Thank God for Private Eye.
And guess what?
They are: Trump in the US, Johnson and his cronies in the UK, Bolsonaro in Brazil, etc.
The new Cold War
Timely piece in the Economist:
Three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the unipolar moment is over. In China, America faces a vast rival that confidently aspires to be number one. Business ties and profits, which used to cement the relationship, have become one more matter to fight over. China and America desperately need to create rules to help manage the rapidly evolving era of superpower competition. Just now, both see rules as things to break.
Consider the Tardigrade
From a remarkable Aeon essay on ‘extremophiles’ (creatures that can survive in extreme conditions) by the evolutionary biologist David Barash:
Typical extremophiles specialise in going about their lives along one axis of environmental extremity – extreme heat or cold, one or another heavy metal, and so forth – tardigrades can survive when things get dicey along many different and seemingly independent dimensions, simultaneously and come what may. You can boil them, freeze them, dry them, drown them, float them unprotected in space, expose them to radiation, even deprive them of nourishment – to which they respond by shrinking in size. These creatures, also known as water bears, are featured on appealing T-shirts with the slogan ‘Live Tiny, Die Never’ and in the delightful rap song that describes their indifference to extreme situations, entitled Water Bear Don’t Care.
Tardigrades might be the toughest creatures on Earth. You can put them in a laboratory freezer at -80 degrees Celsius, leave them for several years, then thaw them out, and just 20 minutes later they’ll be dancing about as though nothing had happened. They can even be cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero, at which atoms virtually stop moving. Once thawed out, they move around just fine. (Admittedly, they aren’t speed demons; the word ‘tardigrade’ means ‘slow walker’.) Exposed to superheated steam – 140 degrees Celsius – they shrug it off and keep on living. Not only are tardigrades remarkably resistant to a wide range of what ecologists term environmental ‘insults’ (heat, cold, pressure, radiation, etc), they also have a special trick up their sleeves: when things get really challenging – especially if dry or cold – they convert into a spore-like form known as a ‘tun’. A tun can live, if you call their unique form of suspended animation ‘living’, for decades, possibly even centuries, and thereby survive pretty much anything that nature might throw at them. In this state, their metabolism slows to less than 0.01 per cent of normal. Compared with them, a deeply hibernating mammal is living at lightning speed.
In the bad old days of the Cold War, we used to think that the only living things that would survive a nuclear holocaust would be beetles. Now that we are headed for a climate catastrophe, my money’s on the tardigrades.
How to grill a politician: a masterclass
Eddie Mair’s celebrated interview with Liz Truss. Who she, you ask? Why, none other than Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade.
UK this way
We’ve been in France, as usual. Coming back yesterday, ours was the first car onto the Eurotunnel Shuttle. So, in a way, this was the road to the UK.
Booming tech and rising inequality: correlation or causation?
This morning’s Observer column:
Here is one of the great paradoxes of our time. The world is dominated by a few corporations that are among the most profitable companies in the history of capitalism. In the US (the home of these giants) and in the UK (an enthusiastic vassal state), parts of the economy are booming and employment is at record levels. And yet, in the middle of this astonishing prosperity, inequality is at levels not seen since the period before the first world war. In the US, the share of total income going to the top 1% of the population is now back to the level it was in the 1920s. And in the UK, more than 4 million people are trapped in deep poverty.
Since this catastrophic rise in inequality seems to be correlated with the rise of the tech industry, it’s tempting to see a causal link between the two. Tempting, but too simplistic. For while digital technology has been a central factor in what’s happened, it’s only a part of the story. More often, it’s been an enabler of other forces rather than a prime mover.
The biggest force reshaping our world has been globalisation…
Another reason not to like Facebook Likes
From The Register:
Organisations that deploy Facebook’s ubiquitous “Like” button on their websites risk falling foul of the General Data Protection Regulation following a landmark ruling by the European Court of Justice.
The EU’s highest court has decided that website owners can be held liable for data collection when using the so-called “social sharing” widgets.
The ruling (PDF) states that employing such widgets would make the organisation a joint data controller, along with Facebook – and judging by its recent record, you don’t want to be anywhere near Zuckerberg’s antisocial network when privacy regulators come a-calling.
Well, well.
What took governments so long to wake up to the tech giants’ power?
Interesting NYT column by Kara Swisher:
Here’s a little quiz. When was the last time a significant social media network was founded in the United States? And what about a competitive search engine company? An online ad network? And what about a truly wide-ranging e-commerce start-up?
Here are the depressing answers. The social network Snapchat, in 2011. For search, Microsoft’s Bing appeared in 2009, a replacement for its Live Search. I’m drawing a blank on an ad network. With e-commerce, the answer is probably Wayfair, which arrived in 2002, and still has only 1.3 percent of the market (most retail innovation has been in niche areas, like luggage (Away) or special fashion (The RealReal)).
To put this another way: Facebook and its Instagram unit have close to 50 percent of the social media market, dwarfing all the other companies in monthly active users tenfold. Google has about 90 percent of the search market, with Bing and Yahoo dwindling ever further behind by the month. Google and Facebook also suck up 60 percent of the digital ad spend, with only Amazon moving up aggressively in that fast-growing space. And speaking of Amazon, the retail giant has about 50 percent of total e-commerce sales in the United States, with eBay and Walmart at 7 percent and 4 percent, respectively.
Finally, it looks as though the US government is beginning to think that there might be something wrong here. Which prompts three questions:
- What took them so long? Was it just that they were still in thrall to Robert Bork’s The Antitrust paradox?
- Have they left it too late?
- And how do you punish companies that can absorb a $5B fine without missing a beat?
(Interestingly, Amazon.co.uk is currently selling a paperback copy of Bork’s book for £207.02!)
What can British journalists learn from US hacks’ experience of covering Trump?
Nice, useful advice by Emily Bell:
In the end, perhaps the biggest lesson the British media can learn from the US experience of Trump is that their work matters to people beyond their readership or audience, and to that end it needs to become more rigorous and more serious. On both sides of the Atlantic there is a circular firing squad of the commentariat who wonder, on a daily basis, how did this happen? The boring truth is that we need to pay attention to the substance and not the glockenspiel. When the circus has left town, we will need a reliable record to remind us of what happened, and how, and why.