This is why (a) I love geeks and (b) the rest of the world wonders what they’ve been smoking!
Er, full disclosure. I have a fancy piece of software that takes my digital photographs and processes them to mimic the grain pattern of, say, Tri-X B&W (i.e. analogue) film. When I demonstrate it to normal, rational people they shake their heads in wonderment and talk about leading-edge uselessness.
Lovely cover on this week’s Economist.
I’m writing about last week’s London Confererence on Cyberspace and while doing some background research came on a splendid YouTube video made by the British Ambassador to Mexico — in both English and flawless Spanish. But — you know how it is with YouTube — what should appear on the side but this wonderful Monty Python sketch about the British Embassy in Smolensk.
The result of this serendipitous discovery is that I have been unable to write for at least five minutes on account of a severe outbreak of uncontrollable laughter. You have been warned.
I go to London quite a lot. This wonderful device (a Brompton folding bike) has enabled me to stop using the Tube. And taxis. Over the years it’s more than paid for itself.
Cyclists have a touching faith in apparently robust bike locks. This pic (snapped on a Cambridge street yesterday morning) may persuade them to think differently. It shows how easily an apparently thick chain can be neatly snipped with bolt cutters. The work of a moment, I’d guess.
LATER: I had a nice email from Dermot Ryan, who knows a thing or two about this stuff.
The type of lock in your picture, which is a cable lock rather than a chain, is famous among experienced cyclists for being easily defeated. A bolt cutters, as you suggest, can dispatch one in seconds, but some of the cheaper versions can be bust open by simply pulling vigorously on the bicycle.
Suffice to say, one can put one’s faith to a large extent in robust bicycle locks made out of tempered steel (for example), but not cheap cable locks.
One of my kids studied Classics at school, and I’ll never forget the moment when, deep in a textbook at the dining-room table, he suddenly said: “Dad, I get it. Tragedy is when you can see the terrible thing that’s coming but you know that nobody can do anything about it.” This is a perfect description of the Eurozone fiasco — as demonstrated by this morning’s news that the laboriously-stitched “deal” to stop a Greek default on its debt has now been upended by the Greek government’s decision to call a referendum on the deal. You don’t have to be a genius, let alone an economist, to see that the Euro project is doomed because — as many people, including Gordon Brown, pointed out at its inception — you can’t have a currency union without a political union. But because failure is unthinkable to the European political classes — this really is something that is “too big to fail”.
Anybody who doubts that Greeks are going to default just needs to read Michael Lewis’s splendid Vanity Fair piece, “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds” (which is on a par with his terrific piece about the Irish bank meltdown). He provides a really bleak insight into Greek society, and in particular what happens to a society where corruption is endemic.
As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms—and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,” Manos put it to me. “And yet there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.” The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland’s. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.
The conviction that the Euro is “too big to fail” is at the root of the wilful blindness
The question everyone wants an answer to is: Will Greece default? There’s a school of thought that says they have no choice: the very measures the government imposes to cut costs and raise revenues will cause what is left of the productive economy to flee the country. The taxes are lower in Bulgaria, the workers more pliable in Romania. But there’s a second, more interesting question: Even if it is technically possible for these people to repay their debts, live within their means, and return to good standing inside the European Union, do they have the inner resources to do it? Or have they so lost their ability to feel connected to anything outside their small worlds that they would rather just shed themselves of the obligations? On the face of it, defaulting on their debts and walking away would seem a mad act: all Greek banks would instantly go bankrupt, the country would have no ability to pay for the many necessities it imports (oil, for instance), and the country would be punished for many years in the form of much higher interest rates, if and when it was allowed to borrow again. But the place does not behave as a collective; it lacks the monks’ instincts. It behaves as a collection of atomized particles, each of which has grown accustomed to pursuing its own interest at the expense of the common good. There’s no question that the government is resolved to at least try to re-create Greek civic life. The only question is: Can such a thing, once lost, ever be re-created?
We don’t know the answer to that question. But in a way it’s now beside the point. We need to be planning on the assumption of a default. But if it were known that the EU was planning for that contingency, then that information alone would trigger the catastrophe they are trying to avoid.
It makes Catch-22 look like a tea party. And as for Italy…
An HDR image produced by an iPhone4 with the ProHDR app.
One implication of what’s happening to British universities is that the thrust of the Browne Report (and of government policy) is to marginalise the Arts and Humanities. This is, IMHO, not only stupid and myopic, but also dangerous, because one of the functions of the humanities (as Martha Nussbaum has pointed out) is to enhance our capacity to empathise with others. It’s also such a contrast with what happened after the end of the Second World War, especially in the US under the GI Bill, as veterans went to university and studied whatever they fancied.
And then I remembered Auden’s poem “Under which lyre”… (which he subtitled “A reactionary tract for the times”)
Encamped upon the college plain
Raw veterans already train
As freshman forces;
Instructors with sarcastic tongue
Shepherd the battle-weary young
Through basic courses.Among bewildering appliances
For mastering the arts and sciences
They stroll or run,
And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter
Are shot to pieces by the shorter
Poems of Donne.
Terrific analysis by the Political Editor of the Irish Times of how Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness comprehensively destroyed Sean Gallagher, the front-runner in the Irish presidential election, and handed the election to Michael D. Higgins.
The critical passage in the TV debate is here.
“He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.”
John McCarthy
