Lovely column by Simon Caulkin, who has been looking at the current crisis of capitalism in the light of re-reading an elegant introduction to Das Kapital.
It takes a reading of Francis Wheen’s concise and lucid Marx’s Das Kapital – a biography (Atlantic) for the penny to drop. The cantankerous ghost hovering over the global turmoil and glorying in the discomfiture of its chief agents is that of Highgate Cemetery’s most eminent denizen and the UK’s great revolutionary. The sense of the grinding of the gears of history, the shifting of the political and economic plates, comes straight from Karl Marx (although some might also want to add an element of Groucho). When the governor of the Bank of England talks of protecting people from the banks, and plaintively recommends that graduates should consider a career in industry as well as the City, shimmering eerily through his remarks is the Gothic vision of alienation and auto-destruction that Marx outlined 150 years ago…
Another interesting perspective on capitalism is that of systems engineering. The basic problem is that the system is intrinsically unstable. It can be maintained in a semi-stable state for periods of time by regulation, but in the end its latent instability breaks through. Oscillations between boom and bust are a feature, not (as its apologists maintain) a bug.
If you’ve signed up for a new web service recently, you may have noticed that a final stage of the enrolment process presents you with an indistinct image of a number of letters and numbers, often in a wavy line, and sometimes displayed against a confusing background. You are asked to identify the sequence and type it accurately into a text box. You have just encountered a Captcha…
The real significance of the iPhone is that it’s a powerful Unix box that sits in your hand. But exactly how powerful is it? John Gruber approached the problem by asking: “which Mac does it most closely resemble in terms of specification?. Here’s his answer, which is based on some clever digging by Craig Hockenberry:
So, my answer to the question: the original “Pismo” G3 PowerBook. The numbers match up pretty closely: 400 MHz CPU, 100 MHz bus speed, 64 MB of RAM. (The higher-end Pismo had a 500 MHz CPU and 128 MB of RAM.) Even storage sizes are similar: hard drive options for the Pismo were 6, 12, or 18 GB. Another possible answer: the original blue-and-white Power Mac G3 — again, 400 MHz CPU, 100 MHz bus speed, 64-128 MB of RAM, and 6-12 GB hard drives. Think about that — in just nine years, the specs that then described Apple’s top-of-the-line desktop computer now describe their phone.
So — it took about eight years to get a G3 PowerBook into a phone. That means that in eight years’ time we’ll get a MacBook Pro into a phone.
I got a laptop from work last year with Windows Vista installed. I don’t use it much (I have a Vaio with XP which works fine), but it has become our media machine at home. Then yesterday it gave the message that the activation period had expired and this version of Windows was not valid. I tried entering the code on the sticker on the machine but no joy. I contacted tech guys at the ou who reckon I will need to plug it into the campus network for it to update. As I’m in Cardiff and in the US next week, this means it’s at least a couple of weeks before it will be usable again. I asked if they knew this would happen, and was told no. I wonder if other organizations know about this ‘feature’ of Vista? I’ve always been reasonably pragmatic about Windows as an OS, if everyone else uses it, then I’m happy to. But not being able to access a legitimate copy is rather stretching my agnosticism. So finally it may be a case of Linux, here I come.
… in 1869, a golden spike was driven at Promontory, Utah, marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. The spike was tapped into a prepared hole in a polished California laurel tie by Leland Stanford, one of the financiers of the railroad (and founder of Stanford University).
According to UnderstandingRace.org,
Chinese railroad workers present at the site were deliberately excluded from the photograph. Hired by the Central Pacific railroad, these Chinese workers operated under the most dangerous conditions, handling explosives used to blast through the Sierra Nevada mountains, resulting in higher fatalities than other workers.
Wonder what happened to the spike.
Later: Harry Metcalfe emailed:
When I was last there, in I think 1993, on the way by car from San Fran via Death Valley, the Apache Reservation in Utah, to Washington D.C. it was still there, but safely indoors, not still in the track.
According to Wikipedia (where else?) the spike and the special tie rail were replaced soon after the ceremony.
Still later: Found this (via Google Images):
Caption reads: “There were two golden spikes made for the ceremony joining the two halves of the Transcontinental Railroad… this one was the long-lost (but never used) twin of the spike that’s now at Stanford University. ”
The spike is engraved on the top and on all four sides. On the head are the words, “The Last Spike”; on side one: “The Pacific Railroad ground broken Jany. 8th 1863, and complete May 8th 1869″(the ceremony was to take place on May 8th but was delayed by adverse weather and labor problems that held up the Union Pacific delegation); on side two: “Directors of the C.P.R.R. of Cal. Hon. Leland Stanford. C.P. Hunting. E.B. Crocker. Mark Hopkins. A.P. Stanford. E.H. Miller Jr.”; on side three: “Officer. Hon. Leland Stanford. Presdt. C.P. Huntington Vice Presdt. E.B. Crocker. Atty. Mark Hopkins. Tresr. Chas Crocker Ge. Supdt. E. H. Miller Jr. Secty. S. S. Montague. Chief Engr.”; and on side four: “May God continue the unity of our country, as this Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the world. Presented by David Hewes San Francisco.”
Shawn Fanning, best known for founding Napster, has a new job. He will be working at Electronic Arts, which is about to buy his social-network-gaming startup Rupture for $30 million, according to sources with knowledge of the deal. His co-founder Jon Baudanza will also join Electronic Arts. We first heard of a possible deal back in February, but did not know who was the buyer. Rupture’s first product was a social network for players of the online video game World of Warcraft, but it only came out with a beta version and kept delaying its public launch.
Electronic Arts is buying the company for its technology, since it doesn’t have a lot of users (it was only ever in beta) and never launched the second version of its service. Presumably, creating social networks around massively multiplayer video games is a key component of its online strategy. The company has not yet officially announced the acquisition, but it is expected to do so soon. [Update: The closing of the deal is imminent, but there are still some papers to sign].
I’m glad that he has finally hit pay dirt. He changed the world, IMHO for the better.
It is observed that at this stage bots (or bot-infected machines) are trying to sign up as many accounts as possible with Gmail mail services. One of the main concerns here is attacking CAPTCHA. Unfortunately, spammers seem to have success with it. The bot is signing up an account feeding all the prerequisites or input data that goes into the signup page and successfully creating a mail account.
Considering the normal / routine process involved in signing up a web mail account (Gmail), CAPTCHA authentication is a must for a successful signup. Since a bot is creating an account successfully, it is obvious that CAPTCHA is broken…
Can Mr Brown reverse the dynamics? He has been offered no shortage of advice from his party. Turn left, say those who never much cared for the New in New Labour, and in his weakness see a chance to ditch it. Smile more, say others—though when Mr Brown tries to speak human he seems less convincing than when he sticks to macroeconomics. There are a few who, despite the risk of looking chaotically undemocratic, simply enjoin him to go: over half the Labour supporters in a Populus poll for the Times want him out.
Mr Brown can scarcely complain about disloyalty, for he helped to inculcate a taste for plots and mutinies during his long march to Downing Street. But would his removal improve things? From the Labour Party’s point of view, there are too many flimsy contenders to replace him and scarcely any serious ones. The struggle to get rid of a leader causes lasting damage—as the Tories, who only recently recovered from the civil war unleashed by the ouster of Lady Thatcher, know well. Besides, the Tories need a huge swing to form a government at the next election, probably in 2010. They are still planning for a hung parliament. Scandal, or an eruption of atavistic, Conservatism may yet weaken Mr Cameron. The new mayor of London, Boris Johnson, now an icon of Tory resurgence, may embarrass his party.
If you read nothing else today, then read this NYT column by Frank Rich.
He begins with the obsessive attention the US media have paid to Barack Obama’s now-terminated devotion to a screwball black preacher named Jeremiah Wright. Then he draws our attention to this:
i.e. a white (note colour) screwball preacher comparing the Catholic church (the “Whore of Babylon”) to Hitler.
What’s interesting about this? Well,
Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.
Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video — far from the only one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious networks, including twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.
It seems that McCain has been shocked to learn that his clerical ally has made many other outrageous statements.
Mr. Hagee, it’s true, did not blame the American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, particularly a scheduled “homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came.”
Mr. Hagee didn’t make that claim in obscure circumstances, either. He broadcast it on one of America’s most widely heard radio programs, “Fresh Air” on NPR, back in September 2006. He reaffirmed it in a radio interview less than two weeks ago. Only after a reporter asked Mr. McCain about this Katrina homily on April 24 did the candidate brand it as “nonsense” and the preacher retract it.
Now, here’s the funny bit. Whereas Obama’s ‘Wright problem’ has been endlessly retailed in the US media, we’ve heard awfully little about McCain’s Hagee Problem.
“Aw well”, you say, “Unlike Wright, Hagee didn’t say that America had brought 9/11 upon itself”, and that’s true. But perhaps Wright was a bit slow off the mark there. After all, two days after the attack, the NYT reported that
The Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson set off a minor explosion of their own when they asserted on television on Thursday that an angry God had allowed the terrorists to succeed in their deadly mission because the United States had become a nation of abortion, homosexuality, secular schools and courts, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
What’s interesting about that? Well,
Had that video re-emerged in the frenzied cable-news rotation, Mr. McCain might have been asked to explain why he no longer calls these preachers “agents of intolerance” and chose to cozy up to Mr. Falwell by speaking at his Liberty University in 2006.
So, here’s the situation. A (black) pastor spouting nonsense is apparently a big problem for a (black) presidential candidate. But white evangelists spouting nonsense are not seen by the US media as posing any kind of problem for a white Republican candidate.
And here’s another interesting fact that is apparently of no interest to the fearless US media. The Republican party “does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington”.
This particular column is one of the best things I’ve read in ages, not least because its savage indignation never spills over into incoherence. It’s beautifully controlled from start to finish.
