- The punishment of democracy Remarkable, insightful essay on the horrible election campaign to which the UK electorate is being subjected. Unmissable and wise.
- Impeach Trump. Save America. Tom Friedman on the urgency of the impeachment process. If Congress doesn’t do it, he argues, then the US will never again have a legitimate president. It’ll be back to de-facto monarchy.
- “Startups and Uncertainty” Long, thoughtful essay by Jerry Neumann on risk, uncertainty and what startups are really about.
- “This Guy Studies the ‘Global Systems Death Spiral’ That Might End Humanity” Could climate change get so bad that it leads to our extinction? A few researchers are trying to answer that question.
King Donald the First
Marvellous blast from Thomas Friedman: “Impeach Trump, save America”:
Folks, can you imagine what Russia’s President Putin is saying to himself today? “I can’t believe my luck! I not only got Trump to parrot my conspiracy theories, I got his whole party to do it! And for free! Who ever thought Americans would so easily sell out their own Constitution for one man? My God, I have Russian lawmakers in my own Parliament who’d quit before doing that. But it proves my point: America is no different from Russia, so spare me the lectures.”
If Congress were to do what Republicans demand — forgo impeaching this president for enlisting a foreign power to get him elected, after he refused to hand over any of the documents that Congress had requested and blocked all of his key aides who knew what happened from testifying — we would be saying that a president is henceforth above the law.
We would be saying that we no longer have three coequal branches of government. We would be saying that we no longer have a separation of powers.
We would be saying that our president is now a king.
Brings to mind the Benjamin Franklin’s reply to the question he was asked as he was leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787: “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a Republic or a Monarchy?” “A Republic”, said Franklin, “if you can keep it.”
Looks like they can’t.
Linkblog
- Amazon Should Ban Auschwitz Ornaments, But Not Hitler’s Book Interesting argument by Tyler Cowen. “Where should a company such as Amazon.com Inc. draw the line when it comes to selling third-party merchandise? I propose a standard: Focus on whether the merchandise contributes to further understanding, one way or another, rather than whether it might embody evil.”
- Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later. He Had One Question. Amazing, heartwarming story.
- Larry and Sergey: a valediction A kind of living obituary of Google’s co-founders, who have stepped back into oblivion (while holding on to their shares).
- Startups and uncertainty Interesting (long) blog post by Jerry Neumann on risk, uncertainty and founding a company.
Fancy a job in Bletchley Park?
In late 1941, a mysterious Mr Gavin wrote to the Daily Telegraph offering £100 to be donated to charity if anyone could solve this crossword in less than 12 minutes. The competition was to be held at the Telegraph’s office in Fleet Street, London.
A few weeks later those who managed it received letters asking them to report to Military Intelligence (that well-known oxymoron), which then sent them on to Bletchley Park.
This recruitment method would never get past HR nowadays. But then, there was a war on.
(As you can see, someone in our house has been having a go at it!)
It’s different from the cryptic puzzles one finds nowadays in the posher newspapers — it’s a mixture of cryptic and quick clues.
A pandemic might do it
Interesting interview of Michael Lewis by Tim Adams in today’s Observer, talking about Lewis’s marvellous book, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy about how the Trump Administration is dismantling or enfeebling vital bits of the administrative state. I particularly liked this segment:
Adams: Part of your story examines the consequences of the ideological cull of climate scientists from government. You have lived in close proximity to wildfires in California, there have been unprecedented hurricanes. Do you think there will come a point when people demand leaders who understand the importance of scientific knowledge?
Lewis: You would think so. It hasn’t happened yet. For people to suddenly start to value what good government does, I think there will have to be something that threatens a lot of people at once. The problem with a wildfire in California, or a hurricane in Florida, is that for most people it is happening to someone else. I think a pandemic might do it, something that could affect millions of people indiscriminately and from which you could not insulate yourself even if you were rich. I think that might do it.
Adams: That is quite an apocalyptic thought. You have always seemed by nature an optimist, are you feeling more nihilistic about what you call the drift of things?
Lewis: I’m a little more wary than I have been. What we are seeing is an attack on the idea of progress and the idea of science. In the Trump administration there seems to be a total lack of respect for expertise. It sounds like you have something of the same with Boris Johnson. For this kind of attack to work you need to have characters who don’t care at all about consequences.
The myth of American competitiveness
Most of the complacent guff about how American capitalism is better than its counterparts in other parts of the world is just that — guff.
The economist Thomas Philippon has done a terrific, data-intensive demolition job on the myth. In The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets he shows that America is no longer the spiritual home of the free-market economy (any more than Westminster is now “the mother of Parliaments”). Competition there is not fiercer than it is in ‘old’ Europe. Its regulators have been asleep at the wheel for decades and its latest crop of giant companies are not all that different from their predecessors.
Or, as he puts it:
”First, US markets have become less competitive: concentration is high in many industries, leaders are entrenched, and their profit rates are excessive. Second, this lack of competition has hurt consumers and workers: it has led to higher prices, lower investment and lower productivity growth. Third, and contrary to popular wisdom, the main explanation is political, not technological: I have traced the decrease in competition to increasing barriers to entry and weak antitrust enforcement, sustained by heavy lobbying and campaign contributions.”
So next time some tech evangelist starts to rant on about how backward Europe is, the appropriate reply is: give me a break.
Ideology and tech evangelism
This morning’s Observer column:
For my sins, I get invited to give a few public lectures every year. Mostly, the topic on which I’m asked to speak is the implications for democracy of digital technology as it has been exploited by a number of giant US corporations. My general argument is that those implications are not good, and I try to explain why I think this is the case. When I’ve finished, there is usually some polite applause before the Q&A begins. And always one particular question comes up. “Why are you so pessimistic?”
The interesting thing about that is the way it reveals as much about the questioner as it does about the lecturer. All I have done in my talk, after all, is to lay out the grounds for concern about what networked technology is doing to our democracies. Mostly, my audiences recognise those grounds as genuine – indeed as things about which they themselves have been fretting. So if someone regards a critical examination of these issues as “pessimistic” then it suggests that they have subconsciously imbibed the positive narrative of tech evangelism.
An ideology is what determines how you think even when you don’t know you’re thinking. Tech evangelism is an example. And one of the functions of an ideology is to stop us asking awkward questions…
Linkblog
- Biased Algorithms Are Easier to Fix Than Biased People Fascinating study which rather goes against the grain. Researchers studied bias in human-mediated and algorithmically-mediated health diagnosis. Both showed racial bias. But the algorithmic bias was easier to spot, and is potentially fixable. Is this the case with human bias? Er, …
- The thing is, HI (Human Intelligence) isn’t all it’s cracked up to be “Humans may be a powerful technology with great potential. But until we have developed human decision-making systems that comply with some basic principles, we risk substantial harm.”
- The Sinosphere vs the Anglosphere Two Cultures that can’t get on with one another.
- Guess what: Young people don’t make the best entrepreneurs Zuckerbergism is a delusion of tech undergraduates and the lazier segments of mass media. Who knew?
FedEx goes the last mile
Dave Winer has bought a house in Woodstock, where it’s been snowing. He arranged to have some boxes of stuff that was in storage in California shipped to him via FedEx. Here’s what happened —- from his blog:
As you know I’ve had trouble with UPS, so I figured when Fedex was set to do a big delivery to my house just after a 1.5 foot snow in the area, that they would never get one of their big delivery trucks down the road to my house, and I’d end up driving somewhere to pick up the packages. But yesterday afternoon there was a knock on the door, and there was the Fedex guy with my packages. Smiling. I couldn’t believe it. #
The truck said Hertz, not Fedex. It was a small AWD vehicle. He said when they came to deliver the stuff a day before they realized their big truck wouldn’t make it down the orad, so they rented a smaller truck and drove that to my house with my package. He said we like to go the extra mile. Yes, they surely do! Compared to UPS, which has basically the same policy, trust the driver, but the ethos of this driver compared to whoever made the call at UPS (basically the customer can fuck off) was night and day. #
Hat’s off to Fedex. You win this contest, hands down. #
Linkblog
- The New China Scare “Why America Shouldn’t Panic About Its Latest Challenger”. Fascinating (long and thoughtful) essay by Fareed Zakaria. Suggests that current US strategy on dealing with China is wrong and likely to be counter-productive. Too complex an argument for its President, though.
- What happens when a kid buys a used IBM mainframe computer and installs it in his parents’ basement Touching and funny talk. Useful for parents of geeky kids. I particularly liked Slide 21 of his presentation — the one about “Lessons Learned”. “Listen to your mother and get a warehouse”.
- Are robots competing for your job? Lovely, acerbic New Yorker essay by the historian Jill Lepore. Robots are almost certainly coming for the jobs of the manufacturers of the exclamation marks that are de rigeur in scare-stories about robotics.
- Privilege and inequality in Silicon Valley Why few successful startup founders grew up desperately poor. Sobering reflections on inequality by a poor boy who did make good.