The end of Assad

Posted on by

Steve Coll thinks that Assad is finished.

Now, Assad’s coming demise seems less of an argument than an observation. It looks probable that the President will take his place among the war’s victims, at the hands of a coup-maker within his ranks, or else at the hands of a rebel attack, in the manner of Muammar Qaddafi’s death at the climax of Libya’s rebellion. It is conceivable that Assad could slip into exile, perhaps to a dacha outside Moscow, where deposed Soviet clients and spies used to settle into retirement and give the occasional bitter interview to a Western correspondent back during the Cold War.

Venture Capitalists: the slash-and-burn artists of technology

Posted on by

Eventually the generation that Fred Wilson [of Union Square Ventures] leads will fall behind, as did the one led by John Doerr at Kleiner-Perkins. What they will be replaced with is one that is not only aware of the usability of products, but also has a sense for the flow of open technologies to fuel the ecosystem. These VCs will make side investments in technologies that are not intended to produce an IPO or acquisition, rather are intended to produce a new layer of technology that a whole generation of startups can feed off. At the same time, some percentage of each fund will be plowed into programs designed to generate the next layer after that.

The VCs will tell you that it’s not their business to fund innovation for the sake of innovation. That’s as short-sighted as saying that an oil company wouldn’t invest in exploration or research into new extraction methods. Or if you got good service at a restaurant you wouldn’t leave a 15 percent tip. Of course you don’t have to do either. But if you don’t do some exploration or leave decent tips, you’ll be out of business one day, or get hot coffee spilled in your lap.

I’ve always felt that as long as Moore’s Law is operating, and it shows no sign of letting up, that we aren’t doing our jobs if the tech industry isn’t tracking its growth in a linear fashion. The boom-bust cycle is a product of the lack of vision of the VCs. Or our over-reliance on VCs to lead the investment decisions of the tech industry.

This post by Dave Winer is interesting because of its rarity. Insiders in the technology industry rarely write or talk in public about venture capitalists, probably because they think they might need them some day. Or they believe in appeasement (defined by Winston Churchill as “being nice to a crocodile in the hope that he will eat you last”.) As a result the public has a peculiarly rosy — and misleading — impression of them. There are, of course, good VCs: I know a few. But there are an awful lot of creepy, destructive ones too. One of the lovely stories in Michael Lewis’s great book about Jim Clark concerns Clark’s decision to exclude from the Netscape IPO the VC who had screwed him at Silicon Graphics. The guy committed suicide as a result, and I remember thinking at the time that it looked like a fitting conclusion to a sordid career.

TIJABP

Posted on by

Lovely blog post by Dave Winer.

I’d like to propose a new acronym. TIJABP.

This. Is. Just. A. Blog. Post.

In other words, this is not the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence.

Or the Treaty of Versailles or even legally binding.

It’s not Hey Jude or Beethoven’s 9th.

Not Catcher In The Rye or Annie Hall.

And it’s definitely not the 10th inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. (Yo Mookie!)

It’s just a blog post, so read it that way.

Twas written quickly, by one (busy) person, who then moved on to something else.

After Vermeer

Posted on by


After Vermeer, originally uploaded by jjn1.

I like Vermeer’s work, for several reasons: it reminds me of the time I lived in Holland; I love his use of window lighting; and my former colleague Philip Steadman wrote a convincing book establishing that the ‘photographic’ feel of much of his work arose because Vermeer used a camera obscura. So whenever I see a window shedding interesting light on an interior, I go for it.

Interestingly, David Hockney, in an equally fascinating book went further than Phil, arguing that Vermeer and some other artists probably used lenses as well.

Why the Net matters

Posted on by

From the Pew Internet Survey

Thirty percent of U.S. adults help a loved one with personal needs or household chores, managing finances, arranging for outside services, or visiting regularly to see how they are doing. Most are caring for an adult, such as a parent or spouse, but a small group cares for a child living with a disability or long-term health issue. The population breaks down as follows:

24% of U.S. adults care for an adult
3% of U.S. adults care for a child with significant health issues
3% of U.S. adults care for both an adult and a child
70% of U.S. adults do not currently provide care to a loved one

Eight in ten caregivers (79%) have access to the internet. Of those, 88% look online for health information, outpacing other internet users on every health topic included in our survey, from looking up certain treatments to hospital ratings to end-of-life decisions.

The Real Scandal of Mitt Romney and Bain

Posted on by

I really don’t understand the US. I mean to say, here’s a rich, inventive country stuffed full of innovative and smart folks. And yet the best it can do by way of a presidential challenger is a hypocritical creep like Mitt Romney. Now, serious folks tell me that he might even beat Obama, despite the astonishing contradictions and evasions in his account of himself. This nice New Yorker blog post by James Surowiecki ponders the recent revelations which suggest that Romney didn’t part company with Bain, the private equity firm that made him rich, when he claimed he did.

What Romney’s career shows, after all, is that once you’re at the top, you can keep being called C.E.O. even if you’re not even working at the company. You can get paid a hundred grand a year—chump change for Romney, to be sure, but twice the U.S. median income—while doing, by your own account, nothing at all for the company. You can build up an I.R.A. worth tens of millions of dollars when the maximum annual contribution is four thousand dollars. (Henry Blodget suggests here that Romney’s ownership of Bain Capital shares may explain how that I.R.A. could have legally gotten so big.) And, above all, if you manage a private-equity firm, you can reap the benefit of the carried-interest tax loophole and pay a much lower tax rate on your income than the vast majority of Americans, and you can continue to reap the benefit of that loophole even after you stop working for the firm. None of these things is illegal, but none of them are things that ordinary Americans can benefit from, and that’s the real scandal of Romney’s career at Bain.

Osama bin Laden meets Thomas Hobbes

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

Every time I go through airport security nowadays the thought that comes to mind – as I take off my shoes and belt, unpack my laptop and display my toothpaste in a transparent plastic bag – is that Osama bin Laden won hands down. The same thought pops up when taking a photograph outside the London Stock Exchange – or inside an airport or a railway station – and a uniformed jobsworth appears from nowhere to inform me that photography is “not allowed, sir”. And it also comes to mind whenever the home secretary opens her mouth on the subject of the draft communications data bill, aka the snoopers charter. Terrorism – or the perceived threat of it – has turned democracies into paranoid armed camps in which the state feels justified in assuming that every citizen is a potential terrorist.

The intrusiveness and ubiquity of state surveillance is already shocking. But we ain’t seen nothing yet – the technology is just getting into its stride…

Holy Smoke!

Posted on by

Today’s International Herald Tribune has nice piece by Ralph Blumenthal based on a visit to Le Thor, the village in Provence where Pierre Salinger, JFK’s Press Secretary, made his home. Concludes with this story, which will touch the heart of every cigar smoker:

Here in Le Thor, Mr. Salinger’s penchant for fine wine and cigars is fondly recalled. A centerpiece of the museum is a large wooden cigar box, all that remains of a gift that Nikita Khrushchev presented Mr. Salinger during a visit to Moscow in 1962. The 150 cigars had come from Fidel Castro and violated the newly installed embargo. President Kennedy was aghast, directing Mr. Salinger to surrender the cigars so Customs could destroy them.

Years later, Mr. Salinger reflected ruefully that he could have done that himself, “one by one.”

Sigh. In the Summer of 1968 I took an impoverished elderly friend to dinner at l’Epicure, a lovely French restaurant (now sadly gone) in Greek Street in Soho. After dessert, I asked my guest if he would like a cigar. His face lit up: yes, he said, very much. So I summoned the waiter and said we’d like to see a selection of his better cigars. He went off and whispered to his boss, when then approached us and, bending down, asked me in a confidential tone “Would either of you be an American gentleman, Sir?”. “Certainly not!” I replied indignantly. He smiled, bowed and withdrew, returning a few moment later with… a box of Cohibas. Bliss!

Too Much Email? Try this

Posted on by

Quentin’s two tips for those who are overwhelmed by email.

Don’t have it on all the time, and for God’s sake don’t let it ping or beep at you whenever a message comes in. That way madness lies. For your loved ones as well as for you. I tend to check my emails in the morning and in the evening. Occasionally in the middle of the day…but don’t count on it.

Email isn’t instant messaging. If people need an immediate reply they should be using some other technology to contact you. And one of the best ways to ensure you get more email is to keep responding to it promptly! Besides, I often read emails in a spare minute on my phone, when replying isn’t really practical.

You know it makes sense.