Master of the Universe

This handsome specimen is a cat we looked after for a couple of days last week when his so-called ‘owners’ (i.e. servants) were away. He is living proof that P.G. Wodehouse was right about cats.

Tweet of the Day

See Marina Hyde’s column — linked below.

Quote of the Day

”So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.”

• Alan Bennett on Arianna Stassinopoulos

She was an undergraduate at Cambridge in my time, and boy, was she a pain.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ruth Moody with Mark Knopfler | Pockets

Link

Long Read of the day

The untold story of the big boat that broke the world

Intriguing Wired story of what happened to the ship that blocked the Suez Canal.

Outside, the Egyptian sun slowly simmers cargo headed for the UK and Germany, as well as trains destined for central and eastern Europe – wiring, lawnmowers and gazebos which will one day be bound for assembly lines, supermarket shelves and homes across the continent. Alongside surgical gowns, wheelchair parts and sun loungers, there’s also plenty of food: tea leaves, lemons and tofu all rot away in the heat. None of it can be offloaded.

This is the Ever Given, the same ship that launched a thousand memes when it got stuck across the Suez Canal on March 23 and held up nearly $60 billion of trade. It took a week of tugs, dredging and a crack team of salvage experts to free the 220,000-tonne megaship. As the Ever Given set sail once more, horns blared out in triumph. Yet its next unscheduled stopover lay just 30 kilometres away in Great Bitter Lake where it was towed for a seemingly routine inspection. It’s been anchored there ever since.

The vessel is stuck once more – this time by an almighty international legal row.

Great read.

Marina Hyde on Hancock’s Half Hour

As usual, she’s spot on:

Sorry, but the only thing I want to see Matt Hancock doing against the back of his office door is sliding down it with his head in his hands. But he can probably bank on not being sacked by Boris Johnson for having an affair. It would be like being sacked by Stalin for being slightly arsey to work with.

Even so, Hancock will be glad that the British Antarctic Territory has been added to the green list, just as he’s been added to the shit list. The South Pole suddenly looks well worth packing his bags for. Temperatures are currently minus 87 but feel like minus 108, making it considerably less frosty than any of Matt’s current climes.

That said, if Hancock does end up being resigned for this, it would fit with the general twilight mood in the UK’s national story. Nothing says “country that’s going to make a massive success of itself’” like a guy getting away with contributing to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths but having to quit for a knee-trembler. It’s like getting Al Capone for snogging.

What a columnist!

Memo to corporate leaders post-Covid: the disruption to businesses has only just begun

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

The problem with having had the fast-forward button suddenly propel us into an unexpected place, though, is that we find ourselves unmoored. We start wondering about what lies ahead as the immediate threat of the virus recedes. What will our post-pandemic future be like? In relation to work, three main possibilities are currently taking up all the airtime: continuing to work from home (WFH); a hybrid mode in which we spend some time in the office but also two or three days WFH; and a return to ye olde days commuting to the office to gather round the water cooler and pretend to be doing something useful.

In a remarkable essay published a few days ago, first as a long blog post entitled Creating the Future of Work and later as an engaging Tweetstorm, Stephen Sinofsky, a former senior Microsoft executive, argues that if these are the only options under consideration then we have gravely underestimated the industrial significance of the pandemic. Of course the nature of work will have been changed by what has happened. But what is more significant, he contends, is that the shock will also reshape the nature of the corporations in which most of us work. The problem is that most of the people who run large organisations and corporations haven’t twigged that yet…

Do read the whole thing.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Cat who family thought had been cremated turns back up at home Link
• Michigan boat captain finds message in a bottle after almost a century Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Girl and grand piano

Quote of the Day

”My idea of a good picture is one that is in focus.”

• Andy Warhol, 1979

And, boy, did it show.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Diana Krall | Fly Me to the Moon | Live in Paris

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Whose Democracy Counts When Global Social Media Rules Are Set? 

What works for the United States may not work elsewhere, and a provision that seems benign in one national governance context can be anything but, in another.

Insightful essay by Heidi Tworek arguing that when we talk about the impact of social media on democracy, we spend most of the time talking about social media and very little about ‘democracy’ — as if it were a simple and uncontested concept.

Instead of talking about democracy as an abstract, ill-defined ideal, we can examine different definitions of democracy and consider the role of social media in each. By breaking down the components of democracy, we can piece together a more complete picture of how platform governance might address each issue. Perhaps even more crucially, we can follow a global thread to see how solutions that might seem to work in one democracy may prove harmful or extremely complicated in another.

She puts forward a neat idea — to think about democracy is as a Venn diagram of values. For different democracies, these values overlap in different ways.

Worth reading the whole thing.

Hypocrisy, Pulitzer prizes and the New York Times

Zaid Jilani asks whether the New York Times’s behaviour in forcing out a star reporter over claims of racism, only to reassure the Pulitzer Prize Board that he was innocent was hypocritical.

The answer, of course, is yes.

Don McNeil is the star reporter in question, and his treatment by the Times was, in my opinion, unforgivable. It provided a vivid confirmation of Naughton’s First Law of Organisations: All organisations are sociopathic. Which is why Facebook, say, could be entirely staffed by clones of Mahatma Gandhi and St Francis of Assisi and it would still be a toxic organisation — because it will do what it’s constituted to do, namely maximise shareholder value.

Jilani’s account of what happened to McNeil is worth reading, just to get chapter and verse of the case.

Is it time to ditch Chrome?

From Wired

Answer: yes. I did it long ago, and I get very cross when I come on websites which refuse to work properly if you access them with a less obnoxious browser.

Despite a poor reputation for privacy, Google’s Chrome browser continues to dominate. The web browser has around 65 per cent market share and two billion people are regularly using it. Its closest competitor, Apple’s Safari, lags far behind with under 20 per cent market share. That’s a lot of power, even before you consider Chrome’s data collection practices.

Is Google too big and powerful, and do you need to ditch Chrome for good? Privacy experts say yes. Chrome is tightly integrated with Google’s data gathering infrastructure, including services such as Google search and Gmail – and its market dominance gives it the power to help set new standards across the web. Chrome is one of Google’s most powerful data-gathering tools.

It’s dead simple to do: Other browsers — Brave, Firefox, Safari, to name just three — are just a click away. And they’re more protective of your privacy.

A Day at the Seaside in 1899

This is astonishing — a short movie filmed 132 years ago on the beaches of Étretat and Le Tréport in Normandy, possibly by George Mikes. It’s been enhanced using machine-learning technology and colorisation. The film begins with passengers arriving at Mers-Le Tréport train station. Interesting also to see the preposterous mobile beach huts for more adventurous women to change into swimming costumes. The huts were then rolled down to the water’s edge for a secluded dip in the water.

The ‘enhancements’ were:

1. Cleaned noise artifacts
2. Increased frame interpolation from 15 fps to 60 fps using Rife
3. Increased resolution from 240p to 4000p.
4. Colorised using Deoldify
5. Created ambient soundtrack.

Magical.

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Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Brexit referendum!

Quote of the Day

”I don’t know what our relationship will be in 20 years’ time. I don’t know what the EU will be like in 20 years. And maybe I don’t know what your Union here will be like in 20 years’ time. Who knows? So we have to be ready for change.” * João Vale de Almeida , the EU’s Ambassador to London Lovely.

Bitcoin news

It’s peaked (at least for the time being). But if you had Bitcoins before late 2020, you could still contemplate a comfortable retirement.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Laudate Dominum, KV 339 | Patricia Janečková

Link

Sublime.

Long Read of the Day

”A politics of hope against a politics of fear”

This is the title of a striking essay that Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times of May 1, 2019. It came up when I was digging through my notebook for a piece I’m incubating about concepts of democracy. The original text is behind a paywall, so here’s a summary based on my notes.

“Faith in the kind of democracy we prefer”, writes Wolf, “is declining. “And charismatic politicians are enticing people into giving them support. How should politicians of the centre and centre-right respond? The underlying reality that the only way for liberal democracy to survive is by enabling widely-shared prosperity.”

Amen to that.

Wolf has ten ideas for how to counter populist politics.

1. Leadership matters. Democratic politics is not about buying votes. Politicians have to persuade people — i.e. get ‘buy-in’.
2. Competence matters. Most populists are good at campaigning but useless at governing.
3. Citizenship matters. “A democracy is a community of citizens. The sense of what is owed to — and expected from — citizens is the foundation of successful democracies.
4. Inclusion matters. In the US the Gini coefficient (which measures inequality of market incomes) is not particularly high, but inequality of disposable incomes is much higher. This is a policy choice, not an accident.
5. Economic reform matters. As Paul Collier (in The Future of Capitalism) and Colin Mayer (in Prosperity), argue we need reform of taxation and of the corporation if we are to create a society that is economically successful and more inclusive.
6. The ‘local’ matters. “devolving decisions, while also giving communities the means to revitalise themselves, must be part of good new politics.”
7. Public services matter — “even if people dislike paying the taxes needed to support them…. The libertarian idea of a minimal state that leaves all this to a free market is not only unworkable, but incompatible with democracy”.
8. Managed globalisation and global cooperation also matter. “No country is an island. We depend on ideas, resources, people, goods and services from other countries. National sovereignty does matter. But it is not all that matters.”
9. Looking ahead matters. “We live in a world of large long-term upheavals — notably climate change, artificial intelligence and the rise of Asia. Good governments must look at these changes and what these things might mean for their peoples. If democracies cannot do this kind of forward thinking, then they will fail.”
10. Complexity matters. Mencken: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” Wolf: “A politics that rests on popular anger and despotic whim is bound to fail. The right response has to be a politics that bases hope on realism. That is the only sort of democratic politics worth doing.”

Wolf is one of the wisest people I read.

Startups Race Microsoft to Find Better Ways to Cool Data Centers

Nonconducting liquids show promise in replacing expensive and wasteful air conditioning.

Link

Data centers consume 2% to 4% of the world’s electricity, and almost half of that power goes to cooling, according to the Uptime Institute, a consulting firm in Seattle. Early on, most data was kept on-site at the banks, universities, or corporations that generated it, where cooling often meant little more than opening the window. Today, a growing share of the world’s data is consolidated in megacenters with thousands of processors, and the vast majority of them use traditional air conditioning. While some heat is good for computers, too much can cause systems to crash, and with each generation of computer chips running faster and hotter, the systems will soon be too hot for even the most efficient air conditioner. Finding better ways to keep temperatures down could save the industry some $10 billion a year on electricity alone, according to Uptime. “Air just isn’t a very effective medium for transferring heat,” says Rabih Bashroush, global head of IT advisory services at Uptime.

So what to do? Answer:

Microsoft — which has more than 200 data-centres globally — is testing systems in which servers are bathed directly in a fluid that doesn’t conduct electricity. It estimates liquid cooling could allow it to fit 10 times as much computing power in the same space. “We’re just starting down the liquid path,” says Christian Belady, chief of the unit that develops technology for data centers. “You’re going to see a lot of rapid change in how we do things.”

One of the startups hoping to exploit this, er, liquid opportunity, is called Iceotope! It’s based in Sheffield.

Boris Johnson’s next own goal

UEFA’s leaders threatened last week to take the final away from Wembley and move it to Hungary unless 2,500 of their dignitaries can avoid quarantine rules. Now they are “working closely” with the UK government using the so-called elite sport exemption to enable a 2,500-strong horde of hangers-on and parasites to come to the UK for the final.

As usual, Marina Hyde gets to the heart of the matter:

The optimistic among us would hope Uefa might come to understand that trying to blag 2,500 members of the “football family” through under the elite sport exemption was a bit of a stretch – unless the sport in question was expensing five-course dinners and sex workers.

But the realists among us – ie everyone with any experience of football governance and current UK governance – will be thinking that something rather less palatable is in the offing. Is hosting the final worth further compromising the idea that we’re all somehow in this together, or is the waiving of Covid rules for a bunch of largely parasitic liggers regarded as a price worth paying by Boris Johnson’s government?

My hunch: the government will cave. Too many votes in football.

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Why many employers like staff who work from home

Official statistics in the UK showed people working from home last year put in six hours of unpaid overtime a week on average, compared with 3.6 hours for those who never worked at home Source: Financial Times, 13 June, 2021

Quote of the Day

””Never express yourself more clearly than you think”

• Niels Bohr.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grateful Dead | Not Fade Away & Goin’ down the Road Feeling Bad | Live at Manhattan Center, New York

Link

More evidence of my misspent youth.

Long Read of the Day

Biden’s China strategy: a chronology

By Adam Tooze

Link

Joe Biden has come a long way on China. At the beginning of his Presidential run in May 2019 at a speech in Iowa he still adopted a blithe attitude of superiority. Invoking his years of diplomatic experience he reassured the crowd: “there’s not a “single solitary” world leader who would trade the problems the United States faces for those confronting China. “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man … I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.”

By 2020, as the campaign heated up, Biden’s soft line on China was out of tune with a growing bipartisan consensus on the need to confront China’s rise. As one of his advisors would later remark to the Economist, “During the campaign Mr Biden had to be “reprogrammed” on China.”

The people who did the reprogramming were the members of the DC foreign policy “blob” that gathered around Biden.

This is part of work in progress by Adam Tooze. But if you’re interested (as I am) in tracking the gradual move towards the kind of superpower conflict envisaged in 2034: A Novel of the next world war it’s a useful start.

Jonty Bloom on the DUP

link

Of all the groups promised the earth by the Brexiteers and then abandoned, the DUP and the good people of Ulster are the largest and most obvious. The consequences are truly terrifying but the most frightening thing is that the Brexiteers don’t care.

There is an obvious answer to all these issues however, the UK could rejoin the EU’s veterinary standards regime and 80% of the checks disappear. Then the DUP can join a foreign round the world trip promoting Northern Ireland as the best of both worlds, in the UK and the Single Market. The money, jobs and investment would flood in.

What are the chances of that? About zero, the UK government is too stupid to compromise on veterinary standards, the DUP is too stupid to see the way ahead. Both are stuck in fantasy cults, where reality and facts are as nothing to the purity of the cause.

More on Edward de Bono

I said in my post on de Bono that I could never decide whether he was a genius or a charlatan. Quite a few readers emailed to say that they though he might have been the former — or at any rate a visionary.

For example Clive Page wrote:

I wasn’t going to follow this up, but the Weekend FT yesterday published a letter from Andrew Hilton the director of the “Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation” claiming that the obituaries in the papers didn’t take Edward de Bono seriously enough and that he once published a paper on “The IBM Dollar” which was genuinely innovative.

This was written in 1994, perhaps towards the end of the era when nobody got fired for buying IBM. It might still be relevant if one replaces IBM by say Apple.

And Dave Birch (Whom God Preserve) pointed me to a post on his blog making much the same point:

Many years ago I picked up a report from the CSFI called “The IBM Dollar”, written Dr. de Bono.

His writing had an immediate impact on me, coming as I was from the technology side of electronic money. IBM, in de Bono’s early 1990s thought experiment, might issue “IBM Dollars” (what we would now called “tokens”) that would be redeemable for IBM products and services, but are also tradable for other companies’ monies or for other assets in a liquid market. When I read this, I felt as if scales were falling from my eyes. It hasn’t occurred to me that anyone other than a central bank could issue money!

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Wild roses in the wood down the road.

Quote of the Day

”Aristotle once said that a play should have a beginning, a middle and an end. But what did he know? Today, a play must have a first half, a second half, and a station break.”

• Alfred Hitchcock

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Scott Joplin | The Entertainer | Richard Smith

Link

First time I’ve heard a guitar version.

Long Read of the Day

Where is the Political Economy?

by Angela P. Harris, Amy Kapczynski and Noah Zatz

Long, sobering, scholarly and perceptive.

Link

Neoliberal rhetoric portrays the economy as a self-regulating machine that begins to malfunction when the state “intervenes,” disrupting the internal mechanisms that would otherwise yield good and efficient results. LPE scholars, building on previous critical legal work, argue instead that markets are created and maintained by state law and are embedded in political institutions and social norms. Turning to prescription, we often call for “democratizing” the economy—as in the LPE Project’s recent conference, “Democracy Beyond Neoliberalism.” But what, and where, is the economy that we should be democratizing?

Embracing the terms “economy” and “political economy,” as LPE has done, risks—unless we are careful—invoking just the kind of separate, reified realm that we are trying to critique. In our view, defining “the economy,” and studying how legal institutions have done so, should be central issues that LPE scholarship aims to address.

The Law and Political Economy (LPE) project is one of the most interesting things going on in academia at the moment.

Apple thought it could ‘manage’ China: big mistake

Salutary dose of realism from Jack Nicas.

Mr. Guthrie’s career arc and evolving view of China tell the story of Western industry’s complicated dance with the country over the past three decades. Mr. Guthrie and many executives, politicians and academics had bet that Western investment in China would lead the country to liberalize. It is now clear that they miscalculated.

“We were wrong,” said Mr. Guthrie, who left Apple in 2019. “The wild card was Xi Jinping.”

This is a useful primer on the history of Apple’s involvement in China. Mr Nicas told the story in more depth on an edition of the NYT’s The Daily podcast.

It only takes one bit of data…

Quentin’s salutary, not to say creepy, tale:

A few days ago, I created a new Facebook account. Not for myself, of course; I’m not stupid! (I deleted my own account many years ago and haven’t looked back.) No, it was because my company was writing some software that connected to Instagram, and doing that requires you to have a Facebook account in order to get ‘Developer’ access and for testing.

So, I set up a new email address and registered with a somewhat fake name, logged in and started browsing a generic here-are-some-feeds-you-might-be-interested-in type of experience. No personal details… all nice and anonymous.

The following day, I couldn’t log in. “Your account has been blocked.” Had I been rumbled? Ah, no, they just wanted to check I was really a real human by sending a text to my phone. I put in my phone number, got the text, filled in the code, and I was back in again. Jolly good. I logged out and went back to work.

A few days later…

The following Tuesday I logged in again, and there was a picture of my cousin, listed as someone I might want to connect with. Nice picture, I thought. And then, “Wait a minute! How do they know about her?”

I scrolled down, and sure enough, there were my friends, family, past work colleagues… dozens of ’em, all just waiting to welcome my ‘anonymous’ account into the fold. And then I remembered…

Read on…

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Quote of the Day

”The whole way I think about politics came out of the English Department. They taught a form of literary criticism which was based on analyzing texts in a very close way. If you start analyzing the text of a newspaper or a political commentator on CNN using the same approach of close textual analysis, you come to understand it in a different way. It’s not any different from reading Henry James.”

• Joan Didion, 2001

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Richards and Norah Jones | Love Hurts

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Minimum Viable Self

Nice meditation by Drew Austin.

This is how it begins…

Two decades ago, before social media existed, Zygmunt Bauman articulated a perfect description of how it would soon shape our behavior and frame our relationships to one another. In his 2000 book Liquid Modernity, Bauman wrote: “Seen from a distance, (other people’s) existence seems to possess a coherence and a unity which they cannot have, in reality, but which seems evident to the spectator. This, of course, is an optical illusion. The distance (that is, the paucity of our knowledge) blurs the details and effaces everything that fits ill into the Gestalt. Illusion or not, we tend to see other people’s lives as works of art. And having seen them this way, we struggle to (make our lives) the same.” The conditions Bauman described had already emerged in other media environments, such as television, but the participatory nature of the internet and specifically social media would compel everyone involved to develop an online identity, intentionally or not, that would correspond to their offline identity but would never quite mirror it perfectly.

Reasons to be cheerful — well, more optimistic anyway

Scott Galloway’s glass-half-full view

This week’s edition:

And this week, Lina Khan, the author of “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” was confirmed by the Senate (with 19 Republican votes) as Federal Trade Commissioner. In a surprise move, Biden even appointed her Chair of the Commission. A 32-year-old, British-born woman of Pakistani heritage is now facing down the most powerful corporations in history, backed by the full might of the U.S. government.

I. Am. Joyous.

Our existing antitrust laws are heavy ammunition, but they’ve been weakened by business-friendly judges and aren’t optimized for our digital world. So Congress is working on Antitrust 2.0, with a legislative package that would address Big Tech’s habit of buying the competition, their monopolistic platforms, and their restrictions on consumer data portability. Significant parts are still a long way from passage, but still … progress.

Ms. Khan will get more resources as well. Biden has proposed an 11% funding increase to the FTC, boosting its spending from $351 million to $390 million. The president’s proposal will also see the FTC increase its headcount to 1,250 — its largest staff since it was eviscerated in the early 1980s. The DOJ’s Antitrust Division will receive a budget increase of 10%.

Galloway’s blog is always like a a breath of fresh air.

Is Biden’s appointment of a pioneering young lawyer bad news for big tech?

Answer: hopefully yes!

My column in yesterday’s Observer.

Arrayed on big screens before the members of the subcommittee are the four bosses of the aforementioned tech giants: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, then midway through his Star Trek makeover; Tim Cook of Apple, looking like the clean-living lad who never understood the locker-room jokes; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, wearing his trademark glued-on hairdo; and the Google boss, Sundar Pichai, every inch the scholarship boy who can’t understand why he’s been arrested by the Feds. And on the vast mahogany bench towering above these screened moguls sits David Cicilline, subcommittee chairman and the politician who has overseen the investigation.

To be honest, I was watching out of duty and with low expectations. All the previous congressional interrogations of Zuckerberg and co had alternated between political grandstanding and farce. I expected much the same from this encounter. And then I noticed a young woman wearing a black mask standing behind Cicilline. She looked vaguely familiar, but it took me a few moments before I twigged that she was Lina Khan. At which point I sat up and started taking notes.

I had been following her for years, ever since a paper she had published as a graduate student in the Yale Law Journal in January 2017…

The perfect number of hours to work every day? Five

From Wired:

Tower CEO Stephan Aarstol says he was startled by the results when the business adopted a five-hour working day in 2015. Staff worked from 8am to 1pm with no breaks and, because employees became so focused on maximising output in order to have the afternoons to themselves, turnover increased by 50 per cent.

“The warehouse guys were rolling their eyes when we first rolled this out, but the biggest gains were actually there,” he says. “It had taken them five minutes per package to ship before, but within a few weeks they had got that down to less than three minutes. They were doing stuff that real productivity experts would do. I told them they had a constraint and it forced them to creatively think.”

Rheingans CEO Lasse Rheingans says when he first floated the idea of compressed working with staff they came up with the idea of banning distractions like smartphones from their desks and minimising the use of “productivity killers like Slack”. The aim for Rheingans was to keep productivity constant but to give people more time off.

I really like that reference to Slack. I’ve never understood why people use it.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Rocket Man Nice five-minute movie about Ky Michaelson. He’s a retired Hollywood stunt man who lived to tell the tale. Now builds rockets in his garage. He was the first civilian to successfully launch an amateur rocket into space in 2004. Link
• Tim Hunkin: Secret life of the fax machine. Link
•  Monty Python | The Royal Society For Putting Things On Top of Other Things Link
• The Onion’s guide to modern Irish literature.  After reading its Bloomsday spoof the other day, Cormac McKenna sent me the link to a much more creative spoof they had done — this time on Samuel Beckett: “Scholars Discover 23 Blank Pages That May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play”.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Guy Haworth RIP

Guy died on Wednesday, after suffering a severe stroke a few days earlier. He was an eminent academic (with about 55 papers to his name), an expert on chess programming and an historian of systems engineering as a discipline.

In the late 1960s he and I shared a lovely sub-basement office in the Cambridge Control Lab when we were graduate students. He was a much better student than I was, and I always had the feeling that he thought I was a little weird. (Perfectly understandable: I was probably the only graduate student in Engineering who went to Raymond Williams’s lectures in Sidgwick Avenue!) But he was always genially tolerant of my eccentricities and I liked him a lot.

After we left Cambridge we lost touch for a while, and then I discovered that he was a dedicated follower of this blog. He was a very sharp and perceptive reader too — I have a nice little trove of short emails from him that would arrive first thing in the morning alerting me to a typo, or a glaring error, or adding something useful to my inadequate store of knowledge. And he was always as non-judgemental as he had been when we were graduate students together.

In March this year, for example, I posted a photograph of Trinity Lane in Cambridge and observed that Vladimir Nabokov’s room had overlooked the lane when he was a student in Trinity. Back came an email from Guy pointing out that the lane had also been used by Pasolini when he was filming the Miller’s Tale — something I wouldn’t have known in a million years. The last email came on April 23 after he had spotted a claim in Memex of the day before that Joe Biden had “dominated” Lina Khan, when of course I meant that he had nominated her for the FTC.

He was the kind of reader that every blogger dreams of having — fiercely intelligent, well-informed and generous. I was lucky to have known him. May he rest in peace.

Quote of the Day

Katherine Hepburn, on meeting her co-star in a new film for the first time:

”I’m a little too tall for you, Mr Tracy.”

Spencer Tracy

”Never mind, Miss Hepburn, I’ll soon cut you down to size.”

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel: | “As steals the morn” | Amanda Forsythe and Thomas Cooley | Voices of Music

Link

I love Handel, but didn’t know this aria.

Voices of Music is a non-profit artists and teachers dedicated to: performing and recording music composed before the year 1800; affordable educational programs for children and adults; advanced training for young professionals; and community outreach. There’s a donation link which I recommend.

Long Read of the Day

A virtuous cycle of worker power and technology?

What if higher wages drive faster productivity growth?

Recently, pondering the mystery of why the pandemic doesn’t seem to have been as economically devastating as we expected, I chanced on this essay by Noah Smith.

The other day I ordered at a restaurant on my smartphone. No waiter came by to ask me if I was ready to order. I scanned a QR code on a piece of paper taped to a wooden post; this brought up the menu on my phone, and I simply indicated what I wanted. As if by magic, a server appeared a few minutes later with the food. During my meal, no one wandered by to ask me if I “was still working on that”; when I wanted more food, I just used my phone again. I’m sure I’m one of many millions of Americans who’s learning to order food this way, as a result of the understaffing and social distancing rules imposed by the Covid pandemic.

While I was ordering this way, I kept thinking over and over that this shift is a real game-changer in terms of productivity. Let people order food on their phones, and the number of wait staff you need to deliver the same service goes way down. It’s barely more onerous for the customer if at all, and it eliminates the need to have human beings constantly sashaying around the establishment, eyeing how much diners have eaten.

Which is why he wasn’t too surprised when he saw this chart of how productivity appears to be rising sharply…

So then he starts to reflect, in his characteristically thoughtful way, on the possible reasons for this.

Read on to follow his reasoning. It’s worth the journey.

Edward de Bono RIP

I could never decide whether he was a genius or a charlatan. I enjoyed some of his books in the way I enjoyed the books of Roald Dahl. Some of his former colleagues in the Cambridge Medical School, however, seemed to be in little doubt about the question (which might have been influenced by the fact that his earnings were hundreds of times theirs!).

This Guardian obit by Stuart Jeffries is nicely balanced, as obituaries should be.

He was rarely burdened with humility, informing the world that his childhood nickname was “Genius”. By contrast, he did not suffer detractors gladly. Years after a stinking review of Six Thinking Hats appeared in the Independent, written by Adam Mars-Jones, De Bono told the Guardian: “That book, we know, has saved $40m dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours. Now, some silly little idiot, trying to be clever, compared to the actual results, that just makes him look like a fool.”

Mars-Jones retorted that when his review appeared, De Bono “wrote to the editor [saying] … that he was entitled to compensation for the loss of earnings which my comments had inflicted on his lecture tours (which he assessed at £200,000). He seemed less taken with my proposal that he pay a dividend to every journalist who, by taking him seriously, had inflated his earning power.”

At last, the Onion takes Bloomsday seriously

From yesterday’s edition:

DUBLIN—Professor Hanlon O’Faolin, once called “mad” at the Royal Irish Academy for attempting to reanimate the traditional body of Celtic folktales with the power of elcectic multilingual puns, is readying his apoplectic Bloomsday Device for activation on June 16. “Yes! Yes, they laughed at me yes but now yes I will make them pay and yes!” O’Faolin wrote in a letters to the Irish Times, promising the destruction of Dublin on the same day portrayed in Joyce’s Ulysses. “When the sun first strikes the Martello Tower, the first notes of ‘The Rose of Castille’ shall ring out, the streets shall run with rashers, kidneys, and sausages, and I shall forge in the smithy of Dublin’s soul the uncreated conscience of my race!” Dublin police say they are working around the clock from profiles to create a portrait of the professor as a crazy man.

A photographer at Dartington Hall, overlooked by Henry Moore’s reclining nude.

Quote of the Day

”Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”

• Robert Frost

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon and Alan Connor | Lament for Limerick

Link

First time I’ve heard them play together.

Short Read of the Day

Coding is not ‘fun’, it’s technically and ethically complex

Nice Aeon essay by Walter Vannini which rather punters the feel-good nonsense spouted by Education ministers everywhere.

Sample:

Insisting on the glamour and fun of coding is the wrong way to acquaint kids with computer science. It insults their intelligence and plants the pernicious notion in their heads that you don’t need discipline in order to progress. As anyone with even minimal exposure to making software knows, behind a minute of typing lies an hour of study.

It’s better to admit that coding is complicated, technically and ethically. Computers, at the moment, can only execute orders, to varying degrees of sophistication. So it’s up to the developer to be clear: the machine does what you say, not what you mean. More and more ‘decisions’ are being entrusted to software, including life-or-death ones: think self-driving cars; think semi-autonomous weapons; think Facebook and Google making inferences about your marital, psychological or physical status, before selling it to the highest bidder. Yet it’s rarely in the interests of companies and governments to encourage us to probe what’s going on beneath these processes.

Victory for Tech’s Critics?

I’ve added a question-mark to that Bloomberg headline:

President Joe Biden named Lina Khan chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, an unexpected move that puts one of the most prominent advocates of aggressive antitrust enforcement against U.S. technology giants in charge of the agency.

Khan’s elevation to chairwoman marks her rapid rise to the top of U.S. antitrust enforcement. Currently a professor at Columbia Law School, just a few years ago she was a law student at Yale University. Now the 32-year-old is in charge of one of two agencies responsible for policing competition in the U.S. The other is the Justice Department’s antitrust division.

This isn’t something I expected. I had fervently hoped that she would become a Commissioner. Making her the Chair is a brilliant move and suggests that Biden is more serious about controlling the companies than doubters believed.

Ms Khan is a remarkable woman. I’ve been following her since reading her pathbreaking article — “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” in the Yale Law Journal in January 2017. In a way, she’s the benign inverse of Robert Bork, whose 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox shaped the way that American thinking and jurisprudence about antitrust evolved over 40 years. Bork’s view was that we should only be concerned about corporate power if there was evidence that consumer harm — for which price-gouging was a proxy — could be shown. But if companies weren’t inflicting that kind of consumer harm then we should be less concerned about their power. And since many of the products and services provided by the tech giants were both free and immensely popular with users, arraigning them simply because they were powerful amounted to punishing them for being excellent. (This was the ‘paradox’ implied by his book’s title.) My (optimistic) hunch is that Khan’s thinking will shape the next few decades of corporate regulation and jurisprudence in a different direction, at least in the tech industry.

My Observer column next Sunday is about this and the legislative blitzkrieg launched the other day by David Cicillene, the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Law and Administrative Law.

Andreessen Horowitz’s new blog

It looks like a multi-author blog on the Crooked Timber model. One of the initial posts is by Marc Andreessen, an individual who (a bit like Elon Musk) manages to be interesting, infuriating and insanely rich. And he’s often an entertaining writer.

His opening sally on this new venture is — predictably perhaps — a hymn of praise to the technology that enabled us to keep working under lockdown conditions. Sample:

Finally, possibly the most profound technology-driven change of all — geography, and its bearing on how we live and work. For thousands of years, until the time of COVID, the dominant fact of every productive economy has been that people need to live where we work. The best jobs have always been in the bigger cities, where quality of life is inevitably impaired by the practical constraints of colocation and density. This has also meant that governance of bigger cities can be truly terrible, since people have no choice but to live there if they want the good jobs.

What we have learned — what we were forced to learn — during the COVID lockdowns has permanently shattered these assumptions. It turns out many of the best jobs really can be performed from anywhere, through screens and the internet. It turns out people really can live in a smaller city or a small town or in rural nowhere and still be just as productive as if they lived in a tiny one-room walk-up in a big city. It turns out companies really are capable of organizing and sustaining remote work even — perhaps especially — in the most sophisticated and complex fields.

This is, I believe, a permanent civilizational shift. It is perhaps the most important thing that’s happened in my lifetime, a consequence of the internet that’s maybe even more important than the internet.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Magic Tricks May Fool You, but These Birds Can See Through Them Well, some of them anyway. Link
•  Shutter sounds of 18 cameras from 135 full frame to 810 large format. You have to be a real photo-nerd to enjoy this. Also, it doesn’t mention the quietest cameras of all — the early screw and M-series Leicas. I always liked the solid ‘ker-thunk’ of my Hasselblad, which is featured in the video. Not a camera for discreet photography, though. It was an unobtrusive as an AK-47. Link

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