Das Boot

Or should it be zwei Boote, really?

Taken years ago in North Norfolk. The boat in the foreground eventually broke up and is no more.

Quote of the Day

”Yesterday, in the gym, my physiotherapist placed my own claw-like hand onto my own face. It was certainly a horror, as if several semi-frozen vegetarian sausages had been draped across my face by a prankster.

The hand felt cold and inanimate. But Miss S claims I should forego the self-pity. If I persist, I will soon be waving at London taxis and giving my enemies the finger. At the moment, my right hand is more lively than my left, which feels nearly dead.

What I would like, what I wish for, what I dream of, is the ability to pick up a fountain pen, and make a mark in the page; to write my own name in purple ink. This is my ambition.”

• Hanif Kureishi, dictated from his hospital bed.

On holiday in Rome just after Christmas he suddenly collapsed onto the pavement; as he fell he twisted his neck and grievously injuring the top of his spine. He lost the use of his arms and legs and is now in a specialist rehabilitation clinic. But from the outset he has been dictating blog posts like this one to his son Carlo.

This is moving and impressive. What it reminds me of is the great historian Tony Judt who, when he was similarly immobilised before his death, managed to produce a truly beautiful book, The Memory Chalet.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn | String Quartet in D Major Op.64-5, Hob.III:63, “The Lark”, 1st Movement | . Classikan String Quartet

Link

Good ol’ Papa Haydn.

Long Read of the Day

Ken Burns on His Most Important Film

Transcript of an interview Bari Weiss did with documentary film-maker Ken Burns on his latest film on American attitudes to the Holocaust.

BW: I want to start with one of the first scenes of the six-hour documentary, which is about the Frank family. Many have read the diary of Anne Frank, but you decide to tell this story in a new light by focusing on her father, Otto Frank, and the way that he desperately tried to get the Franks into the United States. He couldn’t, despite having all of the connections one would need to make it from Europe into America. This theme—America’s policy toward Jewish refugees during the war—underscores the entire film. Why did you decide to open with this story of Otto Frank desperately trying to escape, instead of the story that we know, of an innocent little girl hiding in an attic?

KB: Let’s remember that the diary of an innocent girl, who is often the point of entry for many Americans and certainly schoolkids to the story of the Holocaust, isn’t about the Holocaust. It’s about everything leading up to the moment of her arrest and the overshadowing fear of hiding in the secret annex. As a country, we think we’re disconnected from that, but we are not. We are culpable. Otto Frank had connections in the United States. He had crossed every t and dotted every i and he still couldn’t get in. What I wanted to do is leave our audience with the sense from the very beginning that she could be here and still be alive.

Unmissable. Do read it.

Nick Clegg: from Liberal hope to Trump Enabler

Nice sharp Guardian comment piece by Jan-Werner Müller on Meta’s decision (announced by Clegg) to allow Trump back on its platform.

But Trump has neither paid any price for various offenses against democracy, nor ever shown the slightest repentance for his role in what Facebook, in its official announcement, gingerly calls “civil unrest” (as if we were talking about some general conflagration, with all sides to blame). By allowing him back on, Facebook is signaling that neither the past, nor what a perpetrator thinks about the past, matter. It pretends that, unless Trump is on the platform, citizens have no chance to find out what “the king of social media” (according to Nigel Farage) is thinking, depriving them of vital information – a patently absurd claim given that Trump remains the most public American who has ever lived. Not only that: AJ Liebling once observed that freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one – if nothing else, freedom to address the public is also guaranteed to those who own a social network.

That description of a Trump-fomented armed insurrection as “civil unrest” would have delighted the author of “Politics and the English Language”

My commonplace booklet

Jonty Bloom sees the connection between Father Ted and Nadhim Zahawi

Nadhim Zahawi, poor love, feels hard done by, lynched by the media and driven out of office by a mob. Without even the chance to clear his name.

Father Ted was exiled to Craggy Island, when the money involved was “just resting in my account”.

How much worse for the former Chancellor, who only sought to hide the fact that he was being fined by HMRC, while running HMRC, for trying not to pay several million pounds in tax to HMRC.

After all it is not as if we need the money or anything, and he has stables to heat at his own expense these days; will no one think of the poor horses?

Still not to worry, Father Ted may have been on Craggy Island for years, but these days political exile for bullying staff, starting your own foreign policy, avoiding tax or even leaking state secrets, is a few weeks at most.

At this rate we will be lucky if Mr. Zahawi isn’t back in the cabinet by February.

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The icy forest

Actually a close up of iced-up Santolina taken during the cold snap a few days ago. But when I looked at it again I suddenly imagined it as an aerial view of an arctic forest!

Quote of the Day

”Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination.”

• Christopher Isherwood

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder, Ricky Skaggs, Sharon White

Link

Long Read of the Day

How to win arguments online

Dave Karpf is a tenured professor at George Washington University and a blogger. He teaches a class in ‘strategic communication’, and was recently handed a case study in how not to engage in an online row.

What happened was that Karpf tweeted something rude about Brett Stephens, a conservative NYT columnist, who wrote something with which he disagreed. He called him a “bedbug”. Stephens then emailed him — cc’ing the Provost of his university (i.e. in the shaky hierarchy of a US university, his boss’s boss) — complaining about this.

This was the standard old-world response of an ‘elite’ commentator aiming to activate the usual Establishment mechanism for disciplining a heckler. Big mistake in today’s networked world. Karpf tweeted about Stephens’s action and attached a copy of the email. At which point the whole thing went viral.

Karpf’s essay is an account of what happened, and reflections on what can be learned from it.

Riveting and instructive.

Why has Alphabet hit the panic button? Only Google can answer that question

Yesterday’s Observer column…

In a strange way, the best thing that could have happened to Google (now masquerading as Alphabet, its parent company) was Facebook. Why? Because although Google invented surveillance capitalism, arguably the most toxic business model since the opium trade, it was Facebook that got into the most trouble for its abuses of it. The result was that Google enjoyed an easier ride. Naturally, it had the odd bit of unpleasantness with the EU, with annoying fines and long drawn out legal wrangles. But it was the Facebook boss, Mark Zuckerberg – not Google’s Larry Page, Sergey Brin and their adult supervisor Eric Schmidt – who was awarded the title of evil emperor of the online world.

This sometimes enabled Google to fly below the regulatory radar and avoid public criticism. Its relative immunity may also have been fostered by credulity induced by its “Don’t be evil” motto. What may also have helped is the way that, over the years, it fumbled quite a few things – Google+, Google Wave, Google Glass, Knol and Google Reader, to name just five. On the other hand, it also managed to create useful and successful products – Gmail, for example, plus Google Maps, Google Scholar, Google Earth and Google Books. And, of course, it made inspired acquisitions of YouTube in 2006 and of artificial intelligence startup DeepMind in 2014.

What enabled the company to get away with that mixture of creativity, fumbling and indirection, obviously, was that it was always rolling in money…

Do read the whole thing.

My commonplace booklet

I recently highlighted an article about the way Wikipedia dealt with the thorny question of what pronouns to assign to Ernest Hemingway’s offspring — ‘Grace’ or ‘Gregory’ — before eventually settling for the former.

Chris Patten writes to say:

And if you query why ‘Grace’ has replaced Gregory, Google asks if you want to hear about HIS life! The delusion can’t be maintained.

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Whence KM came

My notes the other day about Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield prompted Andy Linton to send this photograph of her birthplace in New Zealand where, he says, Mansfield is a “minor deity”.

For which picture, many thanks.

Quote of the Day

”Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.”

• P.J. O’Rourke

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Casals | Song of the Birds (Arr. Sally Beamish) | Steven Isserlis

Link

Casals once played it to the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Long Read of the Day

The Crypto Collapse and the End of Magical Thinking

Terrific NYT essay by Mihir A. Desai

I have come to view cryptocurrencies not simply as exotic assets but as a manifestation of a magical thinking that had come to infect part of the generation who grew up in the aftermath of the Great Recession — and American capitalism, more broadly.

For these purposes, magical thinking is the assumption that favored conditions will continue on forever without regard for history. It is the minimizing of constraints and trade-offs in favor of techno-utopianism and the exclusive emphasis on positive outcomes and novelty. It is the conflation of virtue with commerce.

Where did this ideology come from? An exceptional period of low interest rates and excess liquidity provided the fertile soil for fantastical dreams to flourish. Pervasive consumer-facing technology allowed individuals to believe that the latest platform company or arrogant tech entrepreneur could change everything. Anger after the 2008 global financial crisis created a receptivity to radical economic solutions, and disappointment with traditional politics displaced social ambitions onto the world of commerce. The hothouse of Covid’s peaks turbocharged all these impulses as we sat bored in front of screens, fueled by seemingly free money.

With Bitcoin now trading at around $17,000, and amid declining stock valuations and tech sector layoffs, these ideas have begun to crack. The unwinding of magical thinking will dominate this decade in painful but ultimately restorative ways — and that unwinding will be most painful to the generation conditioned to believe these fantasies.

Is life in the UK really as bad as the numbers suggest?

Yes, it is, says economist Tim Harford, writing in the Financial Times on what has happened to the UK.

TL;DR version: The past 15 years have been a disappointment on a scale we could hardly have imagined.

The British economy is in a generation-long slough of despond, a slow-burning economic catastrophe. Real household disposable income per capita has barely increased for 15 years.

This is not normal. Since 1948, this measure of spending power reliably increased in the UK, doubling every 30 years. It was about twice as high in 1978 as in 1948 and was in touching distance of doubling again by 2008, before the financial crisis intervened. Today, it’s back at those pre-crisis levels.

It’s worth lingering on this point because it is so extraordinary. Had the pre-crisis trend continued, the typical Brit would by now be 40 per cent richer. Instead, no progress has been made at all. No wonder the Institute for Fiscal Studies is now talking of a second lost decade…

And…

Many people struggle to pay for the basics. A large survey conducted by the Resolution Foundation in late November found that about a quarter of people said they couldn’t afford regular savings of £10 a month, couldn’t afford to spend small sums on themselves, couldn’t afford to replace electrical goods and couldn’t afford to switch on the heating when needed. Three years ago, only an unlucky few — between 2 and 8 per cent — described themselves as having such concerns over spending. More than 10 per cent of respondents said that at times over the previous 30 days, they’d not eaten when hungry because they didn’t have money for food.

This is not supposed to happen in one of the world’s richest countries. But then, the UK is no longer in that club. As my colleague John Burn-Murdoch has recently shown, median incomes in the UK are well below those in places such as Norway, Switzerland or the US and well below the average of developed countries. Incomes of the poor, those at the 10th percentile, are lower in the UK than in Slovenia.

My commonplace booklet

Yehudi Menuhin gets his Blue Plaque

The plaque, which is awarded by English Heritage, will commemorate the six-storey house in Belgravia, London, where he lived, worked and entertained for the last 16 years of his life until 1999.

The news triggered a memory of a story I was once told about him when he visited the painter Derek Hill at his lovely house on the shores of Lake Cartan in Co Donegal.

The house (which is maintained as it was when Hill was alive), has a large old-fashioned kitchen, in which Hill, who was a convivial soul and very popular with the people of the locality, used occasionally to invite local musicians to drop in on Saturday evenings for drinks, singing, dancing and music-making. Since Donegal is famous for its tradition of fiddle-playing, Hill set up such an evening when Yehudi Menuhin was staying, and the great violinist joined in wholeheartedly. A good night was had by all, but it seems that some of the locals had no idea who the visitor was, and when the party was breaking up one of the departing musicians was heard saying to Hill “Yon Hughdie McMenamin is a fine fiddler!”

‘Hughdie’ was a popular adaption of ‘Hugh’ when I lived in Donegal as a child. And McMenamin is a common family name thereabouts.

Hill left his house and land to the Irish state on his death and there’s now a lovely gallery in the grounds. If you’re ever in Donegal, don’t miss it.

Grey Gowrie has written a nice book about Hill, whom he knew well.

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Misalignment

Wonderful photograph from Quentin’s blog. One person who commented on it thought that the seagull ruined the picture. I disagree. The bird upsets the symmetry, which is the whole point!

Quote of the Day

”If I have to prove I’m not a computer by identifying traffic lights and busses, perhaps we’re not quite ready for self-driving cars.”

• Mastodon user @joelle@social.joelle.us

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Crosby Stills and Nash | Suite: Judy Blue Eyes | Live 2012

Link

A small memorial to David Crosby, sadly no longer with us.

Long Read of the Day

Wikipedia Quietly Shapes How We View the World

Really interesting piece by Noam Cohen in The Atlantic…

As veteran readers of this blog will know, I am an admirer (and user of) Wikipedia. (I also try to donate to it regularly.) What fascinated me about it from the beginning — and certainly from reading the chapter about it in Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet — was the elaborate protocols its founders developed to handle disagreements. They were extraordinarily prescient in that they anticipated what would happen when people would not only have their own opinions, but their own ‘facts’ too. They saw the future in which we are now living.

What’s nice about this essay is that it starts with a contemporary case study that brilliantly illustrates this.

For more than 15 years, Wikipedia discussed what to call the third child of Ernest Hemingway, a doctor who was born and wrote books as Gregory, later lived as Gloria after undergoing gender-affirming surgery, and, when arrested for public disorderliness late in life, used a third name, Vanessa. Last year, editors on the site finally settled the question: The Gregory Hemingway article was deleted, and its contents were moved to a new one for Gloria Hemingway. This would be her name going forward, and she/her would be her pronouns.

Wikipedia’s billions of facts, rendered as dry prose in millions of articles, help us understand the world. They are largely the brain behind Siri and Alexa. They have been integrated as official fact-checks on conspiracy-theory YouTube videos. They helped train ChatGPT. So, unsurprisingly, when you search Google for “Gregory Hemingway,” it follows Wikipedia’s lead: You are told about Gloria instead…

Worth your time.

PS: I have a standard modus operandi whenever I get into discussions with people about Wikipedia. If the person is complaining about an error in an entry, my response is: well then, if you know it’s wrong, why haven’t you corrected it?

And to the person who gushes about how wonderful Wikipedia is! I ask: well, then, have you given it a donation?

You can guess what the most common responses to both questions are!

Books, etc.

Recently my good friend Quentin embarked on reading Joyce’s Ulysses and blogged on how unimpressed he was by it. He drew comfort, he said, from the fact that no less a person than Virginia Woolf herself was repelled by the book and quoted the well-known extract from a her diary entry on the subject:

“Never did I read such tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th–merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges. Of course genius may blaze out on page 652 but I have my doubts. And this is what Eliot worships…”

I took him to task about this and we had an enjoyable exchange on Signal. My point was that VW’s views on the novel were rather more complicated than you’d gather from just reading that extract, and so I set about gathering everything Woolf had written about the book in her diaries. It was an enjoyable rabbit-hole for someone who’s interested in Joyce, as you can imagine.

But then yesterday morning Quentin alerted me to a lovely essay  by James Heffernan published in the Yale Modernism Lab. He had, of course been reading Woolf’s diaries (like me) but (unlike me) had also been reading her letters. So it was an enjoyable and instructive read.

Heffernan insightfully illuminates one aspect of the controversy which had always annoyed me, namely what I saw as Woolf’s obtuseness (or even hypocrisy) in ostensibly dismissing Joyce’s method while at the same time using it herself in the writing of Mrs Dalloway. She may have had trouble admitting it but she and Joyce were in the same business. And he had beaten her to it.

“A few days earlier,” writes Heffernan,

she had told her diary that in her “laborious dredging . . . for Mrs Dalloway” [her story, that is] she was “bringing up light buckets” (D 2: 189). Having begun to suspect–as noted above–that Joyce was probably beating her at her own game, how could she avoid measuring herself against him or, more precisely, wanting to find his buckets just as light as hers? And could she finish her story or turn it into another novel of her own so long as this strange new giant of literature cast his shadow before her? The answer, I think, is no. To go on writing, she had to stop reading Ulysses. I believe that she stopped at page 200 and then did all she could to drive it from her mind. On August 26 she tells her diary: “I dislike Ulysses more & more–that is think it more & more unimportant; & dont even trouble conscientiously to make out its meanings. Thank God, I need not write about it” (D 2: 195-96). By this she clearly meant that she would write no more about it for publication, since she did indeed have a few more things to say in private. On September 3, eight days after last reporting that she had read just 200 pages, she tells her diary, “I should be reading the last immortal chapter of Ulysses: but I’m hot with Badmington [sic] in the orchard . . . we dine in 35 minutes; & I must change” (D 2: 197). And three days later she tells her diary, “I finished Ulysses” (D 2: 199).

“Just what does this mean?” asks Heffernan,

I believe it can only mean that she had finished with it – not that she had read it all, let alone tried “conscientiously to make out its meanings.” In the more than four months from mid-April to August 24, she had read just two hundred pages of Ulysses even though she had already read many of them once or twice before. Could she have read the remaining 532 pages in the eleven days from August 26 to September 6, when she claims to have finished the novel? The answer is both yes and no. On one hand, she could have read those pages in one long day, for the whole of Ulysses has been many times read aloud–typically by a team of readers– in twenty-four hours. On the other hand, given the rate at which she had been reading Ulysses, she could not possibly have read it all by September 6 – especially since she was already overloaded with other tasks.

Thanks to Quentin (who is now listening to an audio version of Ulysses) for launching me down such an enjoyable slippery slope.

My commonplace booklet

What if everything ran on gasoline?

Fabulous ad for the Nissan Leaf. It’s only a minute long. Don’t miss it.

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Leaves of ice

It’s still cold around here.

Quote of the Day

”The people of Crete, unfortunately, make more history than they can consume locally.”

• Saki (H.H. Munro)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Like Someone in Love (by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke) | Gregory Chen (Piano), Mike Karn (Bass), Scott Lowrie (Drums)

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Dark Underbelly of ChatGPT

Good exposé by Time.

In its quest to make ChatGPT less toxic, OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan labourers earning less than $2 per hour.

To build that safety system, OpenAI took a leaf out of the playbook of social media companies like Facebook, who had already shown it was possible to build AIs that could detect toxic language like hate speech to help remove it from their platforms. The premise was simple: feed an AI with labeled examples of violence, hate speech, and sexual abuse, and that tool could learn to detect those forms of toxicity in the wild. That detector would be built into ChatGPT to check whether it was echoing the toxicity of its training data, and filter it out before it ever reached the user. It could also help scrub toxic text from the training datasets of future AI models.

To get those labels, OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest.

OpenAI’s outsourcing partner in Kenya was Sama, a San Francisco-based firm that employs workers in Kenya, Uganda and India to label data for Silicon Valley clients like Google, Meta and Microsoft. Sama markets itself as an “ethical AI” company and claims to have helped lift more than 50,000 people out of poverty.

The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour depending on seniority and performance. For this story, TIME reviewed hundreds of pages of internal Sama and OpenAI documents, including workers’ payslips, and interviewed four Sama employees who worked on the project. All the employees spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for their livelihoods.

OpenAI confirmed that Sama employees in Kenya contributed to a tool it was building to detect toxic content, which was eventually built into ChatGPT.

Books, etc.

One of the things that’s always puzzled me about Virginia Woolf’s diaries (to which I am addicted) is her apparent obsession with Katherine Mansfield. Here are the index entries for her in Volume 2 of the Woolf diaries.

Although puzzled by Woolf’s obsession with KM, I’ve always put off reading her. Life’s too short, etc.

Now, however, an essay by Kirsty Gunn in Literary Hub has persuaded me that that omission will have to be rectified. This month is the centenary of KM’s death — which, says Ms Gunn,

marks the beginning of a flurry of publications and reviews honoring the author of a prose style that Virginia Woolf envied (“I was jealous of her writing,” she wrote after Mansfield’s death, “the only writing I have ever been jealous of”) and whose stories established a prototype for the kind of short fiction in English we now take for granted.

And,

Her stories plunge the reader into their midst and off we go: “And after all the weather was ideal.” “The week after was one of the busiest weeks of their lives.” “In the afternoon the chairs came.” From their first lines, the reader is brought right inside the fictional worlds which simply seem to open up and change as time passes—a method that Mansfield herself described as “unfolding,” introducing to literature a kind of free indirect narrative that traces the actions and minds of characters with such detail and nuance and sensitivity that she may as well be writing in invisible ink. “What form is it? you ask,” she wrote in a letter to the painter Dorothy Brett about her long short story “Prelude,” first published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. “As far as I know it’s more or less my own invention.”

Time to visit a bookshop.

My commonplace booklet

Rentokil pilots facial recognition system as way to exterminate rats

At first I thought that this has to be a spoof released inadvertently two months ahead of April 1st. If it is, then both the Financial Times and the Guardian have taken the bait.

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Tulip Mania

Seen on our kitchen windowsill the other day.

Quote of the Day

”Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.”

• A man from the UK Meteorological Office, quoted by Andrew Martin in the FT weekend edition.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon | Blackbird

Link

I’ve always thought she’s terrific, and now find from reading Alan Rickman’s diaries that he thought so too.

Long Read of the Day

The UK is wasting a lot of wind power

Fascinating (and sobering) explanation by Archy de Berker of the dysfunctional way the country’s energy market — and grid planning — works.

Note: It’s a graphics-heavy page and might be slow to load, so be patient.

Last year, the UK generated 30% of its energy from renewables, of which windpower (23% total generation) was by far the biggest contributor.

But on the windiest days, we deliberately capped the amount of power our turbines were producing, reducing the total amount generated by 6%. In fact, it’s worse than that: not only did we turn off our turbines, but we paid the owners of windfarms to turn them off. This is called curtailment.

In 2022, a year characterized by extraordinary hikes in energy prices for consumers, we spent £215m on turning windfarms off, and then another £717m turning on gas power plants to replace the lost wind power. In the process, we emitted an extra 1.5 million tonnes of CO2.

Very good explainer which is worth reading. But it’s also a compelling illustration of difficult long-term energy planning is, especially when you have governments like the ones the UK has been labouring under for over a decade.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for alerting me to it.

How you get fired by Google

As you will doubtless have read, Google has ‘let go’ (e.g. fired) 12,000 people, taking the total number of redundancies in the big tech companies to 200,000 and rising. Jeff Jarvis pointed me to a LinkedIn post by one of them, Bobby Nath, on how he found out he no longer had a job — via his Nest thermostat!

I woke up this morning to our Google Nest Hub in a locked state asking to link my account. I don’t recall ever seeing it in this state before, but it’s an older prototype unit with bugs from time to time, so I didn’t think much of it. When I went to check my work email, I was still in a waking state and couldn’t make sense of why I was getting so many emails asking if I was OK. Scrolling further down, there was a form email from PeopleOps indicating, as you may have surmised by now, that my employment at Google has been terminated.  

Skipping straight to the 5th stage of grief (acceptance) — THANK YOU so much to everyone for the outpouring of support (and apologies in advance if I don’t respond immediately). I’m still in shock of course, but am totally OK for the moment, and am grateful for the privilege of being able to feel OK despite the tragic nature of news like this… 

There’s an interesting Comment below the post from another Google executive, Guillermo Romano, who also finds that he has been ‘let go’.

It seems it was a numbers game, they kept the people that costs less or have not been promoted or less pay apparently and let go of the people that had either a higher salary or costs more to keep ( for the same job). I know this does not help but gives maybe a little answer to a “why”.

Still, it was good (for them) while it lasted. Part of the reason was the company adapting to a much worse economic downturn than its bosses anticipated (after all, Google had been growing continuously ever since it was founded), and partly because there’s panic over the deterioration of their Search engine and the perceived threat from competitors like ChatGPT.

Funny how everyone in the tech industry is astonished when they discover that the laws of economic gravity eventually apply to them.

How to sell to the youth of today

Nice Leader in The Economist…

Dear boss—You have always tried to attract young and youngish consumers, and our consultants have always come up with new ways to label them. I don’t need to remind you that “millennials” and, increasingly, “Gen Z” are our most important markets. Together they make up a majority of the world’s population and a third of America’s. The trouble is that coming up with rules to define a swathe of humanity is more art than science. It is liable to become an exercise in applying stereotypes; not every youngster is sipping kombucha in a Brooklyn warehouse. Luckily you have me, and I’m here to tell you that much of what is written about marketing to today’s most prized consumers is a myth.

Start with the idea that, glued to smartphones, Gen Z barely notices the physical world and slavishly follows the latest hype from Instagram or TikTok. It’s true that the days of marketing chiefly through television, newspapers and magazines are long gone. Yet social media has not just changed the ways in which people discover brands; it has undermined the power of marketing as a whole. Such is the ease with which digital natives can fact-check our dodgy marketing claims and swipe left on our ads that it is getting harder to build brand loyalty. Online, talk is cheap and prices are readily Googled. Surveys suggest that young Americans are among the most price-sensitive food shoppers. It doesn’t help that they have accumulated less wealth than earlier generations had by the same age.

There is a similar temptation to think that physical shops no longer matter…

It goes on like this. Uncomfortable reading for many senior marketing executives, I’d say.

Mastodon: restoring the lost art of online conversation?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

What I loved about Twitter at the beginning was that it enabled you to plug into the thought streams of people you liked or admired. Like all good things, though, that came to an end when the platform embarked on the algorithmic curation of users’ feeds to increase “engagement” (and, it hoped, profits). And from then on, it became increasingly tiresome, though I kept my account. But when it became clear that Elon Musk was going to buy the platform – and wreak havoc – I decided to explore possible alternatives.

Like many other people, my gaze alighted on Mastodon as a possible refuge from the Musk-induced madness. After all, it offered its users the same kind of microblogging facilities. But there the similarities ended. Twitter is a single site. Mastodon, in contrast, is a protocol – “a system of rules for spinning up your own social network that can also interact with any other following the same code”. So whereas Twitter is a universe, Mastodon is what has come to be called a “fediverse” – that is, a decentralised network made up of a large number of semi-independent nodes, or as one observer put it: “A distributed network of Twitter-like services.”

That sounds intimidating, but in reality, it’s relatively straightforward…

Do read the whole piece.

My commonplace booklet

The first Selfie

… Well, in photographic form anyway, since artists have been doing self-portraits for aeons. It comes from 42 Photos That Are Authentic Milestones In The History Of Photography, a cheery and interesting list.

According to the accompanying blurb for this picture,

The very first portrait photograph was actually a selfie! In 1839, Robert Cornelius, a photographer from Philadelphia, had the patience and determination to sit still for 15 minutes, the time needed for a daguerreotype. This resulted in the first clear photograph of a person, the first portrait, and the first ever selfie, all at once.

Thanks to Quentin (himself an accomplished photographer) for the link.

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Angling…

… for something.

On Cley beach in Norfolk. For them, patience is clearly a virtue.

Quote of the Day

”Obscenity is what happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Don McLean | American Pie (Live in Austin)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Secretary jobs in the age of AI

Terrific Long Read by Hollis Robbins, who is the Dean of Humanities at the University of Utah, and has studied organisation theory and bureaucracy. In this post, she predicts that secretaries could be in demand in the AI-driven future — not as old-style administrative assistants, but as confidantes and advisors. She starts by pointing out that the term ‘secretary’ literally means ‘person entrusted with secrets,’ from the medieval Latin secretarius, the trusted officer who writes the letters and keeps the records. The secretarial role as originally conceived was therefore far more central than the 20th-century role implied. In some ways, maybe one could think of Thomas Cromwell as Henry VIII’s secretary.

I have been thinking about the “keeper of secrets” aspect of the old-school secretary now that ChatGPT is being touted as the final answer to a cheap, reliable assistant available to all, from job seeker to CEO. Indeed, ChatGPT is a kind of assistant, the way Google is, but let’s separate the assisting tasks from the assistant position, which is, still, woefully low paid. The general idea is: why hire a person when you’ve got an answer machine in your pocket? Not only is ChatGPT cheaper (even when it stops being free) but the very concept of ‘assistant’ is vexed, particularly among assertive Gen-Z and Millennial women who are expecting to start at the top.

And yet I predict that ChatGPT is going to drive a comeback of the “keeper of secrets” role, paid well to screens calls and emails, who will make whoever can afford a good secretary much more efficient. If you’re in a role of any importance, you’re going to be flooded with AI-written communication, much of which will be incorrect. You’re going to need to hire someone with a head of their shoulders to sort through it. Why not a secretary, if a culture shift could bring back both the job and title?

Interesting throughout.

Speaking truth to power

The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, excoriated his audience at the Davos gabfest on Wednesday.

“Today, fossil fuel producers and their enablers are still racing to expand production, knowing full well that their business model is inconsistent with human survival,” said Guterres. “This insanity belongs in science fiction, yet we know the ecosystem meltdown is cold, hard scientific fact.”

Guterres highlighted evidence published last week that detailed the precise climate change predictions made by scientists working for ExxonMobil as far back as the 1970s.

”Just like the tobacco industry, they rode roughshod over their own science,” he said, and now the world is on track for a ‘devastating’ 2.8 degree increase in temperature.”

The world’s largest financial institutions and asset managers — many of whom are also on the guest list — are collectively still pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into companies producing and burning fossil fuels, according to a report published by NGOs on Tuesday, despite pledging to align their investments with a world of net zero emissions by the middle of this century.

Those findings echo the criticisms made last year by a task force launched by Guterres to hold corporate actors to account for their pledges.

”More and more businesses are making net zero commitments,” he said. “But benchmarks and criteria are often dubious or murky. This misleads consumers, investors and regulators with false narratives. It feeds a culture of climate misinformation and confusion. And it leaves the door wide open to greenwashing.”

Yep. Wide open.

Lisa’s 40th birthday

Photo by Ted Thai

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the unveiling of the Apple Lisa, the precursor of the Macintosh. Ars Technica has a nice piece about it.

I was fascinated by the Lisa from the word go, and managed to persuade Apple UK to lend me one so that I could show it to my academic colleagues. When I set it up in a seminar room in my department the place was packed with curious — and, I have to say — some sceptical observers. The really interesting thing (for me) was that it was the administrators who were most wowed by it. And it meant that from the moment the Macintosh arrived they were the ones who were keenest to have one. For at least one of those present it was a life-changing moment — a revelation of what computing was really for. And of what it could do for non-techies.

Books, etc.

I’m still reading my way through Alan Rickman’s Diaries. I can see why actors everywhere have been wowed by it, because it captures the kind of lives they have to live if they are successful. Endless travel; insecurity (they’re sensitive about bad reviews (like everyone else); they lunch, dine and (it seems) drink too much; are constantly battling exhaustion, not to mention fanatical or obtuse film directors. And, it seems, have very little time to do much thinking.

My commonplace booklet

Two replies to my question of what did people see in it.

• Keith Devlin (Whom God Preserve): “A startled dog”.

• Chris McLarty: “The face that looks surprised to see you?”

Thanks to both. I’m with Chris, I think.

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Icy Rorschach test

What is normally a muddy puddle on one of our regular country walks, took on a more enigmatic appearance yesterday. Can you see a face in it?

Quote of the Day

”The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences that never happened.”

• Saki (H.H. Munro)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Christine McVie | Got A Hold On Me

Link

Long Read of the Day

It’s Time to Get Serious

A bracing post by Katherine Boyle on how “prevailing wisdom insists that your twenties are for extreme exploration—collecting memories, friends, partners, identities.”

TL;DR summary: it’s bullshit.

She has the good sense to start with Sam Bankman-Fried.

The biggest technology story of this past year involves a fraud perpetrated by a boy. Or so the press would have us believe. 

Just months before Sam Bankman-Fried’s unraveling, Fortune Magazine referred to the billionaire as a “trading wunderkind” a latter-day Warren Buffett only with a “goofy facade” and a penchant for fidget spinners. Even after his downfall and subsequent arrest in the Bahamas, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and Axios all referred to Bankman-Fried, or SBF, as a disgraced “crypto wunderkind.” 

Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times illustrated his boyishness best when interviewing him at the Times’ DealBook Summit last November. “When you read the stories,” Sorkin said, “it sounds like a bunch of kids who were all on Adderall having a sleepover party.”

SBF’s fate will now be decided by the Southern District of New York, but his media charade of aw-shucks interviews and congressional testimony laced with brogrammer idioms built a public persona that we’ve largely come to accept: SBF is just a kid. Indeed, he’s so young that his law school professor parents were involved in his business and political dealings. (In this, they embody the helicopter style of child-rearing favored by nearly the entire Boomer elite.)

The reality, of course, is that SBF is a grown-ass, 30-year-old man. He is twelve years older than many of the men and women we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan…

Great stuff.

Books, etc.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about an experiment my wife and I are doing — reading novels before watching films based on them. My friend Gerard, who is also interested in the adaptation process, wrote to suggest we listen to one of the novelist’s Hilary Mantel’s BBC Reith lectures. So we did and found it interesting and insightful.

Worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

From WashPo:

For 25 years, the National Archives has been working to rid itself of government red tape — through its gift shop.

We’re talking about actual, physical tape: the red-dyed lengths of fabric that were used from the 1780s to the 1980s to bundle many of the nation’s documents, and that, according to the Archives, gave rise to “red tape” as shorthand for bureaucratic entanglements.

The “tape” the agency is selling off isn’t adhesive tape; it’s a soft, flat and narrow woven cotton that’s snipped from a spool. Red tape eventually was abandoned for white or undyed tape because of its tendency to bleed, but in its heyday, the government used vast amounts of the red stuff. For instance, in 1864, the War Department headquarters purchased 154 miles of red tape, according to the Archives. And even in 1943, the Treasury Department bought nearly 123 miles, a Washington Post article from the time noted. Quite a bit of that mileage landed at the National Archives among its billions of paper records…

Someone should tell the UK’s Brexiteers about this.

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Pigeons of Venice unite!

You have nothing to lose save your birdbrains.

Quote of the Day

”All science is either physics or stamp collecting”.

• Ernest Rutherford

Typical Rutherfordian hyperbole. And a bit hard on stamp collecting.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee | Baby Please Don’t Go

Link

Long Read of the Day

Globalization is Dead and No One is Listening

Really interesting commentary by Kevin Xu.

Includes his transcript of Morris Chang’s speech at TSMC’s Arizona “tool-in” ceremony.

The “tool-in” ceremony of TSMC’s new fab in Arizona drew a lot of attention last week. CEOs from Apple, Nvidia, and AMD attended and spoke. President Biden, along with a coterie of cabinet officials, congresspeople, and local Arizona politicians, came to rally, celebrate, and claim (as we will see, a premature) victory.

Amidst all the pomp and circumstance was a short, but powerful and sobering speech by Morris Chang, the now-91-years-old founder of TSMC. He shared his dream of building a fab in the US, the hard-earned lessons from TSMC’s first time building a fab in America 25 years ago, his perspective that globalization and free trade is almost dead, and why this event is just the “end of the beginning”. 

It was the only speech that gave a real sense of what America’s semiconductor future would really look like. Yet no one listened. No American, or any Western media outlet for that matter, bothered to cover this speech. Only Nikkei and a handful of Taiwanese outlets wrote about it. Not even C-Span carried footage of the speech. (And C-Span carries everything!)

Really interesting, including about the amazing training requirements for people who want to work in this kind of chip-fabrication.

Morris Chang is a pretty formidable guy.

‘Succession’ has nothing on Davos

Elite conclave mulls next leader.

Link

DAVOS, Switzerland — It’s the political race everyone is afraid to talk about.

For 52 years the World Economic Forum has been synonymous with its founder and executive chair Klaus Schwab, whose humble manner belies what many who know him describe as great ambition and boundless energy, even into his mid-80s. 

Schwab has grown WEF’s $6,000 startup capital in 1971 into a $390 million a year business, turning a once sleepy organization into the think tank world’s FIFA.

Today, WEF’s annual meeting attracts more billionaires and CEOs than any other event on earth, and more political leaders than any gathering outside the United Nations General Assembly. 

So what (and who) comes after Klaus Schwab? 

Yawn. Frankly, who gives a damn? The Davos gabfest never really recovered from Donald Trump’s election. And it’s interesting to see how media obsession with it has waned in recent years.

Irrelevant factoid #3,567: I went to Davos once, in the Summer, before it was famous. Thought it a very dull place. But I bought a penknife there which I still use, so at least one useful thing came from it .

Striking wind, not oil

The Economist’s Schumpeter columnist (behind a paywall, alas) has an interesting column this week about Texan (Republican) ranchers who are hostile to the green movement but avid supporters of wind and solar energy. Why? There’s money in them thar airflows. His conclusion:

The upshot is that there are ways to promote clean energy that do not rely on convincing climate sceptics that they are bonkers. A better sales pitch may be to play up the cost advantages of renewables rather than the climate benefits, emphasise their contribution to cutting air pollution rather than carbon emissions, and acknowledge that, owing to intermittency factors, natural gas may have a role to play in power generation for years to come. As Michael Webber, a professor of energy at the University of Texas, puts it, “It’s not unusual for Texas to do the right thing for all the wrong reasons.”

My commonplace booklet

Password security

Further to Bruce Schneier’s advice on choosing passwords the other day, if you want to find out if your phone number or email address has appeared in a data breach, haveibeenpwned is a good place to check.

And if you’ve been using LastPass to manage your passwords, it might be worth thinking again.

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