Shoppers?

At a Christmas market (remember them?) some years ago.

Quote of the Day

”I understand your desire for disruption, but I am tired of picking up the pieces. Over and over, I have to glue together the cups you have broken so we can sit down and take tea together.”

• Angela Merkel to Emmanuel Macron (as reported in the New York Times)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

David Lindley & Ry Cooder | The Promised Land

Link

Wow!

How two Irish brothers started a £70bn company you’ve probably never heard of

This morning’s Observer column

The most valuable private company in Silicon Valley is an outfit most people have never heard of – unless they are a) Irish or b) tech investors. It’s called Stripe, and this week the latest round of investments in it have given it a valuation of $95bn (£68.5bn). It was founded in 2010 by two smart young lads from rural Ireland – the brothers John and Patrick Collison – who were then aged 19 and 21 respectively. The latest valuation of their company – based on a recent investment of $600m from investors including Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency, Fidelity and Sequoia Capital – means that each now has a net worth on paper in the region of $11.5bn.

The Collisons hail from Dromineer, a small town on the shores of Lough Derg in County Tipperary. When they were growing up it was too remote to have an internet connection, and initially the only way they could get decent broadband was via an expensive satellite link. In some ways they look like young prodigies from central casting. As a teenager, Patrick discovered Lisp, the programming language that was once the lingua franca of early AI programmers, and used it to create a conversational system that won him Ireland’s young scientist of the year award in 2005, at the age of 16. His brother, two years younger, got the highest scores ever recorded in the Irish school leaving certificate.

When John was 15 and Patrick 17, they launched their first startups…

Do read the whole thing.

Incidentally… I don’t know much about John, but Patrick Collison is a really interesting guy. See, for example, the reading list on his blog. Or his remarkable conversation with the economist Tyler Cowen. Silicon Valley hasn’t produced many intellectuals, and many of those who aspire to the title are just miming profundity or apeing Peter Thiel. (See What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub for an entertaining takedown of Valley pretensions in this respect.) But Patrick Collison looks to me like the real deal.

Long Read of the Day

Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future Link

This is really sobering, even for someone (like me) who is sceptical about our species’s capacity to avoid the coming catastrophe.

Here’s the TL;DR summary:

We report three major and confronting environmental issues that have received little attention and require urgent action. First, we review the evidence that future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts. Second, we ask what political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action. Third, this dire situation places an extraordinary responsibility on scientists to speak out candidly and accurately when engaging with government, business, and the public. We especially draw attention to the lack of appreciation of the enormous challenges to creating a sustainable future. The added stresses to human health, wealth, and well-being will perversely diminish our political capacity to mitigate the erosion of ecosystem services on which society depends. The science underlying these issues is strong, but awareness is weak. Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals.

But if you have time, it’s worth reading the whole thing.

(I sometimes think that what we need is a theory of incompetent systems — i.e. ones that can’t fix themselves.)

Books of the Week

It’s been an extraordinary week, with four interesting books hitting the shelves.

Value(s): Building a Better World for All by the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney. Will Hutton gave it a near-rave review today.

If 25 years ago anyone had suggested that one of the world’s most prominent ex-central bankers would launch an intellectual broadside at free market fundamentalism for shredding the values on which good societies and functioning markets are based, I would have been amazed. If, in addition, it was suggested he would go on to argue that stakeholder capitalism, socially motivated investing and business putting purpose before profit were the best ways to put matters right, I would have considered it a fairy story.

Me too.

Many Different Kinds of Love: A Story of Love, Death and the NHS by Michael Rosen. Reviewed by Kate Kellaway.

With a writer’s ability to extract something from misfortune, he has become Covid-19’s frontline spokesperson, go-to survivor, man who nearly did not make it. It is not a role anyone would gladly choose. He has been interviewed on television, been the subject of Radio 4’s The Reunion, has written newspaper articles and now this book. Even at the beginning of the pandemic, Rosen was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme in reaction to a tweet in which he protested that older people’s lives were being undervalued. What he did not know then was that he had already contracted Covid-19 himself.

Invisible Walls: A Journalist in Search of her Life by Hella Pick.

Reviewed by Fergal Keane. The story of how a girl — number 4672 — who arrived in Britain on the Kindertransport that brought around 10,000 Jewish children to safety in Britain after Kristallnacht, turned into one of the world’s great foreign correspondents. Her voice, Keane says, “from before the age of Facebook and Twitter is profound and urgent.” As someone who read her as since I was an undergraduate in the Sixties, I know just what he means.

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli, an Italian theoretical physicist who makes a brave attempt to explain quantum mechanics. Brave man. But Rovelli has form. His collection of essays, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics sold over a million copies and is one of the best-selling science books ever.

My bedside reading list just got longer. Sigh.

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Heave!

Quote of the Day

”You can’t make a better past, only a better future.”

• Nathan Gardels, Noema magazine

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Wailin’ Jennys | Bird Song

Link

Long Read of the Day

Scott Galloway: America Has Replaced Capitalism With Cronyism** 

This is a great post from Scott’s blog last year. Here’s how it begins.

My father is approaching 90, recently divorced (for the fourth time), and spends his days watching replays of Maple Leafs games and abusing Xanax. His affinity for Xanies is a feature, not a bug, since at the end of one’s life “long-term effects” lose meaning. He’s near the end, exceptionally intelligent, and high. In sum, he’s my Yoda.

Our calls are mostly me yelling short questions and waiting for something profound in return. Occasionally he delivers: When I asked him what he thinks makes America different, he said, “America is a terrible place to be stupid.”

That’s why he immigrated here. A pillar of capitalism is you can’t reward the winners without punishing the losers. I worry our government has been co-opted by the wealthy and is focused on protecting the previous generation of winners, even if it means reducing future generations’ ability to win. Aren’t we borrowing against our children’s prosperity to protect the wealth of the top 10 percent, if not the one percent?

It’s a forceful critique of how the system we’ve been building since the 1970s has been boosting the rich and punishing everyone else, especially the poor. And when you look at the bailouts during the pandemic, we see this accelerating. Companies — like airlines — that have spent decades rewarding executives and doing share buybacks are getting lavish pandemic support. Biden’s stimulus measure is the first reversal of this we’ve seen.

Worth reading in full.

Substack writers are mad at Substack. The problem is money and who’s making it.

I’m not sure that I have a dog in this fight, but just for the avoidance of doubt, the daily newsletter edition of this blog (https://memex.naughtons.org) — is published on Substack, for free. For me, Substack simply provides a reliable way of getting the edition out by email every morning at 7am, UK time.

But according to Peter Kafka, the author of the article in Vox, some people who publish on Substack — including Jude Doyle — have been leaving because

they were upset that Substack was publishing — and in some cases offering money upfront to — authors they say are “people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”

Doyle’s list includes some of Substack’s most prominent and recent recruits: Former Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald, my former Vox coworker Matt Yglesias, and Graham Linehan, a British TV writer who was kicked off Twitter last year for “repeated violations of Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct and platform manipulation.”

Another take on this comes from Annalee Newitz (writing on Substack, as it happens).

Because Substack’s leadership pays a secret, select group of people to write for the platform. They call this group of writers the “Substack Pro” group, and they are rewarded with “advances” that Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie calls “an upfront sum to cover their first year on the platform that’s more attractive to a writer than a salary, so they don’t have to stay in a job (or take one) that’s less interesting to them than being independent.” In other words, it’s enough money to quit their day jobs. They also get exposure through Substack’s now-considerable online reach.

By doing this, Substack is creating a de facto editorial policy. Their leadership — let’s call them editors — are deciding what kinds of writing and writers are worthy of financial compensation. And you don’t know who those people are. That’s right — Substack is taking an editorial stance, paying writers who fit that stance, and refusing to be transparent about who those people are.

I don’t know why Substack has been offering money to some writers to sign up to the platform. I guess that the people in question have large followings on social media and may bring a proportion of those hordes to Substack, which can then benefit from the 10% cut it levies on the fees the writers earn. (I’m assuming they are all charging a monthly fee to subscribers, which I have no intention of doing.)

So, as far as Substack is concerned, I’m a dead loss as a commercial proposition. I’m no better than a free rider, hitching a ride on a train which has some Big Shots — of whom some people disapprove — in the First Class carriage.

The thing that would worry me more is that Substack might have a strategy (like all tech firms) of building a walled garden (like Medium’s) — which is why everything I publish on it or in any of these walled gardens is always published first — and available free – on my blog on the open Web.

Email scammers are upping their game

This from Chris Nuttall’s invaluable FT notebook:

“Simon! I’m so thrilled we’ve agreed a deal for such an iconic work of art. As I always say, we are not owners; but custodians. New bank details attached, just to be on the safe side. My regards to Amanda — and hope the kids’ colds clear up!”

An email like this nearly cost a wealthy British collector £6m. It had been sent to the family office that managed his finances by criminals impersonating a genuine art dealer, with whom the collector had been negotiating for a year.

“ The client came screen to screen with hackers during a £6m transaction,” recalls Paul Westall, founder of Agreus, a British company that recruits staff for family offices. “All correspondence was via email — back and forth . . . When they had finally reached a conclusion on price, the client received an email to say something along the lines of, I hope the children are recovering from their colds — we have just amended our bank details for security and here they are.”

As it sounded like previous emails, the art-loving client replied. Fortunately, his family office then demonstrated its strength: a structure built on personal accountability. Someone at the office phoned the real dealer to check the transaction before approving a transfer.

Next time I’m shelling out £6m for something I’ll definitely be more careful.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

•  Stella McCartney shows off the world’s first clothes made from mushroom leather. No, I did not make that up. Link
•  24 Surprising Ways to Injure Yourself When You’re Over 50 by Liz Alterman Link
•  The rich vs the very, very rich: the Wentworth golf club rebellion. Much ado about nothing. But a very entertaining read, nevertheless. 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!

“Streets full of water — please advise.”

From a famous journalistic cable in the Hearst era.

Quote of the Day

“The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.” * George Bernard Shaw

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Sonata #10 in C Major | Andante Cantabile | Glenn Gould |

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Secret Passage: Decoding ten bars in Wagner’s “Ring.”

Wonderful meditation by Alex Ross on the Ring

Wagner’s reputation for gigantism misses the mark. The “Ring” is big, no question, but it is made up of hundreds of intimate moments, through which the mythical squabbles of gods, dwarves, and men take on an almost uncomfortable immediacy. It is an affair of sidelong glances, compassionate shrugs, paralyzing hesitations, callous joys, comforting sorrows, and, beneath it all, endless yearning.

Ross picks on one of those ‘intimate moments’.

Just before Wotan falls to pieces, the orchestra plays a brief interlude—more a “microlude,” to borrow a term from the Hungarian composer György Kurtág. It is couched in E-flat major, which, significantly, is the key in which the “Ring” commenced, the primeval harmony of the Rhine. It consists of a single upward-arcing, gently aching phrase, lasting ten bars and around thirty seconds. It is not part of Wagner’s leitmotif system, the network of themes representing characters, objects, and ideas. It appears just this once, a solitary spasm of regret.

I’ve loved the passage as long as I’ve known the “Ring.” Each time I hear the opera, I wait for it, and try to grasp it as it unfurls. It seems to communicate some essential wisdom that the characters cannot put into words. So I dug into those ten bars—studying the score, reading the literature, talking to musicians—in the hope of gaining a perspective that might elude me if I started with Antigone or Colonel Kilgore. There are, of course, no final answers in the “Ring,” a behemoth that whispers a different secret into every listener’s ear. But I suspect that Willa Cather, in her operatic novel “The Song of the Lark,” was onto something when she had her heroine say, “Fricka knows.”

I’m really a musical ignoramus but I love the way Ross writes about it.

‘It’s a very special picture.’ Why vaccine safety experts put the brakes on AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine

This is the most informative piece I’ve seen on the more detailed reasoning that has led to the (temporary?) suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine in EU countries.

Scientists don’t know whether the vaccine causes the syndrome, and if so, what the mechanism is. “Everyone’s scratching their heads: Is this a real signal?” says Robert Brodsky, a hematologist at Johns Hopkins University. But vaccine safety officials say they did not take the decision lightly, and that symptoms seen in at least 13 patients, all between ages 20 and 50 and previously healthy, in at least five countries are more frequent than would be expected by chance. The patients, at least seven of whom have died, suffer from widespread blood clots, low platelet counts, and internal bleeding—not typical strokes or blood clots. “It’s a very special picture” of symptoms, says Steinar Madsen, medical director of the Norwegian Medicines Agency. “Our leading hematologist said he had never seen anything quite like it.”

The New York Times reported that a somewhat similar blood disorder, called immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), has been seen in at least 36 people in the United States who had received the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against COVID-19. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it was investigating these cases, but also said the syndrome did not appear to be more common in vaccinated people, and immunizations in the United States have continued. But it seems that the cases seen in Europe in recent weeks are distinct from ITP, which lacks the widespread blood clots seen in the European patients.

There seem to be all kinds of possible explanations for the European cases. We’re they a product of an immune system over-reaction? Were some of the victims actually infected with Covid-19 when they were vaccinated? It’ll be a while before we get to the bottom of this, and in the meantime some people will catch Covid and die from it.

It’s a very mysterious disease. The remark of Steiner Madsen — about how Norway’s leading hematologist “had never seen anything quite like it” reminded me of the case of a good friend of mine — the fittest person I knew — who caught Covid and nearly died from it, after having two massive strokes (from which he is making an astonishing recovery). The neurologists who dealt with his case likewise said that they had never seen anything like it before.”

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to my second jab.

Thanks to Seb Schmoller for alerting me to the Science article.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• Why Mount Everest’s height keeps changing. Something I never thought about. But really interesting. Link Geologists think the Himalayas are rising by 5mm a year.

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 your decide that you inbox is full enough already!

Quote of the Day

“If Marxist revolutionaries ever seized power in the United States, the could nationalise Amazon and call it a day.”

• Franklin Foer, in The Atlantic

H/T to Alina Utrata

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder and David Linley | Sí Bheag, Sí Mhor | Vienna Opera House

Link

A real discovery this (for me, anyway). The pair take on an ancient Irish tune.

Long Read of the Day

What comes after Zoom fatigue?

You know the answer: more Zoom. But this is an interesting exploration of why it makes us exhausted.

‘Global Britain’ is happy to do business with human-rights violators

From the Huffington Post:

Dominic Raab has told officials in a leaked video call that Britain will seek trade deals with countries around the world that violate international standards on human rights.

The foreign secretary told staff in his department that only trading with countries that meet European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) standards would mean the UK missing out on trade with future “growth markets”.

In a question and answer session with Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) staff, a recording of which has been heard by HuffPost UK, Raab said: “I squarely believe we ought to be trading liberally around the world.

“If we restrict it to countries with ECHR-level standards of human rights, we’re not going to do many trade deals with the growth markets of the future.”

So, within Europe, who might these new trade partners be?

Source: Statista

It will, of course, also be imperative to strike a big trade deal with China. And of course Saudi Arabia.

And while we’re on the subject of China, the Economist points out in a sobering assessment that it’s not just states that are afraid of annoying the Chinese Communist Party.

You might think the death of liberalism in Asia’s financial centre, which hosts $10trn of cross-border investments, would trigger panic, capital flight and a business exodus. Instead Hong Kong is enjoying a financial boom. Share offerings have soared as China’s leading companies list there. Western firms are in the thick of it: the top underwriters are Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Last year, the value of us dollar payments cleared in Hong Kong, a hub for the world’s reserve currency, hit a record $11trn.

The same pattern of political oppression and commercial effervescence is to be found on the mainland. In 2020 China abused human rights in Xinjiang, waged cyber-warfare, threatened its neighbours and intensified the cult of personality surrounding President Xi Jinping. Another purge is under way. Yet when they talk to shareholders about China, global firms gloss over this brutal reality: “Very happy,” says Siemens; “Phenomenal,” reckons Apple; and “Remarkable,” says Starbucks. Mainland China attracted $163bn of fresh multinational investment last year, more than any other country. It is opening the mainland capital markets to foreigners, who have invested $900bn, in a landmark shift for global finance.

The West has no way of boycotting the Chinese regime into submission.

In the short run, if forced to take sides, many countries might choose China over the West. After all, China is the largest goods trading partner of 64 countries, against just 38 for America. Instead of isolating China, America and its allies could end up isolating themselves. In the long run, unlike the oil-soaked Soviet Union, China is big, diverse and innovative enough to adapt to outside pressure. It is testing a digital currency, which could eventually rival the dollar as a way to settle trade. It aims to be self-sufficient in semiconductors.

We’re back in a bi-polar world, in other words, and this time the West doesn’t look in great shape.

How to avoid being live-streamed without your consent

It’s well-known in some circles that if you don’t want your photograph spread all over social media, then arrange to have a t-shirt printed with an image copyrighted by a small number of powerful media firms like Getty, ideally with “© Getty Images” also prominently displayed. This will ensure that it’ll be taken down automatically by the automated IP-infringement detection algorithms used by the companies.

But now there’s an ingenious adaptation of this trick — this time by American police forces who want to make sure that live-videos of them abusing protestors and other awkward customers do not get streamed live by social media companies. Vice has an interesting story about how police officers in Beverly Hills have been playing music while being filmed, seemingly in an effort to trigger Instagram’s copyright filters.

Last Friday, a man entered the Beverly Hills police department, only to be treated to a mini DJ set that could potentially get his Instagram account banned.

Sennett Devermont was at the department to file a form to obtain body camera footage from an incident in which he received a ticket he felt was unfair. Devermont also happens to be a well-known LA area activist, who regularly live-streams protests and interactions with the police to his more than 300,000 followers on Instagram.

So, he streamed this visit as well—and that’s when things got weird.

In a video posted on his Instagram account, we see a mostly cordial conversation between Devermont and BHPD Sgt. Billy Fair turn a corner when Fair becomes upset that Devermont is live-streaming the interaction, including showing work contact information for another officer. Fair asks how many people are watching, to which Devermont replies, “Enough.”

Fair then stops answering questions, pulls out his phone, and starts silently swiping around — and that’s when the ska music starts playing.

Fair boosts the volume, and continues staring at his phone. For nearly a full minute, Fair is silent, and only starts speaking after we’re a good way through Sublime’s “Santeria.”

The officer is banking on Instagram’s copyright algorithm detecting the music, and either ending the live stream outright or muting it.

Or, continues Vice

even if the algorithm does not detect the song immediately, someone — for example, a disgruntled police officer—could simply wait until a user posts an archive of the live video on their page, then file a complaint with Instagram that it contains copyrighted material.

What this suggests, among other things, is that surveillance capitalist companies are more assiduous about protecting the IP of large media corporations than they are about, say, controlling hate speech on their platforms. Maybe their excuse is that IP-infringing content is easier to spot.

Cash for Clunkers

Joe Biden is preparing a major new infrastructure bill for renewing America’s crumbling roads, bridges, etc. According to The Verge Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, is straining at the leash to switch the citizenry from gas-guzzlers to EVs.

As part of that package, Schumer said he plans to include his ambitious proposal to get every American to swap their gas-guzzling car for an electric one.

“It’s a bold new plan designed to accelerate America’s transition to all electric vehicles on the road, to developing a charging infrastructure, and to grow American jobs through clean manufacturing,” Schumer told The Verge in a brief interview this week. “And the ultimate goal is to have every car manufactured in America be electric by 2030, and every car on the road be clean by 2040.”

Similarly ambitious plans are being touted by governments everywhere. But what nobody seems to be talking about (yet) is what is to be done about the Everests of scrapped petrol and diesel cars that this transition will produce? For various reasons I had to drive around town today. And all I saw were diesel and petrol-fuelled vehicles. The only EV in town was the one I was driving. Maybe this is why Elon Musk is so obsessed with Mars. He sees it as an ideal place to dump the scrapped detritus of the transition to electric vehicles.

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!

Memories of a monochrome Summer

The Orchard, Grantchester

Quote of the Day

”I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.”

• Robert Frost

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

B B King & Eric Clapton – Riding With The King

Link

Long Read of the Day

Thoughts on 2050 and beyond

Great essay by Martin Rees, one of the wisest people I know. Famously, he also only gives us a 50% chance of making it into the next century — though that sobering thought isn’t mentioned in this essay. Link

Uber bows to reality sort-of (in UK, anyway).

There’s good news and bad news in this CNN report. On the plus side, the company has bowed to the inevitable and reclassified all of its 70,000 UK drivers.

Uber is reclassifying its 70,000 drivers in the United Kingdom after the UK Supreme Court upheld a ruling last month that they should be classified as workers and not independent contractors.

The company said Tuesday that as “workers” — a classification unique to employment law in the UK that falls short of “employee” — drivers will be entitled to minimum wage, vacation time, and a pension. Uber did not apply the changes to its Uber Eats food delivery workers, only ridehail drivers.

But… (there’s always a but with companies like this)

Uber said the minimum wage will be based on engaged time after a trip is accepted and after expenses — a definition that received push back from drivers on Wednesday. The court determined last month that drivers are working from the time they turn on Uber’s app, rather than only when transporting passengers as the company has argued.

This looks as though Uber isn’t complying with the Court’s judgment. Not a wise move IMO.

Uber’s policy changes following the ruling mean that “drivers will be still short-changed to the tune of 40-50%,” Yaseen Aslam and James Farrar, the former drivers who led the legal action against Uber, said in a statement. “While Uber undoubtedly has made progress here, we cannot accept anything less than full compliance with legal minimums,” they added.

Tulips to Tesla | Scott Galloway on booms and busts

Scott is always good value, and this week’s post is no exception.

Financial crises have many causes, but generally they boil down to a few key elements:

• easy money
• poor regulation
• consensual hallucination that the market always goes up

The crisis is preceded by a cocaine-fueled party, where everything and everyone looks and is great. The party creates an asset bubble — a wave of optimism that lifts prices well above levels warranted by fundamentals — ending in a crash. The first documented asset bubble was the Dutch tulip mania in 1636, when speculation drove the value of the rarest tulips to six times the average salary at the time.

His point is that what he calls “story stocks” are the new tulips de nos jours. And the trading app Robinhood is the E-Trade of our age.

I was very struck by this chart which suggests a close correlation between the number of Robinoood users holding Tesla shares and the Tesla share price. (Tesla being a classic ‘story stock’.).

His recommendation: if you want to know what the Tesla share price will do next, check out how many Robinhood users have joined the service.

And yes we are currently in a crazy asset-bubble.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• Yo-Yo Ma plays cello in vaccine waiting room in Massachusetts Lovely. 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!

Temperamental optimists

Fishermen on the beach at Cley-next-the-Sea in Norfolk.

Quote of the Day

”This person was a deluge of words and a drizzle of thought.”

• Peter De Vries

Remind you of anyone? (Hint: Carefully tousled blond with a posh accent.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Voi Che Sapete | Marianne Crebassa | Le nozze di Figaro | Dutch National Opera

Link

Utterly sublime nonsense. And if you have time, compare it with the 2012 Glyndebourne version.

Long Read of the Day

Margaret Mitchell’s letter about the ‘firing’ of Timnit Gebru

This letter relates, in a way, to my column in Sunday’s Observer about Google’s ethics-theatre. Dr Mitchell was co-director with Dr Gebru of Google’s Ethical AI team.

This is how it begins:

When diving deep into operationalizing the ethical development of artificial intelligence, one immediately runs into the “fractal problem”. This may also be called the “infinite onion” problem. That is, each problem within development that you pinpoint expands into a vast universe of new complex problems. It can be hard to make any measurable progress as you run in circles among different competing issues, but one of the paths forward is to pause at a specific point and detail what you see there.
Here I list some of the complex points that I see at play in the firing of Dr. Timnit Gebru, and why it will remain forever after a really, really, really terrible decision.

The Punchline. The firing of Dr. Timnit Gebru is not okay, and the way it was done is not okay. It appears to stem from the same lack of foresight that is at the core of modern technology, and so itself serves as an example of the problem. The firing seems to have been fueled by the same underpinnings of racism and sexism that our AI systems, when in the wrong hands, tend to soak up. How Dr. Gebru was fired is not okay, what was said about it is not okay, and the environment leading up to it was — and is — not okay.

Do read the whole thing.

(Thanks to Sheila Hayman for reminding me of it.)

Doc Searls: the Eventual Normal 

Characteristically thoughtful reflection on what might lie ahead:

There will be a new normal, eventually. It will be a normal like the one we had in the 20th Century, which started with WWI and ended with Covid. This was a normal where the cultural center was held by newspapers and broadcasting, and every adult knew how to drive.

Now we’re in the 21st Century, and it’s something of a whiteboard. We still have the old media and speak the same languages, but Covid pushed a reset button, and a lot of the old norms are open to question, if not out the window completely.

Why should the digital young accept the analog-born status quos of business, politics, religion, education, transportation or anything? The easy answer is because the flywheels of those things are still spinning. The hard answers start with questions about how we can do all that stuff better. For sure all the answers will be, to a huge degree, digital.

The vaccine programme had one key thing Test and Trace didn’t. And it wasn’t money

Terrific piece by Robert Colville in the Sunday Times. It’s paywalled but Charles Arthur has the key extract in his wonderful Overspill.

Something almost no one outside government appreciates is that the British state, like all its modern counterparts, is essentially a collection of databases. Throughout the pandemic, its policy successes have largely come where there are good databases, and its failures where there are not.

The furlough scheme worked because of PAYE. The expansion of universal credit relied on the existing benefits system. The “shielding list” of vulnerable patients was compiled by blending six data sets from NHS Digital.

Good data is also the secret sauce of the vaccination rollout. The jabbers could move seamlessly down the age and risk cohorts, because GPs had the appropriate patient lists. There have still been huge challenges in distributing the vaccines and tracking down the unregistered, but the data gave us an enormous head start.

The central problem with Test and Trace, by contrast, was that it didn’t have a database. When the pandemic hit, Apple and Google developed a joint framework for contact-tracing apps, which would ping you if someone you met later tested positive. But they wouldn’t let your phone share those details with the government — hence Matt Hancock’s abortive attempt to develop a homegrown alternative.

The trackers and tracers therefore had to map out the nation’s social network from a standing start, getting individual contact lists from every person who had tested positive to find out who else needed testing and quarantine. Public Health England even managed to lose 16,000 cases because it built its database with a stone-age version of Microsoft Excel and the file grew too large.

So the key discriminator between success and failure was not (as I had assumed) public sector vs (bloated and incompetent) private contractors, but who had a database and who didn’t.

The Fantasy Island that is ‘Global Britain’

This from Jonty’s Blog hits the nail on the head:

“The Brexit fantasy combines brilliantly in the final story from the weekend. The government is being urged to permanently station a frigate in Australia as a “warning” to China. That is a warning to a country with a navy which is expanding so rapidly that it is building the equivalent of the whole French navy every three years. What possible difference would one frigate make, except to hack off Beijing? The country we apparently want a trade deal with. “

Reminiscent of the famous story about Stalin who, upon being told that the Pope was opposed to something he was doing, inquired “And how many Divisions has the Pope?”

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Nudes for rent

Quote of the Day

”We have long passed the Victorian era when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.

• Somerset Maugham

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eels | Grace Kelly Blues

Link

Google might ask questions about AI ethics, but it doesn’t want answers

My Observer column this morning.

If I told you that an academic paper entitled “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” had caused an epochal row involving one of the most powerful companies in the world, you’d have asked what I’d been smoking. And well you might: but stay tuned.

The paper has four co-authors, two from the University of Washington, and two from Google – Dr Timnit Gebru and Dr Margaret Mitchell. It provides a useful critical review of machine-learning language models (LMs) like GPT-3, which are trained on enormous amounts of text and are capable of producing plausible-looking prose. The amount of computation (and associated carbon emissions) involved in their construction has ballooned to insane levels, and so at some point it’s sensible to ask the question that is never asked in the tech industry: how much is enough?

Which is one of the questions the authors of the paper asked…

Read on

Amazon’s S3 is 15 years old

From Protocol:

S3, or Simple Storage Service, made its debut 15 years ago this weekend. It would be years before “the cloud” became one of the most disruptive forces in the history of enterprise computing. Amazon didn’t even use the term when it announced S3 on March 14, 2006. But the storage service’s launch instantly solved some very tricky problems for entrepreneurs like Alvarez, and would come to change the way all businesses thought about buying information technology.

Basically, Amazon was making infinite disk-space available to anyone with a credit-card. Which meant that start-ups didn’t have to deal with the problem that bugged (and often bankrupted) start-ups in the doc-com boom. It was easy to use and you only paid for what you needed.

S3 was really what kicked off the cloud computing boom which is still going on and shows no sign of slowing. Initially it was just online storage, but the killer application came when Amazon added rentable-by-the-minute computing power the offer — the service that became Amazon Web Services — AWS.

Last year AWS provided Amazon with more than $45 billion in revenue. In the process — as some of my colleagues have noted — it also became part of the critical infrastructure not just of tech companies, but also of departments of the US government. The CIA, for example, has a contract with Amazon to build and operate its ‘private’ cloud. Which leads to the question of other Amazon could, in effect, shut down those departments and therefore the Federal government.

Way back in 2012 my friend Quentin discovered one Monday morning that his credit card account had been charged a hefty sum over the weekend. On inspection it turned out that he had forgotten to terminate the processes he was running on AWS after finishing on Friday. To avoid this happening again, he built a little system using a Raspberry Pi with a green button and a red button which made it simple to connect to, and disconnect from, AWS.

Underestimating Joe Biden

In the run-up to the election — and afterwards — most of those in my (slightly-left-of-centre) echo chamber seemed rather dismissive of Joe Biden. His main merit, they felt, was that he wasn’t Donald Trump, but apart from that he was a dozy, old-style, touchy-feely, traditional politician who wasn’t particularly bright and might even be prone to ‘senior moments’. And so they had very low expectations of Biden as President on the grounds that he hasn’t had a big idea since 1946, and besides the Republicans in the Senate would stop him doing anything serious. Zzzzz…

I’m wondering whether they still think that. From where I sit, Biden is getting some amazing things done.

That’s not just my opinion. For example, here’s Noah Smith observing that

In his first few weeks in office, Biden executed on a large number of progressive priorities — rejoining the Paris climate talks, canceling the Keystone pipeline, ending the Muslim Ban, and much more. Then he passed a huge $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill (or “stimmy”, as the kids are now calling it), which also contained an incredibly generous unconditional child allowance that will transform American’s welfare state (assuming it becomes permanent at the end of the year, which many expect). But that’s only the beginning — Biden’s next moves include a big immigration bill with a path to citizenship, minimum wage, and a green infrastructure bill that’s not called a “Green New Deal” but certainly has some similarities.

In other words, Biden is bringing the most transformational progressive agenda since LBJ. And this presents the Left with a bit of a dilemma, because one of their core bedrock beliefs during the campaign season was that Biden was a basically Clintonite centrist. The fact that their predictions have been hilariously wide of the mark, and Biden is governing more like FDR, presents leftists with a choice: They can either admit (however grudgingly and provisionally) that Biden is a lot better than they thought, or they can find reasons to denounce Biden in spite of all he’s doing.

Or, here’s the NYT on what he’s been up to.

Its first major legislative act under President Biden was a deficit-financed, $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” filled with programs as broad as expanded aid to nearly every family with children and as targeted as payments to Black farmers. While providing an array of benefits to the middle class, it is also a poverty-fighting initiative of potentially historic proportions, delivering more immediate cash assistance to families at the bottom of the income scale than any federal legislation since at least the New Deal.

Behind that shift is a realignment of economic, political and social forces, some decades in the making and others accelerated by the pandemic, that enabled a rapid advance in progressive priorities.

This is remarkable, not just because it’s the polar opposite of the sordid and venal chaos of the Trump regime, but also that it seems pretty radical. I guess that my sceptical echo-chamber dwellers will now change their refrain from ‘no he won’t because he can’t’ to ‘yeah, but can it last?’

As regular readers know, I was concerned that the burgeoning move to bring the tech companies under control bight be compromised by the inrush of ex-Silicon-Valley people into the Biden administration. And then last week he appoints Tim Wu to the national economic council with a brief to oversee antitrust action, and nominates Lina Khan as.an FTC Commissioner. These are really serious appointments, and a sign of a President who knows that he’s doing.

The current rethinking that I cited above summons up echoes of FDR. But the under-estimation of Biden calls to my mind a different historical parallel — Clement Attlee, the best Prime Minister the UK has had since the war. He too was greatly under-estimated, including by Churchill, for whom he ran the country while Churchill ran the war. (Churchill observed of him that “he was a modest man with much to be modest about”.)

These misjudgements never seemed to bother Attlee, who famously mocked them in a little ditty towards the end of his career :

There were few who thought him a starter.
And many who thought themselves smarter.
But he finished PM,
CH, and OM,
An Earl and a Knight of the Garter.

In praise of Haynes Manuals

My post yesterday about the usefulness of the Haynes Manual for our little Toyota Aygo prompted a lovely note from my friend and Open University colleague, David Vincent.

“I don’t like mending cars”, he writes, “but when young and poor, I had no choice. One of my proudest memories of my Cambridge PhD time was replacing the entire engine of a Ford Popular, with the help of three friends, one now an FBA. On the roof of the car throughout the operation was an open Haynes manual, which guided us through the task.

Decades later, David became the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, and as such one of the senior members of the university who had the responsibility for conferring degrees.

On one occasion, he recalls, “the ceremony was held in Cheltenham, where I discovered that the Honorary Graduand was none other than John Haynes. He was now well on in years, and in wealth, arriving for the event in a Rolls. He was an absolutely appropriate person for an OU degree. Few people did more to extend the technical learning of the British public”

Yep.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• I’m the package you impulse-ordered three days ago and no, I’m not going to make you feel any better. Lovely, imaginative rant by Paula Aceves. Link
• How I earn a living selling my open source software. Interesting and open. And an honest business model. Link

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Listening to the Cosmos

Some of the radio telescopes at Lord’s Bridge.

Quote of the Day

”We were discussing the possibility of making one of our cats Pope recently, and we decided that the fact that she was not Italian, and was female, made the third point, that she was a cat, quite irrelevant.”

• Katharine Whitehorn

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Days like this

Link

Such a lovely, evocative song. Especially when we’re marking such a grim anniversary. Thanks to Anne Chapel for reminding me of it.

Long Read of the Day

Rug Time by Jonathan Steinberg

My friend Jonathan, who died last week, was a terrific book-reviewer. I’ve just been re-reading his LRB review  of The Price of Power, Seymour Hersh’s biography of Henry Kissinger, published in 1983. It’s a typically thorough Steinberg piece which is a pleasure to read — hence my recommendation.

This is how it concludes:

The Price of Power has perplexed me more than any book I have read for a long time. The story Mr Hersh has to tell is unrelieved and nasty. He attacks Kissinger less by invective than by weight of evidence. Super-K is to be buried under the thousand interviews and the mountains of notes. Yet the man himself slips through, almost unscathed. I tried to log the number of times Mr Hersh uses strong language, words like ‘betray’ or ‘fawn’ or ‘lie’, but gave it up for he does so sparingly. The facts, it would appear, are to speak for themselves. But they don’t. I know that the first law of reviewing is to talk about the book and not to complain about the one that the reviewer might have wanted. I have to break the rule in this case. Here we have a work by one of America’s most famous journalists, a work which he evidently felt was so important that he left the New York Times to complete it: and yet he gave me no deeper understanding of Kissinger the man or Kissinger the statesman than I had before I started. Perhaps the rigorous traditions of New York Times journalism with its non-committal tone and taste for factual accounts unfit a writer for the flights of imagination or sweep of judgment that seem to me to be lacking here. Perhaps Mr Hersh hates Dr Kissinger and has to restrain himself lest it show. I don’t know. What I do know is that nobody will ever be in a better position to write the definitive study of Kissinger’s foreign policy and I am sorry that, for whatever reason, Seymour Hersh has not done so.

One of the nice ironies of history was that when Jonathan’s magisterial biography of Bismarck was published, the New York Times asked Kissinger to review it.

I never hear the name Kissinger without thinking of Tom Lehrer’s famous observation that “Satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize”.

The one great thing about YouTube

YouTube’s recommender algorithm has been a disaster for democracy, but the basic service YouTube provides is often wonderful in all kinds of mundane ways. It’s particularly good — in my experience — when you’re trying to do some mundane DIY task and discover that it’s more difficult than you envisaged. At which point you discover that someone much more competent and resourceful than you has encountered and solved it — and is willing to demonstrate on video how s/he did so.

A good case study of this public good arose this morning. Our second car is a Toyota Aygo, a small runabout that I bought years ago when the kids were learning to drive, and which we still use as a workhorse for all kinds of mundane trips. Although it’s badged as a Toyota, in fact it’s just a rebranded runabout that was designed by either Peugeot or Citroen — which is why you see various manifestations of it all over the place.

One of the curious aspects of the car that we discovered years ago is that it seems to have been designed to be cheap to manufacture but fiendishly difficult to repair. A few years ago the heater fan broke and we discovered that it would cost neatly £600 to replace it. Why? It wasn’t the cost of the fan — about £100 — but the labour costs of the work needed to replace it. A significant chunk of the front interior had to be painstakingly removed in order to get at the faulty part. One of my wife’s sons — who is naturally good at this stuff — kindly did it for us, and it was an eye-opener to observe the lengths to which he had to go in order to replace that one single component. We had a similar experience when trying to replace a headlamp bulb — an apparently trivial task which, on the Aygo, seems to require superhuman dexterity and the ability to work in a very confined space.

Yesterday, the indicators started to malfunction, making the car dangerous to drive. Having consulted the Haynes manual I concluded that the indicator stalk on the steering column was probably faulty and would need to be replaced. I then discovered that doing so looked like being tricky in classic Aygo style — involving, among other things, temporarily disabling the airbag and taking off the steering wheel. But just to confirm that suspicion, I went to YouTube and found this wonderful video — which provided the desired confirmation but was also a beautiful example of how to teach by example. And while the chap was doing the repair, he had occasional interludes (complete with visual warnings) for rants about French automobile design, with all of which I heartily concurred.

”No 10 was a plague pit”

The Guardian today carried a vivid account of what it had been like inside Johnson’s so-called government in the early days of the pandemic. It’s useful in confirming what one guessed it must have been like, but it has lots of colourful detail. Here’s how it opens…

Horrified staff and ministers, dealing with the worst crisis in decades, had to reckon with how the country could be run when everyone in charge was getting ill.

Famously, Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and Dominic Cummings contracted the virus. So did England’s chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, and the then cabinet secretary, Mark Sedwill. Ministers and their staff had it. Almost all the staff in Downing Street, too.

It spread to special advisers across Whitehall and to parliamentary lobby journalists. Although the Palace of Westminster escaped any mass outbreaks among staff, several MPs caught Covid. Many in the office of the Labour leader, including Seumas Milne, had it. Jeremy Corbyn may have had it, although he was never tested and so has never been sure.

But the situation was at its worst at the heart of Downing Street. For a number of days aides looked almost entirely to the then director of communications, Lee Cain, for direction.

“No 10 was a plague pit,” one adviser recalls. “No one outside the postcode quite knows how bad it got in there.”

Another said: “Lee was running the country, genuinely, for quite some time.”

According to many of those present, almost the entire staff team in Downing Street caught Covid-19 at some point during those weeks, with James Slack, the prime minister’s spokesperson, a notable exception.

I’ve been to No 10 a couple of times and was astonished at how much of a rabbit-warren it is. I once interviewed one of the UK’s most senior civil servants in his office there. It was not that much bigger than a walk-in wardrobe.

The other thing I remember (it was in the late 1990s) was that on entry you had to switch your mobile phone off and put it on the hall table with a post-it note giving your name. I did as required and went off to do the interview. When I went to reclaim my phone I noticed that next to it was a Nokia on which the post-it note said “First Sea Lord”.

Straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Another — fascinating — link

The Antikythera Cosmos: Recreating an ancient mechanical Cosmos Link

This is an utterly fascinating 30-minute video account of how researchers at UCL have solved a major piece of the puzzle that makes up the ancient Greek astronomical calculator known as the Antikythera Mechanism, a hand-powered mechanical device that was used to predict astronomical events.

It was the world’s first analogue computer and the most complex piece of engineering to have survived from the ancient world. The 2,000-year-old device was used to predict the positions of the Sun, Moon and the planets as well as lunar and solar eclipse.

The stupendous effort and ingenuity that went into this project is astonishing.

And the video makes for riveting viewing. Best way of spending half an hour I can think of.

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Covid warning — geek version

I love this. CSAIL is the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

Quote of the Day

“She clapped me to her bosom like a belladonna plaster and pushed me onto the dance floor. It was like being lashed to an upholstered pneumatic drill.”

• Richard Gordon in Doctor at Sea

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Soave sia il vento | Cosi fan Tutte

Link

One of the loveliest things Mozart ever wrote. And if you’re planning your funeral, consider it for the closing music as your cortege heads for the graveyard. For if you do, you’ll have the last laugh — and some members of the congregation may feel twinges of anxiety. The two ladies are hoping the wind blows gently for their beloveds, Ferrando and Guglielmo, as they supposedly head off to war — when the two rogues (as the audience and Don Alfonso know) are actually planning to return in disguise and make fools of their deluded fiancees. It’s basically sexist nonsense accompanied by heavenly music.

Long Read of the Day

How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire

Useful piece by Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev. Familiar stuff for those of us who have to follow the evolving story, but a good summary roundup for anyone who wants to catch up on what is rapidly becoming a major concern for democracy.

The beginnings of a working public EV-charging grid for the UK?

Lovely post by Quentin on his blog marking the announcement that Ecotricity was to lose its monopoly on the provision of electric chargers at motorway service stations. Henceforth public charging at service stations will be provided by a partnership of Ecotricity and Gridserve, the new kid on the block. Quentin is the right person to write this post, since he was a pioneering adopter of EVs — he had a gorgeous little BMW i3 five years ago, and now has a Tesla (as do I).

The problem was that the Ecotricity charging network suffered from the problems often displayed by monopoly providers — as Quentin tactfully points out:

Over the years, though, fondness for Ecotricity has waned, because the network was poorly-maintained and unreliable, the ‘rapid’ chargers were, by modern standards (a whole five years later!), slow and cranky, and nobody now heads for an Ecotricity charger if there is any other viable option. A recent Zap-Map survey of the UK’s 16 charging networks — yes, there are actually 16 — placed Ecotricity at position… ahem… 16.

In a nice touch, his blog post bookends the story with a picture of his little i3’s first public charge at an Ecotricity charging point, and its final charge (before exchanging it for a Tesla) at the new Gridserve service station near Braintree.

Long Covid: How poor reporting can lead to misinformation and anxiety

Zeynep’s Tufecki is in a class of her own — IMHO the best writer on the pandemic. This essay is a masterclass in how faulty — if well-intentioned — reporting can lead to unfortunate results.

The headline on the offending article (in the New York Times) was “Many ‘Long Covid’ Patients Had No Symptoms From Their Initial Infection”. The nub of it was this:

Many people who experience long-term symptoms from the coronavirus did not feel sick at all when they were initially infected, according to a new study that adds compelling information to the increasingly important issue of the lasting health impact of Covid-19.

The study, one of the first to focus exclusively on people who never needed to be hospitalized when they were infected, analyzed electronic medical records of 1,407 people in California who tested positive for the coronavirus. More than 60 days after their infection, 27 percent, or 382 people, were struggling with post-Covid symptoms like shortness of breath, chest pain, cough or abdominal pain.

Nearly a third of the patients with such long-term problems had not had any symptoms from their initial coronavirus infection through the 10 days after they tested positive, the researchers found.

You can see why this piece caused lots of concern. It was saying that asymptomatic infection seems to potentially create “Long Covid” sufferers in large proportions. Scary.

But watch Zeynep going to work on it…

Here’s the problem though—and these are things you’d never know if you read only the New York Times or other articles about the study, rather than the study itself. The findings were drawn from electronic health records: i.e. people who were interacting with the hospital system. So the study necessarily excludes anyone who didn’t feel the need to interact with the hospital after their positive test. Who is still interacting with the hospital sixty days after their diagnosis? People who don’t feel great. Who is not? People who don’t feel the need to because they feel fine. Hence, clearly, this is not a representative group whatsoever. These are people who sought follow-up, by definition. Their problems are real, for sure, but they don’t form a basis from which to report percentages, really. This is called a “selection effect” — if you only include people who select themselves into a group, you have little idea of what’s actually going on besides some people selecting themselves into that group.

And so on.

It’s (too) easy to be judgmental about this and — as a columnist who has sometimes been spectacularly wrong I’m in no position to throw stones. Pam Belluck, the author of the article, is a well-known health and science writer who has shared a Pulitzer Prize for some of her work. She’s no rookie, in other words. Among the lessons implicit in Zeynep’s dissection are that: Covid reporting is hard; the scale of the pandemic means that many Covid-related stories make headlines; really accurate Covid reporting is even harder; and often the truth is elusive and not amenable to punchy headlines. Also worth bearing in mind is that the journalist who never made a mistake never wrote anything.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• A Toronto burger joint Toronto has named its menu items after office supplies so that customers can include them on expense reports. Smart. Mine’s a Mini Dry Erase Whiteboard with fries; no mayo. Link
• Dave Winer’s blog for March 11, 2020. He has a daily blog, just like mine. And it’s now very interesting to look back to a year ago: the storm was coming, but relatively few knew how bad it was going to be. Link
• Thought Economics. Amazing site created by Vikas Shah: huge collection of interviews he’s done with an amazing range of people. Link. Thanks to Diane Coyle for the pointer.

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!