Category Archives: Asides

Anybody here an MP and speak English?

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“He has sadly become part of the problem. It is time for him to go”

Jo Swinson, Liberal Democrat MP, on the Speaker of the House of Commons. Quoted in today’s Observer.

Presumably s/he meant to say “Sadly, he has become part of the problem.”

Bah!

Meetings 2.0

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I must be getting old: I find myself agreeing with Steve Ballmer. There’s a terrific interview with him in today’s NYT. I particularly like this bit:

Q. What’s it like to be in a meeting run by Steve Ballmer?

A. I’ve changed that, really in the last couple years. The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call “the long and winding road.” You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion.

That’s kind of the way I used to like to do it, and the way Bill [Gates] used to kind of like to do it. And it seemed like the best way to do it, because if you went to the conclusion first, you’d get: “What about this? Have you thought about this?” So people naturally tried to tell you all the things that supported the decision, and then tell you the decision.

I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore. I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it’s efficient. I get impatient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: “I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.” That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to the recommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.

I’d go further. When I’m Supreme Leader all the chairs will be removed from committee meeting rooms.

The serious point behind Ballmer’s Meetings 2.0 is not so much that it’s efficient (which it is) but that it means that each meeting adds value or moves things on. And, in a way, that’s the whole point of our networked information ecosystem. One can often assume nowadays that anyone who’s prepared to put in a little effort can be as well informed as you are. So the question then becomes: how can s/he or we add value and move us on?

I tried to make this point in my seminar last week at the Reuters Institute in Oxford. I said I was sick and tired of seeing an expensive TV journalist being filmed outside the door of 10 Downing Street telling me stuff that I already know. I want him or her to move the story on, not waste airtime and bandwidth in useless summary or colourful waffle.

The other really interesting point to emerge from the Ballmer interview is that his favourite ‘management’ book is Bill Collins ‘Built to Last’.

Coming soon: the Global Approximation System

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley.

If the Air Force and its contractors don’t get their act together pretty quickly, in a couple of years your car’s navigation system may be giving you instructions like “In a mile or so, turn right” or “You have reached your destination, more or less.” The Air Force is responsible for maintaining and modernizing the network of satellites that provides GPS service, but according to a new Government Accountability Office report, technical problems, leadership lapses and contractor woes have combined to put things way behind schedule. “As a result,” said the report, “the current IIF satellite program has overrun its original cost estimate by about $870 million and the launch of its first satellite has been delayed to November 2009 — almost three years late.”

The problem is that the GPS system needs a constellation of at least 24 satellites to deliver complete coverage and accurate results, and some of the birds now flying have been up there almost 20 years. If they start to fail before replacements are up, GPS accuracy will start to deteriorate. As things stand, the report concluded, “it is uncertain whether the Air Force will be able to acquire new satellites in time to maintain current GPS service without interruption. If not, some military operations and some civilian users could be adversely affected.”

Bah! And just when I was getting to rely on it for getting to Norham Gardens.

More Celtic Donkey news

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From the every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining department. This from the front page of today’s Irish Times.

In an unforgiving recession that has led to a collapse in demand for many trappings of the luxury lifestyle, Ireland’s best-known helicopter company has ceased its charter service.

Celtic Helicopters, controlled by businessman Ciarán Haughey, returned its air operations certificate to aviation regulators yesterday.

The firm now plans to focus on hangaring services for helicopter owners who are mothballing aircraft to curtail their day-to-day outgoings.

The firm offered business travel and aerial photography services, as well as pleasure trips, golf tours and transfers to race meetings.

Although helicopter trips became a symbol of spectacular wealth accumulation in the boom times, they are no longer in vogue. The chopper, for example, was a favoured mode of transportation among property developers. Now many members of that community are under considerable fiscal strain. Celtic is making five staff redundant as a result of the decision to halt charter services, but it will continue to employ another eight.

Knowledgeable readers will recall that Celtic’s owner is the son of Charlie Haughey, the disgraced gangster who was, for a time, Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister). Celtic Aviation prospered during his reign — and of course during the boom.

Financial epiphanies

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From Nick Paumgarten’s piece on the decline of high finance in the current New Yorker…

A private-equity executive I talked to said that he sensed the jig was up when his cleaning woman — “from Nicaragua or El Salvador of wherever the fuck she’s from” — took out a subprime loan to buy a house in Virginia. She drove down with her husband every weekend from New York, six hours each way, to fix it up for resale. They cleared sixty-five thousand dollars on the deal, in a matter of months. To many, this would have been proof that America is a land of opportunity, but to him it signalled a fatal imbalance between obligation and means.

One could find many similar stories from the UK ‘buy-to-let’ bubble. At the height of the bubble, British buy-to-let speculators didn’t really care whether they had tenants for their properties because the capital value was escalating so quickly that renting didn’t seem worth the hassle — or the agency fees.

‘Honourable’ Members?

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I’m temperamentally suspicious of the British press when it’s in self-righteous mode — as it is currently about MPs’ expenses. (I’m with Macaulay on that one. “We know no spectacle so ridiculous”, he wrote, “as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”.) And I suspect that behind at least some of the apparently outrageous claims there is probably a sensible explanation.

But the thing that really bugs me is the incessant invocation of the mantra that any expense claimed, no matter how bizarre, was “within the rules”. We had the same thing a while back when a very senior Irish bank executive was shamed into resigning when it was revealed that he had been ‘warehousing’ huge personal loans for nearly a decade to keep them off his bank’s balance sheet at the end of each financial year. As he crashed in flames, he issued a statement saying that while his actions may have been ‘inappropriate’, nevertheless they were within the law.

What was missing in his case — and is clearly missing in some British MPs — is any sense of honourable behaviour. His actions were clearly designed to keep the truth of his financial dealings with the bank he ran from being known. Most of us who are lucky enough to be in employment are entitled to claim legitimate expenses. But most of us have a sense of what’s reasonable and what’s not. For example, if I go to London on university business it’s obviously reasonable to claim for any rail, tube and/or taxi fares needed to get me to and from my destination. But is it reasonable to claim for the Americano that I would have had anyway, travelling or not? Obviously not.

And the irony is that Parliamentary etiquette still insists that the shysters who have been exploiting the expenses system should be referred to as “Honourable Members”. Perhaps the best revenge would be to refer henceforth to the most blatant claimers as Dishonourable Members.

As ever, sunlight is the best disinfectant. When in doubt ask yourself: How would this look if it were presented in evidence in court? Or published in the report of a committee of inquiry? And then decide what to do.

The New New Deal

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You’d need to be a psychiatrist to understand what’s going on in the heads of US Republican politicians at the moment. At the moment, for example, many of them are rewriting history to ‘prove’ that FDR’s New Deal was a ‘failure’. Russ Daggatt has a nice rant about this on Mark Anderson’s blog.

Former New York Senator and UN Ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

Increasingly, it seems, Republicans are trying to create not only their own facts but their own reality. This is particularly problematic when the mainstream media treats every issue as some kind of polarized “Crossfire” debate, with “balanced” treatment of “both sides.” Hence, we can end up with mainstream media “debates” over things like evolution, global warming and even torture.

A few years back Paul Krugman commented on the media desire for “balance” over objectivity. As an example he said that if Bush proclaimed the world was flat, the headline in the New York Times the next day would be “Shape of The World, Views Differ.” Indeed, that would be a “balanced” portrayal of the “debate” over the shape of the Earth. But objectively, the world is spherical. Stating that fact is not “bias” (except to the extent reality is a bias). Even if a large group of people – like the entire remaining rump of the Republican Party – disputed that fact, the New York Times would be doing its readers a disservice to give the impression that there was any credible, objective basis for the dissenting view.

At the Future in Review Conference in San Diego last year, Harvard professor James McCarthy, former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was asked how many of the world’s top 1000 climate experts would disagree with the basic scientific consensus that the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations over the last 50 years to levels not seen in 650,000 years is primarily anthropogenic. He replied, “Five.” (He also told an amusing anecdote about a colleague being asked the same question at a conference and answering, “Ten.” McCarthy went up to him later and asked how he got to ten. The guy replied that he could only think of five – the same five as McCarthy – but doubled the number to provide a margin of error.) That is about as solid a scientific consensus as you are ever likely to get for such a complex set of phenomena. Yet it is almost an article of faith in Republican circles these days that the threat from global warming is at best greatly exaggerated and at worst a “hoax.”

I’m not even going to waste time with evolution. If you think there is a legitimate debate over evolution, don’t even bother to read further…

Russ’s piece has two interesting graphs. One shows that GDP rose steadily through FDR’s time in office. The other graph is of US national debt as a percentage of GDP.

Rather puts Obama’s measures in context, doesn’t it?

Cloud computing to go

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Hmmm… I might want one of these. Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

Novatel Wireless unveiled MiFi, an unprecedented line of Intelligent Mobile Hotspots. Together with a rich applications environment for enterprises and consumers, MiFi drives a new ecosystem of broadband connectivity. Unlike existing router solutions that require an external broadband modem and serve only to provide connectivity, the MiFi line creates a personal cloud of high-speed Internet connectivity that can be easily shared between multiple users and Wi-Fi devices such as laptops, cameras, gaming devices and multimedia players. The MiFi products serve as an intelligent, open platform capable of hosting advanced software applications and flexible enough to address the continued evolution of mobile broadband. At the moment, they’re only available in the US. David Pogue of the NYT has tried one and given it a pretty enthusiastic review. “Imagine”, he writes,

“if you could get online anywhere you liked — in a taxi, on the beach, in a hotel with disgustingly overpriced Wi-Fi — without messing around with cellular modems. What if you had a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a private hot spot, that followed you everywhere you go? Incredibly, there is such a thing. It’s the Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). It’s a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot. The MiFi gets its Internet signal the same way those cellular modems do — in this case, from Verizon’s excellent 3G (high-speed) cellular data network, which relies on mobile tower lease for coverage. If you just want to do e-mail and the Web, you pay $40 a month for the service (250 megabytes of data transfer, 10 cents a megabyte above that). If you watch videos and shuttle a lot of big files, opt for the $60 plan (5 gigabytes). And if you don’t travel incessantly, the best deal may be the one-day pass: $15 for 24 hours, only when you need it. In that case, the MiFi itself costs $270. In essence, the MiFi converts that cellular Internet signal into an umbrella of Wi-Fi coverage that up to five people can share. (The speed suffers if all five are doing heavy downloads at once, but that’s a rarity.)”

UPDATE: Bill Thompson points out that similar functionality is available via Joiku for users of Nokia and selected other phones. And then Quentin tweeted about the Huawei D100 Wireless Broadband Router.

Thinking about the unthinkable

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I spent today at an interesting symposium on ‘The Economic Crisis’. It was organised by my friend John Cornwell, held at Jesus College, Cambridge and funded by the Rustat Conference Fund. The format was a round-table discussion led by a series of experts. Invitees were described by the organisers as “people in the front line of politics, the City, business, industry, education and social services”. Today’s line-up included the CEO of a Very Large supermarket chain, a handful of professors, a brace of top London lawyers, some investment bankers, senior partners from the global consultancy firms, bank regulators, a former Cabinet minister, an MP who serves on the Treasury Select Committee, the head of a leading economic think-tank, a famous economic commentator from a certain pink newspaper, a few private equity investors, a former Cabinet Secretary, the London correspondent of a leading German magazine, the editor of a weekend magazine — and yours truly. The entire event was held under Chatham House rules, which mean that one can report what was said but not who said it.

I found it an absorbing but troubling day. Early in the proceedings, it became clear that the world now faces a choice — described by one participant as “optimism of the will versus pessimism of the intellect”. That is to say, if you think hard enough about the crisis, and know enough about it, then you are bound to be pessimistic; and the only way to be optimistic is to be determinedly so and whistle cheerfully to keep your spirits up.

Reflecting on the day afterwards, here are the points that stood out for me:

  • China, China, China. Impossible to over-estimate the importance of China over the next two decades. The Chinese are already a dominant force in globalisation. The huge trade surpluses accumulated through Chinese exports over the last decade and a half were an important contributory factor to the financial bubble which has now collapsed. But — as one expert put it — “China has been made anew”. And although the Chinese face acute problems as a result of the recession, they are in a far better position to weather the storm. And they will not tolerate a return to the status quo.
  • There was much talk about whether this will be a V-shaped recession (i.e. with a rapid bounce-back) or something longer and more problematic. But even if it is indeed V-shaped, there’s no possibility that we will return to the world as it was in 2006. Apart from anything else, the Chinese won’t permit it. And Western electorates won’t either — see later. So the wishful thinking of Gordon Brown & Co — and the bankers — is just that.
  • Brown & Co were lucky that the British banks that required bailing out were ones with a primarily UK focus. If it had been, say, HSBC — with its huge foreign presence — which had been enfeebled, it would have been politically impossible to provide UK taxpayers’ money to rescue foreign operations. As someone put it, “finance is global, but rescue packages have been national”. The Obama administration has already discovered this in connection with public resentment of the bailout of Citigroup.
  • The need for theory. Various experts pointed out that the economic theory which underpinned the fantasies that only ‘light regulation’ was needed were all based on models of risk-management and risk-pricing that turned out to be wrong. But we are now trying to rethink regulation in the absence of a workable theory of management and pricing. As a result, the new regulatory regimes — whatever they turn out to be — are likely to be ad-hoc and theory-free. The danger is that they will be like building regulations — rules formulated to ensure that old errors do not happen again, but unable to protect us from dangers that haven’t occurred yet.
  • One thing that bothered me a lot was a perception that the experts who inhabit this rarefied world of international capital and regulation really have no idea of how ‘ordinary people — i.e. electors — are reacting to what has happened. They have no concept of how damaging this has been to the kind of trust that banking and democratic systems need if they are to function. There was one brilliant talk by a (continental) European academic about the likely impact of all this on European electorates. He predicts a radical upheaval as a result of the June 7 Euro elections. The post-election European parliament will, he says, be much more activist and leftist — and viscerally hostile to the Commission. He foresees significant social unrest across Europe in the Autumn. The sequence is: banking crisis –> economic crisis –> social unrest –> political unrest. He predicts political fragmentation in most European states, with governments formed from unstable coalitions, with this fragmentation leading to weak political leadership at just the time when strong leadership is necessary. He also detects very strong feelings across Europe that the banking crisis is not “our fault” — i.e. it’s the fault of Wall Street and Canary Wharf. I was very struck by his talk, because I’ve been wondering why more people are not concerned about the political impact of the crisis. I keep thinking about Weimar Germany and the rise of Nazism.
  • There was a lot of expert talk about regulatory regimes. But the thing that strikes me — speaking as an engineer — is that capitalism is an inherently unstable system. Over the last few decades — since the war — we have found ways of keeping it under some kind of control. But it continues to escape as its natural oscillatory mode breaks through. And as it get more complex, inter-related and information-rich it becomes harder and harder to control it. I kept thinking about Ross Ashby and the theory of requisite variety, which essentially says that if you want to be able to control something, then your regulatory apparatus has to be able to match the variety of the system. Our regulatory systems seem very inadequate and feeble and post-hoc. We’re basically “one club golfers”. Actually, watching central banks take interest rates down close to zero, we’re increasingly looking like zero-club golfers.
  • We’re also going to have to address the problem the UK has created by enabling Lloyds TSB to acquire such a dominant position in the UK banking market. Allowing it to take on HBOS was the kind of decision that would have been unthinkable without the panic induced by Northern Rock. But Lloyds’s position in banking makes Tesco look like a competitive underdog in retailing.
  • I tried to raise the issue of why our media proved so inadequate in warning the world about what was going on. But, interestingly, nobody — except another academic — seemed interested in exploring that question.

    • I came away with two resolutions: to read the Turner report; and to read Gillian Tett’s book on the origins of the crisis. I’ve had the latter on order from Amazon for days, but no sign of it yet. Bah!

    LATER: Here’s what I love about the Web. In no time at all there were two tweets in my Twitterstream (from lorcanD and brianamc) pointing out (gently) something I hadn’t known — namely that the “pessimism of the intellect” phrase was from Gramsci. Sometimes my ignorance seems boundless.