No Way!

I love this picture and wish it were mine. I think it was (deservedly) a prize-winner in a nature photography contest some years ago, but I can’t find any details and so can’t credit the photographer. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had the idea of using it as my Zoom placeholder, but it gave the wrong impression to my colleagues, so I abandoned it. It’s always reminded me of that wonderful New Yorker cartoon which shows a male peacock, in full regalia, staring in astonishment at a distinctly unimpressed female and saying: “What do you mean — No?”

Quote of the Day

Fifty years ago, at a harp recital in Gloucester­shire, a retired British military officer with a clipped aristo accent came across a brown-skinned teenager. “I say, old chap, do you speak English?” the officer said.

As a story in Yale’s New Journal recounted, the young man —Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah—replied, “Why don’t you ask my grandmother?”.

“Who, may I ask, is your grandmother?” the retired officer said.

“Lady Cripps.”

Lady Cripps was Isobel Cripps, the widow of Sir Stafford Cripps, a Christian socialist and Labour politician who had been chancellor of the exchequer and the Crown’s ambassador to the Soviet Union; he was known for his stalwart desire to relinquish Britain’s imperial possessions, from Calcutta to Accra.

I love this story, which comes from a Paris Review interview by David Remnick, Editor of the  New Yorker .

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

James Galway and The Chieftains | Over the Sea to Skye

Link

Nice arrangement of a familiar tune and an interesting combination of musical talent. For a gentle alternative try this recording by the Corries.

Long Read of the Day

Memory lanes: Google’s map of our lives

This is really charming — an essay about memories triggered by seeing people from one’s past when browsing Google Streetview.

Rather than offering a facsimile of the world we live in, Street View offers something more profound: the opportunity to spot loved ones on familiar streets, unaware that their errand or commute would be captured for posterity by the all-seeing eye of a camera-mounted Street View car.

Worth your time.

Chart of the Day

Source: The Lancet

More on that Zuckerberg video about the Metaverse

You may have been wondering where Nick Clegg stands in all this. Well, this video has the beginnings of an answer.

Many thanks to the readers who suggested it.

A message from Will Shakespeare

Via Michelle Cohn in McSweeney’s:

Greetings, fair countrymen. It is I, William Shakespeare, sending word from beyond the grave. I have seen the influence of my canon, and I’ve relished watching many fine actors and theaters put on productions of my plays that have stirred hearts and minds alike. But I come to you from the afterlife with one humble request.

Please stop letting high schoolers put on Macbeth.

Macbeth is about status, it’s about ambition, it’s about the corruption of the human soul once it gives in to the spoils of evil. Nothing a bunch of pimply teens living in suburban Westchester have ever come in contact with. I mean, seriously, do you think a seventeen-year-old can realistically go from eating a pack of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos to being one of the fiercest protagonists in literary history? Are you kidding me? The poor kid is probably wearing Calvin Klein underwear from Target, and he’s supposed to portray a tyrant? A murderous tyrant? I’ve seen these kids—they freak out if they see a cockroach. They come to rehearsal in basketball shorts, and then recite my immortal “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. God, it makes me want to cry.

Furthermore, I didn’t write the role of Lady Macbeth, one of the most iconic in the history of the theater, so that it could be played by a high school senior who sees this as her big chance to show the school her acting chops. I simply can’t watch another performance of my esteemed work where my villainous queen is clearly half thinking about getting high with the three witches at the cast party. I refuse to be witness to another “unsex me here” speech performed by a young waif who unironically reads Cosmopolitan for advice.

He is, though, keen on more teenage productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “That play”, he thinks, “works much better, as high schoolers are a bunch of horny freaks anyway”.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already! 

Break Time

Bikers taking a break in a Derbyshire village, August 30th.

Quote of the Day

”Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”

• Robert Frost

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Martin Hayes (violin) and Dennis Cahill (guitar) | Three reels (The Sailor’s Bonnet, Tommy Peoples’ and The Union Reel.

Link

Recorded in Dolan’s pub in Limerick, Christmas, 1999.

Long Read of the Day

“It Might Well Be Unsolvable”: Nilay Patel on Facebook’s reckoning with reality (and the Metaverse-size problems to come)

Transcript of an interesting, wide-ranging Vanity Fair interview with the Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, a very experienced observer of the tech industry. The interview discusses how tech journalism covers the industry (badly, IMHO), the fact that even giant companies can fade away (remember GE?), whether we are at an inflection point with the technology and its corporate exploiters and — naturally — Facebook’s latest attempts to escape from the consequences of its actions.

Sample:

I think it’s the beginning of a reckoning with how being this connected affects us and affects our lives. I don’t know that we have built the social systems or the political hierarchies to deal with it. I think that has huge repercussions, especially in a country with a First Amendment like ours. I’m not sure the government has the tools it might need, and I am extremely unsure the government should have those tools.

So I think this is the beginning of that: How connected should we be, and who should be the gatekeepers of that connection? How do we hold those gatekeepers in line? No one knows the answer. It is the central challenge of our time. The literal reckoning with the shape of society that absolute connection has brought us, is upon us. And it is nowhere close to the end.

Interesting throughout.

Zuckerberg’s Metaverse

Given that you probably have better things to do than follow every twist and turn in the Facebook saga, you may have missed the most idiotic pivot to date — the attempted re-branding of the company as ‘Meta’ and the launch of Mark Zuckerberg’s big new idea — the ‘Metaverse’. I was going to try and explain how fatuous this idea is but then thought that the most efficient way to get the idea across would be to suggest that you watch the lad himself doing it.

Link

So if you’re curious, do have a look. It’s 11 minutes long, but it speaks volumes about the delusion of using technology to escape reality.

Oh — and keep a sickbag handy.

Talking politics on Albania

My colleague David Runciman has a great podcast series called Talking Politics which has been running since 2015 and (deservedly) has a huge audience.

A couple of weeks ago he recorded a remarkable conversation with Lea Ypi about her book,  Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, which is the story of her childhood in Communist-run Albania and the effect on her of discovering as a teenager that all of her assumptions about her country and her family had been wrong.

It’s a truly extraordinary tale, and Ypi (who is now a Professor of Political Theory at LSE) tells it beautifully in the book. The podcast conversation, an exchange between two political theorists who eschew jargon, is terrific.

It’s almost an hour long, so you will need to set aside time for it. But it’s worth your while.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

I’m not an epidemiologist, but it has seemed obvious to me almost since the virus first arrived (and certainly after the first variants manifested themselves), that the world has changed and that we’ll never get completely free from this plague. So why not adjust to this new reality?

And now I find that Dr Anthony Fauci was saying much the same thing in a White House Briefing on October 13:

It is going to be very difficult — at least in the foreseeable future and maybe ever — to truly eliminate this highly transmissible virus. And again, as I mentioned, we’ve only eradicated one.

So, what are we looking for?

We’re looking for a level of control of the virus that would allow us to be able to essentially approach the kind of normal that we are all craving for and that we all talk about.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already! 

Poplars

Seen on a recent cycle ride on a perfect Autumn day.

When I was a kid, William Cowper’s The Poplar Field was one of my favourite poems.

And I still love the trees: they’re the Cypresses of the East Anglian landscape.

Quote of the Day

“Once you build it, who is going to augment reality? Who is in charge of that project? If I’m standing at the United States Capitol and you’re standing there, and we’re both looking at the Capitol, what are we seeing—what is the label on that building? Is it the “home of democracy,” or is it “where Donald Trump got screwed”? We’ll actually live in different realities.”

• Nilay Patel, Editor of the Verge in an interview by Vanity Fair, talking about augmented reality spectacles.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

R. E. M. – Everybody Hurts (Live at Glastonbury 2003)

Link

Wonderful. Wish I’d been there on the night.

Long Read of the Day

 Hey, Facebook, I Made a Metaverse 27 Years Ago

Wonderful essay by Ethan Zuckerman on the absurdity of Mark Zuckerberg latest attempt to avoid responsibility for the toxic mess that has made him a zillionaire. Sample:

So, after watching metaverses spring up and crumble for 27 years, and after building one myself, I feel fairly well equipped to offer context for what Mark Zuckerberg is trying to do with his firm’s pivot to “Meta.” In his heavily produced keynote video for Facebook Reality Labs, Zuckerberg starts by acknowledging that this is a bizarre time for the company to be launching a new product line—Facebook is under more scrutiny than ever for its ill effects on individuals and societies, and for the company’s utter unwillingness to address these issues.

But why bother with that mess? Or, as Zuckerberg put it: “Now, I know that some people will say that this isn’t a time to focus on the future. And I want to acknowledge that there are important issues to work on in the present. There always will be. So for many people, I’m just not sure there ever will be a good time to focus on the future.” Allow me to translate: Fuck you, haters.

Unmissable. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

What you need to know about COP26

(According to Leslie Hook, the FT‘s Environment reporter)

Six years ago in Paris, countries came together and all agreed to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, ideally 1.5 degrees Celsius. But they actually left a lot of the fine print to be figured out later, and that later is right now. So there’s a lot of nitty-gritty questions like, how do you report your emissions of your country? Like, what form do you use? Who audits that report of your emissions? Another topic is how can countries exchange carbon offsets? Trade carbon offsets, buy and sell carbon offsets between each other? What’s the framework governing that global carbon market? So we’ve got some really thorny details to be worked out in Glasgow. That’s kind of the fine print of the summit.

So basically this is the “moment of truth” for the Paris accord. Will the accord really have solid rules that mean that there’s no loopholes, everyone’s on the same playing field and that it has real teeth?

Tall order, Ne c’est pas?

Wall Street’s Tesla dilemma

The problem is — as I wrote in my Observer column on Sunday — that the company’s share price, like the Peace of God in the Bible, “passeth all understanding”. That’s mainly because it’s driven by what professionals disdainfully refer to as “retail investors” (ie schmucks like you and me) who think that Tesla, like Bitcoin, might be a good bet.

As the professionals see it, Tesla shares are trading at around 130 times the company’s future earnings, compared with 21 for the S&P 500 index. Which is daft. Time and again, big fund managers reckon that the stock simply must be at its peak, and in their world you never buy at the peak. So they don’t. But the shares keep going up and they keep missing out.

What makes things worse for them is that since December 2020 Tesla has been a member of the S&P 500 index. This sucks yet more money in to the shares through passive investment by index-tracking funds. So we’re getting to the point where fund managers will have to buy Tesla shares against their supposedly better judgement.

Does that remind you of anything?

It reminds me of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, and of a sensible and successful fund manager, Tony Dye, who refused to buy into the madness and lost his job as a result. Shortly after he was ejected, the tech bubble burst, and the fund he had been managing survived and thrived.

Which perhaps goes to confirm the wisdom of Keynes’s famous doctrine of the 1930s: “An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety”.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

I was mesmerised by this — Bruce (Xiaoyu) Liu playing Chopin’s Etude in C sharp minor, Op. 10 No. 4 in the first stage of the 18th Chopin Competition — and thinking that surely the video has been speeded up. But it hasn’t.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already! 

My friend Jonathan’s Memorial was on Saturday in his college. It was a celebration which did him justice — attended by lots of his friends, former colleagues and students. There was poetry by Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, a beautiful remembrance by his brother David (also a distinguished academic), a warm and affectionate speech by Christine Carpenter, a nice memoir by Arthur Kiron, his colleague and neighbour at the University of Pennsylvania, and — finally — an appreciation by Chris Clark, a great historian and a former student of Jonathan. There was also music by Alexander Goehr (who was present to hear it) and it closed with Unfinished Business, that lovely poem of Primo Levi’s:

Sir, please accept my resignation
As of next month,
And, if it seems right, plan on replacing me.
I’m leaving much unfinished work,
Whether out of laziness or actual problems.
I was supposed to tell someone something,
But I no longer know what and to whom: I’ve forgotten.
I was also supposed to donate something 
—  A wise word, a gift, a kiss;
I put it off from one day to the next. I’m sorry.
I’ll do it in the short time that remains.
I’m afraid I’ve neglected important clients.
I was meant to visit Distant cities, islands, desert lands;
You’ll have to cut them from the program
Or entrust them to my successor.
I was supposed to plant trees and I didn’t;
To build myself a house,
Maybe not beautiful, but based on plans.
Mainly, I had in mind A marvelous book, kind sir,
Which would have revealed many secrets,
Alleviated pains and fears,
Eased doubts, given many
The gift of tears and laughter.
You’ll find its outline in my drawer,
Down below, with the unfinished business;
I didn’t have the time to write it out, which is a shame,
It would have been a fundamental work.

He was a truly lovely man. If you’re interested, you can find my tribute to him here on the day he died.

Quote of the Day

“There is a Pythonesque sketch waiting to be written about a judge passing a sentence of imprisonment for attempted suicide: ‘Let this be a lesson to you and to any others who may be thinking of killing themselves.’ In fact, by the mid 19th century the law had got itself into such a tangle that a person injured in a failed attempt at suicide could be indicted for wounding with intent to kill, an offence for which Parliament had thoughtfully provided the death penalty.”

• (Sir) Stephen Sedley in the LRB, at the beginning of a coruscating examination of the absurdities and contradictions of British legal and legislative attitudes to assisted dying.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dvořák: Serenade for Strings in E, Op.22 – 1. Moderato

Link

Not a bad way to start November.

Long Read of the Day

 The Next Cyberattack Is Already Under Way

Jill Lepore’s New Yorker review essay on Nicole Pelroth’s This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race which, if anything, is more alarming than the book itself. Put succinctly, the message of both book and essay is that the online world we have built is catastrophically insecure. And yet we continue to ignore this reality. Perhaps that is because not to ignore it would be to force us to come to terms with it. In that sense it’s more like the climate crisis than like anything else. And yet we stand a slightly better chance of dealing with the pervasive insecurity of the online world that we do of fixing the climate.

Here’s how the essay concludes:

The arrogant recklessness of the people who have been buying and selling the vulnerability of the rest of us is not just part of an intelligence-agency game; it has been the ethos of Wall Street and Silicon Valley for decades. Move fast and break things; the money will trickle down; click, click, click, click, buy, buy, buy, like, like, like, like, expose, expose, expose. Perlroth likes a piece of graffiti she once saw: “Move slowly and fix your shit.” Lock down the code, she’s saying. Bar the door. This raises the question of the horse’s whereabouts relative to the barn. If you listen, you can hear the thunder of hooves.

But it’s worth reading in its entirety.

Hertz’s supercharged Tesla deal could haul us into the electric vehicle age

Yesterday’s Observer column:

On Tuesday, Hertz, the car-rental firm that recently emerged from bankruptcy, announced that it had made a deal to buy 100,000 cars from Tesla for what knowledgeable sources estimate to be worth $4bn. On learning this, my first thought was that if this is what insolvency is like, please direct me to the nearest bankruptcy court. My second thought, though, was that this could be a significant moment on the road to wider adoption of electric vehicles (EVs).

The reason is, as anyone who has rented conventional cars will know, is that the best way of having a realistic test drive of a vehicle is to rent one for a week or two on holiday. As Teslas become available via Hertz, many more people will have a chance to experience what an EV is like. This is important because, generally, only geeks and masochists (like this columnist) are early adopters of novel technology and normal cautious consumers regard EVs as rather exotic and peculiar, not something you’d rely on for commuting or the school run.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that a key factor in changing people’s minds about EVs is word of mouth: someone you know has taken the plunge and has given you a ride in theirs. This was the driving force behind the widespread adoption of the Toyota Prius hybrid in the last decade and it seems to be happening now with EVs, which may account for the fact the Tesla Model 3 was the biggest selling new car in the UK in September, despite the fact that the company spends zilch on overt marketing or advertising.

Do read the whole thing.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already! 

Autumnal flourishing

Seen in a friend’s garden.

Quote of the Day

“A party without cake is just a meeting”

• Julia Child

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | If I Didn’t Have You | (From the soundtrack of Monsters Inc.)

Link

Long Read of the Day

 ‘The Problem Is Him’ Kara Swisher on Mark Zuckerberg

For years I’ve thought of Zuckerberg as a high-IQ, half-educated sociopath who happens to be the absolute ruler of a powerful company. But Kara Swisher knows — and has interviewed — him a few times. So I found that this NY Mag interview with her made riveting reading. Hope you do too.

Here’s a sample:

Q: In the 2018 interview, he said that his philosophy about running a company was understanding what you’re willing to tolerate. Have you noticed any change in what he or Facebook tolerates?

A: He doesn’t think like you and me. When they were debuting Facebook Live, I had a million questions about abuse. And they were like, “What are you talking about?” It was so typical. It wasn’t him, but it was his people — people who were like him who just reflect him. They were like, “You’re such a bummer, Kara.” And I’m like, “Okay, I’m a bummer, I guess, but I think someone’s going to kill someone on this thing and broadcast it.” And it didn’t take long before there was a mass murder on it. The idea of consequences seems to escape them almost entirely because most of them have never had an unsafe day in their lives. Truly. Why would he? He lived in a very, very expensive suburb of New York. He was treated like a prince by his parents. He went to Harvard. What’s his difficulty? What’s his challenge? I’d like to know.

Do read the whole thing.

A British teenager bought Google ads for his scam website and made 48 Bitcoins duping UK online shoppers

“If he was an adult he would be going inside”, said the judge.

From The Register:

A “sophisticated” teenager has had £2.1m ($2.88m) in cryptocurrency confiscated after he set up a phishing site and advertised it on Google, duping consumers into handing over gift voucher redemption codes.

The schoolboy set up a website impersonating gift voucher site Love2Shop. Having done that he then bought Google ads which resulted in his fake site appearing above the real one in search results, Lincoln Crown Court was told.

Crown prosecutor Sam Skinner told Her Honour Judge Catarina Sjölin Knight that the boy, whose identity is protected by a court order, harvested £6,500 worth of vouchers in the week his site was active. Love2shop began investigating in April 2020 after a customer complained, at which point the boy took down his fake site.

The stolen vouchers were converted into Love2Shop vouchers on the A-level student’s own account. A later police investigation discovered 12,000 credit . card numbers on his computer along with details for 197 Paypal accounts. On top of that, he had 48 Bitcoins: when police arrested him in August last year these were worth £200,000 but their value has risen tenfold since.

When I checked yesterday, one Bitcoin was worth £42,820.34. So the lad’s little haul came to £2,055,376!

‘Applying to be a spy felt thrilling – until a stranger approached me on a train’

Salutary tale for those thinking of applying to MI5/6, as Emma Hughes apparently did.

I lived in west London at the time, and took the Piccadilly line to work. The train had often come from Heathrow, full of travellers, some of whom could be chatty. So I thought nothing of it when, one morning, the man standing next to me struck up a conversation. He was slightly older, with an accent I couldn’t place and a pleasant but persistent manner.

Whereabouts did I live, he asked. What was it like? How long had I been living there? Was it convenient for my office? Where did I work? I was still instinctively wary: even at 23 I had lived long enough to know that interactions with strange men on public transport, no matter how innocent, rarely ended well.

After a couple of stops, he turned to me as the train slowed to a halt. “Well, this is me,” he said. “It was nice to meet you, Emma Hughes.”

It wasn’t until the train started moving again that I realised I hadn’t told him my surname.

She didn’t make the cut, needless to say.

Facebook isn’t the only shifty tech company

Some conscientious souls have been digging out juicy bits in the 173-page antitrust suit filed by 17 US states against Google. Here’s an excerpt that interested me; it’s about Google’s use of its Chrome browser to track users across the Web.

To get publishers to give Google exclusive access over their ad inventory, Google set publishers up for a lose/lose scenario. First, Google started to leverage its ownership of the largest web browser, Chrome, to track and target publishers’ audiences in order to sell Google’s advertising inventory. To make this happen, Google first introduced the ability for users to log into the Chrome browser. Then, Google began to steer users into doing this by using deceptive and coercive tactics. For example, Google started to automatically log users into Chrome if they logged into any Google service (e.g., Gmail or YouTube). In this way, Google took the users that choose not to log into Chrome and logged them in anyways. If a user tried to log out of Chrome in response, Google punished them by kicking them out of a Google product they were in the process of using (e.g., Gmail or YouTube). On top this, through another deceptive pattern, Google got these users to give the Chrome browser permission to track them across the open web and on independent publisher sites like The Dallas Morning News. These users also had to give Google permission to use this new Chrome tracking data to sell Google’s own ad space, permitting Google to use Chrome to circumvent reliance on cookie-tracking technology. The effect of this practice is to rob publishers of the exclusive use of their audience data (e.g., data on what users read on The Dallas Morning News), thereby depreciating the value of publishers’ ad space and benefitting ad sales on Google’s properties (e.g., YouTube).

(Thanks to Jon Gruber for the link.)

I don’t use Chrome, for a variety of reasons, including the shenanigans detailed above.

In some ways, Facebook’s current PR travails have been a Godsend for Google, which is just as manipulative and domineering but has been under the radar in the last year or so. This antitrust suit provides a useful reminder that society has unfinished business with the search giant too.

Amazon is now critical infrastructure for more than home deliveries

Well, well. It’s been revealed that the UK’s spy agencies have signed a contract with Amazon Web Services (AWS) — the company’s cloud-computing operation.

Labour is demanding that the home secretary explain why GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 will use a high-security system provided by the US-based firm, and whether any risk assessment was undertaken before the deal was signed.

The agreement, estimated by industry experts to be worth £500m to £1bn over the next decade, was signed this year, the Financial Times first reported, citing people familiar with the discussions.

Other government departments such as the Ministry of Defence will also use the system during joint operations.

Truly, you couldn’t make this up, even if (like some devout Remainers) you thought that sovereignty is dead. Turns out that some of the US’s security services are also running their stuff on Amazon’s cloud.

Which reminds one of the old joke — that if Marxist revolutionaries ever managed to stage a successful coup d’etat in the US, all they would have to do once they arrived in the White House would be to nationalise Amazon, after which they could tweet “Job done: mission accomplished.”

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

I’ve had lots of fascinating emails about the Classic iPod which make it clear that I was not the only one who appreciated that lovely and iconic device. Many thanks to everyone who wrote in. I’m going to have a go at reviving — perhaps revivifying — mine. Stay tuned.

  This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already! 

Set in stone

A small rock, picked up on the beach on the North Norfolk coast the other day. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know its history.

Quote of the Day

”The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”

• Alfred Hitchcock

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tommy Emmanuel and Igor Presnyakov | Eric Clapton’s Tears In Heaven

Link

Long Read of the Day

Why Hungary?

Or, more accurately, why has the American Right become so keen on Hungary as a model for what they’d like to do to the US?

This terrific post on Heather Cox Richardson’s blog explains.

On paper, Hungary is a democracy in that it still holds elections, but it is, in fact, a one-party state overseen by one man.

Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy, replacing it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.”

Hungary is in the news in the United States because Americans on the right have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to hold elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.

In 2019, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson endorsed Hungary’s anti-abortion and anti-immigration policies; in that year, according to investigative researcher Anna Massoglia of Open Secrets, Hungary paid a D.C. lobbying firm $265,000, in part to arrange an interview on Carlson’s show. Recently, former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest at a forum denouncing immigration and urging traditional social values, where he told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump put on the court. Further indicating the drift of today’s right wing, the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held in Budapest.

The US is turning into a basket-case. The mid-term elections will tell us if the (flawed) American experiment with democracy is over.

We can’t plant our way out of the climate crisis

Trees are great, and they are very good at absorbing carbon dioxide. So it’s disastrous that de-forestation is still proceeding at an alarming rate.

Tree-planting schemes always sound like a good idea. (Though there’s a time-lag before they reach the necessary maturity to do their stuff for the planet.) Of course, sometimes there’s a whiff of ‘buying carbon offsets about these schemes. But even if there isn’t and motives are pure, it seems that many planting schemes fail.

In his marvellous Just Two Things blog, Andrew Curry points to a story on Vox about how large tree-planting initiatives often fail — and some have even fuelled deforestation.

In one recent study in the journal Nature, for example, researchers examined long-term restoration efforts in northern India, a country that has invested huge amounts of money into planting over the last 50 years. The authors found “no evidence” that planting offered substantial climate benefits or supported the livelihoods of local communities.

The study is among the most comprehensive analyses of restoration projects to date, but it’s just one example in a litany of failed campaigns that call into question the value of big tree-planting initiatives. Often, the allure of bold targets obscures the challenges involved in seeing them through, and the underlying forces that destroy ecosystems in the first place.

Instead of focusing on planting huge numbers of trees, experts told Vox, we should focus on growing trees for the long haul, protecting and restoring ecosystems beyond just forests, and empowering the local communities that are best positioned to care for them.

Trees are harder to grow that one might think. Some years ago, Cambridge University planted a large wood with 800 trees in Madingley to mark the university’s 800th anniversary some years ago. Many of those trees are thriving. But a surprising proportion are not. And this is par for the tree-planting course, I’m told.

Recently a survey of the mature trees around where we live was commissioned. The consultant who carried it out observed that the British climate seems to be changing into two rather than four seasons — much wetter winters and much drier summers. Which is exactly what many current species of native trees trees don’t need.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

Further to yesterday’s musings about the iPod’s 20th anniversary, here’s mine. It was a gift from a very generous (and wealthy) friend many years ago. Its battery is long dead, but it’s the only iPod I really liked. So I’ve begun to wonder if I should take the bull by the horns, open it up and get a replacement battery from those wonderful folks at iFixit. Hmmm…

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already! 

Halloween cometh

Seen on a walk yesterday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

”Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering, and it’s all over much too soon”.

• Woody Allen

Thanks to Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) whose email signature line is a thing of wonder.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Wagner – Siegfried Idyll (Proms 2012)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Accounting for uncertainty during a pandemic

Long and sometimes demanding attempt to address an important question: How can we adequately account for uncertainty in a pandemic? Worth it for the takeaway: sometimes it’s better to think like an engineer than like a ‘scientist’ (and the two are different: I can say that because I’m an engineer).

Or, to put it more judiciously:

The question is probably better reframed as: How can we be better prepared to address the uncertainty inherent in the response to the next pandemic or another catastrophic, unforeseen—but foreseeable—event. An answer to this question may lie in a reimagining of the tools of epidemiological modeling from something that looks a bit more like the engineering perspective and a bit less like the “pure science” perspective. This entails a move away from analyses as one-off exercises that uncover some permanent—or at least durable—truth, toward a more software-like, continuous improvement conception of the products of statistical analysis.

Facebook: parallel universes

Universe 1

In which it is now abundantly clear that Facebook is a toxic company which prioritises ‘engagement’ over the public good, and revenues above all else. Here, just as an illustration, are some of the headline stories:

• Washington Post:  Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation 

• The Atlantic: How Facebook fails 90 per cent of its users

• Rest of World: The Facebook Papers reveal staggering failures in the Global South

• AP: Facebook froze as anti-vaccine comments swarmed users

• Stephen Levy in Wired: Facebook Failed the People Who Tried to Improve It

• Chris Stokel-Walker in The Guardian:Facebook cannot moderate itself – its problems have only just begun

• Matt Stoller in The Guardian: Facebook was born, lives and thrives in scandal. It’s been lawless for years

And so on, seemingly ad infinitum.

Universe 2

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, Facebook is a raging success and a great company…

Here, for example, are excerpts from an email I got yesterday from a prominent stock-market analyst…

“As always with Facebook it’s important to look at the numbers not the headlines. Revenue is up 35% in the quarter and profit is up 30%. Facebook itself has 1.9 billion daily users and the group of platforms has 2.9bn billion users. A 12% increase. Yet from the narrative you’d assume everyone hates Facebook at the moment.

But…

“Facebook is positioning itself as a strong metaverse contender. It has the Oculus technology, which is the primary hardware, but with metaverse they will have a big presence in virtual gaming, live events and e-commerce. Facebook are investing $10bn in the metaverse over the next year.

“The guidance for the next quarter is a little below expectations but due to iOS 14 and the fact that Facebook’s advertising customers are supply constraints. But next year, Facebook will increase capex by 60% to $29-$34bn and will be investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

And the advice for investors?

“Overall Facebook looks cheap from a valuation perspective, and once again it’s all about fundamentals not about the headlines.”

And as for the stock price, CNBC reported that

The social media giant fell 5.5% after Facebook missed estimates for revenue and monthly active user growth for the third quarter. Several Wall Street analysts cut their price target on the stock after the report, though they kept their buy ratings. (Emphasis mine.)

All of which explains two things:

1. The current hoo-hah will have zero impact on Facebook’s management. And,
2. Facebook will continue to be a darling of the Wall Street crowd. Just as tobacco, oil companies and arms manufacturers used to be.

RentaTesla

“Just months after bankruptcy, Hertz says it will buy 100,000 Teslas for new electric fleet.”

Eh? Where does the necessary $4 billion come from? If this is bankruptcy, show me the way to the court. According to NBC News,

Hertz plans to field 100,000 Tesla electric cars through its North American and European rental car fleets.

The move will position the rental company as the largest source of electric vehicle rentals in the U.S., and one of the biggest in Europe, at a time when electric vehicles are beginning to gain real traction. In turn, it could help not just Tesla, but the auto industry overall, by increasing awareness of what today’s latest electric vehicles can do.

The one-time rental car leader declared bankruptcy in May 2020, re-emerging 13 months later. Earlier this month, it announced that former Ford CEO Mark Fields would come on board as its interim chief executive.

“The new Hertz is going to lead the way as a mobility company, starting with the largest EV rental fleet in North America and a commitment to grow our EV fleet and provide the best rental and recharging experience for leisure and business customers around the world.”

Personally I’m a bit pissed off by this news. After buying a Tesla in December I was looking forward to being regarded as a plucky, adventurous pioneer. Now it turns out I’m just an average schmuck.

Sigh.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

The Apple iPod is 20 years old this month. If you’ve ever wondered that the original prototype looked like, Jason Kottke has found the answer:

“As you can see”, says Cabel Sasser,

it’s… quite large! We’ve always assumed that this mighty shell was designed to fit the large breadboards or circuit boards that were used during the earliest days of iPod development, until everything was eventually sized down to actual iPod-size. (It also has the Jobsian side-benefit of keeping the engineers in the dark about what the final device will look like.) I can’t get enough of those chunky, clunky, clicky black buttons wired up for navigation.

Pic shows how big it actually was when compared to the size of the actual iPod.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe!

On the waterfront

Wells-next-the-Sea late on Friday afternoon. Beautifully still. Tide still out.

Quote of the Day

“Etiquette” used to be the second-most stolen book from the library after the Bible (which presumably is taken by people unfamiliar with the Ten Commandments).

• Louis Menand, in his New Yorker review of Jess McHugh’s Americanon.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Gentle Morpheus | Alceste | Emma Kirkby

Link

An aria I didn’t know — until last week. Better late than never.

Long Read of the Day

 Climate optimism of the will

Noah Smith’s surprisingly passionate argument that climate fatalism is both misguided and disabling. His point is

that we don’t have to depend on any one magical deus ex machina technology to come and save us. There is no single such technology. Instead, everywhere you look, scientists and engineers are inventing new technologies to maintain our industrial society while eliminating greenhouse emissions. And everywhere you look, companies are eager to both develop and purchase these technologies, promising to bring them down in cost the way solar and batteries have fallen in cost.

And a new report from the Institute for New Economic thinking suggests that this flurry of technological innovation has already changed the game in a fundamental way. In “Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition”, INET’s team notes that we’ve consistently underestimated progress in renewable technology. They argue that realistic forecasts mean that green energy will be so cheap that even businesses that don’t care about climate at all will now find it worth their while to ditch fossil fuels.

As a pessimist about climate change who also realises that pessimism is disabling, I found this piece refreshing. Hope you do too.

Whistleblowing requires courage, but don’t expect Facebook to change its ways

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The bigger question is whether whistleblowing does any good even when it is accomplished as skilfully as she has managed it to date. Does it lead to meaningful change?

Take Edward Snowden’s case. His revelations were genuinely sensational, revealing the astonishing scale and comprehensiveness of the NSA’s (and its allies’) electronic surveillance. It was clear that the democratic oversight of this surveillance in a range of western countries had been woefully inadequate in the post-9/11 years. Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg

The revelations triggered inquiries in many of those countries, but what actually happened? In the US, very little. In the UK, after three separate inquiries, there was a new act of parliament – the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, which replaced inadequate oversight with slightly less inadequate oversight and gave the security services a set of useful new powers.

Will it be any different with the Haugen revelations? My hunch is no, because the political will to tackle Facebook’s astonishingly profitable abuse is still missing…

Do read the whole thing. _

Great news for Facebook: it’s no longer the most toxic social network!

Trump has a new social media operation. Marina Hyde celebrates its arrival in her inimitable style:

For now, Facebook is only convincingly troubled by “disinformation” if it’s about itself. We don’t know what will emerge next week, but we can be almost sure how the firm will react to it. The usual MO of Facebook’s chiefs has been to deny they even did the thing they’re being accused of, until the position becomes untenable. At that point, they concede they did whatever it was on a very limited scale, until that position becomes untenable. Next up is accepting the scale was more widespread than initially indicated, but with the caveat that the practice has now come to an end, until that position is the latest to become untenable.

Clear evidence that the practice never came to an end and, in fact, only became more widespread will come with aggressive reminders that it is not and never has been technically illegal. If and when whatever-it-is has been proved to be technically illegal after all, Facebook will accept the drop-in-their-ocean fine, with blanket immunity for all senior officers, and move back to step one in the cycle. We get rinsed; they repeat.

Such a wonderful columnist.

Amazon’s ambitions to build an air freight empire got a lift from the pandemic

From: Quartz:

Amazon went on a plane buying spree in the pandemic summer of 2020, fueling the fastest expansion yet of its air fleet. “They had plans for this, but the pandemic obviously pulled forward everyone’s demand for e-commerce and strained Amazon’s shipping capacity,” said John Blackledge, an analyst at the investment bank Cowen.

In 2020 alone, Cowen analysts estimate that Amazon invested $80 billion in logistics infrastructure—everything from warehouses to trucks to cargo planes—and they expect the company will wind up spending another $80 billion in 2021. That compares to the $56 billion Amazon spent on logistics infrastructure in the five years between Amazon Air’s launch in 2015 and the onset of the pandemic in late 2019, Cowen analysts estimate.

Amazon’s air freight investments aren’t just an urgent effort to move goods faster as the holiday shopping season approaches: Analysts who watch Amazon believe it will be one of the first steps toward competing directly with incumbent couriers like FedEx and UPS as a global delivery service.

My Commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

“Simulations reveal that ducklings swimming in a single-file formation behind the parent can achieve a wave-riding benefit whereby the wave drag turns positive. — from The Journal of Fluid Mechanics, no less.

Gives a new meaning to ‘getting your ducks in a row’!

This blog is also available as a daily newsletter. If you think this might suit you better why not sign up? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. And it’s free!