports have been abysmal, by the way. The company keeps missing its sales targets. And that was before Elon made the brand unbelievably toxic among the segments of the public most likely to purchase an electric car.
I really like his observation that inside every tech company there are really two businesses: the actual business of creating the product or service; and the imaginary business of “building the future”.
The entire piece is worth your time IMO.
Books, etc.
I’m reading this dutifully but without much enjoyment, perhaps because I dislike most of the people who appear in the story. But if you write about the tech industry, that’s a cross you have to bear. Sigh.
My commonplace booklet
In the February 11 edition, the picture of the day was a photograph of the portico of the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge that I had snatched one evening on my way to a college dinner. My interest had been piqued by the illuminated lines from a poem with which I was unfamiliar.
Various readers came to my aid. The first was Kevin Cryan, who wrote to explain that the poem was “Waiting for the Barbarians” by Constantine P. Cavafy.
Last Sunday, I discovered that Andrew Curry had picked up on the image and then proceeded to add more value — as he always manages to do on his terrific blog.
Cavafy was writing just as the forms of the modern European nation state were starting to harden, as the technologies of bureaucracy were being put in place, as states started to insist on travel documents such as passports to cross boundaries.
One of the things the nation state tends to do is to “other” strangers. It is a familiar political strategy. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, published in 1902, captures contemporaneously the sense of this in London.
The great point of the poem, Andrew explained, is that the barbarians never show up. Worse still, they are a completely fictional construct.
In other words, as metaphors go, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ is a poem that stalks the 20th and 21st centuries, It has had a long cultural afterlife, in particular from the later part of the 20th century, when Cavafy’s work was popularised.”
And of course Donald Trump has long traded on the fiction that he was going to build a wall that would keep them out.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Lynk hybrid with 200km electric range.
Interesting arrival. Launching in Europe at a price of Euro 52k. Should eliminate range anxiety for most drivers. Wonder if it’ll be available in the UK. And how long it will take Toyota & Co to catch up.
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