Is there still time to rein in the tech giants?

Posted on November 21, 2021 by jjn1

Long piece by me in today’s Observer:

When historians look back on this period, one of the things that they will find remarkable is that for a quarter of a century, the governments of western democracies slept peacefully while some of the most powerful (and profitable) corporations in history emerged and grew, without let or hindrance, at exponential speeds.

They will wonder at how a small number of these organisations, which came to be called “tech giants” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft), acquired, and began to wield, extraordinary powers. They logged and tracked everything we did online – every email, tweet, blog, photograph and social media post we sent, every “like” we registered, every website we visited, every Google search we made, every product we ordered online, every place we visited, which groups we belonged to and who our closest friends were.

And that was just for starters. Two of these companies even invented a new variant of extractive capitalism. Whereas the standard form appropriated and plundered the Earth’s natural resources, this new “surveillance capitalism” appropriated human resources in the shape of comprehensive records of users’ behaviour, which were algorithmically translated into detailed profiles that could be sold to others. And while the activities of extractive capitalism came ultimately to threaten the planet, those of its surveillance counterpart have turned into a threat to our democracy…

Read on

Friday 19 November, 2021

Posted on November 19, 2021 by jjn1

Portrait of the Director as a Young Photographer

Random discovery: if you do an image search for “Self-portrait with Leica” you get a lot of images. It’s not surprising, I suppose, given that Leica cameras were the working tools of many celebrated photographers.

This, for example, is one of Stanley Kubrick’s selfies. He was a talented photographer before he became a movie director.

Quote of the Day

.”I’d like to kick the habit of writing books, at least for a while. If there were a detox unit or an analog to the nicotine patch for serial offenders, I think I would sign up for treatment. My habit has already cost me more precious time than I care to admit. The problem with book writing and other addictions is that the resolve to quit is greatest during withdrawal, but as the painful symptoms recede, the craving is apt to return.”

James C. Scott, in the foreword to Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brian Eno | An Ending (Ascent)

Link

According to MusicRadar, this was originally recorded for a documentary on the Apollo moon missions entitled For All Mankind. An Ending was taken from Eno’s 1983 studio album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks and was written by Eno alongside production from his brother Roger and long time collaborator Daniel Lanois.

Long Read of the Day

The genius of John Von Neumann

I’m reading Ananyo Bhattacharya’s fine biography at the moment and have been collecting interesting reviews of it.

This is one of them.

At 17, still at high school, he partly rescued Cantor’s set theory, the basis of much mathematical theory, from a crippling paradox. A couple of years later, he helped reconcile Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger’s rival models of quantum mechanics. In the early Thirties, he met the astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and worked with him on general relativity and the behaviour of stellar clusters. Chandrasekhar would later tell an interviewer, “If I say, ‘He reminds me of von Neumann,’ that’s about the best compliment I can give anyone.”

Von Neumamm read some Alan Turing research which imagined a hypothetical computing machine, and saw how to build a working computer. The paper he produced building on Turing’s ideas is considered “the birth certificate of modern computers”, according to the computer scientist Wolfgang Coy. With his wife Kläri, and Ulam, he pioneered Monte Carlo simulations, vital now in climate modelling and a million other fields.

Astonishing man. Even those whom we traditionally regard as geniuses thought he was smarter than they were.

Apple changes its mind about the right to repair

This is big news, at least to people who live in the Apple ecosystem.

Early next year, a previously impossible repair will be possible: you can buy an iPhone screen directly from Apple, use Apple’s repair guide (and tools, if you want) to install it, and have it fully work as intended, using Apple’s diagnostic software. And you won’t have to own an authorized repair shop to do it.

What makes this surprising is that Apple always maintained that letting consumers fix their own stuff would be dangerous, both for them and for the kit. Now, though, the company has discovered a new interest in letting people fix the things they own.

Starting in early 2022, Apple will sell parts and tools for the iPhone 12 and 13 including the display, battery, and camera to individuals in the US. Apple intends to expand the program to more complicated iPhone repairs and to M1 MacBooks later in the year. You’ll be able to buy parts and tools through the ‘Self Service Repair Online Store,’ where you’ll also have access to service manuals and some version of their repair-enabling software.

This is good for the environment, at least. But I wonder if it has anything to do with the renewed interest of regulators in Apple’s monopoly control of its ecosystem?

Which reminds me — I need to order the tools I need to revitalise my Classic iPod.

Let’s Not Consign Journalistic Transparency to the Memory Hole

Very interesting Politico column by Jack Shafer on how newspaper should correct previous stories when they find they were mistaken or flawed.

Newspaper proprietors, especially former Washington Post President and Publisher Philip L. Graham, have long subscribed to the idea that their newspaper articles constitute “the first rough draft of history.” Some first rough drafts are more accurate than others, as every journalist will concede. So when reporters uncover new information that undermines earlier copy, they write new stories, updating the record. What they don’t do is go back and erase the original, flawed version. But that’s what the Washington Post did last week.

As Post journalist Paul Farhi reported last Friday, the newspaper removed from its archives two stories from 2017 and 2019 related to the controversial Steele dossier and replaced them with new articles that added and deleted whole sections and also added explanatory text at the top, alerting readers to the changes…

What’s peculiar about the Post’s method of error correction, says Shafer, was its decision to vaporise the two original stories. They can’t be retrieved from LexisNexis, as the Post left that database in late 2020. Apparently the deleted pages can be found on Factiva, a Dow Jones subscription database that costs about $249 a month, which makes it expensive for readers who can’t afford the service to determine precisely what the paper’s first rough draft got wrong and how it was amended.

Such heavy reworking of years-old copy is so rare it approaches the unprecedented, as American University media history professor W. Joseph Campbell told Farhi. Stephen Bates, a professor of journalism at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, concurs. “It’s hard to have a paper of record if the record keeps changing,” Bates says.

Surely the ‘first draft of history’ should stand, along with the updated correction, even if its presence is embarrassing for the publication that originally ran it.

My commonplace booklet

Caroline O’Donoghue: How I imagine an annual performance review with the dog would go

Hello, dog. Please take a seat. I’m so glad we could find time for this little chat.

Are you… Ok, you’re still sitting down.

So to begin… Still sitting down. Right. Maybe the tight circular movements can wait until after our annual performance review, and you can just stand for the meantime.

I know you only do the little circle movements when you’re anxious. I also know why you are anxious. You have sensed, correctly I think, that there has been a certain level of disharmony among the senior members of staff (me and Gavin) and much of that unhappiness has stemmed from our disappointment in your most recent work.

Link

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Thursday 18 November, 2021

Posted on November 18, 2021 by jjn1

Self-portrait with Leica

I love this self-portrait by Ilse Bing. She was one of the leading European photographers of the interwar period — as this V&A summary demonstrates.

Quote of the Day

“What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness”

Flann O’Brien

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss | When You Say Nothing At All

Link

Magical!

Long Read of the Day

AI-tocracy

By Martin Beraja, Andrew Kao, David Y. Yang and Noam Yuchtman

An NBER working paper that is both fascinating and depressing. The authors argue that the conventional wisdom which holds that autocracies are generally bad for innovation is wrong, or at least not universally the case. Their conclusion is that some advanced technologies can be sustained under autocracy when the tech and the authoritarian leadership mutually reinforce each other.

There’s a free pdf download if you’re a newcomer to NBER. And if you’re too busy, here’s the Abstract:

Can frontier innovation be sustained under autocracy? We argue that innovation and autocracy can be mutually reinforcing when: (i) the new technology bolsters the autocrat’s power; and (ii) the autocrat’s demand for the technology stimulates further innovation in applications beyond those benefiting it directly. We test for such a mutually reinforcing relationship in the context of facial recognition AI in China. To do so, we gather comprehensive data on AI firms and government procurement contracts, as well as on social unrest across China during the last decade. We first show that autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government procurement of facial recognition AI, and increased AI procurement suppresses subsequent unrest. We then show that AI innovation benefits from autocrats’ suppression of unrest: the contracted AI firms innovate more both for the government and commercial markets. Taken together, these results suggest the possibility of sustained AI innovation under the Chinese regime: AI innovation entrenches the regime, control stimulates further frontier innovation.

If you wanted an argument for why facial recognition is a toxic technology, then this is a pretty good one.

Tech can’t fix the car problem

Good piece by Shira Ovide with interesting references. She’s been reading Peter Norton’s Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving.

Our health and that of the planet will significantly improve if we switch to electric cars. They are one focus of the global climate summit underway in Glasgow. And taking error-prone drivers out of the equation could make our roads much safer. But making better cars isn’t a cure-all.

Popularizing electric vehicles comes with the risk of entrenching car dependency, as my New York Times Opinion colleague Farhad Manjoo wrote. Driverless cars may encourage more miles on the road, which could make traffic and sprawl worse. (Uber and similar services once also promised that they would reduce congestion and cut back on how many miles Americans drove. They did the opposite.)

The future of transportation needs to include more energy efficient and safer cars. But Dr. Norton also said that it would be useful to redirect money and attention to make walking, cycling and using shared transportation more affordable and appealing choices.

EVs are wonderful in their way. But they’re still cars. They’re so good, in fact, that they might make us even more infatuated with the automobile.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

Are AirPods Out? Why Cool Kids Are Wearing Wired Headphones

The Wall Street Journal confirms that I am not cool. But then, I never was.

Also, none of my current Apple mobile devices has a headphone port.

Wednesday 17 November, 2021

Posted on November 17, 2021 by jjn1

Quote of the Day

”Poor Henry James! He’s spending eternity walking round and round a stately park and the fence is just too high for him to peep over and he’s just too far away to hear what the countess is saying.”

Somerset Maugham

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | The Fox Chase

Link

Extraordinary piece which captures the dynamics of a fox-hunt.

Long Read of the Day

We have privatised our cyber security. The winners are the hackers

Stark warning in Prospect magazine from Ciaran Martin, the ex-GCHQ guy who set up the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre. He uses as a case-study the successful hacking of the Colonial pipeline in the US.

Colonial, it should be said, broke no rules. And that’s the point. Insufficient protection of its pipeline—a critical national asset—caused social disruption that clearly met the threshold of a national security threat. But there is nothing—yet—in the regulations governing this critical sector that requires firms to do better (and Republicans in Washington are starting to push back against suggestions for tighter controls). The unspoken message behind the Colonial case is that businesses can choose how to respond, whatever the consequences, and the government will pick up the tab.

It’s a neoliberal wet-dream, in other words — just like the 2008 banking crisis. An unregulated private sector is allowed to run risks which eventually come to threaten the security of the rest of us. And then the taxpayer (in the shape of the government) comes to the rescue and no corporate executive goes to gaol.

Good piece, worth reading in full.

The erosion of the American republic (contd.)

Joe Biden achieved what many people thought would be impossible — the passing of a huge bi-partisan Bill to renew the country’s crumbling infrastructure. And guess what? Heather Cox Richardson takes up the story:

It is a historic bill, not least because it recalled times when the government just…functioned, with members of both parties backing the passage of a popular bill that reflected a lot of hard work to hammer out a compromise.

And yet, Trump loyalists have attacked the bill as “Joe Biden’s Communist takeover of America” and have attacked any Republican who supported it as “a traitor to our party, a traitor to their voters and a traitor to our donors.” Some of the Republicans voting for it have gotten death threats.

Tuesday 16 November, 2021

Posted on November 16, 2021 by jjn1

Little Gidding

Last Sunday morning I watched a televised conversation between Andrew Marr and the actor Ralph Fiennes, who is currently engaged in an amazing theatrical experiment — doing TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, his last great poem, as a combination of Shakespearean soliloquy and an intimate monologue. (Arifa Akbar has a nice review of it in the Observer.)

Towards the end of the conversation, Marr asked Fiennes to read a piece from Little Gidding, the last of the four poems that make up the set. It was spellbinding to watch and listen to him. And a reminder of what an amazing gift actors have of bringing text to life.

And so on the spur of the moment, I decided to get into the car and drive to Little Gidding, a tiny hamlet about 45 minutes’ drive away. I’d often seen signs to it when driving up the A1 and made the kind of mental notes one makes but never follow up. So this was a nice way of making amends.

We drove along country roads of decreasing width and eventually came to the sign. We turned onto a narrow straight road which was marked as a dead end (somehow appropriate for Eliot, I thought) and eventually came to a beautiful spot with one large house and a few smaller dwellings. And a tiny church set in what appeared to be the garden of the large (but currently apparently deserted) house. There was nobody around — although there were some cars parked near the smaller dwellings.

Somewhat to our surprise, the church was open, but as it was towards the end of a November day, it was pretty dark. But it was also extraordinarily peaceful. If you wanted to retreat from the world, this would be a pretty good place to do it.

And then I took out my phone and found the text of the poem, and read this:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire
Beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

Quote of the Day

”However conservatism might be defined, placing the free market at its centre has been self-defeating. Margaret Thatcher’s political outlook was a blend of Burkean traditionalism with Hayekian libertarianism, a highly combustible mix. Unleashing the anarchic energy of free markets dissolves any social order that is based on traditional notions of duty and responsibility. Choice trumps other values, and everything is for sale. The result has been a culture of narcissism and the commodification of anti-capitalism. It is probably only an oversight on the part of their PR team that the Kardashians have not been marketed as daily readers of Karl Marx.”

John Gray, writing in last week’s New Statesman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Händel | Lascia Ch’io Pianga (from Rinaldo) | Michael Rieber (double bass) and Götz Schumacher (piano)

Link

This is the first instrumental version of the aria I’ve ever heard.

Long Read of the Day

How Does Britain Maintain Relevance in a Changing World?

With difficulty, I’d say. Terrific, perceptive essay by Tim Marshall on the Political Future of Post-Brexit England.

This is how it opens:

Britain’s instinct post-2016 has been to look to the United States. Given America’s continuing political and economic power, this makes sense; but there are now differences to the 20th-century rationales for doing so. In the Cold War, it wasn’t just politically unacceptable to do major trade deals with Russia, it was of limited economic value. But this is not the case with 21st-century China, which, along with the EU and the US, is one of the three modern entities with massive purchasing power. So another hybrid strategy will be required, one that sticks with Washington, but somehow leaves the door open for good political and economic relations with Beijing. It will be, as the diplomats in the Foreign Office like to say, by way of understatement, “challenging.” However, a clear indication of what the British believe to be their best option was seen in the summer of 2021 when its new aircraft carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, was dispatched to the South China Sea with ten US Marine Corps F-35 jets on board.

Don’t you just love that word — “challenging”?

Seán Quinn, the Streisand Effect, and improving the operation of the right to be forgotten

Very interesting blog post by Eoin O’Dell (Whom God Preserve), a distinguished Irish legal scholar, on the flaws in the so-called ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ (RTBF).

Before you embark on it, it might be helpful to know a bit about the Quinn family which features in the story. The Wikipedia page on Seán Quinn, once allegedly the richest man in Ireland, is helpful in that context.

Footnote: The RTBF is a misnomer as the material of which a petitioner complains remains published on the Web. It’s just the right to have Google exclude that article or articles from its Search engine. Perhaps it should be known as The Right to be ‘Disappeared’, since in a comprehensively networked world if the dominant search engine can’t (i.e. won’t) find you then you have been ‘disappeared’ as Pinochet & Co used to put it.

A commonplace booklet

Airless tyres

Now here’s a really good idea.

Made by Michelin, it combines an aluminum wheel with a special “tyre” around it. Made with a plastic matrix laced with — and reinforced by — glass fibres. The company claims to be hoping to have them on the market by 2024.

Monday 15 November, 2021

Posted on November 15, 2021 by jjn1

Fuchsia

My favourite plant. Still going strong in the front garden.

Quote of the Day

Dominic Cummings on working with Boris Johnson:

“One morning in mid-January he called me into his study.

Johnson: Dom, I want to run something by you.

Do you think it’s OK if I spend a lot of time writing my Shakespeare book?

Cummings: What do you mean?

Johnson: This fucking divorce, very expensive. And this job. It’s like getting up every morning pulling a 747 down the runway. (Pause) I love writing, I love it, I want to write my Shakespeare book.

Cummings: I think people expect you to be doing the PM’s job, I wouldn’t talk to people about this if I were you…

You get the idea. Within a month of the election he was bored with the PM job and wanted to get back to what he loves while shaking down the publishers for some extra cash.”

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Wailin’ Jennys | The Parting Glass

Link

A favourite end-of-the-evening song in my part of the world. And if you want to hear what it sounds like at the end of a really big evening, try this.

Long Read of the Day The pandemic and the chronic erosion of trust

A fascinating Tweetstream by Michael Bank Petersen.

Public support for governments is decreasing across the democratic world. This is driven by voter fatigue with restrictions that drag on and on. Such fatigue is a major explanation of increasing radicalisation…

And so the argument builds.

This is an adroit use of Twitter to outline a complicated argument. The end-point is that if countries try to compel vaccination or to quarantine the unvaccinated (as, say, Austria is apparently doing now) then the political backlash could turn really nasty.

Not such a long read. But it gives one a different perspective on things..

DeepMind crunches the numbers – but is it really a magic bullet?

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

The most interesting development of the week had nothing to do with Facebook or even Google losing its appeal against a €2.4bn fine from the European commission for abusing its monopoly of search to the detriment of competitors to its shopping service. The bigger deal was that DeepMind, a London-based offshoot of Google (or, to be precise, its holding company, Alphabet) was moving into the pharmaceutical business via a new company called Isomorphic Labs, the goal of which is grandly described as “reimagining the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach”.

Since they’re interested in first principles, let us first clarify that reference to AI. What it means in this context is not anything that is artificially intelligent, but simply machine learning, a technology of which DeepMind is an acknowledged master. AI has become a classic example of Orwellian newspeak adopted by the tech industry to sanitise a data-gobbling, energy-intensive technology that, like most things digital, has both socially useful and dystopian applications.

That said, this new venture by DeepMind seems more on the socially useful side of the equation. This is because its researchers have discovered that its technology might play an important role in solving a central problem in biology, that of protein folding.

Proteins are large, complex molecules that do most of the heavy lifting in living organisms…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

Think Robots can’t dance? Boston Dynamics taught its robodogs to mimic the Rolling Stones on stage.

Video

Yes, DeepMind crunches the numbers – but is it really a magic bullet?

Posted on November 14, 2021 by jjn1

This morning’s Observer column:

The most interesting development of the week had nothing to do with Facebook or even Google losing its appeal against a €2.4bn fine from the European commission for abusing its monopoly of search to the detriment of competitors to its shopping service. The bigger deal was that DeepMind, a London-based offshoot of Google (or, to be precise, its holding company, Alphabet) was moving into the pharmaceutical business via a new company called Isomorphic Labs, the goal of which is grandly described as “reimagining the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach”.

As breakthroughs in drug discovery accelerate—thanks in part to AI-driven initiatives like Isomorphic Labs—there’s a growing need for precision and efficiency in how those new medicines are produced and delivered. Discovering a molecule is only part of the journey; transforming it into a viable product requires a suite of sophisticated machinery designed to maintain quality and consistency at scale. Among these, the pill tablet capsule counter is essential for the rapid, accurate counting of tablets, ensuring that every package dispensed is perfectly measured and meets regulatory standards.

This type of automation doesn’t just reduce human error—it also speeds up production, allowing pharmaceutical companies to respond more quickly to health crises and evolving patient needs. From formulation to final packaging, the entire process benefits from smart integration of such technology. After all, it’s not enough to invent a life-saving drug; making sure it’s manufactured, counted, and distributed with precision is equally critical in delivering real-world impact.

Since they’re interested in first principles, let us first clarify that reference to AI. What it means in this context is not anything that is artificially intelligent, but simply machine learning, a technology of which DeepMind is an acknowledged master. AI has become a classic example of Orwellian newspeak adopted by the tech industry to sanitise a data-gobbling, energy-intensive technology that, like most things digital, has both socially useful and dystopian applications.

That said, this new venture by DeepMind seems more on the socially useful side of the equation. This is because its researchers have discovered that its technology might play an important role in solving a central problem in biology, that of protein folding.

Proteins are large, complex molecules that do most of the heavy lifting in living organisms…

Read on

Quote of the Day

Posted on November 13, 2021 by jjn1

However conservatism might be defined, placing the free market at its centre has been self-defeating. Margaret Thatcher’s political outlook was a blend of Burkean traditionalism with Hayekian libertarianism, a highly combustible mix. Unleashing the anarchic energy of free markets dissolves any social order that is based on traditional notions of duty and responsibility. Choice trumps other values, and everything is for sale. The result has been a culture of narcissism and the commodification of anti-capitalism. It is probably only an oversight on the part of their PR team that the Kardashians have not been marketed as daily readers of Karl Marx.

John Gray, writing in this week’s New Statesman

Friday 12 November, 2021

Posted on November 12, 2021 by jjn1

Cafe society

Quote of the Day

”He only feels life through his brain, or through sex, and there is a gulf between these two separate departments.”

Ottoline Morrell on Bertrand Russell (she would know, since she had a long affair with him)

She was an interesting, generous woman and quite a good photographer. Some of her pictures are on her Wikipedia page.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | French Suite No.2 in C minor BWV813 | András Schiff

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Internet’s Unkillable App

Well, of course I was bound to enjoy this paean of praise by Dave Pell in which he argues that the noisier our digital lives get, the more popular the humble newsletter becomes. I’m hoping that you might like it too.

Cave paintings. Petroglyphs. Smoke signals. Carrier pigeons. Telegraphs. The Pony Express. Airmail. Blogs. Myspace. Human modes of communication come and go, each replaced by a new technology and a faster method of delivery. But somehow, the humble newsletter survives. In an era with countless ways to reach out and bombard someone, newsletters have not only endured; they’re more popular than ever (and not only as some artisanal relic kept alive by the same people who keep buying vinyl LPs). More and more writers—including, ahem, some excellent ones right here at The Atlantic—are competing to entice us with the perfect subject line and the most sublime greeting…

Read on.

Mario Vargas Llosa: How I Lost My Fear of Flying

A lovely little essay by a great writer:

There are certain naïve people who believe that a fear of flying is, or can be explained by, a fear of death. They are wrong: fear of flying is fear of flying, not of death, a fear as particular and specific as a fear of spiders, or of the void, or of cats, three common examples among the thousands that make up the panoply of human fears. Fear of flying wells up suddenly, when people not lacking in imagination and sensitivity realise that they are thirty thousand feet in the air, travelling through clouds at eight hundred miles an hour, and ask, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ And begin to tremble.

It happened to me, after many years getting on and off aircraft as often as I change my shirts…

Frank Pasquale on digital capitalism

Frank Pasquale is one of the geniuses in my line of business and this 16-minute Keynote is a paradigm of a perfect Keynote talk: just the right length and profundity. And memorable because you come away with the central message he wanted to get across.

Try it.

Thursday 11 November, 2021

Posted on November 11, 2021 by jjn1

Quote of the Day

”My face looks like a wedding cake that has been left out in the rain.”

W.H. Auden

He was right, as you can see here! But good for him.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder | My Girl Josephine

Link

Long Read of the Day

Shortage nation: why the UK is braced for a grim Christmas

Nice explainer by Tim Harford on why we run out of petrol when supplies are constrained rather than just putting up the price of a gallon (as economists would recommend).

In the textbooks, a “shortage” doesn’t mean dry pumps or empty shelves: it means that prices spike. They might double or triple. Some will find it impossibly expensive to drive, and others might find their finances ruined because they have no choice but to buy fuel they cannot really afford. But there are no queues; there is always petrol available to those who are willing and able to pay.

Ah, those dreamworld textbooks. The real world is a different place.

An instructive read.

More on Alexis Madrigal’s experience of Covid

Andrew Brown (Whom God Preserve) was not impressed by Madrigal’s experience (mentioned in yesterday’s edition). He writes:

Madrigal’s piece gave off such an extraordinary vibe of terrified Eloi wandering too close to the Morlocks. He and his entire family are vaccinated. He caught something that affected him no worse than a bad cold as the price of a fun fancy weekend in New Orleans. And yet we get paragraph after paragraph of freakouts, and the whole family panicking, because of this enormous catastrophe which disrupted his life for a whole week. Right at the end, he asks the only interesting question, which is how will society cope when Covid becomes low-level and endemic: the only possible answer is “better than you did, chum.”

Someone I know who lives in Hong Kong has just sent me pictures of the building opposite where he lives cordoned off by police, and everyone in it tested because someone who lives there tested positive. That’s the price of zero covid and Chinese societies can pay it, for the moment. But there is no way in hell America could be run like that. Poor people just aren’t part of their health planning. So the Eloi are going to remain in a state of ineffective terror while the disease, presumably, slowly loses virulence as it spreads through the Morlocks.

An honest government ad

Link

Nice surprise appearance by Greta Thunberg at the end.

H/T to Andrew Curry — who, incidentally, warns that it’s “not safe for work”. Can’t think why. Readers of this Blog are hardened viewers, surely.

Chart of the Day

Every year, Knight Frank releases data on what it takes to join the 1 per cent in different countries. I always find this data and the disparity between countries to be fascinating. In the UK, $1.8m gets you into the top 1 per cent. Compare that with $280,000 in Brazil or $60,000 in Indonesia.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

Hand-build wooden Apple 1 goes on sale

Anyone interested in an Apple I hand built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak circa 1976 has until 11:30 am PST today to make a bid as the rare computer goes up for auction at John Moran Auctioneers outside Los Angeles, California.

The vintage machine is one of the few Apple-I versions encased in koa wood, from the Acacia koa tree that is endemic to Hawaii and was fashionable in the 1970s. The computer was made during the company’s garage start-up days and is only one of six known remaining Koa wood case Apple-I machines in existence.

Link

Oddly enough, my maternal grandfather was a John Moran. And he was also an auctioneer, among other things. He never sold anything like this, though.