Quote of the Day

”Everyone wants an artist on the wall or on the shelf, but nobody wants him in the house.”

• James Baldwin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sheryl Crow, Eric Clapton, Vince Gill, Albert Lee | Tulsa Time

Link

Nobody sleeps at the back when this crew are in action.

Long Read of the Day

Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.

Another unmissable piece  from Zeynep Tufecki.

Even if the coronavirus did jump from animal to human without the involvement of research activities, the groundwork for a potential disaster had been laid for years, and learning its lessons is essential to preventing others.

This is a really sobering read, which starts by chronicling the history of virological research conducted with sometimes lax attention to safety. I didn’t know, for example, that:

Nearly every SARS case since the original epidemic has been due to lab leaks — six incidents in three countries, including twice in a single month from a lab in Beijing. In one instance, the mother of a lab worker died.

Or that,

In 2007, foot-and-mouth disease, which can devastate livestock and caused a massive crisis in Britain in 2001, escaped from a drainage pipe leak at an English lab with the highest biosafety rating, BSL-4.

Or that,

the last known person who died of smallpox was someone infected because of a lab incident in Britain in 1978.

Read on.

We still don’t know — and maybe never will — how the Covid-19 virus escaped into the human population. But that’s no excuse for not tightening up security precautions — and maybe even banning some kinds of virological research.

He Thought He Could Outfox the Gig Economy. He Was Wrong

Startling story from Wired.

Jeffrey Fang, DoorDash delivery guy, knows you judge his parenting skills, and he’ll join in your condemnation in a moment. He’ll explain that bringing his kids along on his Saturday night shift “made sense, until it didn’t,” and that in hindsight, he understands that it really, really didn’t. But right now, on the night of February 6, he’s not thinking clearly, and you’ll have to excuse him as he sprints pell-mell down a promenade of swank homes after the thief who just stole his phone.

He sees the thief dive into the back seat of a silver sedan, and as the car accelerates Fang keeps running alongside and grabs the passenger door handle—less DoorDash Dad than some kind of bespectacled Jason Bourne. The phone, you see, is his “moneymaking tool”; it’s how he feeds his family. But each stride is taking him farther from his unlocked Honda Odyssey minivan, parked illegally, engine humming, in a driveway where he was making a delivery, with precious cargo in the back seat.

His kids…

Good story, well told. (And, in case you’re worried, it ends well.) But in the process, it paints a graphic picture of what working in the gig economy is like.

David Halberstam

I’d been thinking about The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s great book about America’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam, and went looking for speeches by him. This YouTube video of a keynote address he gave at the JFK Presidential Library is terrific. Nearly an hour long, so make some coffee first.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

 Developing 120-Year-Old Photos found in a Time Capsule

Absolutely fascinating — at least if you’re a photographer. Link

H/T to Jason Kottke.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, 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!

The divinity of cats

Further to yesterday’s picture of a regal feline, this arrived, courtesy of Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve)!

Quote of the Day

“We know no spectacle more ridiculous than the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”

• Lord Macaulay

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Così fan tutte – Come Scoglio | Corinne Winters | The Royal Opera

Link

Long Read of the Day

Jonathan Rauch: The Constitution of Knowledge

Link

When Americans think about how we find truth amid a world full of discordant viewpoints, we usually turn to a metaphor, that of the marketplace of ideas. It is a good metaphor as far as it goes, yet woefully incomplete. It conjures up an image of ideas being traded by individuals in a kind of flea market, or of disembodied ideas clashing and competing in some ethereal realm of their own. But ideas in the marketplace do not talk directly to each other, and for the most part neither do individuals.

Rather, our conversations are mediated through institutions like journals and newspapers and social-media platforms. They rely on a dense network of norms and rules, like truthfulness and fact-checking. They depend on the expertise of professionals, like peer reviewers and editors. The entire system rests on a foundation of values: a shared understanding that there are right and wrong ways to make knowledge. Those values and rules and institutions do for knowledge what the U.S. Constitution does for politics: They create a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways. And so I call them, collectively, the Constitution of Knowledge. If we want to defend that system from its many persistent attackers, we need to understand it—and its very special notion of reality.

An excerpt from his new book. Worth reading.

Operation Nightwatch

This is utterly captivating. When Rembrandt’s masterpiece, The Night Watch was moved from its original location, it was cut to fit its new location and the severed pieces were lost. The Dutch Rijksmuseum launched an extraordinary project to reconstruct and repaint the missing strips using machine-learning technology. A set of short videos explains how it was done.

For someone like me, who spends a good deal of time contemplating the downsides and abuses of the technology, this was a salutary reminder of how — in the right hands and for the right purposes — it can also be a positive augmentation of human capability.

Thanks to Gerard de Vries, who alerted me to it.

More fallout from l’affaire Hancock

Like Macaulay (see Quote of the Day) I dislike the gleeful sanctimoniousness of the British media whenever a public figure is caught in flagrante, as the former Secretary of State for Health was. But I was struck by this item from the (unmissable) daily Politico newsletter from Westminster:

Tory MPs were last night openly sharing the video of Sky News’ Trevor Phillips laying into Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis — which had more than a million views online in 12 hours. It’s worth quoting Phillips: “I wouldn’t normally do something like this but I want to put a private, personal question to you … The pictures that we saw were of an encounter on May 6. On May 11, my family buried my daughter who had died, not of COVID, but during the lockdown. Three hundred of our family and friends turned up online, but most of them were not allowed to be at the graveside, even though it was in the open air, because of the rule of 30, because of the instruction by Mr Hancock. Now the next time one of you tells me what to do in my private life, explain to me why I shouldn’t just tell you where to get off?”

Other hopefully interesting, links

• Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP = officialese for UFOs) Published by the office of the US Director of National Intelligence. It’s only nine pages long and is billed as a ‘preliminary’ report. My reading of it is that the US government is genuinely puzzled about some of the reported ‘sightings’. Link Useful background might be the long New Yorker piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in the April 30, 2021 issue of the magazine.

• People of Earth: Hello Lovely New Yorker message from aliens by Will Stephen. Sample:

We have been observing you for millennia, from a great distance. Your development, your cultures, your wars. Your ways fascinate us. Recently, you have seen our crafts in your airspace. Yes, we are real. And, yes, we are ready to initiate contact.

In earthly terms, we have progressed beyond the concepts of nations, division, and conflict. We are a peaceful civilization, built on coöperation, technological progress, and the power of thought.

We have gathered from our observations that currently the most powerful Thought Leader in your most powerful nation is a human known as Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson. Is that correct?

Because, frankly, this . . . confuses us. What is his deal, exactly?

He is decent at speaking on television, we understand that. But he is far from your most intelligent or most capable human. By, like, a long shot. He seems very upset, all the time, about things that basically don’t exist. And this is coming from aliens.

So why him? Your planet is suffering, its extinction is imminent. And yet this asshole is talking about Antifa. It’s, like, dude. Zoom out.

He does realize Antifa isn’t a thing, right? I mean, we have technology beyond the scope of human comprehension, and even we cannot find a shred of evidence that an organization called Antifa exists, let alone poses any actual threat to your “suburbs.” So some Nazis get punched every once in a while. No offense, but who gives a shit?

Your world is melting, its people are more divided than ever. We want to share our knowledge and alleviate your pain. But, honestly, that Tucker weirdo kinda makes us want to turn around and go home. I mean, good Lord, what a pill.

Puts it in context, eh? The big question is not whether there is intelligent life in space; it’s whether there’s any intelligent life in the Republican party.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, 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!

Master of the Universe

This handsome specimen is a cat we looked after for a couple of days last week when his so-called ‘owners’ (i.e. servants) were away. He is living proof that P.G. Wodehouse was right about cats.

Tweet of the Day

See Marina Hyde’s column — linked below.

Quote of the Day

”So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.”

• Alan Bennett on Arianna Stassinopoulos

She was an undergraduate at Cambridge in my time, and boy, was she a pain.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ruth Moody with Mark Knopfler | Pockets

Link

Long Read of the day

The untold story of the big boat that broke the world

Intriguing Wired story of what happened to the ship that blocked the Suez Canal.

Outside, the Egyptian sun slowly simmers cargo headed for the UK and Germany, as well as trains destined for central and eastern Europe – wiring, lawnmowers and gazebos which will one day be bound for assembly lines, supermarket shelves and homes across the continent. Alongside surgical gowns, wheelchair parts and sun loungers, there’s also plenty of food: tea leaves, lemons and tofu all rot away in the heat. None of it can be offloaded.

This is the Ever Given, the same ship that launched a thousand memes when it got stuck across the Suez Canal on March 23 and held up nearly $60 billion of trade. It took a week of tugs, dredging and a crack team of salvage experts to free the 220,000-tonne megaship. As the Ever Given set sail once more, horns blared out in triumph. Yet its next unscheduled stopover lay just 30 kilometres away in Great Bitter Lake where it was towed for a seemingly routine inspection. It’s been anchored there ever since.

The vessel is stuck once more – this time by an almighty international legal row.

Great read.

Marina Hyde on Hancock’s Half Hour

As usual, she’s spot on:

Sorry, but the only thing I want to see Matt Hancock doing against the back of his office door is sliding down it with his head in his hands. But he can probably bank on not being sacked by Boris Johnson for having an affair. It would be like being sacked by Stalin for being slightly arsey to work with.

Even so, Hancock will be glad that the British Antarctic Territory has been added to the green list, just as he’s been added to the shit list. The South Pole suddenly looks well worth packing his bags for. Temperatures are currently minus 87 but feel like minus 108, making it considerably less frosty than any of Matt’s current climes.

That said, if Hancock does end up being resigned for this, it would fit with the general twilight mood in the UK’s national story. Nothing says “country that’s going to make a massive success of itself’” like a guy getting away with contributing to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths but having to quit for a knee-trembler. It’s like getting Al Capone for snogging.

What a columnist!

Memo to corporate leaders post-Covid: the disruption to businesses has only just begun

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

The problem with having had the fast-forward button suddenly propel us into an unexpected place, though, is that we find ourselves unmoored. We start wondering about what lies ahead as the immediate threat of the virus recedes. What will our post-pandemic future be like? In relation to work, three main possibilities are currently taking up all the airtime: continuing to work from home (WFH); a hybrid mode in which we spend some time in the office but also two or three days WFH; and a return to ye olde days commuting to the office to gather round the water cooler and pretend to be doing something useful.

In a remarkable essay published a few days ago, first as a long blog post entitled Creating the Future of Work and later as an engaging Tweetstorm, Stephen Sinofsky, a former senior Microsoft executive, argues that if these are the only options under consideration then we have gravely underestimated the industrial significance of the pandemic. Of course the nature of work will have been changed by what has happened. But what is more significant, he contends, is that the shock will also reshape the nature of the corporations in which most of us work. The problem is that most of the people who run large organisations and corporations haven’t twigged that yet…

Do read the whole thing.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Cat who family thought had been cremated turns back up at home Link
• Michigan boat captain finds message in a bottle after almost a century 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, Monday through Friday, 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!

Girl and grand piano

Quote of the Day

”My idea of a good picture is one that is in focus.”

• Andy Warhol, 1979

And, boy, did it show.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Diana Krall | Fly Me to the Moon | Live in Paris

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Whose Democracy Counts When Global Social Media Rules Are Set? 

What works for the United States may not work elsewhere, and a provision that seems benign in one national governance context can be anything but, in another.

Insightful essay by Heidi Tworek arguing that when we talk about the impact of social media on democracy, we spend most of the time talking about social media and very little about ‘democracy’ — as if it were a simple and uncontested concept.

Instead of talking about democracy as an abstract, ill-defined ideal, we can examine different definitions of democracy and consider the role of social media in each. By breaking down the components of democracy, we can piece together a more complete picture of how platform governance might address each issue. Perhaps even more crucially, we can follow a global thread to see how solutions that might seem to work in one democracy may prove harmful or extremely complicated in another.

She puts forward a neat idea — to think about democracy is as a Venn diagram of values. For different democracies, these values overlap in different ways.

Worth reading the whole thing.

Hypocrisy, Pulitzer prizes and the New York Times

Zaid Jilani asks whether the New York Times’s behaviour in forcing out a star reporter over claims of racism, only to reassure the Pulitzer Prize Board that he was innocent was hypocritical.

The answer, of course, is yes.

Don McNeil is the star reporter in question, and his treatment by the Times was, in my opinion, unforgivable. It provided a vivid confirmation of Naughton’s First Law of Organisations: All organisations are sociopathic. Which is why Facebook, say, could be entirely staffed by clones of Mahatma Gandhi and St Francis of Assisi and it would still be a toxic organisation — because it will do what it’s constituted to do, namely maximise shareholder value.

Jilani’s account of what happened to McNeil is worth reading, just to get chapter and verse of the case.

Is it time to ditch Chrome?

From Wired

Answer: yes. I did it long ago, and I get very cross when I come on websites which refuse to work properly if you access them with a less obnoxious browser.

Despite a poor reputation for privacy, Google’s Chrome browser continues to dominate. The web browser has around 65 per cent market share and two billion people are regularly using it. Its closest competitor, Apple’s Safari, lags far behind with under 20 per cent market share. That’s a lot of power, even before you consider Chrome’s data collection practices.

Is Google too big and powerful, and do you need to ditch Chrome for good? Privacy experts say yes. Chrome is tightly integrated with Google’s data gathering infrastructure, including services such as Google search and Gmail – and its market dominance gives it the power to help set new standards across the web. Chrome is one of Google’s most powerful data-gathering tools.

It’s dead simple to do: Other browsers — Brave, Firefox, Safari, to name just three — are just a click away. And they’re more protective of your privacy.

A Day at the Seaside in 1899

This is astonishing — a short movie filmed 132 years ago on the beaches of Étretat and Le Tréport in Normandy, possibly by George Mikes. It’s been enhanced using machine-learning technology and colorisation. The film begins with passengers arriving at Mers-Le Tréport train station. Interesting also to see the preposterous mobile beach huts for more adventurous women to change into swimming costumes. The huts were then rolled down to the water’s edge for a secluded dip in the water.

The ‘enhancements’ were:

1. Cleaned noise artifacts
2. Increased frame interpolation from 15 fps to 60 fps using Rife
3. Increased resolution from 240p to 4000p.
4. Colorised using Deoldify
5. Created ambient soundtrack.

Magical.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, 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!

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Brexit referendum!

Quote of the Day

”I don’t know what our relationship will be in 20 years’ time. I don’t know what the EU will be like in 20 years. And maybe I don’t know what your Union here will be like in 20 years’ time. Who knows? So we have to be ready for change.” * João Vale de Almeida , the EU’s Ambassador to London Lovely.

Bitcoin news

It’s peaked (at least for the time being). But if you had Bitcoins before late 2020, you could still contemplate a comfortable retirement.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Laudate Dominum, KV 339 | Patricia Janečková

Link

Sublime.

Long Read of the Day

”A politics of hope against a politics of fear”

This is the title of a striking essay that Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times of May 1, 2019. It came up when I was digging through my notebook for a piece I’m incubating about concepts of democracy. The original text is behind a paywall, so here’s a summary based on my notes.

“Faith in the kind of democracy we prefer”, writes Wolf, “is declining. “And charismatic politicians are enticing people into giving them support. How should politicians of the centre and centre-right respond? The underlying reality that the only way for liberal democracy to survive is by enabling widely-shared prosperity.”

Amen to that.

Wolf has ten ideas for how to counter populist politics.

1. Leadership matters. Democratic politics is not about buying votes. Politicians have to persuade people — i.e. get ‘buy-in’.
2. Competence matters. Most populists are good at campaigning but useless at governing.
3. Citizenship matters. “A democracy is a community of citizens. The sense of what is owed to — and expected from — citizens is the foundation of successful democracies.
4. Inclusion matters. In the US the Gini coefficient (which measures inequality of market incomes) is not particularly high, but inequality of disposable incomes is much higher. This is a policy choice, not an accident.
5. Economic reform matters. As Paul Collier (in The Future of Capitalism) and Colin Mayer (in Prosperity), argue we need reform of taxation and of the corporation if we are to create a society that is economically successful and more inclusive.
6. The ‘local’ matters. “devolving decisions, while also giving communities the means to revitalise themselves, must be part of good new politics.”
7. Public services matter — “even if people dislike paying the taxes needed to support them…. The libertarian idea of a minimal state that leaves all this to a free market is not only unworkable, but incompatible with democracy”.
8. Managed globalisation and global cooperation also matter. “No country is an island. We depend on ideas, resources, people, goods and services from other countries. National sovereignty does matter. But it is not all that matters.”
9. Looking ahead matters. “We live in a world of large long-term upheavals — notably climate change, artificial intelligence and the rise of Asia. Good governments must look at these changes and what these things might mean for their peoples. If democracies cannot do this kind of forward thinking, then they will fail.”
10. Complexity matters. Mencken: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” Wolf: “A politics that rests on popular anger and despotic whim is bound to fail. The right response has to be a politics that bases hope on realism. That is the only sort of democratic politics worth doing.”

Wolf is one of the wisest people I read.

Startups Race Microsoft to Find Better Ways to Cool Data Centers

Nonconducting liquids show promise in replacing expensive and wasteful air conditioning.

Link

Data centers consume 2% to 4% of the world’s electricity, and almost half of that power goes to cooling, according to the Uptime Institute, a consulting firm in Seattle. Early on, most data was kept on-site at the banks, universities, or corporations that generated it, where cooling often meant little more than opening the window. Today, a growing share of the world’s data is consolidated in megacenters with thousands of processors, and the vast majority of them use traditional air conditioning. While some heat is good for computers, too much can cause systems to crash, and with each generation of computer chips running faster and hotter, the systems will soon be too hot for even the most efficient air conditioner. Finding better ways to keep temperatures down could save the industry some $10 billion a year on electricity alone, according to Uptime. “Air just isn’t a very effective medium for transferring heat,” says Rabih Bashroush, global head of IT advisory services at Uptime.

So what to do? Answer:

Microsoft — which has more than 200 data-centres globally — is testing systems in which servers are bathed directly in a fluid that doesn’t conduct electricity. It estimates liquid cooling could allow it to fit 10 times as much computing power in the same space. “We’re just starting down the liquid path,” says Christian Belady, chief of the unit that develops technology for data centers. “You’re going to see a lot of rapid change in how we do things.”

One of the startups hoping to exploit this, er, liquid opportunity, is called Iceotope! It’s based in Sheffield.

Boris Johnson’s next own goal

UEFA’s leaders threatened last week to take the final away from Wembley and move it to Hungary unless 2,500 of their dignitaries can avoid quarantine rules. Now they are “working closely” with the UK government using the so-called elite sport exemption to enable a 2,500-strong horde of hangers-on and parasites to come to the UK for the final.

As usual, Marina Hyde gets to the heart of the matter:

The optimistic among us would hope Uefa might come to understand that trying to blag 2,500 members of the “football family” through under the elite sport exemption was a bit of a stretch – unless the sport in question was expensing five-course dinners and sex workers.

But the realists among us – ie everyone with any experience of football governance and current UK governance – will be thinking that something rather less palatable is in the offing. Is hosting the final worth further compromising the idea that we’re all somehow in this together, or is the waiving of Covid rules for a bunch of largely parasitic liggers regarded as a price worth paying by Boris Johnson’s government?

My hunch: the government will cave. Too many votes in football.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, 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!

Why many employers like staff who work from home

Official statistics in the UK showed people working from home last year put in six hours of unpaid overtime a week on average, compared with 3.6 hours for those who never worked at home Source: Financial Times, 13 June, 2021

Quote of the Day

””Never express yourself more clearly than you think”

• Niels Bohr.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grateful Dead | Not Fade Away & Goin’ down the Road Feeling Bad | Live at Manhattan Center, New York

Link

More evidence of my misspent youth.

Long Read of the Day

Biden’s China strategy: a chronology

By Adam Tooze

Link

Joe Biden has come a long way on China. At the beginning of his Presidential run in May 2019 at a speech in Iowa he still adopted a blithe attitude of superiority. Invoking his years of diplomatic experience he reassured the crowd: “there’s not a “single solitary” world leader who would trade the problems the United States faces for those confronting China. “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man … I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.”

By 2020, as the campaign heated up, Biden’s soft line on China was out of tune with a growing bipartisan consensus on the need to confront China’s rise. As one of his advisors would later remark to the Economist, “During the campaign Mr Biden had to be “reprogrammed” on China.”

The people who did the reprogramming were the members of the DC foreign policy “blob” that gathered around Biden.

This is part of work in progress by Adam Tooze. But if you’re interested (as I am) in tracking the gradual move towards the kind of superpower conflict envisaged in 2034: A Novel of the next world war it’s a useful start.

Jonty Bloom on the DUP

link

Of all the groups promised the earth by the Brexiteers and then abandoned, the DUP and the good people of Ulster are the largest and most obvious. The consequences are truly terrifying but the most frightening thing is that the Brexiteers don’t care.

There is an obvious answer to all these issues however, the UK could rejoin the EU’s veterinary standards regime and 80% of the checks disappear. Then the DUP can join a foreign round the world trip promoting Northern Ireland as the best of both worlds, in the UK and the Single Market. The money, jobs and investment would flood in.

What are the chances of that? About zero, the UK government is too stupid to compromise on veterinary standards, the DUP is too stupid to see the way ahead. Both are stuck in fantasy cults, where reality and facts are as nothing to the purity of the cause.

More on Edward de Bono

I said in my post on de Bono that I could never decide whether he was a genius or a charlatan. Quite a few readers emailed to say that they though he might have been the former — or at any rate a visionary.

For example Clive Page wrote:

I wasn’t going to follow this up, but the Weekend FT yesterday published a letter from Andrew Hilton the director of the “Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation” claiming that the obituaries in the papers didn’t take Edward de Bono seriously enough and that he once published a paper on “The IBM Dollar” which was genuinely innovative.

This was written in 1994, perhaps towards the end of the era when nobody got fired for buying IBM. It might still be relevant if one replaces IBM by say Apple.

And Dave Birch (Whom God Preserve) pointed me to a post on his blog making much the same point:

Many years ago I picked up a report from the CSFI called “The IBM Dollar”, written Dr. de Bono.

His writing had an immediate impact on me, coming as I was from the technology side of electronic money. IBM, in de Bono’s early 1990s thought experiment, might issue “IBM Dollars” (what we would now called “tokens”) that would be redeemable for IBM products and services, but are also tradable for other companies’ monies or for other assets in a liquid market. When I read this, I felt as if scales were falling from my eyes. It hasn’t occurred to me that anyone other than a central bank could issue money!

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, 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!

Wild roses in the wood down the road.

Quote of the Day

”Aristotle once said that a play should have a beginning, a middle and an end. But what did he know? Today, a play must have a first half, a second half, and a station break.”

• Alfred Hitchcock

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Scott Joplin | The Entertainer | Richard Smith

Link

First time I’ve heard a guitar version.

Long Read of the Day

Where is the Political Economy?

by Angela P. Harris, Amy Kapczynski and Noah Zatz

Long, sobering, scholarly and perceptive.

Link

Neoliberal rhetoric portrays the economy as a self-regulating machine that begins to malfunction when the state “intervenes,” disrupting the internal mechanisms that would otherwise yield good and efficient results. LPE scholars, building on previous critical legal work, argue instead that markets are created and maintained by state law and are embedded in political institutions and social norms. Turning to prescription, we often call for “democratizing” the economy—as in the LPE Project’s recent conference, “Democracy Beyond Neoliberalism.” But what, and where, is the economy that we should be democratizing?

Embracing the terms “economy” and “political economy,” as LPE has done, risks—unless we are careful—invoking just the kind of separate, reified realm that we are trying to critique. In our view, defining “the economy,” and studying how legal institutions have done so, should be central issues that LPE scholarship aims to address.

The Law and Political Economy (LPE) project is one of the most interesting things going on in academia at the moment.

Apple thought it could ‘manage’ China: big mistake

Salutary dose of realism from Jack Nicas.

Mr. Guthrie’s career arc and evolving view of China tell the story of Western industry’s complicated dance with the country over the past three decades. Mr. Guthrie and many executives, politicians and academics had bet that Western investment in China would lead the country to liberalize. It is now clear that they miscalculated.

“We were wrong,” said Mr. Guthrie, who left Apple in 2019. “The wild card was Xi Jinping.”

This is a useful primer on the history of Apple’s involvement in China. Mr Nicas told the story in more depth on an edition of the NYT’s The Daily podcast.

It only takes one bit of data…

Quentin’s salutary, not to say creepy, tale:

A few days ago, I created a new Facebook account. Not for myself, of course; I’m not stupid! (I deleted my own account many years ago and haven’t looked back.) No, it was because my company was writing some software that connected to Instagram, and doing that requires you to have a Facebook account in order to get ‘Developer’ access and for testing.

So, I set up a new email address and registered with a somewhat fake name, logged in and started browsing a generic here-are-some-feeds-you-might-be-interested-in type of experience. No personal details… all nice and anonymous.

The following day, I couldn’t log in. “Your account has been blocked.” Had I been rumbled? Ah, no, they just wanted to check I was really a real human by sending a text to my phone. I put in my phone number, got the text, filled in the code, and I was back in again. Jolly good. I logged out and went back to work.

A few days later…

The following Tuesday I logged in again, and there was a picture of my cousin, listed as someone I might want to connect with. Nice picture, I thought. And then, “Wait a minute! How do they know about her?”

I scrolled down, and sure enough, there were my friends, family, past work colleagues… dozens of ’em, all just waiting to welcome my ‘anonymous’ account into the fold. And then I remembered…

Read on…

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, 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!

Quote of the Day

”The whole way I think about politics came out of the English Department. They taught a form of literary criticism which was based on analyzing texts in a very close way. If you start analyzing the text of a newspaper or a political commentator on CNN using the same approach of close textual analysis, you come to understand it in a different way. It’s not any different from reading Henry James.”

• Joan Didion, 2001

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Richards and Norah Jones | Love Hurts

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Minimum Viable Self

Nice meditation by Drew Austin.

This is how it begins…

Two decades ago, before social media existed, Zygmunt Bauman articulated a perfect description of how it would soon shape our behavior and frame our relationships to one another. In his 2000 book Liquid Modernity, Bauman wrote: “Seen from a distance, (other people’s) existence seems to possess a coherence and a unity which they cannot have, in reality, but which seems evident to the spectator. This, of course, is an optical illusion. The distance (that is, the paucity of our knowledge) blurs the details and effaces everything that fits ill into the Gestalt. Illusion or not, we tend to see other people’s lives as works of art. And having seen them this way, we struggle to (make our lives) the same.” The conditions Bauman described had already emerged in other media environments, such as television, but the participatory nature of the internet and specifically social media would compel everyone involved to develop an online identity, intentionally or not, that would correspond to their offline identity but would never quite mirror it perfectly.

Reasons to be cheerful — well, more optimistic anyway

Scott Galloway’s glass-half-full view

This week’s edition:

And this week, Lina Khan, the author of “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” was confirmed by the Senate (with 19 Republican votes) as Federal Trade Commissioner. In a surprise move, Biden even appointed her Chair of the Commission. A 32-year-old, British-born woman of Pakistani heritage is now facing down the most powerful corporations in history, backed by the full might of the U.S. government.

I. Am. Joyous.

Our existing antitrust laws are heavy ammunition, but they’ve been weakened by business-friendly judges and aren’t optimized for our digital world. So Congress is working on Antitrust 2.0, with a legislative package that would address Big Tech’s habit of buying the competition, their monopolistic platforms, and their restrictions on consumer data portability. Significant parts are still a long way from passage, but still … progress.

Ms. Khan will get more resources as well. Biden has proposed an 11% funding increase to the FTC, boosting its spending from $351 million to $390 million. The president’s proposal will also see the FTC increase its headcount to 1,250 — its largest staff since it was eviscerated in the early 1980s. The DOJ’s Antitrust Division will receive a budget increase of 10%.

Galloway’s blog is always like a a breath of fresh air.

Is Biden’s appointment of a pioneering young lawyer bad news for big tech?

Answer: hopefully yes!

My column in yesterday’s Observer.

Arrayed on big screens before the members of the subcommittee are the four bosses of the aforementioned tech giants: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, then midway through his Star Trek makeover; Tim Cook of Apple, looking like the clean-living lad who never understood the locker-room jokes; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, wearing his trademark glued-on hairdo; and the Google boss, Sundar Pichai, every inch the scholarship boy who can’t understand why he’s been arrested by the Feds. And on the vast mahogany bench towering above these screened moguls sits David Cicilline, subcommittee chairman and the politician who has overseen the investigation.

To be honest, I was watching out of duty and with low expectations. All the previous congressional interrogations of Zuckerberg and co had alternated between political grandstanding and farce. I expected much the same from this encounter. And then I noticed a young woman wearing a black mask standing behind Cicilline. She looked vaguely familiar, but it took me a few moments before I twigged that she was Lina Khan. At which point I sat up and started taking notes.

I had been following her for years, ever since a paper she had published as a graduate student in the Yale Law Journal in January 2017…

The perfect number of hours to work every day? Five

From Wired:

Tower CEO Stephan Aarstol says he was startled by the results when the business adopted a five-hour working day in 2015. Staff worked from 8am to 1pm with no breaks and, because employees became so focused on maximising output in order to have the afternoons to themselves, turnover increased by 50 per cent.

“The warehouse guys were rolling their eyes when we first rolled this out, but the biggest gains were actually there,” he says. “It had taken them five minutes per package to ship before, but within a few weeks they had got that down to less than three minutes. They were doing stuff that real productivity experts would do. I told them they had a constraint and it forced them to creatively think.”

Rheingans CEO Lasse Rheingans says when he first floated the idea of compressed working with staff they came up with the idea of banning distractions like smartphones from their desks and minimising the use of “productivity killers like Slack”. The aim for Rheingans was to keep productivity constant but to give people more time off.

I really like that reference to Slack. I’ve never understood why people use it.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Rocket Man Nice five-minute movie about Ky Michaelson. He’s a retired Hollywood stunt man who lived to tell the tale. Now builds rockets in his garage. He was the first civilian to successfully launch an amateur rocket into space in 2004. Link
• Tim Hunkin: Secret life of the fax machine. Link
•  Monty Python | The Royal Society For Putting Things On Top of Other Things Link
• The Onion’s guide to modern Irish literature.  After reading its Bloomsday spoof the other day, Cormac McKenna sent me the link to a much more creative spoof they had done — this time on Samuel Beckett: “Scholars Discover 23 Blank Pages That May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play”.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, 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!