Art and Illusion

A mural in Brignoles.

Click and collect

We’ve been in lockdown since last March. This hasn’t been a particular hardship (as I explain in my Lockdown diary) because we can both work from home, have a spacious house and garden and can go for a cycle every day. But from the beginning we have avoided supermarkets. We tried to get home deliveries early on but found that all the local supermarkets didn’t have delivery capacity to match the demand, and only once succeeded in getting a delivery within a reasonable time-frame. Some of our (grown-up) children live locally and they generously stepped into the breach and did the shopping for us.

But with the arrival of the new variant on the virus we felt increasingly concerned about them being exposed to greater risk on our behalf, and so looked around for a manageable alternative. We found that Morrisons, a supermarket in a small nearby town, did a click-and-collect service with a 24-hour turnaround and have been using that ever since.

It’s terrific. We’re offered a collection slot, drive the 3 or 4 miles to the shop, open the boot and our shopping is loaded into the car. It’s safe — but, more importantly, it’s not exposing our family to unnecessary risk.

Quote of the Day

“Every generation revolts against it fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.”

• Lewis Mumford

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | The Notting Hillbillies | Feel Like Going Home

Link

This morning’s Observer column

 The PR exercise that is Facebook’s ‘supreme court’ Link

This board (originally talked about within Facebook as a “supreme court”) is both a manifestation of preposterous hubris on the part of what is, after all, merely a commercial company and a cunning stunt by said company to avoid taking corporate responsibility for difficult decisions. It consists of up to 40 bigwigs, allegedly carefully chosen (“six in-depth workshops and 22 round tables, attended by more than 650 people from 88 different countries”) but who look awfully like the kind of longlist that might be produced by a high-end corporate headhunter. It includes, for example, a former prime minister of Denmark, nine professors, one vice-chancellor and a former editor of the Guardian. Such eminent worthies, of course, cannot be expected to work for nothing, so, according to the New York Times, they receive at least $100,000 (£73,000) a year for a commitment of 15 hours a week.

Inspection of linguistic clues on the board’s website does not inspire confidence in its supposed collective IQ or independence…

Do read the whole thing.

The GameStop saga, and its wider implications

As someone who regards hedge funds as only marginally less malign than so-called ‘private equity’ I’ve been much amused by the GameStop saga. GameStop is a struggling, mid-size retailer stuck in a legacy business — selling physical video games. In that sense, it didn’t appear to have a great future ahead of it. A number of prominent hedge funds took that view, and engaged in ‘shorting’ its stock.

How does that work? Here’s a simple example:

Let’s say you had chosen to short-sell Rio Tinto shares via CFDs. Rio Tinto is trading at £40, which means that you could open a position to sell 100 share CFDs at £40 (factoring in a 0.10% commission charge1), which would give you a market exposure of £4000. As CFDs are leveraged, you would not have to put up the full value of the trade, instead you would only need to put up a deposit – if the margin was 20%, you would put up £800.

If the market did fall as you’d predicted, you would close your position by buying 100 shares at the new price of £35 (factoring the commission charge mentioned above). You would then calculate the difference between the opening price and closing price, and profit from the difference: in this case, £40 – £35 = £5 x 100 shares = £500. Any profit to a CFD trade is calculated using the full value of your exposure, not just the deposit, which means that profits can be magnified.

Then a group of jokers on the r/Wallstreetbets subreddit (which has 2 million subscribers) decided to have some fun and started buying GameStop shares while also leveraging the viral possibilities of Reddit to spread the idea. In no time at all, there was a feeding frenzy in the shares and they went through the roof.

Which meant that the hedge funds that had reckoned on being able to return the shares they’d borrowed by buying them at the bottom of the market, suddenly discovered that they’d been caught in a ‘short squeeze’ and were staring at substantial losses. In the process, one of the biggest hedge funds, Melvin Capital, nearly folded. What was going on, wrote Matt Piepenburg, a former hedge fund manager, was that

an informed mob of social-media linked, Reddit-savvy and small-time investors got together and decided to do what the big boys on Wall Street have exclusively been doing for years—namely pump a stock.

Only this time the joke was on the big boys, not the little guys of the retail universe, whom the Fancy Lads like to call “suckers.”

A wave of small investor buy-orders rushed across the exchange (which had to temporally halt trading) in a concerted effort to send GME to record highs, thereby front-running themselves while saving Game Stop from a fatal Wall Street short-position and another Amazonian slaughter.

In my mind, part of what we are witnessing this week is a civil war (or war of attrition) between a socially-linked and large class of small investors against a small and exclusive circle of Wall Street short-sellers, like Citron Research or Melvin Capital.

In essence, a band of small retail investors—who are typically the one’s the Wall Street short-sellers crush, turned the table and squeezed the fancy lads while simultaneously trying to save a small business chain.

So you can see why I was amused. “Going after heavily shorted stocks”, writes James Surowiecki, whom I’ve always regarded as a found of wisdom on these matters,

is also smart because it taps into the long-standing distaste for short sellers, and gives meme-stock traders an enemy to focus on. Short selling is an essential component of any healthy stock market: Myriad studies have found that the presence of short sellers makes stock prices more accurate. But investors generally don’t care about whether stock prices are correct — they want stocks to go up. So anyone who is betting that stocks will go down is seen as a killjoy at best and an enemy of the state — or, in this case, of the community — at worst. That’s why, when well-known short seller Andrew Left of Citron Research said last week that GameStop’s stock price would fall to $20, he was savaged on social media and effectively cowed into silence.

The point, then, is that even though GameStop’s current stock price is utterly irrational — it will never make enough money to justify a $6 billion market cap — the way Redditors and others have driven its price up has been quite smart. They’ve shown, in a sense, that if you pick the right stocks, a self-organized community of small investors can make them rise, almost entirely by an act of collective will. In an odd way, it’s a remarkable testament to the internet’s ability to facilitate collective action. The challenge, of course, is that once that collective will begins to erode — either because people want to cash out or just get bored — there are going to be no fundamentals supporting the stock price, which means once these stocks start falling, it’ll be look out below. But by the time that happens, much of the crowd will have moved on. There are always going to be crappy, heavily shorted stocks out there—which means there’s always going to be a chance for more lolz.

Gosh! Who said the stock market is boring. Interestingly, Surowiecki doesn’t share my low opinion of short selling.

Does this have any wider significance? Yes. The techniques used by the Redditers against hedge funds can be used in elections. Indeed, in a way, they were used in 2016, as Surowiecki points out:

Perhaps more interestingly, it also looks a lot like what happened during the 2016 presidential election. Over the course of that campaign, a loosely organized community of alt-right meme lords and their followers, centered on sites like 4chan and Reddit, adeptly used social media to elevate Donald Trump’s candidacy while barraging Hillary Clinton with an endless flow of memes targeting her supposed inauthenticity and corruption. What they did, in effect, was exploit the opportunities created by social media to disrupt the normal workings of the political system, at least in part for the lolz. The traders on r/Wallstreetbets — which describes itself, tellingly, as “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal” — are trying to do the same thing to Wall Street.

This is the kind of thing Americans have to look forward to in 2024.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Why are webcams so bad? (And why they won’t ever improve) Useful (and exhaustive) advice in a Zoomed-out age. Link
• Fried eggs a la Jacques Pépin. Never thought of doing then this way. I will from now on. Link
• Review: Lupin updates classic French gentleman thief for the 21st century. That’s my Netflix viewing decided for the next few weeks. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Joke of the Week

Thanks to Cory for the link.

Vaccination Day

I had my first shot of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine at 10:40 this morning. It was a heartwarming experience — finally, something in the post-Brexit UK working well. The health centre was located right next to a big car park. I was greeted, my appointment checked and given a square piece of paper with my name and a QR Code. Then queued briefly in a line that observed social distancing, had my temperature taken with one of those thermometer guns, put hand-sanitiser on my hands and was guided to a large room which had been subdivided into about ten impromptu booths, each with a GP and a nurse who scanned the QR code and retrieved my NHS medical data. I answered a few quick, routine questions (about whether I’d had any other vaccinations in the last week, whether I was a carer, etc.). Then removed my jacket and had the jab in about 20 seconds. After which I walked back to the car, and set off home.

The UK is, by any standards, doing vaccination brilliantly — having botched nearly everything else. How come? There are two parts to the answer. The first is that it’s being done by the NHS and not outsourced to one of the corrupt, incompetent outfits which have been parasitic on neoliberal British governments (of both parties) for decades — and which screwed up track-and-trace. The second is that, for once, the Johnson government made a good bet on vaccine production. The story of how that happened is told today in a fascinating Guardian piece by Daniel Boffey and Dan Sabbagh which is worth reading in full.

Quote of the Day

“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”

• Toni Morrison

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Clementi Sonata in B-Flat Major, Op. 24 No. 2

Link

And if you think some of this sounds familiar well, maybe it is. Remind you of any Mozart opera overture?

Thanks to Tom Parkhill for the tip.

Long Read of the Day

The age of the cyber romantics is coming to an end

Great essay in NOEMA by Onora O’Neill. Sample:

This is not the first time that new technologies have disrupted established communicative practices and standards. Plato tells us that Socrates was so worried by the written word’s disruption of communication that he relied entirely on the spoken word. Luckily Plato did write, or we would know nothing about Socrates’ misgivings. Socrates worried his words would go fatherless into the world, reaching sundry readers with nobody present to explain what was meant or to clear up misunderstandings.

The problem with writing, however, was not that texts can be separated from their authors and cannot explain themselves, but that the practices of attribution, validation, authorization and commentary, on which writing and publishing now depend, had not been developed in ancient Greece. Now that those practices and standards are in place, we often think of the written word as a particularly robust and reliable way of communicating content accurately and responsibly.

Onora is a really formidable intellectual. I’ve never been to a talk she’s given without coming away seeing things in a new light or from a different perspective. So this is worth reading in full, especially at the moment.

Something I really liked

Austin Kleon kept a diary to get him through the Trump years. This is what started it off.

  This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

In other words, don’t re-tweet idiots, even if the tweet is so stupid you think your friends should see it just to understand how daft it is.

Nice Banksy graffito. Thanks to Dave Winer for spotting it.

Quote of the Day

“The French are a logical people, which is one reason the English dislike them so intensely. The other is that they own France, a country which we have always judged to be much too good for them.

• Robert Morley

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel: Semele HWV 58 / Act 2 – Where’er you walk | Bryn Terfel

Link

Long Read of the Day

Roy Scranton: There’s no going back to that normal

TL;DR summary: Climate change is upending the world as we know it, and coping with it demands widespread, radical action. Link

The other night, I went to pick up takeout at a local Irish pub. It was a gray and rainy evening at the end of a long week, and my partner and I were suffering from Zoom fatigue. We love this pub not just because it has good food, but because it’s a living part of our community. Pre-Covid, they used to have Irish traditional music sessions, and any cold and snowy night you’d be greeted with a burst of cheer, a packed house, friends and families all out for a cozy good time.

Now it’s a ghostly quiet. Social distancing rules mean that even at max capacity, it still only has a tiny fraction of its usual clientele. Standing in that empty pub, haunted by the sense of what we were missing, I felt an ache for “normal” as acute as any homesickness I ever felt — even when I served in the Army in Iraq. I still feel the twinge every time I put on my mask. I want our normal lives back.

But what does normal even mean anymore?

It’s easy to forget that 2020 gave us not just the pandemic, but also the West Coast’s worst fire season, as well as the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record. And, while we were otherwise distracted, 2020 also offered up near-record lows in Arctic sea ice, possible evidence of significant methane release from Arctic permafrost and the Arctic Ocean, huge wildfires in both the Amazon and the Arctic, shattered heat records (2020 rivaled 2016 for the hottest year on record), bleached coral reefs, the collapse of the last fully intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic, and increasing odds that the global climate system has passed the point where feedback dynamics take over and the window of possibility for preventing catastrophe closes.

The ‘Roaring Kitty’ Rally: How a Reddit User and His Friends Roiled the Markets

Several readers were puzzled by my mention of the GameStop frenzy yesterday. This NYT piece might help.

In mid-2019, a Reddit user — known as “Roaring Kitty” on some social media accounts — posted a picture on an online forum depicting a single $53,000 investment in the video-game retailer GameStop.

The post attracted little attention, except from a few people who mocked the bet on the struggling company. “This dude should sell now,” a Reddit user named cmcewen wrote at the time.

But Roaring Kitty was not deterred. Over the next year, he began tweeting frequently about GameStop and making YouTube and TikTok videos about his investment. He also started livestreaming his financial ideas. Other Reddit users with monikers like Ackilles and Bowlerguy92 began following his every move and piling into GameStop.

“IF HE IS IN WE ARE IN💎💎💎,” one user wrote on a Reddit board called WallStreetBets on Tuesday.

Roaring Kitty — who is Keith Gill, 34, a former financial educator for an insurance firm in Massachusetts — has now become a central figure in this week’s stock market frenzy. Inspired by him and a small crew of individual investors who gathered around him, hordes of young online traders took GameStop’s stock on a wild ride, pitting themselves against sophisticated hedge funds and upending Wall Street’s norms in the process.

On Tuesday, Gill posted a picture on Reddit that showed his $53,000 bet on GameStop had soared in value to $48 million. (The Times said that “His holdings could not be independently verified”, Ho,Ho.) The post was “upvoted” — the equivalent of being liked — more than 140,000 times by other users. GameStop, which traded at $4 a year ago, closed on Yesterday at $193 after reaching more than $480 earlier in the day.

Needless to say, the Wall Street Journal was not amused by these guys taking the piss out of Wall Street. “How the Wisdom of Crowds became the Anarchy of the Mob” was its headline on the story.

Apparently books really do furnish a Zoom

There’s an hilarious piece on the Penguin site — “How to create the perfect background bookshelf” about a guy called Thatcher Wine (I am not making this up) who is “the world’s most sought-after celebrity ‘book curator’.” No doubt he thinks he’s the latest thing, but in fact this is a venerable racket invented by a great Irish writer — as I pointed out in May last year, on Day 52 of my Lockdown Diary. Here’s the audio:

Link

And here’s the transcript:

Tuesday 12 May — Day 52

Like many people, I’m spending too much time on Zoom. I’ve even set up a Zoom station in my study, so that when a meeting is due I just go to that part of the room, log into to the Mac that sits there with Zoom running, and start. No fiddling with laptops or microphones for me. Straight down to business.

I’m lucky enough to have a very large study. The guy from whom we bought the house many years ago was an architect, and he ran a successful practice from this room. So it’s big and airy. And it’s lined with books for the very simple reason that I have a book habit. So my background for the purposes of Zoom is a wall of books. This often gives rise to comment in the smalltalk that goes on while people are waiting for others to join the call. Have I read all those books, I am asked?

I’m about to respond indignantly, and then I think of Flann O’Brien, one of the funniest Irish writers of the 20th century. His actual name was Brian O’Nolan, but he wrote under pen names because in real life he was a fairly senior civil servant in the government of the Irish Free State, as the Republic was then known. His other pen-name was Myles na Gopaleen, under which moniker he had a regular column in the Irish Times —a “black protestant newspaper,” as my devoutly Catholic mother used to call it — a column that was so surreal that it made Salvador Dali look like Spinoza.

Flann used the column for many purposes, but one of them was to publish prospectuses for the numerous wacky businesses he had dreamed up. And one of these involved books.

It all started with a visit he made to the new house of a friend of “great wealth and vulgarity”. After kitting out the house, his friend decided that it needed books —because, as is well known, books really do furnish a room. “Whether he can read or not, I do not know,” wrote Flann, “but some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses. So he bought several bookcases and paid some rascally middleman to stuff them with all manner of new books, some of them very costly volumes on the subject of French landscape painting.”

“I noticed,” Flann continued, “that not one of them had ever been opened or touched, and remarked on the fact.” “When I get settled down properly,” said his friend, “I’ll have to catch up on my reading”.

At this point Flann had an epiphany. “Why should a wealthy person like this be put to the trouble of pretending to read at all? Why not have a professional book handler to go through and maul his library for so-much per shelf? Such a person, if properly qualified, could make a fortune.”

Thus was born the concept of a book handling service. Its founder envisaged four levels of handling. The lowest was ‘Popular Handling’: “each volume to be well and truly handled, four leaves in each to be dog-eared, and a tram ticket, cloakroom docket or other comparable item inserted in each as a forgotten bookmark. Say £1 7s 6d. Five percent discount for civil servants.”

Next level up was ‘Premier handling’: “Each volume to be thoroughly handled, eight leaves in each to be dog-eared, a suitable passage in not less than 25 volumes to be underlined in red pencil, and a leaflet in French on the works of Victor Hugo to be inserted as a forgotten bookmark in each. Say, £2 17s 6d. Five per cent discount for literary university students, civil servants and lady social workers.”

Two —even more sophisticated —levels of service were envisaged: ‘De Luxe’ (which included five volumes to be inscribed with the forged signatures of their authors). And then there was the ‘Handling Superb’ service. You can imagine what that involved.

So perhaps you can see why I think of Flann whenever I look at my background during an online meeting. Those books have been well and truly handled. And he would have known that books really do furnish a Zoom.

If you’re interested, you can get the Diary here.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Tab minimalists look away: Vivaldi introduces two-level tab stacks. If you currently have twenty or more tabs on your browser window this might be helpful.
• Michael Lewis has a new book coming — and it’s about the pandemic. First printing 500,000 copies. Join the queue. Link
• Hover Text on Apple Macs. If you are reading this on a Mac then you might find the ‘Hover’ function hidden away in Systems Preferences > Accessability useful. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Southward Ho!

Quote of the Day

“The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.”

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven, Violin Concerto, 3. Rondo

Link

Warning: There’s about 8 seconds of silence before it begins.

Did Everyone Buy a Guitar in Quarantine or What?

A good-news lockdown story from Rolling Stone…

All three retailers report that the guitar was the most popular product they sold in quarantine. “Based on what we saw in 2020, one thing is certain: The guitar is thriving,” says Reverb’s Mandelbrot. “Orders and searches for guitars have been up significantly — including an increase in searches for popular guitar brands like Fender, Gibson, and Taylor — as well as searches for music gear that you pair with your guitar, like amps, guitar straps, effects pedals, and more.” Both searches for acoustic guitars and acoustic guitar amps were up by 50 percent year over year.

He adds that living-room-friendly acoustic guitars like the Taylor GS-Mini have been undeniably popular, but Reverb “continued to sell some really rare vintage guitars — like a beautiful 1965 Fender Stratocaster that Brian Setzer sold through his Reverb Shop.” Limited edition, boutique pedals also did particularly well. Mandelbrot says the selling price of classic and rare effects pedals from vintage brands like Klon and Mu-Tron went up “significantly” in 2020. And drops of limited-edition pedals on Reverb sold out within minutes and, in one case, in less than a minute.

Lupin, Van Gogh and Arles

This is about one of those nice rabbit-holes one finds on the Web…

I came on a nice NYT article about Lupin, a French Netflix series of which I’d never heard, and started reading.

The article is based on an extended interview with John Kay, the British author of the series’ screenplay. Here is the bit that caught my attention:

The Louvre figures prominently in the first block of episodes released in January (a second batch is due later this year). But it was another Parisian institution that stirred Kay’s imagination: the Musée d’Orsay. While “Lupin” is set in contemporary Paris, Kay looked at the time period of the original books for inspiration. A natural destination was Orsay whose collections focus on the turn of the 20th century. “It was a place to go and relax and enjoy the paintings,” Kay said. “But what started to happen — and you’ll see it more and more across ‘Lupin’ — is that the museum became a real inspiration as a place for ideas for the series.” One of the holdings, van Gogh’s “Starry Night Over the Rhône,” inspired an episode in the next set of shows (though it ended up being switched for a Pissarro painting) and the museum is responsible for the name of a forthcoming character. Featuring the Normandy beach town, Étretat, whose signature cliffs figure prominently in the Leblanc novel “The Hollow Needle” and in the show’s fifth episode, can also be traced to the museum, which has period renderings of the town in its collection. “It’s the most Lupin building,” Kay said, laughing, of Orsay.

Which (of course) led me to a search for the Van Gogh painting and 10 Facts You Don’t Know About Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone, which tells me that it was painted at a spot on the banks of river which was only a minute or two’s walk from the The Yellow House on the Place Lamartine which Van Gogh was renting at the time. The night sky and the effects of light at night provided the subject for some of his more famous paintings, including The Starry Night, the most famous Van Gogh night stars painting.

The challenge of painting at night intrigued Van Gogh. The vantage point he chose for “Starry Night Over the Rhone” allowed him to capture the reflections of the gas lighting in Arles across the glimmering blue water of the Rhone. In the foreground, two lovers stroll by the banks of the river. Here his stars glow with a luminescence, shining from the dark, blue and velvety night sky. Dotted along the banks of the Rhone houses also radiate a light that reflects in the water and adds to the mysterious atmosphere of the painting.

This rang a bell for me. Until the pandemic made it impossible, my wife and I drove down to Provence every summer and the final waypoint before we got to the house was always Arles. Our habit was to stay in the same hotel every year — one just out from the centre within easy walking distance. And then in the evening we would walk in, wander around looking for a restaurant (with me taking photographs), have a leisurely dinner and then walk back along the Rhone. And of course I suddenly realised that we had always walked past the spot where Van Gogh set up his easel!

And of course now I’ll have to watch Lupin.

The paradox of Facebook: hated — and rich

Interesting cri de coeur from Shira Ovide…

The company said on Wednesday that its sales — nearly all of which come from the ads it sells on Facebook, on Instagram and its other apps — reached nearly $86 billion in 2020 and are growing rapidly…. Each day, 2.6 billion people use at least one of Facebook’s apps, and the user numbers are still rising.

This is a company that’s embroiled in a different scandal each week and that people say they dislike, yet its products are used by billions of people, and businesses spent like crazy on ads during a pandemic to reach them.

I’ve been writing about corporate finances for a long time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this combination of popularity, fast-growing sales, fat profits — and complete revulsion. “The gap between Facebook’s public reputation and its financial success has never been greater,” Kurt Wagner of Bloomberg wrote this week.

Historians, tell me if there’s a comparable company that was so reviled and yet so widely used and successful….

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• The GameStop stock frenzy, explained. If you neither knew nor cared about GameStop, then this isn’t for you. But if you’re interested in the craziness of the stock market, then it’s right up your street. Link
• Danny MacAskill – The Slabs. If you suffer from vertigo, avoid. But it you want to know what can be done on a mountain bike, then it’s unmissable. And it has great drone photography. Link.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Remember bookstalls?

The pre-pandemic past is indeed looking like a different country.

Quote of the Day

”Freedom is the right to do anything the laws permit.”

• Montesquieu, De ‘’Esprit des lois, 1748

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler – Going Home (Theme of Local Hero)

This is his performance at the Goodwood Memorial event for Stirling Moss. Audio quality is not as good as studio and concert versions, but it has what sound engineers call ‘atmos’.

Link

Three Weeks Inside a Pro-Trump QAnon Chat Room

An unmissable, astonishing, troubling and revelatory piece of reportage by Stuart A. Thompson. Takes you to places you would prefer not to exist in a democracy. The danger is that it encourages one to lurch towards epistocracy, which is not the way to go either. But it helps to explain the size of the task now facing Biden and his Administration.

Make sure the audio isn’t muted when you start on the piece btw.

Computing the Sorrow

Wonderful post by David Vincent:

January 27. Boris Johnson says it is ‘hard to compute the sorrow’ after the official covid-19 death rate passes 100,000 in the UK.

In fact there is a perfectly simple calculation that can be made. Grief professionals work on the basis of at least five bereaved people for every death. On current figures that gives us a population of half a million in the UK facing a lonely future. If we take the more accurate figure of those dying with covid-19 on their death certificates, the number is already 600,000. Globally there are now 100 million deaths, generating a population of half a billion coming to terms with traumatic loss.

Estimating the length of the sorrow is a more difficult task. There seems to be an inverse ratio at work: the more rapid the event of dying, the more extended the process of grieving.

The struggle to come to terms with a loss begins more uncertainly and is likely to proceed more slowly that is the case for non-pandemic bereavements. In this sense Johnson was for once correct in his account. It will be a long time before we can take a measure of the suffering generated by a death rate that is the fifth highest in the world, and the second highest as a proportion of the population.

Worth reading in full.

Liberal Property Law vs. Capitalism

There’s an interesting venture, the Law and Political Economy (LPE) project, (based, I think in Yale Law School). One of the things they do is to pick an interesting or important book and hold a running online symposium on it as one blog post a day from different members of the project.

The symposium I’ve been following is on Hanoch Dagan’s book, A Liberal Theory of Property. Today’s blog post was by Professor Katharina Pistor from Columbia Law School.

Pistor turns out to have some pretty serious disagreements with Dagan, but her piece is a great example of how to disagree respectfully. Here’s how it begins…

Hanoch Dagan has written a wonderful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book. Its publication could have hardly come at a more prescient time. Many observers and commentators rightly despair over the lack of opportunities the current economic and legal regime offers to the many while it privileges the few. Calls for socialism are growing louder as there seems to be no alternative given the realities of the neoliberal order.

Against this background, Hanoch develops a theory of private property that is truly liberal in the original meaning of the term: a theory built on the principle of individual autonomy, or “self-authorship,” but also on structural pluralism and relational justice. This requires a legal order, a commitment to recognize and enforce only rights that meet these fundamental norms, which is why his is a theory of property law and not merely property. Property law confers rights on individuals, which they can use against the state, but, critically, also against fellow humans. A liberal property law, Hanoch argues forcefully, shall not condone the use of property rights to suppress others.

From this normative vantage point it is impossible to endorse private property rights as a Blackstonian “sole and despotic dominion.”…

I wish more debates were as good as this. I remember someone advising me that the best way to have a productive argument with someone is first of all to state (or re-state) his or her argument in the clearest way you can before commencing to explain why you disagree with it.

Hard to do, but always worth trying. Doesn’t work on social media, though.

J. M. Keynes and the Visible Hands

One of my favourite books — as readers of my Lockdown diary will know — is John Maynard-Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, an excoriating attack on the Treaty of Versailles and the statesmen who drafted it. Not surprisingly, then, I was a drawn to this  essay about it by Kent Puckett who is less enamoured of the book than I was/am, largely on the grounds that Keynes’s predictions about the economic consequences of the treaty were wrong. But Puckett does find an original angle — Keynes’s fascination with other people’s hands.

Published in December 1919, Keynes’s book was a sensation. Running quickly into several editions in Britain and America, the book caught fire not only as a wickedly smart condensation of the political and economic doubts that had been forming on both sides of the Atlantic but also—maybe even more so—for its ruthlessly personal depictions of Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson. After all, where else could one read about the thickness of Clemenceau’s boots or the shape of Wilson’s hands (figure 1)?

It’s those ‘ruthlessly personal depictions’ that I first loved about the book. His caricature of Lloyd George is great, but he reserved most of his fire for Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson — the “blind and deaf Don Quixote” of Versailles.

“His head and features were finely cut and exactly like his photographs, and the muscles of his neck and the carriage of his head were distinguished. But, like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated; and his hands, though capable and fairly strong, were wanting in sensitiveness and finesse.”

The essay is part of a series. Intro here.

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Quote of the Day

There are living systems; there is no “living matter”.

• Jaques Monod, lecture to the College de France, 1967

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Max Richter’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert

Link

I love this but ‘Who He?’ I hear you say. (I said it too.) Explanation here.

Long Read of the Day

 The enduring allure of conspiracies

Longish essay from the Nieman Lab about conspiracy theories.

If conspiracy theories are as old as politics, they’re also — in the era of Donald Trump and QAnon — as current as the latest headlines. Earlier this month, the American democracy born of an eighteenth century conspiracy theory faced its most severe threat yet — from another conspiracy theory, that (all evidence to the contrary) the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Are conspiracy theories truly more prevalent and influential today, or does it just seem that way?

Actually it looks as though they’re evolving, in the sense that much of the recent manifestations of conspiracist thinking have jettisoned theory and concentrated merely on repetition and the amplification provided by social media. At least that’s what Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum argue in an intriguing book that’s quoted in the essay. The danger now comes from conspiracy without — a new kind of conspiracism that moved from the lunatic fringe to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. This is very different from classic conspiracy theory, which typically didn’t do much to undermine democracy (and perhaps even kept nutters off the streets). The new manifestations — like QAnon and its like — do seem to pose a danger to democracy, as the events of January 6 suggest.

Oh, and btw, there’s a very interesting post  on Reddit by a former (and recovered) QAnon believer on how to help others who have fallen down this particular rabbit-hole.

Also interesting: After January 6 Twitter deleted 70,000 Qanon accounts. That’s 7 followed by four zeroes.

Hinges of history

Chris Bertram poses an interesting question on Crooked Timber:

Thinking back over the past two decades, which of the following events that took place since the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) are the important moments when something different could have been done that might have saved us from being in the situation we are in? How might history have unfolded differently? Are there key events to notice in Asia, Africa and Latin American that ought to be on the list? What is cause and what is merely symptom?

* The decision of the US Supreme Court to award the Presidency to George W. Bush instead of Al Gore (2000)
* The attacks on the Twin Towers (2001)
* The decision by Bush, supported by Blair, to invade Iraq (2003)
* The failure of policy-makers to anticipate and avert the financial crisis (2008)
* The failure of European leaders to manage the Eurozone crisis so as to avert mass unemployment etc (2009- )
* The Arab spring (2010- )
* The “migrant crisis” in Europe (2015-)
* The Brexit vote (2016)
* The election of Donald Trump (2016)

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• 23-bed detached house for sale near Portsmouth Only one snag. Link. (HT to Ben Evans)
• Why hardware is hard. Don’t tell me. Quentin and I once had a start-up which produced both excellent hardware and innovative software. But we ran out of runway because it takes longer and costs more to get hardware earning its keep. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

As you may have gathered, it’s been snowing round here.

Avoiding “the sociology of the last five minutes” is difficult, sometimes

This yellow warning over my Observer column dated November 28, 2020 is factually correct but epistemologically nonsensical. One of the things I’ve always tried to do in the column is to escape from what the Berkeley sociologist Michael Mann once called “the sociology of the last five minutes” — something that, IMO, bedevils too much tech coverage. This particular column was trying to do just that in the context of the disputes currently going on between tech giants and the governments of Australia and France. Its argument was that the Silicon Valley ideology — that tech drives history and society’s role is simply to mop up afterwards — is pernicious, anti-democratic nonsense. Facebook and Google have profited mightily by hoovering up the advertising revenue that supported local as well as national journalism — journalism that’s critically important for a functioning liberal democracy. So it’s perfectly reasonable for democracies to require these companies to provide restitution for the damage they’re doing.

So here was a column that was trying to provide some historical and constitutional context for a contemporary controversy. The fact that it was a month — or even a year — old happens to be irrelevant in this particular case.

I know that the Guardian means well, and that in many cases it’s helpful to point out that particular online items are hoary old misconceptions. But you can’t do that intelligently simply by algorithmic inspection of calendar dates.

Quote of the Day

”An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off: it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.”

• Nancy Mitford, Noblesse Oblige, 1956.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Glenn Gould | Bach – Goldberg Variations| Aria

Link

Biden and the Tech Giants

From the Bloomberg ‘Fully Charged’ newsletter:

Nothing like a blockbuster quarter to draw unwanted attention from lawmakers and regulators. Over the next week or so, Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. are each expected to report record-breaking quarterly revenue of $100 billion or more. Holiday advertising and lockdown-enhanced online engagement are also likely to drive big earnings for Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc., whose stock prices have soared since the pandemic’s March nadir.

Normally, the holiday quarter is a moment for celebration, but this is no time to spike the football. Success for the tech industry now serves as a stark reminder of its dominance. While brick-and-mortar retailers and restaurants go under, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have collectively delivered a stunning $67 billion in net profit over the past two quarters.

The companies will be wary of antagonising Biden, largely because nobody has any idea yet of what — if anything — he’s likely to do. On the campaign trail, as Bloomberg points out, he was vague about his plans for big tech.

He has generally derided the industry’s “overwhelming arrogance,” criticized the recklessness and abuses of social-media platforms and said he supports a repeal of Section 230, the legal shield that protects internet companies from liability for user-generated content published on their services. At the same time, many members of his administration have close ties to the biggest players in tech, and questions remain about how far he’ll go on antitrust enforcement.

On the other hand, there’s was a Reuters report that the new President is considering appointing an “antitrust Czar”. And there’s nervousness in the industry about speculation that Biden might make Lina Kahn  — one of the brains behind the House Subcommittee fiercely critical report on tech monopolies — an FTC commissioner.

Everything depends, I’d guess, on where controlling tech giants ranks in the new Administration’s priorities. Given all the other stuff on its plate, my (pessimistic) guess is: not high. On the other hand, if Biden makes Ms Kahn a Commissioner then I’ll happily eat my hat.

Long Read of the Day

 Why the iPhone is today’s Kodak Brownie Camera

If you’re a photographer, then you’ll enjoy this reflective essay by Om Malik.

Photography as we know it has been around for about 150 years, though its origins can be traced to earlier civilizations. But it has never been so visceral, and so much a part of our daily lives, as it is now. In short, the arc of photography’s history is that it has always been about getting more and more people to take photographs. Our desire to know more about ourselves means we must have more of them, more often, in more places, and of many more things. Whether it was new chemicals or new film or new sensors, technological advances in this area have — by and large — been about making it simpler for us to capture the moment. All of it has brought us to today, when we have quietly passed the cultural tipping point where taking a photo is as second nature as breathing. There’s no art to it. It is just something we are always doing.

Lovely stuff.

Bets, bonds and kids

One of the things I’m grateful for during this pandemic is that our children are all grown up. I know that many of my colleagues who have young children are having a really toughh time trying to combine childcare with remote working. So I was very struck by this blog post by Jeff Kaufman. Here’s the gist:

A few weeks ago Anna (4y) wanted to play with some packing material. It looked very messy to me, I didn’t expect she would clean it up, and I didn’t want to fight with her about cleaning it up. I considered saying no, but after thinking about how things like this are handled in the real world I had an idea. If you want to do a hazardous activity, and we think you might go bankrupt and not clean up, we make you post a bond. This money is held in escrow to fund the cleanup if you disappear. I explained how this worked, and she went and got a dollar:

Then: When she was done playing, she cleaned it up without complaint and got her dollar back. If she hadn’t cleaned it up, I would have, and kept the dollar.

Some situations are more complicated, and call for bets. I wanted to go to a park, but Lily (6y) didn’t want to go to that park because the last time we had been there there’d been lots of bees. I remembered that had been a summer with unusually many bees, and it no longer being that summer or, in fact, summer at all, I was not worried. Since I was so confident, I offered my $1 to her $0.10 that we would not run into bees at the park. This seemed fair to her, and when there were no bees she was happy to pay up.

Over time, they’ve learned that my being willing to bet, especially at large odds, is pretty informative, and often all I need to do is offer. Lily was having a rough morning, crying by herself about a project not working out. I suggested some things that might be fun to do together, and she rejected them angrily. I told her that often when people are feeling that way, going outside can help a lot, and when she didn’t seem to believe me I offered to bet. Once she heard the 10:1 odds I was offering her I think she just started expecting that I was right, and she decided we should go ride bikes. (She didn’t actually cheer up when we got outside: she cheered up as soon as she made this decision.)

I wish I’d been that inventive when mine were the same age.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Marques Brownlee on how he built (and is now expanding) his YouTube channel. Interesting throughout, even if you’ve no interest in running a YouTube channel. It isn’t as easy as the good ones make it look. Link
• Photopea: a really powerful, free, photo editor that runs in your browser. Link
• Watch Arnold Schwarzenegger getting his Covid-19 vaccine jab. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Constable @ f5.6

North Norfolk a decade ago. I was trying to imagine how John Constable might have portrayed the East Anglian countryside if he’d been a photographer.

Snow

Yesterday afternoon, it began to snow, and for a time the world was briefly transformed. I opened the window to make a video for two members of our family who are sweltering in Sydney. The snow had deadened most sounds, except for the cries of delighted children of our neighbours who were improvising a snowman and giving him an outsized carrot for a nose.

And then, what came into my mind in the way unbidden thoughts do, was the closing passage of James Joyce’s wonderful short story, The Dead. Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta have just returned to their Dublin hotel after a convivial party in his aunts’ house. Gretta is strangely subdued. One of the songs sung at the party had deeply moved her. As they prepare for bed, Gretta tells her husband that the song reminded her of Michael Furey, a frail boy who had loved her as a teenager and had died because he had come out in the freezing rain on the night before she was due to return to Dublin to plead with her not to leave Galway. And he had died from exposure. She then falls on the bed and sobs herself to sleep, leaving Gabriel to his own mortified thoughts.

This is how the story ends:

Link

John Huston made a beautiful film of the story, which I’m astonished (and delighted) to find is on YouTube. It was Huston’s last film. His son John wrote the screenplay, and his daughter Anjelica played Gretta. Huston directed it from a wheelchair, breathing with the aid of an oxygen tank, and died shortly after its completion.

Make an appointment to view. It’s worth it, especially if you like Joyce’s work.

Quote of the Day

“Aren’t women prudes if they don’t and prostitutes if they do?”

• Kate Millett, speaking at the Women’s Writers Conference, march 1975.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Loose Marbles | Burgundy Street Blues

Link

Can facial recognition technology really reveal political orientation?

My Observer column this morning:

Three things about the research paper stopped me in my tracks. The first was the title: Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images. The second was that the author was Michal Kosinski, someone who used to be at Cambridge University, is now at Stanford and whose work I’ve followed for years. And the third was that it was published in Scientific Reports, one of the journals published by the Nature group and definitely not an outlet for nonsense.

The paper reports a research project that suggests that facial recognition technology can accurately infer individuals’ political orientation in terms of whether they have liberal or conservative views…

Long Read of the Day

Inside the Brexit deal: the agreement and the aftermath

The inside story of how the Brexit ‘deal’ was done, told by four terrific Financial Times journalists — George Parker, Peter Foster, Sam Fleming and Jim Brunsden. It’s a scarifying story of arrogance, ineptitude and wilful blindness. None of which comes really as a surprise, but it’s fascinating to see how much damage a fanatical attachment to a single idea — ‘sovereignty’ — can do.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!