Chutzpah, n. unmitigated effrontery or impudence.
Friedmania
Well, well. Not content with traversing the globe and dispatching uplifting epistles based on extensive conversations with heads of state and taxi-drivers, Tom Friedman will now have a conference all by himself. It’s called ‘The Next New World’ and for $995 you can have a whole day watching Tom “explore the complex dynamics of new-world infrastructure, especially the transformative electronic, digital and mobile environment,” impart “invaluable insights into strategies for success in today’s new world order,” and answer the question: “What World Are You Living In?”
Why does Friedman feel the need to start a conference of his own?
“It’s been a feeling of mine for a while”, he says in the introductory video, “that while we were sleeping, something really big happened over the next decade. That is, while we were focused on 9/11 and the subprime crisis, something really big happened in the plumbing of the world.”
[The plumbing btw is basically the internet.]
So what happened while we were sleeping (and therefore not reading the New York Times OpEd pages)? Well,
“The world went from connected to hyperconnected, from interconnected to interdependent, and my view is that this is changing every job, every workplace, every industry, every job. and we’re not talking about it. Yet we’re all living it and feeling it…If you don’t start every day asking, ‘What world am I living in?’ you’re going to get in a lot of trouble.”
Friedman proposes to answer these questions by chatting with a set of white men on subjects including “Threats or Possibilities,” “What Happened to Power?” “What You Don’t Know Is Coming,” and “What Energy Is Going to Be.” If that weren’t enough, the website promises the presence of droves of C-Suite executives, venture capitalists, “content providers,” “hardware manufacturers,” and “service providers.”
As the New Republic astutely points out, if you haven’t got $995, you can achieve much the same result from the wonderful Thomas Friedman OpEd Generator.
Books etc.
Inside the new building of the Royal Library in Copenhagen, where Jeffrey Schnapp and I were lecturing last week. The building is known locally as ‘the black diamond’.
The new world order
Fascinating report in the Economist.
WHEN Stephen A. Schwarzman, chairman of Blackstone Group, a private-equity firm, announced in Beijing on Sunday the $300m Schwarzman Scholars programme to send students to China to study, it was a testament to China’s place in the world as a new centre of gravity. Its gravitational pull on corporate money is already fearsome: Behind Mr Schwarzman himself, a long list of companies and individuals with substantial business interests in China have lined up to contribute to the programme: Boeing, an airplane maker; Caterpillar, a maker of bulldozers and excavators; BP, an oil company; and several large banks.
Schwarzman Scholars will fund scholarships beginning in 2016 for 200 students a year from much of the world to attend classes at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, the alma mater of President Xi Jinping and of many other top leaders (Mr Xi sent a letter to the announcement ceremony). The scholarship is to fund the studies of 10,000 students over 50 years.
As the piece goes on to point out, this idea is modelled on the Rhodes Scholars scheme, which brought bright kids to Oxford at a time when Britain was seen as the centre of the world. How times change.
Where the statue wasn’t
Outside of the cathedral in Aalborg. The black plastic bag appears to be protecting some electrical wiring!
The Mythical Man-Month
This morning’s Observer column:
In 1975, a computer scientist named Fred Brooks published one of the seminal texts in the literature of computing. It had the intriguing title of The Mythical Man-Month and it consisted simply of a set of essays on the art of managing large software projects. Between its covers is distilled more wisdom about computing than is contained in any other volume, which is why it has never been out of print. And every government minister, civil servant and chief executive thinking about embarking on a large IT project should be obliged to read it – and answer a multiple-choice quiz afterwards.
How come? Fred Brooks was the guy who led the team that in the 1960s created the operating system for IBM’s 360 range of mainframe computers…
The ‘Gay Onslaught’
Wonderful speech by Maurice Williamson in the debate in the New Zealand parliament on the bill that would legalise same-sex marriages.
Wish more of our parliamentarians had the same sense of ironical style. I particularly like the bit about him roasting in hell for all eternity.
The Facebook pathogen
This morning’s Observer column.
Infectious diseases, says the World Health Organisation, “are caused by pathogenic microorganisms, such as bacteria, viruses, parasites or fungi; the diseases can be spread, directly or indirectly, from one person to another.” Quite so. Just like Facebook addiction, which also spreads from person to person and has now reached pandemic proportions, with more than a billion sufferers worldwide.
The Facebook pathogen doesn’t kill people, of course, for the good reason that dead people don’t buy stuff. But it does seem to affect victims’ brains. For example, it reduces normally articulate and sophisticated people to gibbering in the online equivalent of grunts. Likewise, it obliges them to coalesce all the varieties of human relationships into a simply binary pair: “friends” v everyone else…
Why does Thatcher get what amounts to a state funeral, while Atlee didn’t?
Terrific column by Peter Oborne.
The decision to give Lady Thatcher what amounts to a state funeral will not lead to fascism. But it nevertheless badly damages the British system of representative democracy, and as such will lead to a series of debilitating practical problems. The most serious of them concerns damage to the reputation of the monarch for scrupulous impartiality. During her long reign, the Queen has avoided attending the funerals of all her prime ministers, apart from that of Churchill, who had led the national government of a united Britain in the great common struggle against Nazi Germany. This is why he was the sole exception to the rule that former prime ministers do not get state funerals.
So the question arises: what’s so special about Maggie Thatcher? Defenders of next week’s funeral arrangements say that she was a “transformational” prime minister. This is true. But so was Clement Attlee, who introduced the welfare system and the National Health Service, thus fundamentally changing the connection between state and individual. Yet the Queen did not attend Mr Attlee’s funeral, a quiet affair in Temple Church near Westminster. According to a 1967 report in Time magazine, “all the trappings of power were absent last week at the funeral of Earl Attlee … there were no honour guards or artillery caissons, no press or television, no crush of spectators. Only 150 friends and relatives gathered for a brief Anglican ceremony in honour of the man who had shaped the political destiny of post-war Britain.”
The decision to acknowledge Lady Thatcher, but not Attlee, makes the Queen appear partisan and is totally out of kilter with the traditional impartiality of the modern British monarchy.
The PC: the new sunset industry
IDC says PC sales fell 14 percent in the first quarter on a year-over-year basis. That’s worse than its forecast of a 7.7 percent drop.
This is the worst quarter for PC industry since 1994 when IDC started tracking sales. So, that pretty much makes it the worst quarter in history.
IDC blames Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system for alienating consumers. The new tile-based interface is too weird for consumers, says IDC.
Instead of buying new laptops or desktops, people are buying tablets and smartphones which serve as good-enough alternatives.