Lovely explanation of the private equity racket by Robert Reich.
Category Archives: Beyond belief
A Festival of Lies
Great NYTimes column by Tom Friedman about the crazed futility of US policy in the Middle East. Sample:
What ails the Arab world is a deficit of freedom, a deficit of modern education and a deficit of women’s empowerment.
So helping to overcome those deficits should be what U.S. policy is about, yet we seem unable to sustain that. Look at Egypt: More than half of its women and a quarter of its men can’t read. The young Egyptians who drove the revolution are desperate for the educational tools and freedom to succeed in the modern world. Our response should have been to shift our aid money from military equipment to building science-and-technology high schools and community colleges across Egypt.
Yet, instead, a year later, we’re in the crazy situation of paying $5 million in bail to an Egyptian junta to get U.S. democracy workers out of jail there, while likely certifying that this junta is liberalizing and merits another $1.3 billion in arms aid. We’re going to give $1.3 billion more in guns to a country whose only predators are illiteracy and poverty.
In Afghanistan, I laugh out loud whenever I hear Obama administration officials explaining that we just need to train more Afghan soldiers to fight and then we can leave. Is there anything funnier? Afghan men need to be trained to fight? They defeated the British and the Soviets!
The problem is that we turned a blind eye as President Hamid Karzai stole the election and operated a corrupt regime. Then President Obama declared that our policy was to surge U.S. troops to clear out the Taliban so “good” Afghan government could come in and take our place. There is no such government. Our problem is not that Afghans don’t know the way to fight. It is that not enough have the will to fight for the government they have. How many would fight for Karzai if we didn’t pay them?
And so it goes. In Pakistan, we pay the Pakistani Army to be two-faced, otherwise it would be only one-faced and totally against us. In Bahrain, we looked the other way while ruling Sunni hard-liners crushed a Shiite-led movement for more power-sharing, and we silently watch our ally Israel build more settlements in the West Bank that we know are a disaster for its Jewish democracy.
But we don’t tell Pakistan the truth because it has nukes. We don’t tell the Saudis the truth because we’re addicted to their oil. We don’t tell Bahrain the truth because we need its naval base. We don’t tell Egypt the truth because we’re afraid it will walk from Camp David. We don’t tell Israel the truth because it has votes. And we don’t tell Karzai the truth because Obama is afraid John McCain will call him a wimp.
En passant: What is truly amazing is the capacity of politicians to talk utter baloney when in office. In the case of Afghanistan, for example, it’s patently obvious that (a) the US/UK/Nato mission is doomed to failure, and (b) that being in that godforsaken country has nothing to do with Britain’s “national security”. And yet — day in, day out — we have to listen to Cameron & Co denying (a) and asserting (b).
Same thing for “austerity” and the deficit.
Lost — or gained? — in translation?
Another one for the you-couldn’t-make-it-up department. According to today’s Guardian, the Russian translation of a pirated version of The Iron Lady puts a new gloss on recent British history.
Speaking to a crowd of supporters, Margaret Thatcher, as played by Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, explains what she would do as prime minister: “Crush the working class, crush the scum, the yobs.”
At least that is a scene from a pirated version of the film in Russia, which has been inadvertently reviewed by one of the country’s top film critics without realising that some rather pointed changes to the script had been made.
The pirated Russian translation of the film, voiced over in a monotone by one man, depicts Thatcher as a bloodthirsty, Hitler-admiring leader, whose fondest desire is to destroy the working class. While some of her critics might say this is an accurate representation of her plans, even her fiercest enemy would concede the Russian version takes it too far.
The translation, no matter how over the top, has fooled at least one film critic on the Russian newspaper Kommersant, who quoted parts of the pirated version in a generally positive review.
I think the Russians got that wrong: that particular quote sounds more like Denis Thatcher.
How Eurocrats see the world
Another one from the “you couldn’t make it up” school of film-making. At first I thought it was a spoof. But it’s not — it’s a “public affairs” (aka propaganda) film for the EU.
Anya Topolski has a lovely analysis of it on openDemocracy.org.
Europe is symbolized as a white woman walking and wading through puddles of water in a warehouse. For those that know their Greek mythology, this cannot simply be a coincidence. Europa, the virgin daughter of an Asian king, was frolicking in the ocean when whisked away by the Greek God Zeus, disguised as a white bull, who then raped and abandoned her. The night before she was assaulted, Europa dreamt of being attacked by the continents of Asia and Libya (the Greek name for what is now Africa) and finally being rescued by ‘civilization’. Just as in the myth, Europe – in the EU video – is attacked by three ‘barbaric’ men. First comes the attack from the East, an aggressive Asian looking kung-fu fighter. Next Europe is attacked from the Orient by a sultan with a massive blade that cannot but convey images of the Crusades and the fight against the infidels. Last but not least comes that half-naked African. Enough said. Europe, reminding the world of its superiority and its ability to put violence in the past in the name of Reason simply stares condescendingly at the barbarians. She multiplies herself – as a good woman ‘created’ to reproduce it implies ought to do – and encircles her enemies who relinquish their weapons. Each of the ‘identical’ women then becomes a star on the European flag and the three barbarians , that is the world in all its diversity, are erased – they vanish.
Aw, shucks: it’s good to know that the EU is still willing to shoulder the white man’s burden.
It’s rumoured that the video has been withdrawn by the Commission, so catch it while you can.
The problem with taking the tabloids
Amid the furore surrounding the Leveson Inquiry, one aspect of the affair is curiously absent: the role of the great British public in all of this. To illustrate this, consider the paradox that at a time when an increasing number of Sun journalists have been arrested on suspicion of making or facilitating corrupt payments to public officials, Rupert Murdoch launches the Sunday Sun to replace the late lamented News of the World — and it sells 3m copies on its launch day. So three million of our fellow-citizens went out and, of their own volition, paid good money to buy the thing.
And that, it seems to me, lies at the root of the problem. The underlying cause of the malfeasance at the Sun and other tabloid papers is that the tabloid market is an intensely competitive one. That’s why journalism in Britain can never be a ’profession’ — with all that implies in terms of standards, ethics and professional sanctions: it’s a trade grafted onto businesses operating in a fiercely competitive market. So journalists on tabloid newspapers are under intense pressure to come with ’stories’ that will give their paper a competitive edge.
But sleazy journalism wouldn’t give them such an edge if readers exercised some kind of moral or ethical judgement when choosing newspapers to buy. So the responsibility ultimately rests with consumers of the British tabloid product. If they genuinely abhorred the kinds of journalistic practices now being unearthed by Leveson, then the incentives to break or bend the law would be dramatically reduced. Bad behaviour would be punished. But what happens instead is that bad behaviour is rewarded — by increased circulation. (***See footnote)
So the great mystery is why consumers of journalistic products seem to be ethically neutered. I had a disturbing insight into this many years ago when visiting some friends of a friend. The couple in question were lovely, decent, unpretentious people in their mid-sixties from a working-class background. I noticed that they were readers of the Daily Express and asked if they were regular subscribers. They were. So, I asked, did it bother them that the paper they read every day was owned by a pornographer?
What was astonishing (to me) is that they were completely floored by the question — not in the sense that they didn’t have an answer, but in the sense that the question seemed, literally, meaningless to them. The idea that there might be an ethical dimension to their newspaper purchasing habit had clearly never crossed their minds. So there was an awkward silence and the conversation moved on. But as I saw the sales figures for the new Sunday Sun, memories of that conversation came flooding back. And as long as media ’consumption’ takes place in that ethical vacuum, then the problems being unearthed by Leveson will continue to plague us.
…………..
*Footnote: As far as I can remember, there has only been one occasion in recent history where bad behaviour was punished by readers — and that was when Liverpool readers boycotted the Sun after its disgraceful allegations about the behaviour of Liverpool football fans during the Hillsborough disaster.
My colleague Andrew Cupples points out that the Sun’s readership in Liverpool has never recovered from the paper’s coverage of the disaster. He pointed me at a Guardian story on the 20th anniversary of Hillsborough, which reads, in part:
The newspaper, which has a circulation of more than 3m nationally, sold just 8,000 copies in the area on the day of the memorial service at Anfield, which was attended by more than 30,000 people.
Inside the newspaper, still known as “The Scum” in Liverpool, “lifelong fan” David Wooding, the Whitehall editor, delivered a poignant tribute to the men, women and children who lost their lives. But for those who gathered at Anfield this week, it was far too little and far too late.
At the Albert pub, squeezed next to the ground, football scarves and Liverpool memorabilia cover the walls and ceiling. The entrance of the pub has a poster mocking the front page of the Sun’s notorious splash, which appeared a few days after the tragedy. The tabloid’s masthead appears to be dripping in blood. “The truth,” it reads. “96 dead. Hillsborough 15th April 1989. Don’t buy the Sun.”
Tommy Doran, who works at the Albert, remembers one regular reading the Sun in a corner of the pub. “I went over to him and said: ‘What’s that?’ and he went: ‘The Sun.’ I just ripped it up into pieces in front of him.” Like many others on Merseyside, Doran will never forgive the decision of then editor Kelvin MacKenzie to lead on 19 April 1989 with a story headlined “The Truth” that was anything but. In it, quoting unnamed police sources and a Tory MP, it claimed drunken Liverpool fans urinated on and picked the pockets of the dead, hampered rescue efforts and attacked policemen.
And the Wikipedia entry about the Hillsborough catastrophe claims that:
Many people in the Liverpool area continue to reject buying The Sun as a matter of principle, and the paper’s sales figures within Merseyside remain very poor. It is the only major newspaper not to have articles published on Liverpool’s official website. As of 2004, the average daily circulation of The Sun in Liverpool was just 12,000 copies a day. Some Liverpudlians refer to the paper as simply: The Scum.
This is interesting, but I suspect it’s the exception that proves the rule.
Who decides what gets sold in the bookstore?
That’s amazing to me. It must be a mistake, right?The realities of our emerging ebook landscape — as experienced by Seth Godin.
I just found out that Apple is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography.
Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon store. IE page 35, David Weinberger link.”
And there’s the conflict. We’re heading to a world where there are just a handful of influential bookstores (Amazon, Apple, Nook…) and one by one, the principles of open access are disappearing. Apple, apparently, won’t carry an ebook that contains a link to buy a hardcover book from Amazon.
That’s amazing to me. It must be a mistake, right?
Er, no, Seth. It’s the way these companies propose to reconfigure the world.
Why I’ll be avoiding Pinterest
At last: someone twigs it.
A woman named Kristen decided to look into the legality of Pinterest. After all, she’s a lawyer with a passion for photography.
What she found scared her so much, she shut down her Pinterest boards entirely.
Kristen’s investigation began after she saw photographers complaining about copyright violations on Facebook. She wondered why Facebook could get in trouble for copyright violation and Pinterest couldn’t.
She browsed Pinterest’s Terms of Use section. In it she found Pinterest’s members are solely responsible for what they pin and repin. They must have explicit permission from the owner to post everything.
How to handle 15 billion page views a month
Ye Gods! Just looked at the stats for Tumblr.
500 million page views a day
15B+ page views month
~20 engineers
Peak rate of ~40k requests per second
1+ TB/day into Hadoop cluster
Many TB/day into MySQL/HBase/Redis/Memcache
Growing at 30% a month
~1000 hardware nodes in production
Billions of page visits per month per engineer
Posts are about 50GB a day. Follower list updates are about 2.7TB a day.
Dashboard runs at a million writes a second, 50K reads a second, and it is growing.
And all this with about twenty engineers!
How things change…
From Quentin’s blog.
There’s a piece in Business Insider based on an interesting fact first noted by MG Siegler. It’s this:
Apple’s iPhone business is bigger than Microsoft
Note, not Microsoft’s phone business. Not Windows. Not Office. But Microsoft’s entire business. Gosh.
As the article puts it:
The iPhone did not exist five years ago. And now it’s bigger than a company that, 15 years ago, was dragged into court and threatened with forcible break-up because it had amassed an unassailable and unthinkably profitable monopoly.
Wow! It seems only yesterday when Microsoft was the Evil Empire.
Let us spray
The graffiti artist who painted the walls of Facebook’s first proper ‘corporate’ office in 2005 was offered $60,000 to do the job but opted for stock instead. That stock is supposedly worth $500m now. Smart lad. Smarter than Stanford, which was offered Cisco stock many years ago, but opted for cash instead.