Preview: Trump’s first tweet after the mid-term elections go against Republicans

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This from Buzzfeed’s report of the DEFCON conference:

This weekend saw the 26th annual DEFCON gathering. It was the second time the convention had featured a Voting Village, where organizers set up decommissioned election equipment and watch hackers find creative and alarming ways to break in. Last year, conference attendees found new vulnerabilities for all five voting machines and a single e-poll book of registered voters over the course of the weekend, catching the attention of both senators introducing legislation and the general public. This year’s Voting Village was bigger in every way, with equipment ranging from voting machines to tabulators to smart card readers, all currently in use in the US.

So here, just for the record, is a copy of Trump’s first tweet after the results start to come in:

Donald J Trump @realDonaldTrump 3m
FAKE VOTES! Just as we warned, voting machines were HACKED by the Democrats. Results in Michigan and Ohio are FAKE. Shocking, shocking. The mid-terms have been RIGGED. Real Americans won’t accept these fake results.

The case against business schools (and the MBA degree, among other things)

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From “The Case against Credentialism” by James Fallows, an intriguing essay published 23 years ago:

The rise of the M.B.A. has occurred during precisely the era in which, as anyone who follows business magazines is aware, the content of graduate business training has come under increasing attack. “We have created a monster,” H. Edward Wrapp, of the University of Chicago’s business school, wrote in 1980, in Dun’s Review. “The business schools have done more to insure the success of the Japanese and West German invasion of America than any one thing I can think of.” I’d close every one of the graduate schools of business,” Michael Thomas, an investment banker and author, wrote in The New York Times.

The specific case against business schools is that they have neglected certain skills and outlooks that are essential to America’s commercial renaissance while inculcating values that can do harm. The traditional strength of business education has been to provide students with a broad view of many varied business functions—marketing, finance, production, and so forth. But like sociology and political science, business training has gotten all rapped up in mathematical models and such ideas as can be boiled down to numbers. This shift has led schools to play down two fundamental but hard-to-quantify business imperatives: creating the conditions that will permit the design and production of high-quality goods, and waging the constant struggle to inspire, cajole, discipline, lead, and in general persuade employees to work in common cause.

Every time I see a company buying back its shares rather than investing in R&D and product development, I think of this.

But Fallows’s essay is about much more than this. He sees the rise of ‘credentialism’ as a process that had three roots:

  • The conversion of jobs into “professions” (see, for example, Mark Twain’s account — in Life on the Mississippi — of the way riverboat captains contrived to form themselves into a professional ‘guild’ to exclude outsiders and incomers). Once, “anyone could declare himself a doctor or a teacher or a lawyer, and the choice about who prospered and who failed would be left to ‘the market’, including people who died after trying to cure their cholera with snake oil. Afterward, those who wanted to enter the professions had to go to school, and once they had their credentials they enjoyed a near-tenured status they had previously been denied.” Business managers, says Fallows, began ‘professionalizing’ about the same time that the other groups did, but their alliance with educational institutions developed more slowly. The new body of knowledge that turned business into a ‘profession’ was created by the rise of huge, complex, integrated corporations. By 1910 graduate schools of business had been established at Dartmouth and Harvard.
  • The invention of IQ tests and the dawning of the idea that ‘intelligence’ was a single, real, measurable, and unchanging trait that severely limited each person’s occupational choice. IQ testing was the essential tool for replacing nepotism and corruption with a meritocracy. It also marked the beginning of the psychometrics which are now the curse of surveillance capitalism.
  • the use of government power to influence education by the creation of different educational “tracks” and foster vocational — as well as academic — schools, thereby channelling people toward certain occupations which essentially determined the degree of social mobility they would enjoy in life.

This is a terrific, illuminating essay which takes the long view of the last century or so, and in doing so helps to explain how we arrived at our current predicament.

Quote of the Day

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“I think network effects are great, but in a sense they’re a little overrated. The problem with network effects is they unwind just as fast. And so they’re great while they last, but when they reverse, they reverse viciously. Go ask the MySpace guys how their network effect is going. Network effects can create a very strong position, for obvious reasons. But in another sense, it’s a very weak position to be in. Because if it cracks, you just unravel. I always worry when a company thinks the answer is just network effects. How durable are they?

Marc Andreessen in an interesting interview with Elad Gil.

Strategic changes are hard

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I’ve been pondering the problem of how to make a reasonably-successful organisation that’s been going for half a century realise that it may need to make some major shifts to address the challenges it will face in the next half-century. Headline: it ain’t easy. So then I started thinking about organisations that have managed the switch. Apple and the iPhone is one, I guess. But then I remembered that I’d once done an interview with Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel — a company which made that kind of radical switch when moving from making semiconductor memory to making processor chips. And that wasn’t easy either.

I then happened upon on a famous essay – “Seven Chapters of Strategic Wisdom” by Walter Kiechel III — which discusses the Intel experience. Here’s the relevant bit:

Just how difficult it is to pull this off, or to make any major change in strategic direction, is wonderfully captured in “Why Not Do It Ourselves?” the fifth chapter in Andrew S. Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company, published in 1996. Grove tells how in 1985 he and Gordon Moore realized that Intel, the company they led, needed to get out of the business on which it was founded, making semiconductor memory chips, to concentrate instead on microprocessors. The reaction they encountered as they navigated their company through this “strategic inflection point” won’t surprise anyone who has tried to effect change in an organization. “How can you even think of doing this?” came the chorus from the heads of the company’s memory-chip operations. “Look at all the nifty stuff we’ve got in the pipeline” (even if we are losing our collective shirt to low-cost Japanese competitors).

Grove and Moore persisted, even though the effort entailed shutting down plants, laying off thousands of employees, and giving up what many thought of as the company’s birthright. Intel’s subsequent success in microprocessors, beginning with its celebrated “386” model, would soon make it the world’s largest semiconductor company. Read over the tale of what it took to get there if, in a delusional moment, you’re ever tempted to think that putting strategy into practice is easy, even a seemingly emergent strategy.

Quote of the Day

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”The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race” – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

David Foster Wallace

So WhatsApp isn’t as secure as we supposed?

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From The Inquirer:

The end result was the researchers had effectively found ways to hack and exploit WhatsApp.

“By decrypting the WhatsApp communication, we were able to see all the parameters that are actually sent between the mobile version of WhatsApp and the Web version. This allowed us to then be able to manipulate them and start looking for security issues,” the researchers explained.

As such, Check Point was able to then carry out three attacks against WhatsApp users, including changing the identity of a sender in a group chat even if they aren’t a member of said chat, changing a correspondent’s reply to effectively fake their response, and sending private messages to a person in a chat group but ensuring that when they respond the whole group sees the reply.

Basically, the attacks could enable malicious actors to sneak into group chats and manipulate conversations and cause communications havoc, and spread misinformation.

Hmmm… They had to do any awful lot of tedious stuff before they were able to pull off those tricks. On the other hand, this is what GCHQ and NSA do all the time, I guess.

How the American dream ended

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Bleak essay by Frank Rich on the national mood. Sample:

In the Digital Century, unlike the preceding American Century, the largest corporations are not admired as sources of jobs, can-do-ism, and tangible goods that might enrich and empower all. They’re seen instead as impenetrable black boxes where our most intimate personal secrets are bought and sold to further fatten a shadowy Über-class of obscene wealth and privilege trading behind velvet ropes in elite cryptocurrencies. Though only a tiny percentage of Americans are coal miners, many more Americans feel like coal miners in terms of their beleaguered financial status and future prospects. It’s a small imaginative leap to think of yourself as a serf in a society where Facebook owns and markets your face and Alphabet does the same with your language (the alphabet, literally) while paying bogus respects to the dying right to privacy.

It would be easy to blame the national mood all on Donald J. Trump, but that would be underrating its severity and overrating Trump’s role in creating it (as opposed to exacerbating it). Trump’s genius has been to exploit and weaponize the discontent that has been brewing over decades of globalization and technological upheaval. He did so in part by discarding the bedrock axiom of post–World War II American politics that anyone running for president must sparkle with the FDR-patented, chin-jutting optimism that helped propel John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan to the White House. Trump ran instead on the idea that America was, as his lingo would have it, a shithole country in desperate need of being made great again. “Sadly, the American Dream is dead,” he declared, glowering, on that fateful day in 2015 when he came down the Trump Tower escalator to announce his candidacy. He saw a market in merchandising pessimism as patriotism and cornered it. His diagnosis that the system was “rigged” was not wrong, but his ruse of “fixing” it has been to enrich himself, his family, and his coterie of grifters with the full collaboration of his party’s cynical and avaricious Establishment.

Great essay. Worth reading in full.

Does TV damage your sex life?

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When I was a kid people used to say that television had ruined the art of conversation. Strangely, this assertion was often made by pompous people who were not exactly noted conversationalists. And I had a friend who used to say that the best conversations in his house were between him and the TV. But now some economists have tackled the much more important question of whether TV affects viewers’ sex lives. This NBER paper — “Does Television Kill Your Sex Life? Microeconometric Evidence from 80 Countries”, by Adrienne Lucas and Nicholas Wilson, argues that it does.

The Abstract reads, in part:

This paper examines the association between television ownership and coital frequency using data from nearly 4 million individuals in national household surveys in 80 countries from 5 continents. The results suggest that while television may not kill your sex life, it is associated with some sex life morbidity. Under our most conservative estimate, we find that television ownership is associated with approximately a 6% reduction in the likelihood of having had sex in the past week, consistent with a small degree of substitutability between television viewing and sexual activity. Household wealth and reproductive health knowledge do not appear to be driving this association.

So now we know!

Will Tesla just be the Apple of the electric-car market?

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Ben Evans is one of the most perceptive observers of the tech industry.

When I bought my first Toyota Prius hybrid many years ago I marvelled at the engineering ingenuity that went into making hybrid tech so seamless. And then realised that (a) Toyota would license the drivetrain to other manufacturers and (b) the technology would eventually be commoditised. So now almost every car manufacturer offers hybrid models even though few of them actually developed the drivetrain themselves. It’s Brian Arthur’s model of technological innovation at work.

In the rapidly evolving electric car market, Tesla has emerged as a frontrunner with its innovative designs and cutting-edge technology. As the demand for electric vehicles continues to grow, Tesla’s ability to maintain its competitive edge and capture significant market share will depend not only on the performance and efficiency of its vehicles but also on its ability to offer unique and desirable accessories. One aspect that sets Tesla apart is its attention to detail in interior design, as exemplified by the tesla model y interior. By creating a stylish and futuristic cabin space that seamlessly integrates advanced features and user-friendly interfaces, Tesla has managed to differentiate itself from other electric car manufacturers. This focus on enhancing the overall driving experience through well-crafted accessories may give Tesla an advantage in sustaining higher margins and maintaining its position as a leader in the electric car industry.

The iPhone — multitouch — analogy is useful. Most smartphones are not iPhones, but most of the profits from smartphones are currently captured by Apple. The big question for Tesla is whether — when electric cars become mundane — it can hold onto Apple-scale margins. In that context, you could say that Nissan — with its Leaf — might be the Samsung of the electric car business.

Quote of the Day

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”When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it fake news in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath).”

Yuval Noah Harari, Observer, 5 August 2018.