Stoned

Taken on the north shore of Galway Bay, with the ‘moonscape’ of the Burren in the far distance. The cairn was built by person or persons unknown. But it was asking to be photographed!

Quote of the Day

”Anyone can make a political case so compelling that he or she can’t see the flaws in it.”

• Henry Farrell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chet Atkins, Leo Kottke and Doc Watson | Last Steam Engine Train

Link

Really fine example of the emergent properties of three great guitarists when you put them together.

Long Read of the Day

There is no “woke mind virus”

Striking essay by Dan Williams about the pernicious idea that if people disagree with you they must be suffering from the cerebral equivalent of Covid.

In the past several years, talk of the “woke mind virus” has itself gone viral among right-wing culture warriors. In a recent interview, Elon Musk alleged that the mind virus had even killed his child. What he meant was not that it had actually killed his child—they are very much alive—but that his child is transgender and so, apparently, dead to him.

According to Musk, he was “essentially tricked into signing documents” allowing his child to take puberty blockers, which “are actually just sterilization drugs.” This experience radicalised him: “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.”

The only polite term for this delusion is horseshit. Or, as Williams puts it,

Ideas, including bad ones, are not infectious mind viruses. This metaphor rests on an inaccurate picture of human psychology and social behaviour that functions to demonise, not understand. Because of this, it poisons public debate, increases polarisation, and hinders our collective capacities to understand the world and each other.

Great essay. Worth your time if you are as irritated by culture wars as I am.

So tech titans are not above the law after all

Yesterday’s Observer column

On 24 August, a Russian tech billionaire’s private jet landed at Le Bourget airport, north-east of Paris, to find that officers of the French judicial police were waiting for him. He was duly arrested and whisked away for interrogation. Four days later he was indicted on 12 charges, including alleged complicity in the distribution of child exploitation material and drug trafficking, barred from leaving France and placed under “judicial supervision”, which requires him to check in with the gendarmes twice a week until further notice.

The mogul in question, Pavel Durov, is a tech entrepreneur who collects nationalities the way others collect air miles. In fact it turns out that one of his citizenships is French, generously provided in 2021 by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. Durov is also, it seems, a fitness fanatic with a punishing daily regime. “After eight hours of tracked sleep,” the Financial Times reports, “he starts the day ‘without exception’ with 200 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and an ice bath. He does not drink, smoke, eat sugar or meat, and saves time for meditation.” When not engaged in these demanding activities, he has also found time to father more than 100 kids as a sperm donor and to rival Elon Musk as a free-speech extremist.

Media profiles of Durov bring to mind Churchill’s celebrated description of Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Durov left Russia because the Facebook clone he co-founded with his brother Nikolai in 2006 led to conflict with the Kremlin…

Read on

Later…

This from the New York Times:

Telegram has become a global sewer of criminal activity, disinformation, child sexual abuse material, terrorism and racist incitement, according to a four-month investigation by The New York Times that analyzed more than 3.2 million Telegram messages from over 16,000 channels. The company, which offers features that enable criminals, terrorists and grifters to organize at scale and to sidestep scrutiny from the authorities, has looked the other way as illegal and extremist activities have flourished openly on the app.

The degree to which Telegram has been inundated by such content has not been previously reported. The Times investigation found 1,500 channels operated by white supremacists who coordinate activities among almost one million people around the world. At least two dozen channels sold weapons. In at least 22 channels with more than 70,000 followers, MDMA, cocaine, heroin and other drugs were advertised for delivery to more than 20 countries.

And this fascinating account by Politico on how the French authorities closed in on Durov.

My commonplace booklet

**Intel’s problems in a nutshell:

• Intel doesn’t have the best manufacturing
• Intel doesn’t design the best chips
• Intel is out of the game in AI

Devastating summary by Ben Thompson, who for a long time had been giving Intel the benefit of the doubt.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Churchill: the naked truth

He made quite an impression during his time as the guest of two presidents. The chief usher at the White House recalled that “In his room, Mr Churchill wore no clothes at all most of the time during the day.” Churchill’s bodyguard remarked how President Franklin Roosevelt knocked on the door of the prime minister’s suite during Churchill’s first White House visit in December 1941, only to find that “Winston Churchill was stark naked, a drink in one hand, a cigar in the other.” Roosevelt, clearly flustered, offered to leave, but Churchill demurred: “You see, Mr President, I have nothing to hide.” The two leaders then spoke for an hour.

From the Economist’s review of Mr Churchill in the White House by Robert Schmuhl.

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The Bridge

Crossing the Severn last Sunday.

Quote of the Day

I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

• Peter Thiel, writing in an online libertarian journal in 2009

Footnote Palantir, the company founded by Thiel (with investment from the CIA) now has the contract to build a data platform for the UK’s NHS.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Edward Elgar | Salut d’amour Op. 12 | Berliner Philharmoniker

Link

Pure schmaltz, but what the hell.

Long Read of the Day

 Silicon Valley is an aristocratic culture

Background: On Sunday last, my Observer column was about the reading habits of the Silicon Valley crowd. It was prompted by reading a reading list created by Patrick Collison, and a Substack post by Tanner Greer commenting on the list and arguing that the literary ‘culture’ of Washington D.C. differs critically from the reading habits of Silicon Valley.

Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) has taken issue with this in his usual erudite way.

The actual difference, as I see it, is not one between the philistines of the Beltway and the bibliophiles of the Valley. It is between a technocratic culture in which the public display of a sound general education is irrelevant and an aristocratic one where it can be a valuable asset. Doing well in DC policy circles depends on technocratic knowledge, bureaucratic ruthlessness and connections that are mostly acquired through work or shared education. To do well in Silicon Valley, you want these things, but you also may prosper better if also you appear to have cultivated the appropriate personal dispositions. Being able to talk in the right ways about certain books may persuade others that you might have those dispositions. Hence, it makes it more likely that your start-up will be picked for Y Combinator, get early funding from the right places and so on.

Most of the elements of this explanation are already there in Tanner’s post, but they are partly obscured by his embrace of Silicon Valley’s self-generated mythology of disruption and rebellion. To the extent that Silicon Valley, unlike DC, has a ‘canon’ of books, it is not because Silicon Valley people care more about books than their Beltway equivalents. It is because book-learning does a different kind of cultural work in the Valley than inside the Beltway…

Like everything Farrell writes, it’s interesting. And his conclusion is rather different from Tanner’s. “Silicon Valley has changed remarkably in the intervening two decades,” he writes.

Its culture now centers not simply on technology but the exercise of power. Powerful founders and funders not only aspire to make lots of money, but to reshape the world along better lines. They see themselves as a political elite as well as a financial one, and they are looking to educate themselves, often in ways that reinforce their own values and understanding of their own benevolent role. They want to be formed, and accidentally or consciously form others too.

Worth your time if you are interested in this stuff.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

Unlike more sensible people I am more wired than is good for me. But I’ve also always carried a paper notebook — and still do. So I was interested to see this book — and then find “Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era”, an interesting excerpt from it, by its author.

Might even have to read it. For now, though, I’ve just scribbled a note in my notebook.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The Geek’s Prayer

Lord, grant me the acumen to automate the tasks that do not require my personal attention,

the strength to avoid automating the tasks that do,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

From Phil Giammetti’s Mastodon, via Quentin.

Feedback

• On Monday I mentioned an historian’s view that the prevalence of evangelical rhetoric in American public life have something to do with the skills on display at the Democratic Congress? Rex Davies is sceptical. “Having taught presentation skills internationally, I deduced that the American educational tradition of ‘show & tell’ is the cause. Children are required to address their classmates on a regular basis in the U.S. education system. Experience of public speaking in these formative years accounts for their oratorial expertise in later life. Subsequent bible-bashing may burnish these skills but simple practice – from an early age – makes perfect.

• And on the Tesla cartoon… David Ballard added a cautionary note: “Also be careful of the autocratic transmission!”

• The photograph of the beautifully maintained Alvis car in last Friday’s edition prompted Mark Sherman, a wizard restorer of older American vintage cars to send a photo of one of his beautifully-restored black Packards “which occasionally causes someone to comment that they look ‘gangsterish’. I point out that back in the day – gangsters drove Cadillacs, Police drove Lincolns, and the Judge that sentenced you drove a Packard…”.

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The wisdom of dogs

This is one of my favourite photographs. It was taken in Antibes in August 2010. We were driving along the beachfront on a blisteringly hot Sunday afternoon when I suddenly saw this scene. The owners of the little dog were lying in the sunshine, baking like sausages on a spit. And it seemed to me that their pet was reflecting on the foolishness of human animals. Smart mutt.

Quote of the Day

”Asking if a machine can think is as relevant as asking if submarines can swim.”

• Edsger Dijkstra, a great computer scientist.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sorcha Richardson | Map of Manhattan

Link

Long Read of the Day

Stone Age builders were good engineers.

That’s the conclusion of a study of a 6000-year old monument as reported in a recent paper published in Nature.

The Neolithic farmers and herders who built a massive stone chamber in southern Spain nearly 6,000 years ago possessed a good rudimentary grasp of physics, geometry, geology and architectural principles, finds a detailed study of the site.

Using data from a high-resolution laser scan, as well as unpublished photos and diagrams from earlier excavations, archaeologists pieced together a probable construction process for the monument known as the Dolmen of Menga. Their findings, published on 23 August in Science Advances1, reveal new insights into the structure and its Neolithic builders’ technical abilities.

A truly astonishing read. “These people had no blueprints to work with, nor, as far as we know, any previous experience at building something like this,” says study co-author Leonardo García Sanjuán, an archaeologist at the University of Seville in Spain. “And yet, they understood how to fit together huge blocks of stone” with “a precision that would keep the monument intact for nearly 6,000 years”.

My commonplace booklet

The public discourse about ‘AI’ (aka machine-learning) is messy and incoherent with everyone on a spectrum that ranges from doom/existential risk at one extreme to cynical shrugging it off as just another tech fad (like crypto, say) at the other. From the beginning I’ve been pragmatic about the technology: the thing it first reminded me of was the spreadsheet — and it looked to me to be really just a new tool for human ‘augmentation’ as dear old Doug Engelbart would have put it.

I still see it that way, but am sometimes berated by sceptics with talk of ‘hallucinations’, the alleged absence of real use-cases for the technology and so on.

All of which is by way of explaining why I welcomed something posted this week by Andrew Jassy, the CEO of Amazon and someone who really does know about use-cases. Here’s his post:

One of the most tedious (but critical tasks) for software development teams is updating foundational software. It’s not new feature work, and it doesn’t feel like you’re moving the experience forward. As a result, this work is either dreaded or put off for more exciting work—or both.

Amazon Q, our GenAI assistant for software development, is trying to bring some light to this heaviness. We have a new code transformation capability, and here’s what we found when we integrated it into our internal systems and applied it to our needed Java upgrades:

• The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real).

• In under six months, we’ve been able to upgrade more than 50% of our production Java systems to modernized Java versions at a fraction of the usual time and effort. And, our developers shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes.

• The benefits go beyond how much effort we’ve saved developers. The upgrades have enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs, providing an estimated $260M in annualized efficiency gains.

This is a great example of how large-scale enterprises can gain significant efficiencies in foundational software hygiene work by leveraging Amazon Q. It’s been a game changer for us, and not only do our Amazon teams plan to use this transformation capability more, but our Q team plans to add more transformations for developers to leverage.

Of course that particular use of the technology is very specific. But the numbers are impressive, and I think credible.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  My First Trip to Norway, With A.I. as a Guide. A NYT journalist asked three ‘AI’ travel planners for advice, and then wrote it up. As someone who doesn’t do package holidays, cruises (or guided tours), this wouldn’t appeal to me. But maybe it works for some people.

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Petrolhead nostalgia

As long-suffering readers of this blog know, I am a recovering petrolhead — and the only member of my extended family who can recognise vintage cars at sight. I spotted this beautifully-preserved 1960s Alvis TD21 in a car park the other day. When I was a kid I thought of an Alvis as the kind of car a gent with private means and handmade tweed suits might own, rather than a Jaguar MkII which would seem — to him — a bit raffish. (I can say this because I once had a blue MkII, and I was definitely a bit raffish then. Fortunately, the Yom Kippur war and the quadrupling of oil prices cured me of that particular addiction.)

Quote of the Day

“Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

• Paul Valery, Pieces sur l’Art, 1934.

Amazingly prescient. Just like David Bowie about ‘music like water’ (in 2002) and E.M. Forster about the Web (in 1909.

Thanks to Philip Steadman for pointing me to it.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Long Time Traveller | Wailing Jennys

Link

Long Read of the Day

Real estate shopping for the apocalypse

Wonderful New Yorker essay by Patricia Marx on the market for domestic nuclear bunkers in the US.

What if they’re right? What if a nuke drops, or climate change turns the world into a foaming puddle, or the next pandemic is spread through selfies? Billionaires have recently been spending millions building themselves customized bunkers, in the hope that they can ride out the apocalypse in splendor. In January, a video surfaced of the rapper Rick Ross bragging that his bunker will be better than Elon Musk’s bunker. (Musk is not known to have a bunker, but that’s a detail.) Ross’s bunker will have multiple “wings” and a “water maker.” Also, plenty of canned goods. Ross’s bunker might even have its own bunker. But what about me—and, if I’m being generous, you? Are there affordable underground shelters available for us to hole up in?

A few months back, I started to scan real-estate Web sites. Hmm, I wondered. Might throw pillows brighten up the underground scheelite mine in Beaver County, Utah, that was converted into a community fallout shelter during the Cold War (a steal at nine hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars, when you consider how many light-bulb filaments you could make from the leftover tungsten you could knock loose)? Or how about the concrete-and-steel stronghold in Hilliard, Ohio, built by A.T. & T. and the Army in 1971 to protect the nation’s communications system in case of nuclear attack? It comes with a “1970’s-era smoking room.” (Note to self: Take up smoking a few months before world ends.) Would house guests get the hint if I mentioned that my new home had three-thousand-pound blast-proof doors? ($1.25 million for nine acres.)

Keep reading. It’s a scream.

Books, etc.

I’ve just discovered this — a book by Dan Mulhall about my native land as the 19th century morphed into the 20th. The blurb says that

“it describesthe political and cultural ferment that gripped Ireland the last time a century turned. Based on contemporary books and newspaper sources, and copiously illustrated with photographs from the period, this book offers a stark insight into the conditions that prevailed in the Ireland of 1900. There is an account of the crimes that captured public attention at a time when urban and rural poverty were rife, the emigrant ship remained a common experience and the workhouse often provided a last refuge for the poor and the old.”

I know Dan slightly. He was the Irish Ambassador to the UK when I first met him (and was later Irish Ambassador to the US, after which he retired). He’s also a keen and knowledgeable Joycean (he wrote a chatty, readable guide to Ulysses, for example), and he was the only diplomat I knew of who tweeted regularly about Joyce, the poetry of W.B. Yeats and related matters. So I’d better catch up with A New Day Dawning before I run into him again.

My commonplace booklet

From Tortoise media’s newsletter yesterday:

Time capsules rarely attract more fanfare at their unveiling than their installation, but an unexpected one at London’s National Gallery certainly has. Constructors uncovered a letter entombed within one of two false concrete columns in the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing. The letter was written in 1990 by donor John Sainsbury (Sainsbury and his two brothers Simon and Timothy originally donated £40 million to the National Gallery for its extension) and snuck into the column during its installation. It details Sainsbury’s great disdain for the column, which he described as “a mistake of the architect” that the National Gallery would “live to regret”. Regret indeed, as more than 30 years on, the letter was discovered in the pillar’s demolition during the wing’s redevelopment, due to reopen in May next year. John Sainsbury died in 2022, but the 1990 letter makes clear how he would have felt. It reads: “Let it be known that one of the donors of this building is absolutely delighted that your generation has decided to dispense with the unnecessary column.” A gloriously petulant “I told you so” from beyond the grave.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From the current issue of Private Eye (Which God Preserve)

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The millennial spire

A church that is over 900 years old, framed by autumnal leaves.

Quote of the Day

”When confronted with magical thinking by dictators, historians feel out of place, like a bridge player invited to judge prestidigitation, say, or a surgeon hired to care for wax figures.”

• Timothy Snyder

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Peter Maxwell Davies | Lullaby for Lucy (1981)

Link

Words by the Scottish poet George Mackay Brown for the birth of Lucy Randall, the first child born in Rackwick, Hoy, in 32years.

Long Read of the Day

Stranded Astronauts and the Biggest Disruption In (modern) Business History

An interesting and instructive essay by Andrew McAfee whose book The Geek Way on how corporations have changed and evolved over a century or more. There’s a whiff of techno-worship and whiggery in his writing, but he’s invariably interesting and knowledgeable. I found this particular essay informative, and it contains some charts that make one sit up, especially the ones that compare the West and East coasts of the US. He begins with the irony of how Boeing (an old-style industrial corporation) took an unconscionable time to build a spacecraft that could take astronauts to the International Space Station, but is unable to take them back to earth. So they will have to be rescued by — guess what? — by a SpaceX rocket built by Elon Musk’s geeks! And it turns out that they only brought underwear for a short stay.

My commonplace booklet

Barry Blitt’s front cover of the current issue of the New Yorker.

Linkblog

Stolen iPhone. I Survived.

David Birch’s iPhone was stolen. He’s written a really helpful account of how he mitigated the potential damage. He sums up the lessons thus:

If your iPhone is snatched:

First, use your laptop (or a friend’s laptop) log in to your Apple account immediately, wipe the iPhone and change your iCloud password. Do this before you call the police or anyone else.

Second, use your spare phone (or a friend’s phone) and call the phone company get the number blocked.

Third, call the police and get the crime number you will need for your insurance. The police are not going to do anything about getting your phone back (it would take every police officer in Britain to do something about this).

To which I would add — if you’re in London (and especially in Westminster — where almost a third of the thefts occur — do not walk around with your iPhone in your hand or in an accessible pocket.

The latest figures (from the Office of National Statistics) show that over the last decade mobile phones have overtaken cash and payment cards as the items most often stolen from individuals in the UK.

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Before the Fall

Seen on a woodland walk yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

• David Bowie, speaking to the New York Times — in 2002!.

Amazingly perceptive. Apple’s iPod was just a year old and we were all carrying our music around with us, rather as Victorian tourists in India carried bottles of boiled water. And now we just turn on the tap marked ‘Spotify’.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Piano Sonata No. 12 in F Major, K. 332: II. Adagio | Seong-Jin Cho

Link

Long Read of the Day

You may think that; I couldn’t possibly comment

Lovely blog post by Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) on the vexed topic of the comments that appear under many articles published online.

When you arrive at the bottom of a story on a news site, you will—especially if the story appears in the “Opinion” section—often find yourself effectively being invited to comment on what you’ve just read. Come on, you’re not just a reader now: you’re also one of the people with the power to make your voice heard! At last you can stick it to The Man!

So what’s your reaction when you find that 1,500 people have already commented on the article?

So when you see that number, do you think: wa-hey! This must have some fun going on, it’s time that people heard my view on this too.

Or do you think: there cannot possibly be any value in being the 1,501st comment below this story.

My guess is that you fall into the latter category. And yet there are plenty of people out there who do not. They see an article with 200 comments—arguably more than even a quite devoted reader who reaches that point is going to bother with—and think to themselves what this really needs is my opinion, because that’s what people have been missing in all this.

Read on.

Speaking personally…. I’ve always been opposed to comment streams that are not moderated — and many (most?) are not because moderation costs money. What unmoderated commenting reveals is that most people haven’t the faintest idea of how to formulate an argument.

Years ago I had an interesting conversation with a well-known journalist who had recently taken up photography and was delightedly posting his work on Flickr — and also following other photographers on the platform. He particularly liked the pictures of one of his followees and one day wrote to him complimenting him on an image but suggesting that it might have been even more effective if it had been cropped in a certain way.

And the response? “Go f**k yourself.”

Constructive criticism is an art not widely understood..

Books, etc.

David Spiegelhalter (Boris Johnson’s least favourite statistician) has a new book coming in September. Hooray!

AI cheating, the education system and common sense

Yesterday’s Observer column:

LLMs are a burning issue for the humanities in particular because the essay is such a key pedagogical tool for teaching students how to research, think and write. More importantly, perhaps, the essay also plays a central role in how they are graded and assessed. The bad news is that LLMs threaten to make that venerable pedagogy untenable. And that there’s no technical fix in sight.

The good news is that the problem isn’t insoluble – if educators in these disciplines are willing to rethink and adapt their teaching to the new reality. Other pedagogies are available. But they require, if not a change of heart, two changes of mindset.

The first is an acceptance that LLMs – as the distinguished Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik puts it – are “cultural technologies”, like writing, print, libraries and internet search. In other words, they are tools for human augmentation, not replacement.

Second, and more importantly perhaps, is a need to reinforce in students’ minds the importance of writing as a process…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

On the language of LLMs

Rob Nelson has a marvellous essay on his Substack

At its core, the debate over how to treat LLMs is about the relationship between computation and cognition. Enthusiasts don’t see a problem with using the concepts of human cognition to describe the behavior of LLMs. For skeptics, human thought is vastly more complex than the computational processes happening in even the largest models, and because LLMs do not understand context, they do not know anything. Using words like think, write, or speak to describe what LLMs do is a category error. As Edsger Dijkstra analogized, asking if a machine can think is as relevant as asking if submarines can swim.

The essay is particularly good on the confusions that arise when machine-learning researchers use terms like ‘attention’ in a very specialised way — as a word to describe the information processing that occurs in a transformer-based LLM, but which is totally unlike how we use the term in ordinary human-to-human discourse. Just to underline the problem, the seminal 2017 research paper in which Google researchers announced the conceptual breakthrough represented by the ‘transformer’ model had the provocative title “Attention Is All You Need”.

Feedback

My comments on how the Breugel painting in last Wednesday’s edition highlighted the ways agriculture has changed over the centuries reminded Joe Dunne of another painting — John Constable’s ‘The Cornfield’.

(For a zoomable version click here)

Joe thinks that in the painting Constable was criticising the impact of the Industrial Revolution on farming. Young people were moving to the cities to work in factories where they could get better and stable wages. And he lists evidence in the painting supporting this conjecture. For example:

• There are only three workers in the field compared to 20 in Breugel’s 1565 ‘The Harvesters’.
• The gate is hanging off its hinges – nobody to fix it (the donkeys & sheep have access to the wheat field so it’s vulnerable to damage).
• The farmer inside the gate of the wheat field is quite old (stooped) indicating the youth have left for the city.
• The plough is still out in the open and therefore rusting even though it’s now August (corn is ripe) and the ploughing was done in March. No staff to look after it properly.
• The tree on the left of the painting is dead – no staff to render the lane safe by cutting it down.
• The young boy in the foreground is looking after the sheep – no mature adult available to do this job.

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Harvesting then and now

This remarkable 1565 painting by Pieter Breugel the Elder stopped me in my tracks the other day. It’s fascinating in its detail (for a much bigger version click on the image here) — right down to the people who may be skinny-dipping in a small lake in the far distance, the man bringing a pitcher of water to the others sitting under the tree, and the exhausted man asleep. But it’s also an interesting illustration of how agricultural practices have changed over the centuries.

Consider the number of people involved in harvesting that crop, and then look at this:

This field, which is farmed by a neighbour of ours, is truly vast — stretching almost as far as the eye can see. Yet its cereal crop was harvested in three days by two men (albeit with a couple of enormous machines). And then it was ploughed by a single man in a huge tractor in (I think) two days.

Quote of the Day

“If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking”

• Benjamin Franklin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Ruth Moody | Wherever I Go

Link

Long Read of the Day

Fixed Narratives, Fixing Narratives

Fabulous essay by Timothy Burke which starts with a scorching critique of the New York Times’s delusional (and dangerous) pursuit of editorial ‘balance’ at a time when that requires ‘balancing’ rational thinking and analysis with the ravings of a deluded ex-President and his supporting cast of right-wing nutters.

The NYT is really at its worst in this year’s campaign cycle, to the point that I’m a bit at a loss to imagine what’s going on in the newsroom. Their behavior is so programmatic that I have to think they’re consciously pursuing an obsessive, almost lunatic version of “balance” in their coverage of both presidential campaigns. It’s so over the top and calculated that it ends up feeling less like news coverage and more like an attempt to be a third side—not even being a referee but an advocate set against both campaigns on behalf of some imagined and very Rube Goldberg jerry-rigged “centrism”. Nate Cohn’s weird freak-out about how Harris was far to the left on economic policy right after she moved into the lead spot was a foretaste of what we’ve had ever since.

Today’s piece on why Harris is wrong that inflation has anything to do with price gouging is a good example of what this drive is doing to the clarity and structure of NYT news analysis. It’s not a patient laying out of the concept of inflation, nor an exploration of the history of inflation in post-Bretton Woods global economies. It’s not a methodical sector-by-sector look back at price increases during the pandemic and its immediate aftermath. It’s not a detailed analysis of whether there have been supply chain issues and which commodities have been affected most, or even what “supply chains” mean in the contemporary globalized situation, which is something quite different than what they meant in 1974, 1980, or 1990. The whole piece reads as if the conclusion was reached first and then the authors tried to find ways to make the conclusion hold. Which, I know, is not an unfamiliar habit in journalism or academia, but it’s a bad look when it is this obvious and this motivated.

Two junctures where I really found myself frustrated with the article was first that in fact some economists do say that “price gouging” and profit-seeking were one reason inflation remained high into 2022 and 2023. The article acknowledges that fact, but way down near the bottom of the inverted pyramid, whereas the lede frames the story as “politicians who have a message vs. the strong consensus of experts.” “Gouging” of some kind, fueled in part by the stimulus provided to consumers and nominal increases in wages in response to workers quitting their jobs, was so visible in 2022 and 2023 that some companies touted their continuing strategy of increasing prices to pad profits a part of their annual reports and have developed a marketing narrative to go along with it—that they want consumers to normalize a preference for “premium” brands where the main thing that’s premium about them is the price.

What really drove me nuts is a paragraph early on that sets out to rubbish the idea that companies are keeping supplies artificially low in order to pump demand and keep prices high. It drove me nuts first because there have been demonstrated cases of price manipulation of that kind in the last seventy-five years of global economic history. This is not folklore or conspiracy theory. Sometimes it’s not the companies, it’s speculative buyers that keep supplies low, but it absolutely can happen. More importantly, what the article offers as disproof that this was happening between 2021 and 2023 the following: “At least in theory, such a situation should be only temporary. New competitors should enter the market and provide products at a price people can afford.”

Among other things, the essay supports the view that if the US does finally sink into unshackled authoritarianism in November, then the country’s mainstream media will have — wittingly or unwittingly — been an accessory after the fact.

Books, etc.

Corporate BS

This looks interesting. Blurb reads:

From praising the health benefits of cigarettes to moralizing on the character-building qualities of child labor, rich corporate overlords have gone to astonishing, often morally indefensible lengths to defend their profits. Since the dawn of capitalism, they’ve told the same lies over and over to explain why their bottom line is always more important than the greater good: You say you want to raise the federal minimum wage? Why, you’ll only make things worse for the very people you want to help! Should we hold polluters accountable for the toxins they’re dumping in our air and water? No, the free market will save us! Can we raise taxes on the rich to pay for universal healthcare? Of course not—that will kill jobs! Affordable childcare? Socialism! It’s always the same tired threats and finger-pointing, in a concentrated campaign to keep wealth and power in the hands of the wealthy and powerful.

If in doubt, see Cory’s review!

My commonplace booklet

’Decisive moment’ 2.0

Many thanks to the readers who wrote to me after this pic headed Monday’s edition. Writing back to one of them (a fellow-photographer) I explained that it was the result of a conjunction of a few things: a lovely afternoon; me happening to be in the churchyard; I had a Leica with me (as usual); over to the left, out of view, was an almost extinct bonfire, smoke from which was gently drifting rightwards. The conjunction of all those things made for the ‘decisive moment’ that Henri Cartier-Bresson famously wrote about in his book of that title.

But when I raised the camera to my eye, the scene didn’t look right in colour. So I took out my iPhone, switched on its monochrome filter and took the picture.

“Ah”, wrote my friend, “the decisive moment! That time when you had a Leica and an iPhone and chose to use the iPhone…”. Touché.

But actually, that particular decisive moment happened a long time ago. See this chart.

Most of those ‘digital cameras’ (blue colour) are in smartphones.

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The Amphitheatre next door

Arles, 2024

Quote of the Day

”S&P Global is paying Accenture to train all 35k staff in ‘generative AI’. I used to joke that if you say ‘Digital Transformation’ three times, an Accenture partner will appear in a puff of smoke and offer you a contract – now the same happens for ‘AI’. Welcome to enterprise IT.”

• Benedict Evans

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

You Raise Me Up | Life in 3D

Link

I got this from Quentin who discovered these three musical siblings while browsing. Their names are Devon, Daylon and Daura, hence the ‘3D’!

Long Read of the Day

Seeing Like a Matt

Fascinating essay by Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) on the intellectual blind spots of anti-anti-neoliberalism. Sounds arcane, I know, but if you’re interested in the ideology that got us into this mess (and I, for one, am), then it’s great read. It’s basically a response to a recent blog post by Matt Yglesias in his series on “Neoliberalism and Its Enemies.”

This is how it opens:

In brief (lots more below), Matt’s diagnosis of the state of affairs seems to me to be as follows. Once, and not so long ago, Democrats like Obama had a technocratic approach to policy which was dubbed neoliberalism by its enemies, but was actually pretty good! This approach involved letting markets do their thing so as to produce lots of delicious economic growth, and redistributing the proceeds to make people happy. Good policy making required careful thinking about the concrete costs and benefits of proposed measures – you calculated the tradeoffs and made the appropriate policy choices, ignoring the complaints of lefties. With notably rare exceptions, such as trade with China, this worked out pretty well. Sadly, in the last few years, many Democrats have fallen off the path of righteousness, seduced by the brazen idols of political economy. They have lost any understanding of tradeoffs, or of proper policy analysis, and are wandering the mazes of their own confused rhetoric in a condition of utter bewilderment. There is a cure. We Must All Return to the One True Path of Technocratic Neoliberalism, Though We Don’t Have To Call It That If It Makes You Feel Sad!

My own take (or, more precisely, my crude riff on other, more intelligent people’s ideas) is unsurprisingly very different. As I see it, there is no realistic prospect of going back to the technocratic shake-and-bake of letting markets rip and divvying up the benefits. It had its virtues, but we live in a different world, in part thanks to its equally substantial flaws.

Do read it. Henry is a fine writer and very erudite, and he’s intellectually combative but never rude. This essay is a model of how to disagree productively.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

The historian Richard J. Evans, my distinguished former colleague, has a new book out, which is on my list. I’ve just seen the NYT review and look forward to reading it. Years ago, Richard, David Runciman and I ran a big, Leverhulme-funded research project on ‘Conspiracy and Democracy’. We started in late 2012 and for the first three and a half years our academic colleagues — who subscribed to the conventional wisdom that conspiracy theories had very little significance for democracy — wondered about our sanity. And then Brexit happened and Trump was elected and our colleagues were no longer incredulous!

My commonplace booklet

Trump’s ‘Affirmative Action Program’: the media

The inability of mainstream media in the US to dispassionately report on Trump is shocking. One sees it everywhere, but it was particularly egregious in the imbalance between the incessant focus on Joe Biden’s frailties and the apparent inability of leading newspapers and broadcast outlets to report truthfully on Trump’s manifestly obvious cognitive disintegration.

So it was refreshing to read John Stoehr, editor of ‘The Editorial Board’ newsletter, on the subject:

Every single person in Washington knows Trump is weak, but he rarely comes off that way to the American public, and that’s thanks to the press corps. In a sense, the press corps is Trump’s “affirmative action program” (if we accept the illiberal definition of affirmative action). It doesn’t matter how much he fails. It doesn’t matter how weak he is. The press corps can be trusted to inject something – anything – he says into any story, even ones where he does not belong, and as a consequence, he will come off as stronger than he is. Case in point: “Biden, Trump exchange jabs as Russia prisoner swap turns political.”

(Trump’s “affirmative action program” was on display this week after he humiliated himself during a televised interview at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. The audience laughed at him when he doubted Kamala Harris’ Blackness. That was funny! But the press corps bailed him out, again, by framing the story as if Harris were responsible for his buffoonery, not him.)

And because Trump comes off as stronger than he is, Biden comes off as weaker than he is. Remember: Biden really did get those prisoners out.

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Gee-up

Striking mural, Brignoles, Provence

Quote of the Day

”I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy . . . the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

• John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

Dead relevant when contemplating the ways in which neoliberal ideas have shaped our world over the last half-century.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Prelude No. 1, BWV 846 (Das Wohltemperierte Klavier) | Alexandre Tharaud

Link

Hypnotically beautiful. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Long Read of the Day

Express Elevator

Truly interesting and subtle essay by the gifted sci-fi writer Karl Schroeder on the flaws in our conventional ways of thinking about — and imagining — possible futures. The title comes from a term devised aeons (probably in the Sixties) for the practice of taking uppers and downers simultaneously. (Spoiler alert: do not try this at home.)

The sad truth is that coherent, single-message futures are easier to understand. That’s why there are more of them. Full stop, end of story. They’re easier to dream up, easier to flesh out if you’re worldbuilding or developing a scenario, and they’re easier to explain. “It all goes to shit!” is a concise enough description of the year 2050 for most people to nod their heads and get right into the action.

But the real world doesn’t work that way.

For example: ending fossil fuels is unquestionably a good idea. But as it turns out, aerosols in the air, mostly produced by burning those fuels, currently mask about .5 degrees C of global warming. There’s a term in geoengineering—”termination shock”—which is the sudden spike in temperature that would go along with ending a geoengineering effort to manage global temperatures. Termination shock is such an evil thing that Neal Stephenson wrote a whole novel about it (guess what the title is). Meanwhile, even as we pontificate about how bad geoengineering is because it has the potential to cause termination shock, we are experiencing actual, for-real termination shock because we’re eliminating coal plants, and the aerosols they’ve blanketed the Earth with for decades.

Coal phase-outs are an express elevator: simultaneously good and bad…

Do read it. It made me think, which is quite an achievement.

Books, etc.

Somewhat to my surprise, I’m finding Nick Wapshott’s book on the clash between two epochal thinkers of the 20th century enjoyable and informative. It helps that it also has the occasional nice anecdote. Like this one about Joan Robinson, the great (but initially under-appreciated) economist who worked closely with Richard Kahn, another of Keynes’s proteges.

She and Austin Robinson were ostensibly happily married with two daughters, but her close intellectual collaboration with Kahn led them to become lovers. The couple was once surprised by Keynes in flagrante, Keynes telling [his wife] Lydia that the pair were “lovingly entangled on the floor of Kahn’s study, though I expect the conversation was only on ‘The Pure Theory of Monopoly’”.

My commonplace booklet

Susan Wójcicki RIP

speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 at Pier 48 on September 14, 2016 in San Francisco, California.

She originally rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were starting Google — and then joined the company, eventually becoming CEO of YouTube. “As one of the earliest Googlers — and the first to take maternity leave”, writes Sundar Pichai (CEO of Alphabet and Google), “Susan used her position to build a better workplace for everyone. And in the years that followed, her advocacy around parental leave set a new standard for businesses everywhere. Susan was also deeply passionate about education. She realized early on that YouTube could be a learning platform for the world and championed ‘edutubers’ — especially those who extended the reach of STEM education to underserved communities”.

She always seemed to me to be a force for good in the industry. Unlike some other — more famous — women one could name.

NYT obit is here

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  The Babylonian Map of the World with Irving Finkel This delightful talk by a great scholar of antiquity is unmissable IMHO.

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Sunset over the Hall

Quote of the Day

”Whether it was a good idea to print the prefaces in a single volume is a moot point, since they were not designed by their author to be encountered in a block. Together they cast much light on what James thought of his own work, on the art of fiction, and on how towards the end of his life he thought about his earlier career. But the process of reading them one after another, without the intervening joys of the fiction, is a bit like being forced to eat a roll of linoleum thickly spread with jam (to make it a little more digestible), while being overseen by a nostalgic nanny who repeatedly attempts to recall the precise origins of each splodge of jam, and of the fruit from which it was, meticulously and with much boiling and concentration, originally confected.”

• Colin Burrow, reviewing The Prefaces by Henry James (CUP, 2024) in the London Review of Books.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Wailin’ Jennys | The Parting Glass

Link

This came to mind as I watched the athletes gathering for the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games last night.

Long Read of the Day

Richard Nixon: My Part In His Downfall

Nice memoir by Lawrence Freedman of his youthful participation in the 1972 Democratic convention.

In July 1972 I was 23, and on my first visit to the United States. As a political junkie – I’d been active in student and Liberal Party politics – I was keen to experience American politics at first hand. Having spent time protesting against the Vietnam War my natural affinities were with the McGovern camp. So a week after arriving in New York and then meeting up with family in New Jersey I took a Greyhound Bus to Miami, itself something of an experience.

On Monday 10 July 1972 I wrote to my parents from the Doral Hotel telling them that I was working as a McGovern volunteer and able to watch was happening behind the scenes. Having been unable to find my relation’s friend who was supposedly a big shot in the campaign I saw a sign which said ‘Volunteers for McGovern: Accommodation Provided.’ As I had nowhere to stay close to the Convention I duly volunteered and was soon filling envelopes with campaign material. This is the sort of thing volunteers often do though it is not very exciting. But I was diligent and keen and when an opportunity came to do something more interesting I took it…

Great read. But to get to understand why the title of the essay (kind-of) makes sense, you have to read to the end!

What opposition to delivery drones shows about big tech’s disrespect for democracy

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Tech determinism is an ideology, really; it’s what determines how you think when you don’t even know that you’re thinking. And it feeds on a narrative of technological inevitability, which says that new stuff is coming down the line whether you like it or not. As the writer LM Sacasas puts it, “all assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimise resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future”.

But for the narrative of inevitability to translate into widespread general deployment of a technology, politicians eventually have to buy into it too. We’re seeing a lot of this at the moment with AI, and it’s not clear yet how that will play out in the long run. Some of the omens are not good, though. One thinks, for example, of the toe-curling video of Rishi Sunak fawning on Elon Musk, the world’s richest manchild, or of Tony Blair’s recent soppy televised conversation with Demis Hassabis, the sainted co-founder of Google DeepMind.

How refreshing it is, then, to come across an account of what happens when the deterministic myth collides with democratic reality…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Think before you post At last, maybe the UK Crown Prosecution Service is getting serious about prosecuting people who make threats on social media. I’ve never understood how, Twitter/X male users who threaten female politicians with rape are not prosecuted. In related news, Irish police have arrested a guy who made online threats about the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and his family. So maybe the democratic worm is beginning to turn.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• ‘It made me cry’: photos taken 15 years apart show melting Swiss glaciers Intriguing (though depressing) story in the Guardian.

A tourist has posted “staggering” photos of himself and his wife at the same spot in the Swiss Alps almost exactly 15 years apart, in a pair of photos that highlight the speed with which global heating is melting glaciers.

Duncan Porter, a software developer from Bristol, posted photos that were taken in the same spot at the Rhône glacier in August 2009 and August 2024. The white ice that filled the background has shrunk to reveal grey rock. A once-small pool at the bottom, out of sight in the original, has turned into a vast green lake.

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