After the election

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Wonderful spoof by Michael Kinsley.

Paul Ryan laughed. He stood naked on top of the vice president’s desk in the Senate chamber, scanning the crowd of sniveling politicians below him.

He flexed his muscles, the result of hours spent in the House gymnasium. Look at these pathetic specimens, he thought. Not one of them could do a one-armed pushup if his life depended on it. Not one was worthy of so much as co-sponsoring one of Ryan’s bills. Every single one of them had been elected by appealing to the average citizen in his (or her — Ryan snorted at the thought) district. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that of all the men and women in this room, only he, Paul Ryan, had been selected for his current office by the president himself.

The president. Ryan’s mind wandered as he thought about the only man who stood between him and absolute power. Mitt Romney was a weakling, he thought — and not for the first time. He’s a man whose views can change. The thought filled Ryan with disgust. His own views were as solid as granite. They were the views of the only clear-thinking woman he had ever met: Ayn Rand.

Ryan thought back on the humiliating “job interview” he had allowed himself to be subjected to before being chosen as Romney’s vice president. Did he have any pregnant, unmarried daughters? Could he see Russia from his living room window?

Worst of all was the probing of his attitude about federal programs such as Medicare and Social Security. His attitude? His attitude was that all of these programs were for pathetic losers. Romney had agreed with him, but said they should keep this opinion under their hats. Ryan had obliged, only long enough to make it through the election. And he despised himself for this. But he did it, and it worked, and the Romney-Ryan team was elected. And now he kept nothing under his hat.

In fact, he didn’t have a hat, or any other article of clothing. Clothing was for weaklings.

Nice as (Raspberry) Pi

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Quentin’s built a really neat gadget using a Raspberry Pi. The video explains the general idea. This blog post discusses some of the software issues.

It’s a lovely example of what happens when you put powerful kit in the hands of smart people.

Raining on the Silicon Valley parade

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Here’s a good one. A month ago a guy called David Sacks sold Yammer, the social-networking-for-enterprises company he founded four years ago, to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. Mr Sacks then withdrew to spend some time with his money. But boredom got the better of him and so the other day he logged into his Facebook account and wrote this:

“I think Silicon Valley as we know it may be coming to and end. In order to create a successful new company, you have to find an idea that (1) has escaped the attention of the major Internet companies, which are better run than ever before; (2) is capable of being launched and proven out for ~$5M, the typical seed plus series A investment; and (3) is protectable from the onslaught of those big companies once they figure out what you’re onto. How many ideas like that are left?”

Now if there’s one thing that gets the digerati of the Valley into a stew it’s any suggestion that their Wonderland might one day cease to exist. So Mr Sacks’s little squib provoked a veritable storm of outrage, scorn and refutation. The response was such as to cause him to qualify his original speculation. “Human creativity has not changed”, he conceded,

“and there will always be new ideas and opportunities. But the question is, how many of those opportunities will be captured by startups versus incumbents? It seems like a statistical fact that when you go from virtually no incumbents to multiple well-run incumbents, an increasing percentage of opportunities will be captured by the latter. That’s the point I’m making about Silicon Valley — we may not be running out of ideas, but we might be running out of big new companies.”

I was pondering this and wondering where to begin (just for starters, had he never heard of Kodak, Microsoft, Clayton Christensen and the Innovator’s Dilemma?) but then I checked again and there was Marc Andreessen, one of the smartest guys in the Valley, rebutting Sacks, and doing it better than I could in a series of snappy bullet points:

  • There are only a few competent incumbents.
  • Each of those incumbents can only do so many new things before you get B and C teams screwing up.
  • Startups continually drain talent out of the incumbents, further impairing their ability to continue to innovate.
  • As the incumbents become more powerful, they increasingly prioritize stability over change — Peter Thiel’s argument — betting on incumbents over time equals bettting against technological change.
  • Innovator’s Dilemma — incumbents tend not to cannabilize themselves through disruptive innovation not because they are poorly run, but precisely because they are well run.

    • Precisely.

    (If you’re interested, TechCrunch has a much more extensive list of the comments provoked by Mr Sacks’s pessimism.)

    Assangian warped logic

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    This Guardian editorial nails it IMHO.

    It is to avoid questioning by Swedish prosecutors that Mr Assange battled extradition orders for almost 18 months with the best legal representation money can buy – before finally jumping bail two months ago. It is to avoid being confronted with accusations of rape and sexual assault that Mr Assange is now holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy – and was forced to say his piece from a diplomat’s first-floor balcony, for fear of otherwise being collared by the police. Yet to listen to the speechifying from his supporters, you would never have guessed at any of this; their remarks concerned western Europe’s “neocon juntas” or the political change sweeping Latin America. And when it was Mr Assange’s turn to speak, he allied his struggle with Russian punk protesters Pussy Riot, with the New York Times, and indeed “the revolutionary values” upon which America was founded. This is his traditional method of argument: to conflate a number of causes – big and small, international and individual – into one, so that Mr Assange is WikiLeaks, which is freedom of speech, which holds powerful states to account; and so on, ever upwards. Yet Mr Assange is not facing a show trial over the journalism of WikiLeaks; he is dodging allegations of rape. To confuse the two does no favours to the organisation he created, which has done so much excellent work.

    Dusk in Burgundy

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    Dusk in Burgundy, originally uploaded by jjn1.

    Driving through Burgundy, we stopped for supper in a small village cafe and then sat talking, which meant that we set off later than planned for our hotel in Ancy-le-Franc. We went there using only deserted back roads, and suddenly came on this magical avenue as dusk was falling.

    As usual, larger size better. It’s a good illustration of the light-gathering capabilities of the M9 sensor.

    The strange case of the Pope and his Butler

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    I noticed that the Pope’s butler has been rotting in sweltering Vatican cells until the other day, when a press officer announced that he has been placed under house arrest. Beyond that, I paid little attention, on the grounds that life is short and the Catholic Church’s odious little statelet isn’t all that interesting. But my friend Conor Gearty has been paying attention, which is only right and proper as he understands Human Rights law. Not that they go in for that kind of thing much in the Vatican.

    The web site of the Holy See takes you to a Vatican City State site, the section on the governance of which begins with the simple statement that ‘The form of government is that of an absolute monarchy’ [‘La forma di governo è la monarchia assoluta’]. Short summaries of the further disposition of power then appear. The ‘Fundamental Law of Vatican City State’ promulgated by John Paul II on 26 November 2000 has more on the nature of the Vatican flag than on the rights of anyone who might be affected by the exercise of executive power. Both the Holy See and the Vatican City State have signed up to various international Conventions – but these have not included anything so specific as the European Convention on Human Rights, with its prohibition on inhumane treatment, its demand for fair trials and its requirement that detention be non-arbitrary.

    Paul Ryan’s ‘budget’ plan: good politics, maybe; bad policy, definitely

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    Martin Wolf’s evisceration of Paul Ryan’s ‘plan for America’.

    Representative Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s new vice-presidential running mate, is, we are told, the man with the deficit-cutting plan. Not for this conservative policy wonk are the phoney figures and evasions of cowardly politicians. He is a man whose integrity his opponents have to respect. Yet this story has one drawback: it is false. Do not take just my word for it. This is what David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan and a true conservative, wrote in the New York Times on August 13: “Mr Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices.” This is right, with one exception: Medicare. On that, Mr Ryan does offer a hard choice. But the maths are incredible.