Category Archives: Crisis management

Sunday 26 July, 2020

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The UK’s contact-tracing app difficulties

This morning’s Observer column:

Some day, we will have a reckoning for how the Johnson administration screwed up so comprehensively. But that will have to wait, because it is still screwing up. The current focus of interest is why it took it so long to realise that the only way to deal with the threat was lockdown, contact tracing and quarantining, a methodology familiar to Europeans since at least the time of the Black Death. And when the history of this time comes to be written, one interesting case study in official ineptitude will focus on the British search for its very own “world-beating” smartphone contact-tracing app.

The best interim report we have on this quest has been compiled by Rowland Manthorpe of Sky News…

Read on

“Hurting people at scale”: at last, Facebook employees are beginning to wonder whether they want to be part of the Zuckerberg project

Very interesting Buzzfeed report:

On July 1, Max Wang, a Boston-based software engineer who was leaving Facebook after more than seven years, shared a video on the company’s internal discussion board that was meant to serve as a warning.

“I think Facebook is hurting people at scale,” he wrote in a note accompanying the video. “If you think so too, maybe give this a watch.”

Most employees on their way out of the “Mark Zuckerberg production” typically post photos of their company badges along with farewell notes thanking their colleagues. Wang opted for a clip of himself speaking directly to the camera. What followed was a 24-minute clear-eyed hammering of Facebook’s leadership and decision-making over the previous year…

Here’s the recording of his farewell message obtained by Buzzfeed. The audio quality is poor (too much treble), but the content is fascinating.

What the Buzzfeed (longish) report suggests is that there is growing employee unease within Facebook about the direction the company is taking. Personally I’m sceptical about this having a major impact in the short- to medium-term. After all, the pay is good, the work (for geeks at least) may be technically interesting, and many smart and apparently decent people work for, say, arms manufacturers or tobacco companies.

Longer term, though, the shine has gone from Facebook and so I can imagine that some of the smarter computer science graduates might now have reservations about working there. For them, it’ll have become more like Palantir — something you might not want to tell your friends about.

Zuckerberg, Trump and November’s Election

The Observer has a big feature-spread today about Trump, Zuckerberg and the presidential election, with contributions from me, Carole Cadwalladr, Yaël Eisenstat and Roger McNamee.

My essay focusses mainly on Zuckerberg’s total control of the company and his possible motives for the decisions he’s been making.

So here we are in 2020, 100 days from the presidential election. Trump is still trailing Biden. But his base support has remained solid. So the point I made in June still stands: if he is to win a second term, Facebook will be his only hope – which is why his campaign is betting the ranch on it. And if Facebook were suddenly to decide that it would not allow its platform to be used by either campaign in the period from now until 3 November, Trump would be a one-term president, free to spend even more time with his golf buggy – and perhaps his lawyers.

For Facebook read Zuckerberg, for Facebook is not just a corporate extension of its founder’s personality, but his personal plaything. I can’t think of any other tech founder who has retained such an iron grip on his creation through his ownership of a special class of shares, which give him total control. The passage in the company’s SEC filing detailing this makes for surreal reading. It says that Zuckerberg “has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets. This concentrated control could delay, defer, or prevent a change of control, merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other stockholders support, or conversely this concentrated control could result in the consummation of such a transaction that our other stockholders do not support.”

Such a concentration of power in the hands of a single individual would be a concern in any enterprise, but in a global company that effectively controls and mediates much of the world’s public sphere it is distinctly creepy…

Carole’s piece is here.

Ian Tucker’s interview with Roger McNamee (an early investor in Facebook is here.

Ian’s interview with Yaël Eisenstat (a whistleblower) is here.

Friend Monitors?

Dave Winer has a good idea:

I have an app called Server Monitor that does something simple but important. It pings each of the apps I have running once a minute to see if they’re still alive. If not, SM sends me an email. I bet everyone who writes server apps has this kind of utility.

I’d like something like this for my friends. A ping goes out to each, if someone doesn’t respond, I get an email.

In the age of The Trump Plague, I worry about my friends.

Me too. I’ve been thinking for a while that I should do something like this. Maybe a small email group to which I send a message a week asking just for a one word reply: OK (or, if not, No) maybe.

Central London Rents Decline as Vacation Homes Flood Market

Well, well. Bloomberg reports

Rents for homes in central London had a record decline last month as landlords flooded the market with properties previously rented out through companies such as Airbnb Inc.

Houses in the city center rented for 7.4% less than a year earlier in June, according to data compiled by broker Hamptons International. The number of homes available to rent shot up by 26% in inner London, driven by houses previously occupied for short periods by visitors to the capital moving to the long-term market.

What Brexit started, the virus has continued. Long overdue IMO.

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Sunday 19 July, 2020

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Don’t post on Facebook unless you are prepared to face the consequences

This morning’s Observer column:

Earlier this month Anne Borden King posted news on her Facebook page that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Since then, she reports, “my Facebook feed has featured ads for ‘alternative cancer care’. The ads, which were new to my timeline, promote everything from cumin seeds to colloidal silver as cancer treatments. Some ads promise luxury clinics – or even ‘nontoxic cancer therapies’ on a beach in Mexico.”

The irony is that King is the last person likely to fall for this crap. She’s a consultant for the watchdog group Bad Science Watch and a co-founder of the Campaign Against Phony Autism Cures. So she effortlessly recognised the telltale indicators of pseudoscience marketing – unproven and sometimes dangerous treatments, promising simplistic solutions and support. In that sense she is the polar opposite of, say, Donald Trump.

But one sentence in her thoughtful article brought me up short…

Read on

Please, Matt Hancock, let us see our loved ones with dementia

A justifiably angry piece by my friend Nicci Gerrard, who was the co-founder of John’s Campaign, which she launched after her beloved father’s dementia worsened dramatically when he was in hospital and his children were not allowed to visit him.

Ten days ago, in response to a letter from seven dementia charities and organisations, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced that the ban on visits to care homes was “coming to an end very soon”. That brought a huge sense of relief to the thousands of family carers who have been unable to see their relatives for almost four months. But since then: nothing. Was it an empty promise, a disgraceful piece of window dressing? Perhaps the health secretary could tell us what “very soon” means; how many days are there in “a few days”?

The letter was sent by John’s Campaign, the Alzheimer’s Society, Alzheimer’s Research UK, Dementia UK, Young Dementia UK, Innovations in Dementia and Tide and called for the government to grant family and friend carers the same status as a “key worker” care home member of staff, allowing them the same access to care homes with the same provision of testing so they can meet the essential needs of residents…

The neglect of care homes from the outset has been one of the greatest scandals in the Johnson regimes handling of the crisis. My mother-in-law, who also had dementia, died because she was in an unprotected care home.

Wacky reasoning and the virus

Tim Harford has a nice piece in the weekend FT about self-fulfilling prophecies.

A vocal minority argues that Covid-19 is not much worse than the influenza we ignore every winter, so both mandatory lockdowns and voluntary precautions have been unnecessary.

A glance at the data gives that argument a veneer of plausibility. The UK has suffered about 65,000 excess deaths during the first wave of the pandemic, and 25,000-30,000 excess deaths are attributed to flu in England alone during bad flu seasons.

Is the disparity so great that the country needed to grind to a halt?

The flaw in the argument is clear: Covid was “only” twice as bad as a bad flu season because we took extreme measures to contain it. The effectiveness of the lockdown is being used as an argument that lockdown was unnecessary. It is frustrating, but that is the nature of a self-defeating prophecy in a politicised environment.

Nice. And necessary.

Recovery from Covid-19 will be threatened if we don’t learn to control big tech

My OpEd piece in today’s Observer.

As societies try to recover from the pandemic, an alarming scenario begins to loom. It goes like this: a vaccine is invented and countries embark on massive vaccination programmes. However, conspiracy theorists use social media to oppose the programme and undermine public confidence in the vaccination drive. It will be like the anti-MMR campaign but on steroids.

What we have learned from the coronavirus crisis so far is that the only way to manage it is by coherent, concerted government action to slow the transmission rate. As societies move into a vaccination phase, then an analogous approach will be needed to slow the circulation of misinformation and destructive antisocial memes on social media. Twitter would be much improved by removing the retweet button, for example. Users would still be free to pass on ideas but the process would no longer be frictionless. Similarly, Facebook’s algorithms could be programmed to introduce a delay in the circulation of certain kinds of content. YouTube’s recommender algorithms could be modified to prioritise different factors from those they currently favour. And so on.

Measures such as these will be anathema to the platforms. Tough. In the end, they will have to make choices between their profits and the health of society. If they get it wrong then regulation is the only way forward. And governments will have to remember that to govern is to choose.

Freud and the pandemic

Striking essay by Alax Danco.

Three months ago, he wrote this:

Over the next few months, across America, a lot of people are going to die. And they’re going die because other Americans are – not just cluelessly, but gleefully – refusing to wear masks, and celebrating it, the way you’d celebrate winning a football game. Meanwhile, the urgent topic occupying all of the air time in elite circles isn’t the pandemic, or its generational economic devastation; it’s “how bad should other people be allowed to make you feel online?”

And now, he concluded,

So yeah, it did, indeed, get worse.

You know who would really have recognized and understood this moment? Sigmund Freud.

In retrospect, he thinks, “the critical mistake of the pandemic was telling Americans that masks protect other people”.

The minute that wearing masks became about protecting other people, it was game over for America. Masks became a symbol of the superego; and as far as symbolism goes, it’s laid on pretty thick. (It’s literally something that you put on your face into order to stop yourself from spraying germs onto other people, and therefore suppress your own guilt of being part of a pandemic!) The minute masks became about suppressing yourself to protect others, the narrative became: The Elites want you to feel guilty about not wearing a mask, just like they want you to feel guilty about driving a car, or eating a burger, or anything else you love. Don’t let them!

Our reaction to this narrative misses what’s really being said. If you’ve ever thought, “how stupid do you have to be to think the government wants to control with a mask”, pause for a minute and think about what’s really being communicated. The real message is “they want to control you with guilt.” Doesn’t sound so stupid anymore, does it? Freud would certainly argue that this message gets it exactly right.

Unfortunately, there is a right answer. Wear the stupid mask. This should be a conversation about public health, not yet another forum for symbolic battle between the ego and superego. And in most countries, that’s the case; people cooperate, wear masks, and their countries can cautiously reopen and get back to something like normal life. Not in America, though! In America, you see political talking heads saying things like “Mask-wearing has become a totem, a secular religious symbol. Christians wear crosses, Muslims wear a hijab, and members of the Church of Secular Science bow to the Gods of Data by wearing a mask as their symbol, demonstrating that they are the elite; smarter, more rational, and morally superior to everyone else.”

Actually, it’s not just in America that you hear people talking like that. A colleague of mine came back wearily from a meeting of his College’s Council the other day, after a two-hour argument about whether students and staff ought to be compelled to wear face masks in the Autumn.

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Saturday 11 July, 2020

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Quote of the Day

”If you want home truths, you should stay at home”

  • Clifford Geertz

The Lark Ascending

Amazing performance in which Victoria Yeh plays all parts of a 13-piece string arrangement of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s masterpiece.

Link

Another Facebook metaphor

This time from Kara Swisher:

I keep trying to figure out a way to explain what is happening — actually, to explain why nothing is happening — with a fresh metaphor. Once, I compared Facebook to a city manager who treats the streets like The Purge. The Salesforce chief executive, Marc Benioff, likened Facebook to a cigarette company. And still others have likened it to a chemical company that carelessly spews noxious information into the river of society.

This week, I finally settled on a simpler comparison: Think about Facebook as a seller of meat products.

Most of the meat is produced by others, and some of the cuts are delicious and uncontaminated. But tainted meat — say, Trump steaks — also gets out the door in ever increasing amounts and without regulatory oversight.

The argument from the head butcher is this: People should be free to eat rotten hamburger, even if it wreaks havoc on their gastrointestinal tract, and the seller of the meat should not be the one to tell them which meat is good and which is bad (even though the butcher can tell in most cases).

Basically, the message is that you should find the truth through vomiting and — so sorry — maybe even death.

In this, Mr. Zuckerberg is serving up a rancid meal that he says he’s not comfortable cooking himself, even as his hands control every aspect of the operation.

Good stuff. I wonder where the next metaphor will come from.

Why is it that the two Western democracies that have mishandled the Coronavirus crisis worst are the US and the UK?

There’s something weird about the ‘Anglosphere’. Could it be that both countries have a lot in common? For example:

  • Their two main political parties are dysfunctional
  • Both states have been hollowed out by decades of neoliberal governance by remote elites
  • Both have chronically unrepresentative electoral systems (FPTP in UK; the crackpot Senate representation which gives rural states the same representation as massive urbanised regions; comprehensive Republican gerrymandering of House of Representative seats; and of course the Electoral College.
  • Dark money plays a major role in campaign funding, and electoral laws are no longer fit for purpose
  • Both have delusions of exceptionalism
  • Both have a history of Imperial and racist exploitation
  • Currently both are led by blustering moral cretins.

Thinking the unthinkable

From Roger Cohen:

Last month, Trump tweeted: “RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” Of course, that foreign country would be China.

Trump is preparing the ground to contest any loss to Joe Biden and remain president, aided, no doubt, by Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department.

I know, it’s unthinkable. So was the Reichstag fire.

Larry Brilliant on Covid-19

He’s the guy responsible for eliminating smallpox. Steven Levy interviewed him for Wired magazine. Here’s the part of the interview that really caught my eye:

 Levy: It seems like the longer it goes, the less we know about it. Every week something new comes up that contradicts what we thought we already knew.

Brilliant: No, no—you know a lot more about it now than you did three months ago. Yes, there are absolutely more questions today than there were 100 days ago. But part of that is because we’re getting more sophisticated in our ability to ask questions. Three months ago, we had only had a couple hundred cases of this novel virus. We have now got over 11 million cases, and a half a million deaths globally. The virus has been speeding along at an exponential speed, but so has science. So now we can begin to understand that this virus attacks the circulatory system, it attacks the vascular and nervous systems, it attacks the respiratory system, it attacks our ability to bring in oxygen. That’s why people can go to the hospital and be on their phone, not in any respiratory distress, but have oxygen saturation in the 50s, which in the old days we’d think of as you’re near death. It also makes you understand why you can get these Covid toes, why you can lose your sense of taste or smell, why you can have a stroke. This virus attacks blood vessels, it creates blood clots. That is probably one of the reasons why it causes strokes. We have a very large number of deaths due to kidney failure, and we are having terrible results from the ventilators that we were so obsessed about early on, though lately it’s looking a little better, because we’ve learned more about how to use them for this disease. We have learned a tremendous amount about this virus, about how it infects people, how it kills, how it spreads, but the big surprise to me is the kind of pan-organ nature of its attack. It gives the lie to anybody who thought that a comparison with influenza was in the ballpark.

 You paint quite a picture.

Brilliant: This is a big fucking deal. If I would not be excommunicated from the world of science, I would call this an evil virus, but I can’t do that because I can’t impugn motives to it. But if I could, I would call it that. It’s certainly pernicious. This is the worst pandemic in our lifetime. And it is the first time we have had a pandemic in the United States in which we have had such a total, abysmal failure of our federal government.

Larry Summers on the significance of Covid-19

The Covid-19 crisis is the third major shock to the global system in the 21st century, following the 2001 terror attacks and the 2008 financial crisis. I suspect it is by far the most significant.

Although the earlier events will figure in history textbooks, both 9/11 and the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy will fade over time from popular memory.

By contrast, I believe, the coronavirus crisis will still be considered a seminal event generations from now. Students of the future will learn of its direct effects and of the questions it brings into sharp relief much as those of today learn about the 1914 assassination of the Archduke, the 1929 stock market crash, or the 1938 Munich Conference. These events were significant but their ultimate historical importance lies in what followed.

Yep. Most people don’t seem to have twigged this yet.

From the Financial Times

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Sunday 28 June, 2020

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Quote of the Day

In 1990, the top three carmakers in Detroit had a market capitalization of $36 billion and 1.2 million employees. In 2014, the top three firms in Silicon Valley, with a market capitalization of over $1 trillion, had only 137,000 employees.

A family outing

A scene from our walk yesterday evening. Think of it as my homage to John Constable! The Canada geese goslings have grown at an extraordinary rate. And it was very considerate of them and their parents to swim in such a straight line.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

Is it payback time for Apple as the EU goes after its licences to print money?

This morning’s Observer column:

On 16 June, the European commission opened two antitrust investigations into Apple’s App Store and Apple Pay practices. The first investigation will examine whether Apple has broken EU competition rules with its App Store policies. The second investigation is into whether restrictions imposed by Apple on the near field communication (NFC) capability of its iPhone and Apple Watch mean that banks and other financial institutions are prevented from offering NFC payment systems using Apple kit.

Let’s take the App Store first. When Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, it created an amazing new opportunity for software developers and, of course, for Apple itself. Because the new phone was basically a powerful handheld computer, that meant it could run smallish programs, which came to be called apps. And because it had an internet connection those programs could be efficiently distributed across the net. From this came the idea that Apple should set up an App Store to which developers could upload their programs. Apple, being a control-freak corporation, would vet those apps before they appeared on the store and would levy a 30% commission on sales. It seems like a great idea…

Read on

Thinking of moving to the US? Listen to this first

Stunning The Daily podcast on what’s been going on in Texas.

Made me realise I didn’t know the half of it.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton interviewed by Der Spiegel

Link. Interesting throughout. For example:

DER SPIEGEL: What has caused this mass-despair in white, middle-class life?

Deaton: Look at the labor market, at wages. Life-time jobs and the meaning that comes from a life like that is very important. Roles for men and women are defined by it, as is their place in the community. It’s almost like Marx: Social conditions depend on the means of production. And these means of production are being brought down by globalization, by automation, by the incredible force of health care. And that’s destroying communities.

DER SPIEGEL: Yet where there are losers, there should be winners as well. Who is to blame for this development?

Deaton: Many people have said that there are two ways of getting rich: One way is by making things, and the other is by taking things. And one of the ways of taking things is to make the government give you special favors. Those special favors don’t create anything, but they can make you rich, at the expense of everybody else.

Case: For instance, the pharma companies get a law passed that Medicare has to pay for drugs at whatever price the pharma companies choose. Or the doctors’ lobby doesn’t allow as many people to go to medical school, which helps to keep doctors salaries up. That’s one of the reasons why doctors are the largest single occupation in the top 1 percent.

DER SPIEGEL: Would you argue that those in the top 1 percent are peculiarly prone to rent seeking?

Deaton: No, but many people are in the 1 percent because of rent seeking. This mechanism is creating a lot of very wealthy people who would not be wealthy if the government hadn’t given them a license to rip off the rest. We’re not among the people who think of inequality as a causal force. It’s rent-seeking opportunities that create inequality.

DER SPIEGEL: How do the losers of this development react politically?

Deaton: Well, many of them like Donald Trump (laughs)!

I’ve just got their book.

If you thought that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory was dead and buried (I did), then think again.

Astonishing — and depressing — NYT story.

Sigh.

Quarantine diary — Day 99

Link

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Friday 26 June, 2020

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Fuchsia

In our garden, this morning. One of my favourite plants, which has really thrived this year, for reasons unknown. Trouble is, it makes me nostalgic for County Kerry, which has more fuchsia hedges than anywhere else in the known world (IMHO).

Grandparents are critical workers too

Interesting long read (estimated reading time 15 minutes) in De Correspondent, a journalistic outfit to which I subscribe.

In a world where half of all Dutch families regularly ask grandparents to provide childcare, and those in other countries do so too; where care provided by grandparents in the UK saves over £7bn each year; and where a significant proportion of US, Filipino and Romanian children are raised by their grandparents, it’s safe to say that grandparents play a key role in shaping future generations.

The different generations are much more closely intertwined than we like to admit. Seen in this light, it’s a shame that many older adults are now being described, first and foremost, as “vulnerable”. If only because our collective strength is not defined by our ability to separate “the vulnerable” from “everybody else” but, as Amy Davidson Sorkin aptly wrote in a recent piece for the New Yorker, “by our willingness to stand together”.

“Covid-19 has caused generations to become increasingly separated from one another,” Gopnik says. “It was already happening in many places, but I think the pandemic makes us realise even more how much we depend on the fact that we have grandparents involved in caring for grandchildren. It makes it really vivid that we’ve sort of neglected those two ends of the life-span.” It also makes vivid the loss that ensues when grandparents and grandchildren are unable to interact.

I know it sounds like special pleading (I’m a grandfather) but I’ve been struck time and again — and not just in the pandemic — about this. I come from a rural culture where (just like parts of Italy, say) there’s always been extensive extended-family groups living in close proximity. But when socially-mobile or ambitious children leave that kind of environment — to live and work, say, in large urban conurbations far away — and then themselves start to have children, suddenly the conflicts between the demands of work and those of childcare become acute. My wife and I both brought up broods without any help whatsoever from our parents, and it made life much more demanding in all kinds of ways. State childcare provision in the UK is abysmal and inadequate by Continental European standards, and so families with young children have much less flexibility when both parents need to be out of the house. Way back in the Ireland I grew up in, that problem didn’t exist. The kids would simply wander round to Granny and Grandad’s place.

The figure of £7B is just an estimate of what parents in the Uk would have to fork out for childcare if their parents weren’t helping. I suspect it’s a huge under-estimate.

That’s not to say that there aren’t downsides to extended families living close together. Apart from the privacy aspects, there’s also the fact that initial impact of the Coronavirus seemed higher in cultures where multiple generations live together.

How to report the spread of a pandemic

The New York Times has produced a terrific animated-graphic-plus-succinct-narrative account. It’s a very good example of how to use digital tools to visualise and communicate a dynamic process.

Well worth a visit. Give it time.

The history of the humble (and not so humble) door handle

A doorknob is a key part of the user-interface of a building. Yet until Covid-19 I’d never given much thought to it — except sometimes in exasperation when realising that a handle is better than a knob for many people and many purposes. And it never occurred to me that it might have an interesting history. Which, of course it has. And it’s had some famous designers in its time. For example:

Arguably the most influential, although not necessarily familiar, door handle was designed not by an architect but by a philosopher – albeit one with an engineering degree. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s handle for the house he designed for his sister in Vienna in 1928 is a simple bent metal bar with one of the pair kinked to accommodate a portion of frame for the French doors it was designed for. It apparently took him a year to design (he spent two years on the radiators), but that simple bent bar morphed into the bent tube which is perhaps the most ubiquitous and generic of all modern designs.

And, needless to say, that reminds me Of an old schoolboy joke: “Was Handel a crank?”

Zoom Hell

Lovely New Yorker cartoon.

Is Digital Contact Tracing Over Before It Began?

Sobering post by Jonathan Zittrain. The momentum towards contact-tracing seems to be on the wane, he thinks.

The work on planning and standing up contact tracing is being overtaken by a public sensibility that the disease has been sufficiently managed for things to more or less return to normal. Where before, the question of voluntary participation in a tracing and isolation scheme was seen as how to get from, say, 50% participation up to 70% or more by the general public, the question now is whether nearly anyone would bother to install or use contact tracing tools at all — or, apps aside, change their behavior should they receive a call indicating that they’ve been exposed by someone who has tested positive. In New York, contract tracers are having a hard time completing interviews. And in Massachusetts, a mixed bag: on the one hand, so many contact tracers were admirably stood up so quickly that there isn’t enough work to go around. On the other hand, most of the cases being diagnosed haven’t been identified beforehand through contact tracing — which means that transmission chains can’t be pruned.

Contact-tracing requires testing. And testing capacity in parts of the US is currently being overwhelmed. On the tech front, Zittrain sees “a plateau in visible activity on the tech side of the ledger since the May 20, 2020, launch of the Apple/Google exposure notification framework”. And it doesn’t seem that any state has yet approved or launched an exposure notification app based upon the framework.

Efforts outside of the United States have made a little more progress. Switzerland has led the charge, piloting an app that implements the Apple/Google framework within hospitals, government agencies, and the military. Other nations — many of them among the 22 granted access to the Apple/Google framework in May — are developing and deploying apps of their own. We’ve also seen the emergence of a number of apps not based on the Apple-Google framework, including in Singapore and Australia.

So it’s all incredibly patchy. So much for tech ‘solutionism’ in this crisis.

So what now? Zittrain sets out two possibilities: the Swedish model and what he calls the ‘Company Town’ model.

The Swedish model is basically to

re-open all but the most high-spreading services and events; ask people to exercise social distancing where they can; have people wear cloth masks to minimize the spread of the moisture in their breath to others; and try to make available testing so that people who wish to know if they’re infected can find out and then self-isolate if they test positive or show worrisome symptoms.

The other option is interestingly different:

It’s one in which some big companies and institutions decide to implement their own test/trace/isolate regimes as employees return to workplaces. A company whose employees don’t physically interact much with the public during the day — an insurance company, or a tech firm like Facebook or Google — might require its employees to undergo regular testing, and then cease coming to work if they test positive. Such a company could stand up its own tracing program, and use data from company-issued devices, with notice to employees and no permitted opt-out, to assist in that tracing. Those who are deemed to have been exposed can also be required not to come to work. Universities might choose to require much the same for their faculty, staff, and students.

The overall regime may thus remain nominally a voluntary one, with respect to government coercion, but participation in private regimes like this will be by choice only in the sense that employees can quit their jobs, or students can choose to drop out of school, if they don’t want to participate in their institutions’ programs. And it of course leaves most people behind: if you don’t work for an institution that can pull off its own internal testing and tracing, you won’t directly benefit from such a program.

It looks as though this latter option is what Cambridge University will adopt — to name just one non-corporate example — because it now has the capacity to do all of that stuff.

But when you look at the bigger picture, this ‘company town’ approach would be a disaster for inequality, and maybe even for democracy. A bit like neoliberalism, in fact.

There’s no substitute for state capacity here, rigorously, competently and fairly administered. And the big questions for us is: can the UK actually do it?

Quarantine diary — Day 97

Link

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Monday 22 June, 2020

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Coronavirus Management: EU vs. USA

Says it all, really.

Coleridge’s childhood home is for sale

Wow! What a glorious pile. 10-bedrooms, 11-bathrooms. The Coleridge family moved to Ottery St Mary in 1760, when John Coleridge became the headmaster of The Kings School. Samuel Taylor was John’s youngest son.

Just check out the library:

From Country Life

Steven Sinofsky on the historical background to wearing masks

Lovely Twitter thread by Steven Sinovsky, liasting cases from the past where there was fierce opposition to taking sensible precautions which eventually became common sense. Examples include:

  • childhood vaccination
  • Helmets for skateboarding
  • Cycle helmets
  • Condoms
  • Smoking in planes and public transport everywhere

One he missed out: seat-belts in cars.

This story is currently being re-enacted with people refusing to wear face-masks in public. There will come a time (hopefully in the not too distant future) when this will seem as absurd as refusal to wear a seat-belt.

Interestingly, my first father-in-law always refused to wear a seat belt. In order to avoid being stopped by the cops, he would drape it diagonally across his chest, but never anchored it.

The UK’s contact tracing app fiasco is a master class in mismanagement

Well, so says the headline on James Ball’s piece in MIT’s Tech Review. But actually the article is more nuanced than that. It also has a useful explanation of two key issues that lay at the root of the problems: Bluetooth power management in smartphones; and the trade-off between the need to preserve user privacy on the one hand and Public Health England’s (understandable) desire to detect outbreaks quickly. Johnson’s bluster about ‘world-beating’ didn’t help either. The eagerness of this Cabinet of half-assed Brexiteers to boast of British exceptionalism is pathetic.

James’s piece is worth reading in full, for those who are interested in these matters.

Quarantine diary — Day 93

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Friday 18 June, 2020

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Good news?

Road rage lunacy: do not try this on the M25

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Finish your muesli before watching. The good news is that nobody gets killed. Which is a miracle. I’ve never seen anything like this.

Wonder what happened to the culprit. At first I wondered if he might have been a conspiracy theorist. (See below for an explanation.)

What conspiracy-theories can do to people

Astonishing story from the New Hampshire Union Leader:

A Massachusetts man arrested after leading police on a chase with his five children in the vehicle live-streamed some of the incident on Facebook before allegedly ramming a cruiser and crashing into a tree in North Hampton.

“We don’t want to die,” one of his daughters screamed at one point as she pleaded with him to stop during Thursday’s frightening ordeal.

Alpalus Slyman, 29, of Dorchester, faces three counts of felony reckless conduct, conduct after an accident, and disobeying an officer.

The arrest followed a pursuit that began when police in Haverhill, Mass., notified New Hampshire authorities to be on the lookout for a blue Honda Odyssey minivan.

Police had received a report that a woman was thrown from the vehicle in Massachusetts, which prompted the chase, but Rockingham County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Al Brackett said they later learned that the woman was Slyman’s wife and that it appeared she jumped out while it was moving because she was concerned about the way he was acting.

Slyman posted several videos from inside the minivan on his Facebook page, some of which were taken before his wife fled and he continued on into New Hampshire with the children — ages 13, 5, 2, 1 and 8 months.

Brackett said the 13-year-old child also posted about the incident on social media.

Screams could be heard several times during Slyman’s livestream as he refused to pull over while listening to WROR, a classic hits radio station.

“Don’t you understand? The cops aren’t your friend,” he tells the children before claiming that he’s trying to protect them.

At one point he turned the camera toward his speedometer, which showed him traveling at 110 mph.

He also asked for help from the president: “Donald Trump, I need a miracle,” he said.

Slyman later told the children, “All they’re going to do is drug me and then say I’m crazy.”

In earlier videos before his wife got out and the chase began, she could be heard begging him to stop.

“Slow down, honey, before you kill us!” she says after telling him that he’s “not right.”

Slyman is being held without bail at the Rockingham County jail after he was found to be a danger to himself and his family. Brackett said a mental health evaluation was requested.

On his blog, Alex Hern did some digging, drawing on excavations by Marc-André Argentino, that revealed that Slyman was a conspiracy theorist, with a line in anti-vaxx, 9/11 trutherism and illuminati theories.

But…

things really went off the rails on June 6th – less than a week before he got in his car and nearly killed his family. That’s when, according to Argentino’s analysis, Slyman was first introduced to QAnon.

(A brief précis for those not versed in this particular branch of internet insanity: QAnon is, narrowly construed, a conspiracy theory, holding that there is a great conspiracy to keep Donald Trump from ridding the world of the illuminati-esque cabal of paedophiles and murders who currently pull the strings as part of the Deep State).

Argentino believes that Slyman first watched a video from the QAnon community on June 6th. Then, “very likely he was red-pilled into QAnon in the early hours of June 8 when he binge watched ‘Fall of the Cabal’ until 4am,” Argentino writes. From there, he descends further, latching on to one particularly niche theory that Hilary Clinton skinned and ate a child on camera for the illicit high gained from consuming a young person’s adrenaline.

Five days after he watches his first Q video, he is live-streaming his belief that the local radio station is sending him coded messages from Q. Later that day, the song You Spin Me Round by Dead Or Alive convinces him the Deep State is coming to kill him, and he gets in the car with his wife and kids and begins his drive.

The old belief that conspiracy theories were mostly harmless, or even socially useful in keeping nutters off the street may or may not have been accurate. But it’s clear that for at least a minority of Internet users, they are definitely toxic. (Just think of PizzaGate, for example.) Sounds to me as though Slyman may have had mental health issues before he got sucked down the Qanon wormhole.

Sobering stuff, Ne c’est pas? I suppose the only good news from this incident is that the kids survived their terrifying ordeal.

Between-centre differences for COVID-19 ICU mortality from early data in England

This is the title of a startling piece of research conducted by four researchers, three from Cambridge and one from UCLA, who looked at the data for outcomes for Covid-19 patients admitted to ICU departments in NHS hospitals over the period from 8th February to 22nd May.

The Abstract reads:

The high numbers of COVID-19 patients developing severe respiratory failure has placed exceptional demands on ICU capacity around the world. Understanding the determinants of ICU mortality is important for surge planning and shared decision making. We used early data from the COVID-19 Hospitalisation in England Surveillance System (from the start of data collection 8th February -22nd May 2020) to look for factors associated with ICU outcome in the hope that information from such timely analysis may be actionable before the outbreak peak. Immunosuppressive disease, chronic cardiorespiratory/renal disease and age were key determinants of ICU mortality in a proportional hazards mixed effects model. However variation in site-stratified random effects were comparable in magnitude suggesting substantial between-centre variability in mortality. Notwithstanding possible ascertainment and lead-time effects, these early results motivate comparative effectiveness research to understand the origin of such differences and optimise surge ICU provision.

The bottom line, summarised in a University bulletin is that:

the NHS trust in which a COVID-19 patient ended up in intensive care is as important, in terms of the risk of death, as the strongest patient-specific risk factors such as older age, immunosuppression or chronic heart/kidney disease. In the worst case, COVID-19 patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) of a particular NHS trust were over four times as likely to die in a given time period than COVID-19 patients in an average trust’s ICU.

[Emphasis added] As with many other aspects of this pandemic, postcode lotteries apply.

Quarantine diary — Day 90

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Tuesday 16 June, 2020 – Bloomsday

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Happy Bloomsday!

June 16, 1904 is the day in which all the action in Joyce’s great modernist novel, Ulysses, takes place. Since the 1950s the day has been celebrated by Joyce enthusiasts all over the world, usually by meetings, readings, lunches, talks, performances — all events that involve people meeting in groups, and therefore difficult or impossible in many locations today.

Hopefully, next year will be different. And 2022 will mark the centenary of the publication of the novel, so that should be fun.

But that doesn’t mean one can’t read from it today. There’s a good annotated version of the text on Wikisource if you don’t possess a copy or if the novel is new to you.

Permanent secretaries ‘not aware of any economic planning for a pandemic’

From today’s Guardian:

Two of the government’s most powerful civil servants have said they were not aware of any attempt to make economic preparations for a possible global pandemic in the years leading up to the coronavirus outbreak.

Sir Tom Scholar and Alex Chisholm, the permanent secretaries in the Treasury and the Cabinet Office respectively, confirmed that although the government simulated an international flu outbreak in 2016, Whitehall did not devise a plan for dealing with the consequences for the economy.

Instead, Scholar told MPs, civil servants devised schemes to help businesses “as they went along”. The disclosure, made before the public accounts committee, prompted its chair, Labour’s Meg Hillier, to say she was “dumbstruck”.

Scholar and Chisholm appeared before the committee on Monday to answer questions about the government’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak. The Conservative MP James Wild asked them whether they were aware of an economic plan equivalent to Exercise Cygnus, the 2016 simulation that involved 950 emergency planning officials.

Scholar, who joined the Treasury in 1992, replied: “We developed our economic response in the weeks leading up to the budget. I don’t know to what extent the Treasury was involved in that exercise.”

Referring to the schemes devised to help businesses during the pandemic, Scholar added: “We didn’t have these schemes ready and designed and ready to go. We have been designing them as we have gone along.”

Why are we not surprised? In one way, the whole Coronavirus shambles is a story of the loss of state capacity.

America’s democratic unravelling

From an essay by Daron Acemomoglu of MIT in Foreign Affairs:

Institutional collapse often resembles bankruptcy, at least the way Mike Campbell experienced it in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “gradually and then suddenly.” As James Robinson and I argue in our recent book, The Narrow Corridor, democratic institutions restrain elected leaders by enabling a delicate balance of oversight by different branches of government (legislature and the judiciary) and political action by regular people, whether in the form of voting in elections or exerting pressure via protest. But democratic institutions rest on norms—compromise, cooperation, respect for the truth—and are bolstered by an active, self-confident citizenry and a free press. When democratic values come under attack and the press and civil society are neutralized, the institutional safeguards lose their power. Under such conditions, the transgressions of those in power go unpunished or become normalized. The gradual erosion of checks and balances thus gives way to sudden institutional collapse.

By refusing to disclose his tax returns, openly pursuing policies that serve his family’s financial interests, vilifying Hispanic and Muslim Americans, propagating conspiracy theories, and relentlessly lying to the press, the president has left practically no norm of democratic governance unviolated.

The United States is currently working through the later chapters of this same authoritarian playbook, which Trump adopted early in his presidency. By dismissing concerns about Russian interference in the U.S. election, refusing to disclose his tax returns, openly pursuing policies that serve his family’s financial interests, vilifying Hispanic and Muslim Americans, propagating conspiracy theories, and relentlessly lying to the press, the president has left practically no norm of democratic governance unviolated. These actions not only weakened the institutions that are supposed to restrain the president but also further polarized the U.S. electorate, creating a constituency that unconditionally supports Trump out of fear that the Democrats will take power. Having destroyed many Americans’ trust in their country’s democratic institutions, Trump has set about destroying the institutions themselves, one oversight mechanism at a time.

That’s why the November election is so important. If Trump is defeated, then there’s a chance that American institutions will recover. If he wins then I think the game’s over.

Quarantine diary — Day 87

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Monday 15 June, 2020

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Quote of the Day

I keep wondering about this too.

Termite capitalism: the menace of private equity

Terrific essay in open Democracy on one of the most pernicious manifestations of capitalism.

The problem is that the private equity model of takeover and ownership is akin to inviting termites into your house. The basic model is as follows: private equity acquires a company using loans, usually from banks but also increasingly from pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds etc. The old management is replaced, the workforce cut, and assets such as land and buildings are sold, often to an entity registered in an offshore tax haven. The new company must pay interest on the debt, repay the debt over time, pay rent for the premises, management fees to the private equity owners.

Costs will also include payment to linked third-party suppliers, at prices which are not arm’s length. The taxable capacity of the new company is thereby reduced, and tax liabilities are shifted towards capital gains tax away from corporation tax. The company can only be financially viable in a booming market or where revenue streams continue to rise.

In general, private equity does not actually create anything – it engages instead in extracting resources from previously existing assets. Eventually, by excessive extraction of revenue flows, the companies are bound to fail. The termites eat away at the foundations until the house falls down.

If ever one wanted a demonstration of the extent to which neoliberal ideology is suffused through our ruling elites, then tolerance of private equity provides it. The argument that it’s really a way of ensuring the survival of the fittest in corporate life is specious — at least in its present manifestations.

The Long Shadow Of The Future

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the death of Max Weber, the patron saint of the administrative state. Wolfgang Drechsler has a nice essay to mark the occasion.

“Weberian public administration in the wider sense”, he writes,

has been, and is, much maligned; bureaucracy is an easy target, and whining about it is a steady feature of complex human societies which always need and automatically generate it. And Weberian public administration has its systemic faults — slowness, process-orientation, a slippery slope to authoritarian, mindless hierarchization and shirking. However, this bureaucracy is in its optimal form ethics-based, high-capacity, and motivation-driven. It is meant to be both responsible — to a state that is above and beyond particular interests — as well as responsive — to groups and citizens, but not at the cost of the commonweal.

However we decide to manage the transition to a CO2-neutral world — via Green Growth or Post-Growth — that process will have to be implemented by competent, motivated, and yes, Weberian civil servants.

Yep. And the problem was that neoliberal ideology never believed that this kind of civil service was valuable. (One of its more fanatical American devotees used to say that his ambition was “to shrink the state until it was small enough to be drowned in a bathtub”.) So its devotees (including Margaret Thatcher) imported economic principles and management theories into the administrative state without recognizing the crucial, fundamental differences between public and private, not least as regards value creation.

As a result, writes Drechsler, “We still stand in front of the smoldering ruins of a capable, responsible state … and we are still paying a high price for it.”

And how! The pandemic has vividly demonstrated this — especially in the cases of the US and the UK. We have discovered that these states lacked the capacity to deal with the crisis because, over preceding decades, that capacity had been eroded or (in the case of the US) actively destroyed, especially during the Trump presidency — as Michael Lewis described in his sobering book, The Fifth Risk.

Which brings us to a remarkable long essay by Nils Gilman and Steven Weber on how different kinds of states have responded to the challenge of the virus. They focus particularly on Taiwan (which did well) but draw some really interesting general conclusions from their survey.

Poor policy reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t the result of a failure of imagination; the pandemic was not a black swan event, and it was not unpredictable. It was entirely foreseeable — and foreseen — by a wide variety of government, business, medical and other foresight professionals. For years, the World Economic Forum hosted pandemic preparedness planning events. Even if we didn’t know when and precisely how, we knew something like COVID-19 was coming.

The real challenge is not foresight itself but how to turn foresight into action — specifically, into operational readiness supported by competent operators. The inability to contain the COVID-19 outbreak signals a failure to take seriously the outputs of our own foresight models by acting to create contingency arrangements, manage risks and secure back-up plans in advance, in a sustained manner and without a precise target date or endpoint.

This failure has taken place in Italy, Iran, Spain, England, Sweden, the U.S. and elsewhere; authoritarian, conservative and social democratic governments alike have been overwhelmed. And because we live in a time of rapid and intensive global flows of people and products, multiple national failures compound inexorably into a global failure. In the words of President Eisenhower: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

And why have a small number of countries, like Taiwan, been able to manage the crisis better than others?

Nils and Weber identify a “distinctive mix of governance attributes” —

at once vigorously participatory, highly trustworthy, competent and with careful plans. In 2004, the year after the SARS epidemic, which was widely seen to have been mishandled, the Taiwanese government established the National Health Command Center as “a disaster management center that focuses on large-outbreak response and acts as the operational command point for direct communications among central, regional and local authorities.” Five years later, Taiwanese health officials staged simulated drills as a capability exercise. Simulations revealed the tensions and miscommunications between different levels of government and agencies during a crisis, allowing officials to develop heuristics for overcoming such problems in advance.

One of the most intriguing ideas in this marvellous essay is the way it highlights the difference between ideas and delivery. “One of the less-positive effects of digital social media over the last decade”, they write,

has been to contribute to a set of mythologies about the special value of ideas. Ideas are of course powerful and ultimately the source of innovation and social change, but the pandemic is revealing a sharp difference between power and value. In a landscape where there are plenty of ideas — good and bad and mixed in terms of quality, and often hard to distinguish — value tends to migrate toward what is relatively scarce. And what’s been shown to be relatively scarce right now is competent operational expertise.

Put simply, ideas are cheap and easy to create and distribute — never more so than on social media platforms. But really knowing how to get things done effectively requires a set of capabilities that are difficult to create, expensive to maintain and improve, and not something you describe in 280 characters. Pandemics and other mass emergencies and mobilizations like wars demonstrate the difference in sharp relief. The ability to execute becomes visibly more important than the ability to ideate. What’s more, the best ideas are rarely discovered in isolation from practical implementation. Improvement depends on concrete feedback from what happens when ideas are put into practice in the world. What works and what doesn’t reveals itself to operators before (and often more clearly than) it reveals itself to idea generators.

Wow! This summary has just scratched the surface of an extraordinary essay. Which is why it’s worth reading in full.

29-hour reading of Ulysses to air on RTÉ radio tomorrow!

If you’re an admirer of James Joyce (like me), tomorrow — June 16 (Bloomsday) — is the most important day of the year.

For over 20 years I’ve hosted a lunch to celebrate the writer and his wonderful novel. We gather, drink burgundy and eat gorgonzola sandwiches — just as Leopold Bloom did in Davy Byrne’s pub — at lunchtime in the novel. And read from the book.

Sadly, this year the virus has put paid to that event. I had pondered trying to do a virtual Bloomsday lunch over Zoom, but decided it was too ridiculous and depressing to contemplate.

But — here’s some good news. RTE, the Irish national broadcasting station, is going to broadcast a marathon reading of the novel, starting at 8am tomorrow, the moment when the novel opens in the Martello Tower in Sandycove, south of Dublin.

Here’s the link. Use it wisely. Hope you enjoy the day.

Quarantine diary — Day 86

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Wednesday 10 June, 2020

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Bedtime by the lake

This evening, 21:00 hrs.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

What a real mudslide looks like

This you’ve just got to see.

The elevator problem

(Actually, we would call it the lift problem, but still…)

From The Elevator Arises As The Latest Logjam In Getting Back To Work:

Once the epitome of efficiency for moving masses of people quickly to where they needed to go, the elevator is the antithesis of social distancing and a risk-multiplying bottleneck. As America begins to open up, the newest conundrum for employers in cities is how to safely transport people in elevators and manage the crowd of people waiting for them.

If office tower workers want to stay safe, elevator experts think they have advice, some practical, some not: Stay in your corner, face the walls and carry toothpicks (for pushing the buttons). Not only have those experts gone back to studying mathematical models for moving people, but they are also creating technology like ultraviolet-light disinfection tools and voice-activated panels.

I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t thought of this problem. Maybe because, in the pre-pandemic era, I work(ed) in low-rise buildings.

Other product offerings in the works include calling the elevator via cellphone, antiviral stickers for elevator buttons, lobby concierge-run elevators, express service for each elevator ride, ultraviolet-light HVAC purification systems and even elevator buttons that riders can activate with their feet, their voice or hand gestures.

To reduce the need to touch buttons, Otis’ Smith said, elevators could be placed into “Sabbath service” mode, where they automatically go to each and every floor — a service offered for decades for those whose religion dictates they not operate electrical devices on certain days.

Don’t you just love the idea of “Sabbath mode”?

What happened at Lafayette Square to clear the ground for Trump’s bible stunt.

Amazing reconstruction by the Washington Post. Great journalism.

12 minutes long. Worth it.

The diffference between Nixon and Trump

Longish, thoughtful post by Larry Lessig. This bit really struck me:

Here’s the picture of a democracy coming to understand a fundamental truth — that Nixon was a crook, and had to go. The relevant dynamic in this picture is the correlation in the change in attitudes between Republicans and Democrats: Both lost confidence at the same time.

And here’s the equivalent chart for now.

This is what polarisation looks like.

Quarantine diary — Day 81

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