Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats.

From Gourmet magazine. It’s notable that gin and oysters were also once proletarian fare. Will Turkey Twizzlers and Ginster’s pies be tomorrow’s delicacies? Less flippantly, there probably is hope for oats, alfalfa and various grains we once fed animals but are no eating ourselves.

I live in London and regularly eat at Michelin-starred places in the City, West End and throughout the South East. The food at Y Polyn is easily on a par with these restaurants, but the startling thing is that it manages to deliver this with a wonderful informality and easiness that is quite extraordinary. No fanciness here, just excellent food, in very pleasant surroundings, cooked by people who care about what their guests eat, not what they are wearing.

If you are within 50 miles, eat there. Book ahead.

With its varnished wooden floors and plush sofas the European Scanning Centre looks more like a boutique hotel than somewhere to scan your heart. But it is the first in the country to have a CT scanner that can produce a three-dimensional picture of a patient’s heart with a very low radiation dose….
…Having a CT scan is much safer than an angiogram, where one in every 500 patients suffers a heart attack or stroke….
…The scan is also cheaper, says Dr Kostas Manis, a GP in Bexley. “The angiogram is £1,300, and the private clinic scanner is £900 and we’re negotiating to bring the figure down to £600.”

A better medical service, in nicer surroundings, with less risk, and at less cost. This is why I love competitive markets.

…private sector balance sheets will always fail at internalizing systemic risk. The official sector will always have to step in to help.

This is one of the conclusions of a New York Fed paper (PDF) on the shadow banking system, which provides a good overview and definition of the sector.

Comte’s thinking on religion had as its starting point a characteristically blunt observation that, in the modern world, thanks to the discoveries of science, it would no longer be possible for anyone intelligent or robust to believe in God. Faith would henceforth be limited to the uneducated, the fanatical, women, children and those in the final months of incurable diseases. At the same time Comte recognised, as many of his more rational contemporaries did not, that a secular society devoted solely to financial accumulation and romantic love and devoid of any sources of consolation, transcendent awe or solidarity would be prey to untenable social and emotional ills.

This piece from the New Statesman is worth reading in full.

During the Peterborough Prison pilot, experienced social sector organisations, such as St Giles Trust, will provide intensive support to 3,000 short-term prisoners over a six year period, both inside prison and after release, to help them resettle into the community. If this initiative reduces re-offending by 7.5%, or more, investors will receive from Government a share of the long term savings. If the SiB delivers a drop in re-offending beyond the threshold, investors will receive an increasing return the greater the success at achieving the social outcome, up to a maximum of 13%.

A colleague told me about these bonds (pdf) this afternoon. They are designed by Social Finance. Bonds with coupons linked to policy outcomes appear to be experiencing a surge in interest at the moment – note also the World Bank’s 2009 Green Bonds and US’s Qualified Green Building and Sustainable Design Project Bonds.

I like the idea of green financial products, but why stop at bonds? Going further in this direction could get us all the way to a Hansonian Policy Analysis Market.

Fear of Google’s knowledge about our every purchase, every web click, every move in the physical world was trumped by the public’s craving for information about anything, anywhere. It was an uneasy truce with the devil: give them your innermost secrets, and you can find anything your heart desires.

That’s from a great essay comparing Google to Apple.

• I finally understand the point of Ryanair. If you are going to Dublin overnight, with a small carry-on case, the cheap, 50 minute flight from Gatwick is superb. Despite having discovered that you can catch the train to Dublin from London for £30, I’d still be tempted to fly again.
• The city centre is flat, low-rise and lacks the impact and grandeur of Edinburgh, or, frankly, Birmingham. If you swapped out the € signs for £s and got rid of the ubiquitous Ye Olde Worlde Celtic Font (used for everything) you could be in Portsmouth, Liverpool or just about anywhere in the UK. In Dublin, the city is less about the built environment and more about the people, who  from the beggars to barmen, seem universally good humoured, friendly and delightful.
• The Temple Bar, the short drinking and partying street, is great fun. Few people from Ireland drink there: expect Brits, Americans and a surprising number of French, all drinking stout to excess in good humour and good song.
• The Guinness Brewery Tour is poor, but worth the €14 for the sample pint in the panoramic Gravity bar. A pint alone normally costs ~€5.50 in the fun parts of town, one effect of heavy Pigouvian taxes. The Jameson’s distillery tour is a much better tourist experience: better explanations, real human guides. Incidentally, John Jameson was a Scot.
• Partly because of the price of the drinks, food in Dublin seems (and sometimes is) very cheap. A full Irish breakfast can be had for €5, even in a high-end café. Oysters are €10 per dozen. However, while Richard Corrigan’s restaurant at Bentley’s Townhouse does a three-course Sunday lunch for €25, the price is the only selling point. I have rarely eaten worse in restaurant of such supposed quality: they served mango sorbet in the same bowl as walnut ice-cream, made an onion soup that tasted like melted garlic butter and even managed to find a way of taking the flavour out of roast beef.
• There is a fascinating exhibit of peat-bog preserved ancient human bodies in the National Museum, but it’s certainly not for the squeamish, and it could put you off biltong for life.

While I lack the experience to pronounce on this, I’m not sure cities are what the Irish are best at.

This is the start/finish straight at Snetterton race circuit, Norfolk. On Saturday I spent over two hours on the track, split over a good seven hours. The weather was fantastic, and the experience absolutely awesome. I am very grateful to Ian who entrusted his race bike to me.

Incidentally, this photo was taken by my Nexus One on default settings. I’m impressed – those bikes were probably going close to 100mph, and there’s no motion blur.

I think this libertarian model is neat, and it makes the share of your income that Governments presume to ’own’ a lot more transparent. Ditto your duty to your parents. However, it does creates an incentive to dupe your investors. For example you could sell stock in yourself to fund a college degree and an MBA, then develop a drinking problem and use the dip in share-price to buy-back your stock. Perhaps the Incorporated Man would need to be audited by doctors?

Apparently, this firm is already pioneering this idea, in Latin America.

Don’t go after large areas. Don’t try to figure out if Merck‘s pipeline is better than Pfizer’s. It’s too hard. Go to where there are market inefficiencies. You need an edge. To succeed, you need to go where the competition is low.

More here.

Ed Lee said that he was “loath to admit it, as a snowboarder”, but that ski cross, which was new for Vancouver, “eclipsed most of the snowboarding events”. No it didn’t. It eclipsed all the snowboarding events, and all the other events, too, up to and including the arrival of Captain Kirk through a hole in the floor.

Indeed, the big, take-away message from Vancouver was this: ski cross rocks. It makes snowboarding — including snowboard cross, on which it is modelled — look like an old fart’s game. Humps! Turns! Mid-air collisions! Tangling ski poles! These were the weeks in which poor, downtrodden, virtually obsolete skiing finally hit back against the snowboarding scene-stealers and said: “Shove this in your half-pipe and smoke it, you baggy-trousered upstarts.”

From The Times.

This leads to what I like to call, “Find me a rock” problems. The classic “find me a rock” story is as follows: A manager goes to his engineer one day and asks for a rock. “A rock?” asks the engineer. “Yes, a rock. That isn’t going to be a problem, is it?” replies the manager. The engineer laughs and tells the manager he’ll go pick one up during his lunch break and it will be no problem. After lunch, the manager visits the engineer again and the engineer shows him the rock. The manager looks at it for a moment before telling the engineer, “No, that one won’t work at all. I need a rock.”

“Find me a rock” problems sound dead simple, but in actuality have requirements that are poorly stated or unknown. You never know what you’re looking for; you only know that you’ll know it when you see it.

If only badly specified requests were limited to consulting.

“There is considerable evidence that group brainstorming is less productive than individual brainstorming”. Explanations for this “productivity deficit” include “social matching… a tendency to conform to peers” and “social loafing… because responsibility is diffused”. The researchers focus on a third , viz “collaborative fixation” — “Exchanging ideas in a group reduced the number of domains of ideas that were explored by participants. Additionally, ideas given by brainstormers conformed to ideas suggested by other participants.”

As she mentions, the experiments were conducted using computer terminals (presumably to enable the researchers to control the environment) and so it’s not clear how face-to-face interreaction would have affected the result.

So what should you do if you find yourself in a timesuck meeting like this? Doodle.

How long before they’re talking about “a new parrot-digm” or “a raft of new initiatives” to “take piracy into the twenty-first century” ?

Just as European nation-states free ride on the American defense shield, allowing them to invest less in military defense than they otherwise would, so too can European individuals free ride on the entrepreneurship that emerges from the American model.

A good point, from Ben Casnocha. As I see it, this is not an argument for America or the American model per se, but rather about having at least one place where free enterprise and free markets reign.

I ran the Stafford Half Marathon for the second year in a row on Sunday. I was pleased to find out today that my chip time was in fact 1h53m15s, more than a six minute improvement on last year’s 1h59m50s. Considering, I’d only run once between November and this race, I was pretty pleased with this performance, even if I was beaten by a man dressed as dalek.

Stafford Council put on a good show. The locals turn out in large number, are friendly and supportive. The town is pleasant, with a lovely park area near the river. There are some wonderful properties on the countryside section of the route. Re-entering town you go through a housing estate where a man dressed in a bear suit offers ‘Strongbow station’ to passing runners. Not many runners take up the offer, but I was tempted.

I am fully aware that I look like a constipated speedwalking pigeon in the above photo. For your further amusement, there are more photos of my looking terrible in different ways here.

Running is not really my sport. Although I am getting better at the mental side of things (being in a race is good for interesting things to look at) I don’t think I will ever have the physique to be competitive at distance, whatever training I undertook. I run not because I love running, but because I love being outside, exercising on sunny days, and seeing what I can do. I don’t think I will ever run a marathon, but doing more than one Half each year is a possibility. I am thinking of the New Forest Half in September.

Philosophically I am highly individualist, objective and rational. I apply rationality to my primary aim, the pursuit of happiness, although I have an unusually low discount rate. In others, I value honesty and candour. I despise collectivism, due to the contraints it puts on human thought and its tendency towards generating tribal conflict. I doubt the sincerity of those who act against their apparent incentives, which I treat as an indication of undisclosed incentives rather than virtue. For these reasons, I value the entry of market-based systems in most areas of life and society.

This does not capture everything, but it does catch what Rand might have called my ‘predicates’.

• A Charter Cities plug
• It turns out that workers value progress in their workplaces. They like to hit project milestones and get stuff done. Managers don’t realise this.
• Short discussion of green bond financing for ecological building retro-fits.

There is also an ethically dubious encouragement to ‘hack work’. While I think this is valid in some cases, I don’t think it is a model that one should promote. In a good organisation, it shouldn’t be necessary, and the ideas that need to be promoted are those that fix the organisation, not learn to work around it more cunningly.

In 1999, UC-Davis civil engineer David Phillips was grocery shopping when he noticed something peculiar. Healthy Choice Foods was offering frequent-flyer miles to customers who bought its products. But a 25-cent pudding would bring 100 miles — the reward was worth more than the product itself.

Recognizing a good thing, Phillips bought 12,150 servings of pudding for $3,140, claiming he was stocking up for Y2K. Then he enlisted the Salvation Army to help him peel off the UPC codes, in exchange for donating the pudding.

He mailed his submission to Healthy Choice, and to their credit they awarded him 1.25 million frequent-flyer miles, enough for 31 round trips to Europe, 42 to Hawaii, 21 to Australia, or 50 anywhere in the United States.

There’s no downside. Phillips also got Aadvantage Gold status for life with American Airlines, which brings a special reservations number, priority boarding, upgrades, and bonus miles. And he got an $815 tax writeoff for donating the pudding.

Lifted wholesale from Futility Closet.

I have just returned from Kitzbuhel in Austria, this year’s venue for our annual family ski trip. If I have not been in contact so much for the past week, this is why – apologies. In Kitz I recommend:

• Schloss Lebenberg, a hotel with first rate fitness facilities (including a roof-top pool and sauna overlooking the town and mountain)
• The Londoner for rowdy apres-ski, especially when the Short and Curlies are playing
• Making the link with Westendorf and checking out the neighbouring SkiWelt ski zone. The lifts and views are better than in Kitz, although it can be busier on the pistes, and you’ll need a different lift pass.

The photo above is the Wilder Kaiser mountain range, visible from the resort’s two main ski peaks. More photos here.

London real estate has actually bounced off the bottom in the last nine months. Prices are now down a mere 9% or so from their 2007 peaks, according to data tracked by mortgage giant Nationwide Building Society. The average home in London, including all those dreary outskirts that go on and on and on, is $436,000. That’s even higher than it was as recently as 2006, when the bubble was in its late stages.

As a homeowner in those ‘dreary outskirts’ I like the phenomenon if not the description.

(Incidentally, if a UK paper was reporting the US market, it would give the foreign-denominated price first, then the local equivalent in brackets. Is it standard US practise to show only dollar amounts? If so, that annoys me more than it should.)

Congressman Donald Schwerbitz, who represented South Dakota back in the 1960s and 70s… recognized that carbon emissions are caused primarily by breathing, and he proposed to cut those emissions in half by requiring every American to wear a device that plugs up one nostril. Congressman Schwerbitz… an irrepressible prankster… managed to get himself invited onto a talk radio program to explain how the nostril plugs would work. (The host was in on the joke.) Because talk radio audiences are dominated by libertarians and reactionaries, the response was not positive. Callers clamored for civil disobedience; one threatened that if he ever saw anyone wearing one of these devices, he’d “punch him in his other nose”. Others worried that our clean air might drift over to Cuba, where the communists could use it. A few, though, were enthusiastic. One woman wanted to know if the devices could be adapted to fit animals. Warthogs, she observed, have very big nostrils.

Although the Steven Landsburg piece from which I have stolen this extract isn’t supposed to be a comment on talk radio, I think this sums up the concerns of most talk radio callers well – at least from what I have heard when travelling in a taxi, or getting my hair cut.

Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions. They offer more control; they’re more efficient. But the vast majority of cars sold today are automatics.

…I discount their opinions appropriately.

In London Victoria station one of the convenience stores, Whistlestop, appears to have opened an Upper Crust coffee stand inside itself. Both brands appear to be owned by the convenience retail company SSP, but it sure looks weird.

My top overseas taxi tip: When you arrive at an airport, go by foot from the Arrivals concourse to the Departures concourse. Collect a taxi there to save yourself roughly 50% of the price of a waiting taxi. (Plus you know they are a real taxi, you just saw their last Westerner fare arrive unmolested.)

I suggested various epithets, from the funny to the lame (Bailout, Liquidity, Too Big to Sail, Floating Charge) but the winner was a banking friend, with the inspired Quantative Ease.

My media consumption keeps me fully up to speed of everything that interests and entertains me. The quality of much of this media is exceptional. Today, Marketplace, Marginal Revolution and Last.fm stand out especially.

Why do I mention all of this? Well, because I find it amazing that, aside from the TV Licence, I pay nothing for any of this media.

• Victors & Spoils – ‘the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles
• The Tuttle Club’s model of collaborative social-media consulting (although I am unclear how they split the fees)
• 99 Designs, CrowdSPRING, Genius Rocket – crowdsourced design

All of these are Nathan Barley creative ventures. Can/does crowdsourcing work as well in other sectors? I am aware, of course, of Wikinvest and Knol, but I am not sure they are in the same category.

In this season, a maverick Baltimore cop, Major Colvin, in despair, stops enforcing drug laws in certain areas of the city. The local drug dealers love the policy, and refer to it as ‘Hamsterdam’ – citing a direct transfer of Amsterdam’s liberal cannabis policies. In reality, Colvin’s plan wasn’t very much like the law in Amsterdam at all. But the dealers obviously had their state-centric hats on that day – had they spent more time reading, they’d be thinking ‘maybe this is an example of the slow process of international, cross-jurisdictional policy learning’!

I think that films are a powerful way to develop case studies. The Mist is a paradigm of testing moral absolutism and Kant’s categorical imperative for a start.

Our guiding principle with design is that we make the game we want to play, and trust that other people will like it. That inevitably means we make the TW games for the hardcore fans rather than for the more casual gamers that are possibly the majority of our customers. We believe that if we succeed in making a game that the fans like it will by definition be a great game, and the because of its quality casual players will like it too, so long as we make it accessible. We need both groups (casual and hardcore) to get enough money in to allow us to keep making the games, so one of the tightropes we walk is the balance between accessibility and depth. Great design manages both, and that’s what we strive for (occasionally successfully!).

We do however also have another customer who we make the game for, and in one particular way they are the most important of all. It’s our publisher, who is driven by the grim necessity of commercial reality. Those necessities tend to be short term compared with the dev time of a game or the lifetime of a series. They are also necessities that we cannot ignore – if we do it’s Game Over. Empire: Total War happened the only way it could – it had to be in a box in Feb 09.  Damned stressful for all concerned, but it’s so much a fact of life it’s almost not worth talking about.

I think some people think that when “commercial reality” wins, they lose. If the car parks at Sega or CA were full of Ferraris, I might agree. But they are not.  When “commercial reality” wins, we live to make another game.

I have mixed feelings on this. Yes, commercial goals and gamer goals can (and should) be compatible. Yes, there will be some trade offs. But the quality of the product should be the last thing a value-add, creative company lets slip. They should lose features before releasing broader, buggier games. There is no excuse for selling buggy software. This approach (shall we call it the ‘Microsoft approach’?) can only work long-term if you have the commercial advantage and customer lock-in to support it. Even then, it will vanish as soon as higher-quality alternatives appear.

I love the Total War series and own three games (of which Rome is my favourite). But I haven’t bought Empire, and probably won’t. When the next installment, Napoleon, arrives, I won’t be rushing out to buy it either. I’ll hang on until the bugs are fixed and the price drops. I don’t want to be paying top dollar for whatever work in progress “has to be in a box by date X”.

1. What the Playing Field Looks Like Now
   • Who are the competitors in the business, large and small, new and old?
   • Who has what share, globally and in each market?
   • What are the characteristics of this business? Is it commodity or high value or somewhere in beteen? Is it long cycle or short? Where is it on the growth curve? What are the drivers of profitability?
   • What are the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor? How good are their products? How much does each one spend on R&D? How big is each sales force? How performance-driven is each culture?
   • Who are this business’s main customers, and how do they buy?
2. What the Competition Has Been Up To
   • What has each competitor done in the past year to change the playing field?
   • Has anyone introduced game-changing new products, new technologies, or a new distribution channel?
   • Are there any new entrants, and what have they been up to in the past year?
3. What You’ve Been Up To
   • What have you done in the past year to change the competitive playing field?
   • Have you bought a company, introduced a new product, stolen a competitor’s key salesperson, or licensed a new technology from a start-up?
   • Have you lost any competitive advantages that you once had – a great salesperson, a special product, a proprietary technology?
4. What’s Around the Corner
   • What scares you most in the year ahead – what one or two things could a competitor do to nail you?
   • What new products or technologies could your competitors launch that might change the game?
   • What M&A deals would knock you off your feet?
5. What’s Your Winning Move?
   • What can you do to change the playing field – is it an acquisition, a new product, globalisation?
   • What can you do to make customers stick to you more than before and more than to anyone else?

 If you run all or part of a large business, buy this book, of which Warren Buffett says: “No other management book will ever be needed.” Now to try and apply this thinking to public policy…

Hugh Everett III (November 11, 1930 – July 19, 1982) was an American physicist who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, which he called his “relative state” formulation.

Discouraged by the “scorn” other physicists heaped on MWI, Everett left physics after completing his Ph.D. Afterwards, he developed the use of generalized Lagrange multipliers in operations research and applied this commercially as a defense analyst and a consultant. He enjoyed commercial success for a while, although at the time of his death he was facing financial ruin. He was married to Nancy Everett née Gore, with two children: Elizabeth Everett and Mark Oliver Everett, frontman of the band Eels.

I don’t think that this is one of those ‘Wikipedia facts’ either.

Dionne Owen and Catherine Milner – friends from my Year 6 Primary School class (pictured) are arranging a class reunion on the 5th February 2010. It will be about 16 years since this photograph. I am not in the photo – I left year 6 early when my family moved from Essex to Dorset. I wonder who I will recognise, and who will recognise me?

Goodin, R. (1982) ‘Rational Politicians and Rational Bureaucrats in Washington and Whitehall’, Public Administration, Vol. 60, pp. 23-41.

This paper is a discussion and reformulation of Niskanen’s model of decision-making. This model has apparently been very influential, especially with Keith Joseph.
First, the paper outlines what it was that Niskanen thought:

The bare bones of Niskanen’d model are very simple indeed. Basically, there are two types of actors: bureaucrats and politicians. The relationship between them is one of bilateral monopoly. The bureaucrats are the sole suppliers of public goods and services, and politicians are the only buyers of bureaucratic outputs. The goals of each actor are equally simple. Bureaucrats are aiming to maximise theor agency’s budget…. Politicians, in turn are aiming to maximise the votes cast for them at the next election….

Niskanen’s thesis is that, owing to special features on both sides of this bargaining game [namely the way that Congressional committees that authorise budgets are stuffed with those who benefit disproportionately from those budgets] public goods and services are oversupplied at a rate of anything up to twice what would be optimal in terms of citizen preferences.

As the paper discusses, this model leads Niskanen to recommend many NPM style government reforms, to enable bureaucrats to compete for resources.
Goodin applauds this model for its simplicity, but doesn’t think that it offers a good description of decision-making, for a large number of reasons, such as:

• He doesn’t think that bureaucrats would ‘bare faced lie’ about their budgetary needs, as this is both not lucrative (they need to be credible) and very high risk
• The Congressional budget approval procedure altered with the creation of the Congressional Budget Office and other reforms in the 1970s – these mean that budgets are considered in places other than just on committees of vested interests
• Niskanen doesn’t follow up the flip side of his argument and identify when budgets may be lower than desired, and bureaucratic outputs undersupplied. Goodin thinks that this would happen when issues fell between defined policy areas (e.g. Climate Change)
• Goodin doesn’t think that Niskanen’s answer – trying to get bureaucrats to compete – is sensible, because they would be more likely to collude with each other
• Goodin says that Niskanen’s simplistic view of bureaucrat and politican motivation is dated and does not reflect more modern thinking that people care about the policies they work on

As a result of these criticisms, Goodin offers an alternative model in which bureaucrats and politicians collude to overload oversight bodies with information, and use the ensuing confusion to bid for higher budgets. This results in the skewed spending around core programme areas, leaving too little for cross-cutting or broadly defined issues.

In general, this is a refreshingly clear article. However, I found it odd that it did not pick up on the one obvious criticism of Niskanen’s model that occurred to me straight away: Niskanen posits that as a monopoly provider of bureaucratic goods and services, bureaucrats would oversupply and overcharge. Indeed, it appears (from Goodin’s discussion) that he confused the two, or saw them as synonymous. But this is odd, given that it is a standard tenet of economic theory that monopolists undersupply and overcharge. If one grafts this assumption to Goodin’s rebuilt model, you get the worst of both worlds – a collusive bureaucratic-political machine that under-delivers and overcharges in core areas, and doesn’t deliver at all in non-core ones. Impartiality prevents me from commenting on whether this is an accurate picture of Washington or Whitehall.

Incidentally, Google Reader ‘found’ this for me – suggesting that I might like it. If its recommendations for what I might enjoy reading continue to be so accurate, I may no longer need to use Tyler Cowen as my human information filter.

As if to remove all illusion that what we were studying was connected to reality, every game we analyzed in class was given a name according to his system of “stochastic lexicography.” Stochastic lexicography means randomly picking two words out of the dictionary and using them as the name of the game under study. So, for example, instead of studying “job market signaling” we studied something like “rusty succotash.”

I like this idea. To some extent, it reminds me of the operational names used in military and police circles, such as the Met‘s ‘Operation Bumblebee’ or ‘Operation Trident’. Working in the government policy process and knowing the degree to which a scheme for X may end up actually being a scheme for Y (but still called the X Scheme) I would welcome the neutrality of abstract nomenclature.

I should thank Helen for coming out to cheer me on at the 7km mark, even though the chilly morning meant she needed to wear two fleeces to do this! Congratulations also to the other members of my running club, Striders of Croydon, especially Richard Lees-Smith, whose 0:35:54 I can never hope to beat.

Race photos are not yet online, but I do have another participation medal to add to the meagre collection under the bed.

This is not interesting, in itself. What is interesting is that this experience made me think, from my perspective, does it matter if it’s a bomb? If this bag had exploded, I’d have died instantly and without knowing. Ignoring any consideration that others that could be harmed directly and indirectly through mourning, would an explosion of the bag matter to me? I figured not: either it wasn’t a bomb, and I would be fine, or it was, and I’d die instantly, but be fine up to that point. What I find interesting (and surprising) about this is that I appear to be fairly indifferent to instant, unknowing death. I think that this is entirely compatible with my standard, human fear of painful, knowing death, and, indeed, any form of unwanted human suffering. I think this view may be widely shared, although I doubt many people have thought about it in detail. After all, people generally report that, had they the option, they’d drift of quietly in their sleep.

I write about this now because I have just read Galen Strawson, who writes on something similar in The Philosophy Magazine. I also wonder about the wider implications: for example, is working in a bomb disposal team actually better than fighting on the front line, because although your risk of death is higher, so is the ‘quality’ of death (i.e. instant and unknown)? On the other side of the equation, at what point does becoming a suicide bomber became preferable (in terms of utility) to being dragooned into fighting as an insurgent?

And it turns out people in suits do occasionally take decorator’s bags on the Tube with them: the owner and his bag alighted at Canada Water.

• Every sentence should grab the reader and propel them forward
• Every paragraph should contain a striking idea, originally expressed
• The most significant ideas should be distilled into the most potent sentences possible
• Use the strongest appropriate verb
• Beware of nominalization

• If I were to visit the area where you live, what would I be interested in? (Geography)
• What is language? (Modern languages)
• If you could save either the rainforests or the coral reefs, which would you choose? (Biology)

In my admissions interview, I was asked if I thought boxing should be banned. When I answered no, the tutors asked whether I would therefore support televised gladitorial combat to the death. I think I got of lightly compared to a friend who was asked “If you were a roundabout, what song would you sing?”

1. Never invest what you can’t afford to lose. From Caleb Loom, my grandfather. You need an income, and you need shelter. Don’t do anything that jeopardises this. Your investment baseline should not be zero, nor should you consider all your assets as part of your portfolio.
2. Invest on the basis of fundamental value. From Benjamin Graham. Every system is phoney, every day-trader a gambler. Patience is not only a virtue, but a competitive advantage.
3. Diversification reduces your potential for large losses, but also your potential for large gains. From Warren Buffett (who put it more succinctly, “When your advisor tells you to diversify, he’s telling you he doesn’t know what he’s talking about”). Note that (as John Kay would argue) diversification is the best way to ensure modest growth – but by prioritising the need for diversifying your portfolio, you are adding another reason to buy a stock: for the sake of diversity. This is one reason too many. The only reason you should have is because it’s a good stock.
4. Hammer down your investment costs. From John Kay. Fees and charges eat your return. Buy and sell smartly – take advantage of deals, buy in bulk. Try for a maximum 1% annual overhead.

I hope to learn much, much more, but this isn’t a bad start.

The New York Times reports that although people say that they make healthier choices when calorie-counts are displayed on fast-food menus, based on evidence from their receipts, the opposite is in fact true. At least in some areas, people are, on average, ordering more calories than before the labelling requirements were introduced.

This is a useful counter-factual for the type of ‘libertarian paternalism’ promoted in Sunstein and Thaler’s pop-policy book, Nudge.

For what it’s worth, I think that this example may be skewed by the demographic in the poorer areas in which receipts were collected. Perhaps people are maximising their calories per dollar. This is, in many ways, the natural human instinct.

The recession may also play a role here. I would be interested to know if this receipt-collection exercise had a control – a measurement of whether calorie consumption had gone up in similar cities where these measures had not be introduced. Without that, how can you rule out the possibility that people comfort-eat in a recession?

This morning I thought: “What if, instead of donating your surplus computing capacity (idle processor time, storage or bandwidth) to a project like Seti@home, you could set a price for that capacity and trade it on a global marketplace? You could enter your input prices, which would mainly reflect your power/energy costs, and then the market would allocate computing tasks in an efficient manner.”

I followed it up further and I am far from the first person to have this idea, it seems.

• The GridEcon Research Project exploring “a marketplace for computing resources” (PDF)
• “Compute Power Market: Towards a Market-Orientated Grid” (PDF)
• Zimory, a (live?) German system

I am not annoyed that I didn’t get there first – in retrospect, it’s an obvious idea. I would, however, have been annoyed if I had put time into this idea before realising that others were working on it. In this way, the internet saves me years of thinking time.

Incidentally, I don’t currently link to my blogging friends enough. This I shall remedy.

My joy at living in a world where people who are better at technology than I am distribute to me the fruits of their superior knowledge and hard labour, continually, at no extra cost, is hard to describe.

I log into WordPress, and somebody just improved their plugin. I pick up an Android phone and it works better than it did yesterday. My browser just got better. My operating system just improved. My search engine gives me more options today.

To me, open source is the answer to that depressing feeling of taking something new and shiny, and having the bliss gradually wear off. Open source software is for future-orientated optimists. Okay, so my Android handset is not yet an iPhone, but one day it will be better.

Update: After now reading this post, I am assuming that there is more than one Gulliver, or that the name is assumed by any Economist correspondent with a business-travel story.

In what might qualify as a surrealistic moment, the Administrator of USAID asked a staffer to summarize the policy conclusions of the Vanity Fair analysis for U.S. foreign aid.

That’s from William Easterly’s working paper “Can the West save Africa?” A footnote to the passage reads:

I verified this by getting an actual copy of the memo

Fashion experts such as Eric Musgrave, who used to be editor of Drapers magazine, says the traditional tailors in Savile Row should press for protected geographical status under EU law.

He said: “You can only call a fizzy white wine champagne if it comes from the Champagne region. You can only call ham Parma ham if it comes from Parma.

“I think the boys on Savile Row should continue battling until they get their definition that ‘Savile Row Bespoke’ can only be made on Savile Row and the defined area around it.”

To that end the Savile Row Bespoke Association is launching a quality mark to distinguish its products from other companies who sell “made-to-measure” suits under the banner “Savile Row Bespoke”.

That would allow potential customers to at least know what they are buying when they pay for their hand-tailored suit.

This raises several questions for me. Firstly, is this a protectionist quest to preserve the economic rent that derives from owning some prime tailoring real estate, or a legitimate attempt to increase the level of information available to customers in the market? More practically, is there are quality difference between suits made elsewhere in the UK (or Europe) and actually on the Row that is noticeable even when all other factors (service location, fitting, etc.) is held the same?

Either way, this article is itself a good bit of PR for – Dege & Skinner and an advert for Sartoriani.

More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people’s identities.

I totally agree, although I don’t think this perspective is new. I think it used to be called impartiality. This essay reminds me of the Hanson and Cowen paper, ‘Are disagreements honest?’

[via Ben Casnocha]

YIMBY n. A person who favors [sic] a project that would add a dangerous or unpleasant feature to his or her neighborhood [sic].

That’s from WordSpy, a new find.

Anyone wish this “world’s shortest course” were longer?

That’s from ‘The World’s Shortest Course in Time Management’ on Marty Nemko’s blog. I assume that it is a trick question.

Time management is an important skill about which people have strong views. Tyler Cowen has previously written:

All people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else.

Will Wilkinson disagrees. I stand between the two. I think it is often tempting to pretend that you are ‘not good at time management’ when you are either lazy or demotivated. But I also think that time management skills can be improved – primarily by adopting a relentlessly single-minded approach to your tasks, for example:

• Don’t live in your inbox
• Make most of your decisions quickly
• Never put anything down unfinished

These are goals I aspire to, rather than principles I uphold.

• The Lake Hotel, Bonchurch – although this wasn’t our first choice of accommodation, the Lake has some great lounges, a lovely garden and the perfect location
• The New Inn, Main Road, Shalfleet – a charming country pub in a lovely spot, with local food, good beer and raised decked area to the rear
• Cachalot Charters – fishing trips from Bembridge marina, £26 for four hours mackerelling and sea angling
• The Tea Shop in Freshwater Bay – proper clotted cream and a nice garden, although the tea was a little disappointing
• The Military Road – running along the south-west coast of the island, this road is a blast on bikes – with stunning views towards the Needles if you’re heading West

I was less keen on The Spyglass, a pub on the front at Ventnor, which had Ringwood beer and huge portions of hearty pub food, but was a bit crowded and dark; the Pond Café in Bonchurch, which had top-class food (and prices) but disinterested service, despite having only five tables; and Red Funnel ferries, which, despite good onboard accommodation and a good outward crossing, made a total hash of loading the ferry out of Cowes on the return leg. I would also advise strongly against riding pillion on the back of a Suzuki GSXR, especially after a wine-tasting. Some photos will appear on Flickr soon.

I have always loved maps, and the mind-shift that occurs when you look at a map centred around a different meridian. Australian maps, which put Australia in the centre of the world and the US in the far right make the cities of the eastern seaboard (Boston, New York, Washington DC) look strangely isolated. The map above, from a Dutch firm of architects, is interesting, although I don’t buy the implicit ‘fortress’ argument. (Via Information is Beautiful)

“You are not supposed to buy an illegal site,” he said. “This is out-of-the-box thinking.”

That’s Hans Pandeya of Global Gaming Factory, on the decision to purchase filesharing site The Pirate Bay for £4.3m, via BBC News.

• The Lamb Shank Redemption
• The Quantum of Sausage
• I Ham Legend
• The 51st Steak
• Catch Me If You Spam
• Gran Chorizo
• If These Walls Could Pork

Any to add? Fish-related words and non-meat substitutes are not allowed (so no The Pike Runner or King Quorn). Films already containing meat references (e.g. Chicken Run, or Jamon, Jamon) are ineligible.

…it is impossible to read this year’s text without coming to the conclusion that microfinance is at a crossroads, and that it might do the industry a power of good if it was able to call a “time-out” to reassess its role. In the popular press, microfinance is still very much the developmental flavour of the month – and even the most battle-hardened aid veteran has to acknowledge its appeal as an alternative to the conventional ‘top down’ model for wasting taxpayers’ money. But… microfinance currently faces serious challenges – challenges that have been exacerbated by the global crisis. Should microfinance institutions shift from their essential social role to a (perhaps) more sustainable profit-seeking model? Can they go on relying (as they have done) on subventions of one sort or another from Western investors? Should they develop into more or less full service financial institutions, and become part of the formal financial sector?

That’s from the CSFI‘s Microfinance Banana Skins 2009, available as a free PDF. My answers would be yes, no, more, and yes, respectively.

I was disappointed to hear that the film of the novel, scheduled for release in 2010, does not include one of  the central characters, Yeamon. The only way to remove Yeamon’s character is to partner the protagonist, Kemp, with Chenault, the wanton Conneticut, from the outset. This would remove much of the storyline, a lot of the simmering tensions and jealousy, and much of the point of the novel. Still, I hope the film works – but I’m glad I got through the novel first.

The state is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

Looking the quotation up, I discovered that Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms covered the economic impact of new railways. Can it be mere coincidence that this is what the meeting was about?

It should be noted that while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.

He goes on to develop the First Fundamental Theorum of Interstellar Trade:

When trade takes place between two planets in a common inertial frame, the interest cost on goods in transit should be calculated by using time measured by clocks in the common frame, and not by clocks in the frames of the travelling spacecraft.

As promised, this does make sense. What a fascinating paper.

…the ninja were but one manifestation of fierce and extensive resistance to encroaching armies in the dying years of medieval Japan…. [they] armed themselves with simple weapons and guerrilla techniques…

Not a bad fit to my new unit. However:

…the ninja and the communities they defended were eventually slaughtered or intimidated into quiescence by the powerful armies of the “unifiers” like Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 16th century.

Not the best omen.

..when individual drivers seek the quickest route, they sometimes end up slowing things down for everybody.

GPS must add to this problem, especially on models that don’t dynamically adjust for traffic. Even with models that do, the Nash equilibrium may be sub-optimal.

I have not come across Braess’s Paradox before. It worries me. Most government intervention is built on the idea of ‘market failure’. A BP situation looks like the ultimate market failure, and could thus be an open door for additional regulation. Some of this would be good, if paternalist (a la Nudge). I worry that some may be bad, in freedom terms (i.e. planners get to override GPS updates).

The saving grace is that regulation to enforce the optimal outcome may be more costly that the gap between the optimal outcome and the Nash equilibrium.

This wine is unusually rounded. Missing is the zangy, tangy, acid sweetness of many cheap pinks. Instead you get a smooth, clear but full-bodied taste; dry but not arid, flavoursome but not boisterous.

That this wine can still be grown, bottled, shipped and sold for so little (especially after our lords and masters have taken their £2.20-odd in duty and tax) is a tribute to the glory of the market economy and proof certain that value and quality are not natural opponents.

Storks’ Tower Tempranillo-Shiraz, 750ml screw-cap, currently £4.26 at Tesco, online (by the case) and in-store

You now need to spend £4.5k per year to make the card pay. This is quite difficult if you play multiple cards off against each other, especially given that AmEx are probably the least widely accepted (after Diners’ Club?). I think that these changes will lose them a lot of smarter customers: good for them, bad for me. Note also the new £20 dormancy charge. Putting the card in the back of the wallet is not an option.

The interesting question in this case is:

Suppose you made a million dollars last year and put all but $50,000 of it in a shoebox. Now imagine you lose the box. What good did the $950,000 do you?

I have spent only ten minutes thinking about this, but I would evaluate access to cash as having ‘real option value’. In other words, the value of the shoebox is the value of the options it gives you: to retire, to start a new business, to travel the world.

This real option value will vary from person to person. $950k won’t increase the real options available to Bill Gates, but it would make much more of a difference to the options open to me (even at $1.70 to £1). Therefore, I figure that the value of money to an individual will vary in real option terms.

Real options will have value, even unexercised. That’s why people pay more for flexible travel tickets. As such, the money in the box has value… up to the point you lose it. Afterwards, no value. However, I don’t think the eventual loss of the box means that it was never worth anything. Okay so the money was sitting in the box, but it wasn’t doing nothing. Even in the box, it was storing value and holding open potential options – that is the unglamourous job of money. Its loss matters.

• The many answers to a job interview question that I flunked (while getting many other answers correct, I hasten to add).
• My friend Winston loses his rag with the spiteful anonymous commentators who spit bile on his blog.
• David Cameron’s television viewing habits are the subject of much speculation. I loved The West Wing and The Wire – should I avoid Lark Rise to Candleford?

As you will have noted, there is no theme.

• MS revenues stable in the short-term, as installed Windows base still high
• Google is continuing a broad strategic shift, from being the providers of an excellent, innovative search product to being providers of a platform who actually don’t innovate as much as they like to think
• The ‘providers of a platform who actually don’t innovate as much as they like to think’ business is/was MS’s home territory. As such, Google’s entry represents a significant threat
• However, MS has more to offer as a firm that provides ‘excellent products’ - Exchange/Office and Xbox being the two best examples
• Although it will be painful, MS should be prepared for the inevitable loss of platform dominance and concentrate entirely on backing great products in its core area(s) of expertise: business productivity and communication (note that Android phone and iPhones have adopted Exchange, and that Google now licences ActiveSync) and home entertainment (Windows Media Centre beats Apple TV hands down, and I can’t see Google Launching a G-Box)

Long term, I think MS needs to start behaving like a more standard, mature company. That means better dividends, surrendering of legacy markets and ruthless focus. This may eventually mean a split between the business apps firm and the home media entertainment firm.

The New World table, hosted by Ellis of Richmond, included a sharp Stellenbosch pinotage rosé (£8.99) and a citrus-heavy Mendoza sauvignon blanc (£8.75). More impressive was the Old World table. Hosted by Top Selection, this featured a rarely-seen Austrian gruner vertline ‘gmork’ (£9.90) and a delightfully light 2007 pinot noir, ‘Domaine Chevrot’ (£9.17). Best of the table was the surprising Blancs de Pacs 2008, an organic Spanish wine in an ugly bottle (£7.95). “Because it’s organic, they can’t even get to the vineywards for most of the year,” said the friendly attendant, “too many mosquitos.”

Most disappointing was the Gosset champagne. While the non-vintage ‘Excellence’ (£25.40) and ‘Grand Reserve’ (£34.21) tasted good – reminding me slightly of entry-level Pol Roger – the minimum order was 15 cases, and retail enquiries were fobbed off to Harrods or Selfridges. You can, however, pick some up from BBR, for what I imagine would be a slightly lower markup.

The organisation of the evening was efficient, but could have been thought through a little more closely. It would have been an idea to check people’s bags into the restaurant cloakroom on arrival. As it was, this wasn’t offered and many people were balancing plates of food, glasses of wine, tasting notes and bags in their hands. Another improvement would have been to have put the raised tables of fresh glasses next to the velvet rope that divided the wine tasting area from the restaurant. This would have allowed waiters to replenish glasses without having to snake through the throng. However, minor quibbles aside, it’s hard to fault a free event with great wines. Vive la France.

The common problem, I believe, is this: the nation-state is becoming too small for the big problems of life and too big for the small problems of life. It is too small for the big problems because there are no effective international mechanisms to deal with such things as capital flows, commodity imbalances, the loss of jobs, and the several demographic tidal waves that will be developing in the next twenty years. It is too big for the small problems because the flow of power to a national political center [sic] means that the center [sic] becomes increasingly unresponsive to the variety and diversity of local needs. In short, there is a mismatch of scale.

That’s Daniel Bell “previewing Planet Earth in 2013″ in The Washington Post in 1988. I think his core focus is on the US government. I have heard that this (with a UK/EU spin) is somewhat the theme of the Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan book, The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain, which I have not read, but plan to.

• No corporate money tied to projects either explicitly or implicitly
• No taxpayer funds
• No FTSE 100 company to give more than 2% of budget [I assume he mean's IEA's budget]
• No corporate sector (eg oil, banking, pharmaceuticals) to give more than 5% [of IEA budget, I assume]

He mentions how he had received offers of tax-efficient funding in return for his extension of scholarships/bursaries to the donor’s progeny (he refused: “Sorry, no deal”). He also thinks that politicians have become more guarded in their dealings with think tanks since 1997.

The first campaign I have been assigned was for Seeds of Change chocolate, to my wife’s delight. I was sent samples of Orange and Fig (odd but lovely) and Apricot and Cashew (less strange, more tasty) and some discount vouchers. It’s a great promotional idea, and great chocolate. I have passed on some vouchers to friends and family, who are suitably grateful. You can check out the Seeds of Change range here, but for some reason, they don’t mention the chocolate. Surely it can’t be a secret?

The Times once published an unintentionally humorous description of a Peter Ustinov documentary, noting that “highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.”

I think this is an area where intelligence and discretion use beats slavish convention.

phoenixed (verb): the process of having gone into bankruptcy to emerge stronger and more streamlined, e.g. General Motors, Chrysler

“Bioshock” and “The Incredibles” show two visions of objectivism. “Bioshock” glorifies this vision before burning it to the ground, and quite rapidly at that. “The Incredibles,” on the other hand,” simply glorifies it. Yet regardless of what these works have to say, they remain some of my favorites of all time, and I hope they will be for you too.

More here.

While new technologies such as GPS satellite tracking could have provided a more accurate minute-by-minute update on the planes location, not all planes are equipped, and there is no requirement for them to be. Flight Wisdom

That a four year old plane doesn’t have GPS when most four year old executive saloons do strikes me as odd.

There is more than a passing resemblance between the cover of Jo Rees’ new book Platinum and the covers of Michel Houellebecq’s and Platform. Same designer? Same model?

Treating people as rational means giving them credit to know what’s best for themselves, rather than adopting paternalist policies. If you want to change behaviour (itself a dubious objective requiring much caution) you have to do more than simply educate people. Education only changes behaviour when there was a lack of information before. If there was no dearth of information, education is just the annoying imposition of another viewpoint. It will have little impact except to waste money and annoy those being ‘educated’.

If you really want to change behaviour, give people credit for knowing their own minds, don’t tell them what to think, but change the incentives. This sometimes offers radically different policy solutions.

This theme has recurred a couple of times in the last week: once when examining UK government policy on teenage pregnancy (as part of my MPA studies) and once when reading an article about the book Portfolios of the Poor in The Economist. In the former case, I was struck that government policy both aims to make life better for teenage mothers – providing them with better facilities, better housing, better job and educational opportunities – while also trying to decrease the numbers of teenage mothers through education. Lisa Arai makes a good case that this doesn’t conform to a rational model, where teenage girls have children because that offers them a better life option. In the latter case, people living in poverty have been shown not to be financially naive spendthrifts, but highly sophisticated, rational consumption-smoothers. Applying rational models to these policy challenges produces very different solutions.

In what other areas would assuming rational behaviour make a huge policy difference?

Out of interest, this is the effect of a link from Marginal Revolution on your blog traffic. I’m not entirely sure why Tyler linked to me linking to Wehr in the World, linking to his own comments, but I guess it’s an example of economizing your PR. Trail, monitor, link.

John’s best line, in my opinion, was going further than asking whether businesses should engage in ‘corporate social responsibility’ to actually ask by what right they did this – recognising that their choices for charitable causes may not be the same as their customers’ or shareholders’. This has stuck with me, not least because I walk past a branch of bath-bomb outlet Lush (complete with TRAINS NOT PLANES! window poster) on my way to and from work.

Peter Day, on the other hand, I have never particularly taken to. He seemed much more qualified to ask questions than to answer them. This makes him both a good choice for a business reporter and a poor choice of panel member. However, to give him credit, he gave a good answer to a question from the floor about the role of the media in the current crisis, staunchly defending Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor who seems to be unfairly loathed for having the audacity to do his job well while being in the posession of a slightly odd voice.

If we accept that life is an end in itself, by which she means (as is clear from the context) that the preservation of human life must be the one and only aim of ethics…

I disagree with the bit after the comma. You can’t say “by which she means” and then create a straw man like that. Or you shouldn’t. Or both.

The question is over whether you aggregate life being all that matters, and whose life you are talking about. Is the life social (all life matters, the Lemmus reading) or non-existent and personal (my life is all that matters). Rand cared about her life, and nobody else’s. If she could save somebody else at no real cost and wanted to, then fine. If she could but didn’t, fine too. Barbarous, some claim, but consistent.

Lemmus again:

Quality of life doesn’t seem to be a concern for her.

But he quotes this direct from Rand:

To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.

Happiness is about quality of life, no?

And that’s it with Ayn Rand and me. Of course I could read all of her books and see whether she has addressed this rather obvious objection anywhere, but given that time is a scarce resource I prefer to spend mine on stuff that promises to be more worthwhile.

Change the gender of that paragraph’s subject, ’Ayn Rand’ to ‘Lemmus Lemmus’ and ‘books’ to ‘posts’, and I agree. Or at least, it would be if I adopted that kind of absolutist approach to analysing somebody’s body of thought.

An idle thought: apart from the vulgarity, would there be any disadvantage to allowing advertising on banknotes, and might this note help government fund printing them? Advertisements could be restricted to a small, standard area, so as nobody could be in any doubt as to them corrupting the general recognition of the note, and the frequency with which such advertisements changed may even prevent fraud, by forcing fraudsters to change their designs regularly. I know that in many places (like Scotland and Hong Kong) private banks issue notes bearing their logos – so why not go all the way?

A great joint hen and stag weekend this, with Helen joining Moira’s gang of girls for some hire wire fun, and myself joining Russ and the lads to go shooting near Harlow. Then back to thhe new Chez Bowdrey for gin and tonic and snacks before a meal at Davy’s. I have a few photos on Flickr.

Epistemology, identity and language. Existence is an irrelevant concept, its validity unprovable and utterly insignificant. Nouns (and thus language) are built on convenient euphemisms and abstractions. You never cross the same river twice: the water has changed and so have you. Identity is feigned. Human communication and universal grammar depends on our ability to form and adapt abstractions: people, rivers, nouns. We process these with verbs, and infer them with argument. We build these abstractions into knowledge. Often we don’t correct enough for evolved biases because we’ve evolved not to. The knowledge we create contains a lot of euphemism and abstraction, (and contorts these into a priori truisms) but also bundles up some important, fundamental and a posteriori physical laws. You dropped an apple, it fell: ‘you’ and the ‘apple’ are abstractions, the revealed law is as close as we will get to experiencing truth. It doesn’t matter who senses this truth, or how. Truth is platform-independent.

Philosophy of science. A unified theory of everything may require multiple universes, although the existence of such universes would pose no new practical problems, in the same way as the existence of previous and future timeframes pose no new practical problems. While we work towards a unified theory we should bear in mind that while we travel through time unintentionally we also exist in the past, ‘now’.

Ethics. There are no ethical facts, and so there cannot be ethical knowledge. Statements of right and wrong are statements of strong (‘sanctified’) preference. Pride, joy, guilt and shame exist as evolved responses to guide pro-social behaviour that favours reproduction. These combine with the self-interest of others to set ‘ethical norms’ and outline ‘natural justice’. There is no ‘good life’ in the absence of an objective; there are no ‘inalienable rights’ outside of contract.

Political philosophy. Because of the inter-generational problem, liberty exists only in polities with the right of exit and entry. The availability of new frontiers increases the quantum of liberty in the universe, through competitive bidding – polities need people as much as people need polities. Escape to space is a genetic necessity.

Economics. Markets are an externalisation of the process of human reasoning. They benefit from the same power, speed and logic, but are subject to the same behavioural biases as individuals and crowds.

Developing economies could better ride the current financial crisis with more effective maintenance of their natural resources, according to a new report.

The report, from Natural Resource Charter, is here. I haven’t read it, although I am sure it would be interesting. The article references Paul Collier, who pushes a fairly simple system for straight auctions of commodities. It’s worth noting that to some extent, this already happens with commodity extraction rights - so maybe it’s a call to do that better. (The journalists could do better with the headline too: ‘Africa urged to auction commodities’?) However, if they are pushing for African countries to auction raw diamonds, coal and whatever, then they’re recommending a highly statist approach in which governments own the extraction plant and companies. That would be a step backwards. More clever public contract managers (with performance bonuses) in government would be a better solution.

In signaling models, selfish agents might voluntarily supply public goods.

The answer to this question seems obvious to me. I don’t have a PhD. Does that imply that I am clever or dumb? Is this really a PhD level question? Couldn’t children answer it? What am I missing? To what extent does my belief that all human beings are to some extent selfish make this question easier to answer? These are things I think about too much.

In the UK, it’s because a game that you enter at a cost (i.e. premium rate phone call) is defined as an unregulated lottery if the result relies solely on luck. Introduce suitable skill and you’re now running a prize competition, with much less regulation. The problem, especially for participation television quizzes, is defining what is a suitable level of skill. Does knowing that 4 results from adding 2+2 count?

This was addressed by UK regulator Ofcom’s consultation into participation television in 2006-2007. Interestingly, Sky responded to this consultation with a claim that “call TV quiz programmes amount to illegal lotteries.”

According to this article, the 2008 Gambling Act made the situation worse, and the regulations more complex:

The result is that if TV quiz shows want to continue broadcasting then they must comply with these new laws by making their competitions more complicated and ensuring that a number of entrants are ‘knocked out’ in the first round. Participants must also be kept to date, and detailed information must be stored on resilient databases for cross reference purposes. Also, where appropriate, they could either obtain a lottery license from the Gambling Commission, which would require the broadcaster to donate 20% of all profits made to charity, or qualify as a ‘free draw quiz’.

I imagine something similar applies in the States.

1. Hiring scavengers may be one, basic, reclaimation option, but I think the cost may rule that out.
2. You could offer an incentive for customers to return their banana skins, and pay by weight. In many ways, this is like outsourcing the scavenger option, and doesn’t remove the inefficiency.
3. Grow your own bananas. Then you need some way to make money from the fruit. Drying and chipping may be the best option, or grinding into banana flour.

Option 3 makes me think that banana-chipping outfits probably already exist in some places. So perhaps there is a stock of banana skin waste…. a quick online search turns up Narosa Farms.

A few weeks ago, on a trip along the Frinton seafront in Essex, I noticed some strange structures out to in the North Sea. They were barely visible on the horizon, but looked across between towers and ships. It turns out that they were ships erecting towers - for a windfarm. For what it’s worth, I think they added interest and focus to the horizon, which, let’s face it, is otherwise just a line obscured by mist.

FEDERAL RESERVE BANK

Important:

You’re getting this letter in connection with new directions issued by U.S. Treasury Department. The directions concern U.S. Federal Wire online payments.

A country-wide phishing attack began on May 6, 2009. It’s taking place hitherto. Therefore a great number of banks and credit unions is affected by this attack and quantity of illegal wire transfers has reached an extremely high level.

U.S. Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in common worked out a complex of immediate actions for the highest possible reduction of fraudulent operations. We regret to inform you that definite restrictions will be applied to all Federal Wire transfers from May 12 till May 25.

Here you can get more detailed information regarding the affected banks and U.S. Treasury Department restrictions:

http://[snipped].com/35945/FRB/phishing/Issue~73126/

Federal Reserve Bank System Administration

Do they think that using words like ‘hitherto’ makes them more credible?

Dear Ross,

Hi, I’m Cheryl Sim, editor for Holiday Fun! magazine which is
published four times a year in Singapore by Point Media Pte Ltd to coincide with
every school term holiday.

Holiday Fun! provides parents with kids aged between 4-12 with useful info on activities to do/places to go during the school holidays.

I’m currently working on the June-August issue and will be using your images on Malacca for the next issue’s article on travelling to Malaysia for a holiday. Your photos are impressive, and I will credit you accordingly. Thank you!

Best regards,
Cheryl Sim
Editor
Holiday Fun! / Holiday Fun! Kids
Point Media Pte Ltd
Singapore

The photos of which she speaks are here. Incidentally, Helen and I loved Malaysia, although KL more than Malacca. I’m quite keen on Singapore too, although I’d prefer to live north of the border.

• Veggie recipes for meaties - I like the look of the bread soup.
• The return of the ‘power breakfast’, with a good breakfast restaurant recommendation for Chicago.
• A photo essay about India’s bonded labourer Dalits, which was very moving, but which I can’t find online. I may post more on Dalits. Their suffering seems so utterly incomprehensible and shameful.
• This piece on drinking alcohol comes pretty close to my position and experience.

Counterbalanced against this, there were some poor articles too. The ‘cover story’ – on the (over)use of the word ‘iconic’ was utterly mundane.

I first read about the plight of India’s Dalits (‘untouchables’) in an Intelligent Life photo essay. If, like me, you think racism makes no sense at all, then the persecution of Dalits – who are physically and genetically indistinguishable from the higher castes – is even more absurd. Social and economic exclusion leads Dalits to take filthy, menial jobs: in rubbish collection, sewerage collection, dealing with carcasses and leather tanning. These dirty jobs lead to more prejudice. In Mumbai, Dalits go to ‘study street’ after a hard day’s work. The streetlight there allows them the illumination they need to do the reading to get the qualifications – essential to overcome the self-perpetuating prejudice associated with their caste. I feel sad about their mistreatment but glad of their tenacity. But it does make me think: if a streetlight can achieve so much, what could be achieved with a library?

I would like to use a Kindle, to see what it feels like to use. I am sure I would be impressed by the display – apparently the matt, still appearance makes it look unlike any LCD you’ve seen before. That’s cool. I hope it holds its high contrast in sunlight though – many displays don’t.

Obviously, Bezos wants to hype this device, but to ignore the drawbacks is moronic. What are those draw backs? Well, I think they’d include:

1. Dependence on battery power. Okay, so it’s efficient, and it lasts a long time. But it does need charging occasionally, and when it’s not charged, you’re not able to read anything. I’d like to see a solar panel on the back of the device.
2. Robustness of the device. I read in the bath, on the beach and laying in parks, among other places. I prop books on kitchen worktops, over the stove. Occasionally, I read in drizzle and rain. I read while planes I’m travelling on take off and land. Would I do this with a Kindle?
3. Resale and lending. Part of the pleasure I get from books is in recommending and lending the ones I like to others. I sell books I don’t like. Maybe they’ll work for somebody else. Can’t do that on Kindle.
4. Loss and breakage. It’s hard to break a book. Short of dropping it totally in the bath, or ocean, they’re robust. But more to the point, if you break a book, you’ve lost about £5, on average. Break a Kindle and you’re in for a few hundred quid. Plus – who steals other people’s books?

I think Kindle will find its niche – perhaps for technical manuals for the mechanic servicing 30 types of car. For the average reader, I’m not so sure. After the inital buzz, won’t you miss the unbreakable book?

Sometimes low-tech works. I think books are a case in point. After all, if the wonder that is email hasn’t yet created the paperless office, what hope has Kindle of ridding us of paper we hold more dear?

“… I have questions about how well the Friedman plan can scale, as newcomers come to the settled frontier, and as pioneers raise children who do not share the consensus of the initial settlement. Sooner or later the problem of pluralism and moral disagreement will rear its head, and there are liberal and illiberal ways to respond.”

This, to me, is more confirmation of my long-held belief that the major problem of all forms of liberal political organisation inter-generational conflict: you may agree that the current set-up is fair (after all, you created it) but what if your children see it differently? In my view, this is a problem for libertarianism, but also for notions of meritocracy, social democracy, etc.
Those who know me well will know that I love to use films as analogies. The case study here would by M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village - a text-book case of an illiberal response to inter-generational conflict?

As he’d gotten older, Espera’s begun to accept that maybe the white man’s system isn’t all that bad. Travelling the world as a Marine has opened his eyes to the stark differences between the way Americans and those in less fortunate parts of the world live. “All these countries around the world, nobody’s fat,” he says. “Back home, fat motherfuckers are everywhere. Seventy-five percent of all Americans are fat. Do you know how hard it is to put on thirty pounds? A motherfucker has to sit on the couch and do nothing but eat all day. In America, white trash and poor Mexicans are all fat as motherfuckers. The white man created a system with so much excess, even the poor motherfuckers are fat.”

Well worth reading the whole book.

This book has reminded me of how much I hate literary interpretation. The first chapter, which focuses on The Merchant of Venice (my favourite Shakespeare play by some distance), makes some interesting observations. For example, that Shakespeare uses the word ‘corner’ as an metaphor to female genitalia throughout many of his plays, and that it this may have links to the cornu, or ‘horns of cuckoldry’. This is vaguely interesting, although it appears Shakespeare used many words as innuendo for female genitalia (Hamlet: Do you think I talk of country matters?)

What is frustrating about this book is that the scholarly interesting cross-referencing and sensible etymology is followed by examples of such utter tripe that the whole book is spoilt. For example, the author suggests that the Bard invented the word ‘witsnapper’ because it sounds a bit like his name – Wi[lliam] S[hakespe]ar[e]. It doesn’t. The idea is groundless and absurd, and stupidities like this cloud the book. I doubt I’ll bother with Chapter Two.

By chance, I have just found this portrait of a lady (Elizabth Barringer) on Flickr. It’s a beautiful painting – the lighting is perfect, and the gentle pink of the dress just enough colour. I hadn’t heard of Madrazo before, although I see that the original is in the Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC. Incidentally, that is home to one of my favourite oils, Westall’s Sword of Damocles.

Despite these gripes, it’s still a good, and quick, read – a good deal better than Hugo Dixon’s Introduction to Finance, which I struggled through at the end of last year. In fact, I read Kay’s book so quickly that I’ve set aside half an hour this weekend to nip back through the investment advice sections and précis the advice. The big lesson I do remember (and it is a key theme through the book) is that holding many unrelated and diversified risks can reduce portfolio risk more than just holding supposedly safe blue chips. Frankly, the book was worth it for this advice alone.

It’s also worth mentioning that the book has a great ‘Bookshelves and bookmarks’ bibliography at the end, with some further reading recommendations. I’m now awaiting about six tomes from Amazon Marketplace to build up my investment library.

[T]oday’s climate science is so complex that only time – and a lot more observation – will tell whether what scientists think they know is really correct…. Until then, the alarmist findings by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are “an unprovable hypothesis”.

Here’s the full piece. Aside from it being nice to see The Register referenced in the mainstream media, the piece is worth bearing in mind the next time you hear scientists say “the science is clear that x” or politicans claim that “the consensus among scientists is that x“. Science is a process, not a consensus, and the significant of the problems that climate change can cause should not lead us to cut corners in that process.

…contrary to intuition and prior hypotheses, the use of search engines contributes to a more level playing field, in which new Web sites have a greater chance of being discovered and thus of acquiring links and popularity — as long as they are about specific topics that match the interests of users as expressed through their search queries.

That’s the egalitarian effect of search engines and it’s backed up by some pretty impressive research. Fittingly, I found it through a search engine.

Lately, we have encountered substantial obstacles that may affect the
repayment performance of Mifex and its entrepreneurs on the Kiva
website…
In the microfinance industry Mifex is a very young organization. We were
amongst the first institutions to use Kiva for financing and we have
heavily relied on Kiva funds to start our organization. Although Kiva
and the great lenders that support the site have helped our institution
form a strong base for growth, we have recently encountered substantial
obstacles…

A shortage of capital, combined with escalating default rates, has put a
heavy strain on our operation. Many of our clients are also having a
very difficult time making their repayments due to the persistent rains
during the first half of the year. These factors have caused Mifex to
accumulate a debt to Kiva lenders that we cannot pay without putting in
danger the sustainability of our organization.

My thoughts? A shame, but not a tragedy. Investing in any asset class attracts risk. I accepted this risk when I signed up. I reinvest my recouped loans from Kiva into other Kiva businesses, so the main effect of bad debt is the reduce the capital I make available to other entrepreneurs. However, I wonder to what extent I would be this relaxed about bad debt through on a system such as Zopa, where I loan money on commercial terms. I’d like to think that I would be able to put that in perspective as well – but something tells me that my disappointment (and annoyance?) may be greater.

A quick but well-deserved round of congratulations to James, who recently managed to get to the top of Everest, raising a bit of cash for a Liberian school in the process. You can find his trip details and donation site here. The most amazing thing on the site is the photo showing Everest’s shadow. Fantastic. Hopefully James will back in London sometime for Bournemouthian drinks, if he’s not climbing something else, or trying to conquer the Polish gym market.

Katie, a friend and ex-colleague, has recently launched a business with her friend Viola. Untitled Books is an independent online bookshop. Its USP is that it focuses only on spectacular books, which it reviews fully and sorts thematically, on a tarot-style wheel (above). It’s much more inspiring and personal than the big web book outlets and prices are comparable. I’ve just put in my first order, which should keep me going for a month or so at least.

SpeeedReader is also in active development, and has come a long way in the past six months alone. I have been using this app since v0.9 and the stability – already good – improves every couple of months. Plus, an Android version is coming soon. All in all, a must-have piece of software for your phone.

1. Pay less [primarily commissions, fees, etc.]
2. Diversify more [between asset classes and within them, remembering that indexes are not diverse]
3. Be contrarian

These may be my financial New Year’s resolutions.